Our Musical Director, Jonathan Darbourne, takes a deep dive into the music and making of The Tempest.

The Tempest is often referred to as Shakespeare’s most musical play, but, more than this, it’s one of his most sound-filled. Throughout the story, sound (and noise) is used not just for effect and entertainment but as a magic wand, casting spells over various characters and plot developments.

Take the scene in which Prospero’s spirit servant, Ariel, causes a banquet to appear for the shipwrecked courtiers, using ‘solemn and strange music’ to amaze (Alonso: ‘What harmony is this?’ / Gonzalo: ‘Marvellous sweet music!’) and confuse them (Alonso: ‘The winds did sing it to me…’). This is typical of the play – much of the time characters are never quite sure who or what creates the things which are heard, and therefore where they come from. Ferdinand, when hearing what the audience knows to be Ariel’s song ‘Come unto these yellow sands’, asks ‘Where should this music be? I’ th’ air, or th’ earth?’ As Shakespeare directs the chorus at the end of the song to be performed ‘dispersedly‘, even the audience could be confused depending on where the singers were placed in the performance area. Ferdinand goes on to say about Ariel’s next musical offering ‘This is no mortal business nor no sound / That the earth owes’.

These sorts of things scream ‘PLAYGROUND!’ to a musician and so this play was an obvious choice for VB’s collaboration with theatre group Out of Chaos, especially as precedents for remoulding the play into a ‘semi-opera’ had already been set during the late-17th century. (This style of show with half text/half music was all the rage at that time with English audiences, who disliked the fully sung operatic dramas more popular in Italy.) In fact, if you asked the average artsy Londoner in the mid-18th century what they thought of The Tempest, they’d think you were talking about a musical version put together by Thomas Shadwell in the 1670s, with text by John Dryden and William Davenant, and music by various composers including Matthew Locke and Henry Purcell. Our version sticks loyally to Shakespeare’s text (not a difficult decision) and uses music from the Shadwell compilation (Locke, Purcell, Pelham Humphrey, John Weldon), as well as pieces by composers contemporary to Shakespeare (John Dowland, Thomas Morley, Robert Johnson, Johannes Kapsberger) and from the later 17th century (François Couperin, Marin Marais).