From Ned Henry: The Met has been showing a different opera every night on demand for 24 hours for free. Well tomorrow [May 12, 2020] is The Tempest. http://metopera.org
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Tempest is an opera by English composer Thomas Adès with a libretto in English by Meredith Oakes based on the play The Tempest by William Shakespeare.
Background and premiere performances
Following the success of Powder Her Face, The Royal Opera, Covent Garden, commissioned a new opera from Adès in the late 1990s. Working with a librettist, a poetic version of the Jonestown Massacre of 1978 was prepared, but the composer found it impossible to set it to music. Finally, the libretto he needed emerged from a collaboration with Meredith Oakes.
The new opera became a co-production with the Copenhagen Opera House and the Opéra national du Rhin in Strasbourg. The Tempest received its world premiere to critical acclaim at the Royal Opera House in London on 10 February 2004. Other productions followed in Strasbourg and Copenhagen later in 2005 and the opera was given its US premiere staging by the Santa Fe Opera on 29 July 2006.
Performance history
Covent Garden revived the opera in March 2007 with the same production team, Thomas Adès conducting, and many of the original London cast, including Simon Keenlyside, Cyndia Sieden, Ian Bostridge, Toby Spence, Philip Langridge, and Stephen Richardson repeating their original roles. Cyndia Sieden is the only member of the cast to sing her role, that of Ariel in all four previous productions. Amongst others new to the cast are soprano Kate Royal as Miranda and countertenor David Cordier as Trinculo.
As a co-production with the 2012 Québec City Opera Festival created by director Robert Lepage[1] and the Vienna State Opera (June 2015),[2] New York’s Metropolitan Opera mounted a new production of The Tempest in the autumn of 2012 featuring Simon Keenlyside.
Meredith Oakes’ libretto
As for the words, you don’t get Shakespeare’s; but you get something that effectively suggests them at key moments, written by Meredith Oakes in rhyming couplets of impactful clarity. Neat and direct.— Michael White’s review of the 2004 Royal Opera House premiere in The Independent[3]
The opera is a brilliant response to the play, rather than merely a setting of it. While entirely true to the spirit of Shakespeare’s play, it is not contained by it. It is its own thing, and allows its own existence and resonance.— Jonathan Kent, director of the 2006 Santa Fe Opera production [4]
Looking for ideas for a new subject, Adès saw Jonathan Kent’s staging of Shakespeare’s The Tempest at the Almeida Theatre in London in 2000.[5] For a new libretto, Adès turned to the experienced dramatist Meredith Oakes, whose work had included a short opera libretto for Miss Treat (2002); since the early 1990s, several original plays, translations and adaptations of classics and modern dramas; and, for television, the story line for Prime Suspect 4 (1995).
Rather than transfer Shakespeare’s words directly into the libretto, Oakes has taken the approach of reducing much of the text to its essence, and she produces a compact libretto with the bulk of the text presented in the form of rhyming couplets. Many examples are given in the following plot synopsis, and they illustrate Oakes’ technique but that does not always mean the complete removal of Shakespeare’s text, as in the following example.
| The result is that the original:Full fathom five thy father lies Of his bones are coral made; Those are pearls that were his eyes | in the libretto becomes:Five fathoms deep Your father lies Those are pearls That were his eyes |
Differences between the libretto and the play
The libretto is structured into three acts, approximately equal in length. As in Shakespeare’s act 1, scenes 1 and 2, the five main characters are introduced. However, as the relationship between Miranda and Ferdinand progresses, the opera turns away from Shakespeare’s presentation of Prospero as the benign manipulator of events, the controller of the pace of the young couple’s growing love by using his trickery and magical powers.
In an aside to Ariel he comments:
They are both in either’s pow’rs. But this swift business
I must uneasy make, lest too light winning
Make the prize light
and later, as his methods begin to take effect: “It works”. The libretto suggests a more fatalistic acceptance by Prospero of the loss of his daughter to the young Prince. Therefore, whereas Shakespeare’s act 1 concludes with Prospero urging on Ariel to further tasks which involve bringing the court to his part of the island, Oakes’ libretto suggests a more vengeful Prospero:
I must punish him
And the rest as well
Bring me to them, Ariel.
Shakespeare’s act 3, scene 2, in which Prospero accepts Ferdinand and Miranda’s relationship, and later in act 4, scene 1, his:
for I
Have given you here a third of mine own life
contrasts sharply with the end of Oakes’ act 2 in which Miranda and Ferdinand find each other again and declare their love, as they are watched over by Prospero, who frees Ferdinand but laments his loss of power in:
Miranda
I’ve lost her
I cannot rule their minds
My child has conquered me
A stronger power than mine
Has set the young man free.
Oakes’ act 2 features action taking place on the stage in the presence of entire court rather than in separate scenes as in Shakespeare’s act 2.
Thomas Adès’ music
Much has appeared in print about the striking music composed for this opera. Ranging from the almost dissonant (parts of act 1) to the sublimely lyrical (the Miranda–Ferdinand love duet, rare in modern operas, and a quintet passacaglia in act 3), with surges and outpourings of emotion contrasting with harmonic clashes of tone and color, The Tempest is regarded as the composer’s towering achievement to date. This is reflected in the following writers’ statements:
The evening deservedly belongs to Adès, who himself conducts a score as orchestrally lush and evocative as vocally varied and articulate. The cumulative effect is by turns ethereal, witty, incandescent, often ravishing.— Andrew Clements, Review of the 2004 Royal Opera House premiere[6]
… For one composer at least, contemporary lyric opera is still a viable medium. It looks like an opera and it behaves like an opera, offering a musical drama in which the traditional operatic virtues of musically delineated characterisation and musically satisfactory dramatic pacing are wonderfully sustained.
The musical action of the opera is continuous but is divided into a sequence of sharply distinct scenes. The techniques of pitch derivation found in earlier Adès scores are used again, so that instead of providing his characters with a set of musical identity cards there is a fluid, evolutionary system of characterisation in which vocal manner and accompaniment style are more important than leitmotifs. Qualities of place and status are as important as individual personalities, so the island is represented by evenly flowing accompaniments in woodwind and strings, while the world of the Milan court is represented by more declamatory writing in which the brass are often evident.— Christopher Fox, The Musical Times, London, [northern] Autumn 2004.[7]
(Submitted by Ned Henry.)