Opera - Peter Conrad wonders if a new Tempest will conjure music to match Shakespeare's poetry

Any new opera, volunteering to extend the tradition, risks comparison with the classics that precede it. In taking The Tempest as the subject for his commission from the Royal Opera, Thomas Ades boldly chose to confront a parade of illustrious ghosts. The list of composers who have contemplated Shakespeare's theatrical elegy stretches from Henry Purcell to Michael Nyman. But they either baulked making an operatic version or chose to approach the play indirectly, writing overtures or episodic interludes: it takes courage to compete with the sweet thunder of Prospero's storm, or to eavesdrop on the noises that Caliban hears shimmering in the island's air. Can Ades, unlike his predecessors, conjure up music to match Shakespeare's poetry?

Purcell contributed just one song to a musical version of The Tempest pieced together by a committee of composers in 1674, and it is sung by a character that doesn't even exist in Shakespeare's original. In the interest of tidy-minded symmetry, John Dryden and William Davenant had revised the play to supply Miranda with a sister called Dorinda, who cheekily woos the pretty youth Hippolito in Purcell's ditty. After that, an elemental pageant replaces the curtailed masque of the goddesses staged by Prospero. Neptune rears from the waves, Aeolus summons his gales and Amphitrite at last restores halcyon days of calm: musicians prefer to think of The Tempest as a poem about the weather, not a drama whose central character, the crabby magician with a dictatorial wand, is himself a monopolistic dramatist.

Mozart supposedly toyed with the idea of an opera based on The Tempest, but died before he could write it - or did he do so obliquely in The Magic Flute, which has a Shakespearean magus who prescribes a series of trials for the young lovers like those to which Prospero subjects Ferdinand and Miranda? Beethoven also flirted with the play and, when asked by his deferential follower Anton Schindler to supply a clue to the meaning of his 17th piano sonata, said: "Just read Shakespeare's Tempest!" If you follow his instruction, the sonata becomes an exercise in romantic meteorology, like Shelley's poems about clouds and electric storms, though the agitation of Beethoven's first movement hints at psychological turbulence. Perhaps the pianist is Prospero, translating his vindictive rage into a howling, pelting storm. The bad weather in Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony blows over quickly; the sonata, alternating between fury and slumped calm, recognises that the drama of The Tempest happens inside Prospero's head, not in the sky.

Berlioz, crazily obsessed by Shakespeare, also saw The Tempest as the lonely monologue of an artist, and in 1832 appended a fantasia on the play to his confessional Symphonie Fantastique. Berlioz's narrator, a composer called Lelio, recovers from the orgiastic insanity described in the symphony and cures his neurosis by choosing a subject "from which gloomy colours can be excluded". He specifies that the gracious spirits must obey Prospero, and that the harmonies of the sylphs should suggest the rustling of their wings. It is a self-deceptive fantasy because, in Shakespeare's play, violence is not so easily wished away; the text has to be filleted to fit the wistful dream, and all Berlioz actually composed was a chorus for the aerial spirits who deliver a bridegroom to the pining Miranda. At least Tchaikovsky's overture, a condensed summary of the play composed in 1873, allows the love between Miranda and Ferdinand to sound fiercely erotic rather than bodiless and ethereal - more so, indeed, than it is in the original source, where their chastity is enforced by Prospero's control.

Rather than undertaking an opera, Sibelius composed incidental music for productions of The Tempest at theatres in Copenhagen and Helsinki in 1926-27. His storm is an icy cyclone, not the blundering comic chaos Prospero actually stirs up. Shakespeare's undignified first scene on the ship, with courtiers and sailors messily grappling to save themselves, was omitted from the stagings to which Sibelius contributed; the drama could not compete with the orchestra, quaking and heaving like an unstable ocean beneath the floor. This is music that can transcribe the eloquence of nature itself. A chorus of winds vocalises wordlessly, accompanied by a tinkling harp and wheezing harmonium, with no need for a Shakespearean text. The violent dissonance in the musical portrait of Prospero near the end hints, like Beethoven's sonata, that the wild weather is a reflex of the composer's disturbed mind. Prospero finally abandons the book that contains his spells: does this presage Sibelius's morose, wintry renunciation of his own art? For the last three decades of his life, he remained stubbornly silent.

In 1991, Michael Nyman composed an abbreviated wedding masque for Peter Greenaway's film Prospero's Books, and plucked up his courage for the assault on the sacrosanct play by remarking that Shakespeare's text was "rather feeble". His score uses synthesised supernatural voices: the computer is the medium of Nyman's magic, though it is hardly his fault that the most operatic sound in Greenaway's adaptation is the lilting tenor register in which John Gielgud speaks the verse.

Obligingly, all these intimidated predecessors have left the way open for Ades, who will also conduct his opera at Covent Garden. Shakespeare's magician is an old man, disenchanted and despairing; only a young man - an artist through whom ambition courses like adrenalin - would dare to take up the wand Prospero lays down and transform it into a baton.

The Tempest is at the Royal Opera House, London WC2 (020 7304 4000) from 10 to 20 February

Post your comment

Please note: you will need to login or register before you can comment on the website