When a writer of genius and a fine composer get together
Attending, the other night, the Covent Garden opera's magnificent performance of Gounod's Faust, with libretto by Michel Carre, drawn ultimately from Goethe, I asked myself, 'Which writer has been most often set to music?' Goethe is certainly a competitor for the title. His Faust has the enormous total of over 12,000 lines, and no one is going to sit through a musical setting of all of it. In fact Gounod's Faust is based on only the first part. On the other hand, Goethe nearly always wrote verse with music in mind. He asked to be set to music, and that is one reason his verses have provided such excellent fodder for composers of art-songs, like Schubert and Hugo Wolf.
Goethe also rewrote old lyrics and poetry to make musical setting; easier. It is said he did a parody of 'God Save the King', not liking the original lines (and who can blame him?). He parodied Burns, whose poetry proved surprisingly popular in Germany during the early Romantic era. In writing Faust he adopted Ophelia's Valentine's Day song from Hamlet, which he gave incongruously to Mephistopheles, and he also used part of the grave-digger's scene from Act Vat the point in the second half of his epic when the Doctor's grave is excavated. The huge poem is punctuated by separable songs (as in Shakespeare) positively begging to be set to music.
Goethe greatly admired Mozart and regarded his death in 1791 as a personal disaster, as he wanted Mozart to write an opera based on Faust. Personally I am not sure it would have worked. Mozart was keen on such themes as sin and redemption, with their obvious musical possibilities, but he thought bringing Hell into the opera house should be done sparingly, and got the proportion exactly right in Don Giovanni. The trouble with Faust is that Hell is really the parameter of the whole plot and omnipresent in suggestion, and Satan is actually present physically, almost as important as the Doctor himself. By the end of the Gounod opera one has got a bit tired of the smell of sulphur. Goethe admired Beethoven, though at their famous meeting, being a lifelong courtier, he was rather shocked by the composer's stiff-necked refusal to bow to the dukes. He saw Beethoven's version of his Egmont at Weimar in 1814 and thought highly of it. Obviously he would have liked Beethoven to tackle Faust, and who could have done it better? Beethoven twice considered the idea, and stated in 1822 that Goethe was the ideal poet to be set to music. He actually published four different versions of a Goethe lyric, noting with uncharacteristic modesty, 'There was not time to produce something really good, so there were several attempts.' Later, Berlioz and Schumann, Liszt and Mahler tried their hand at Goethe, and it is amazing, come to think of it, that Wagner did not pounce on Faust — not bits either, but the whole poem.
Victor Hugo runs Goethe close as a source for musical inspiration, and I'm not taking into account such popular musicals as Les Misembles or the Disneyfication of his ideas. Some of his poetry is easily adaptable by composers, but in his prose works, unlike Goethe, he rarely wrote with music in mind. Some of his sentences are immensely long. In Graham Robb's marvellous book on Hugo, he says that a sentence in Les Miserahles is the longest in Western literature. It contains 823 words, with 93 commas, 51 semi-colons and four dashes. Robb calls it the longest 'before Proust' but doesn't specify where the old cork-lined-cellman did better. Does any reader know? And did James Joyce beat both in Finnegans Wake? I have never been able to get through it. The late Bernard Levin wrote some very long sentences. one (it is claimed) occupying an entire article in the Times of, say, 1,200 words. But this may be hearsay. Did anyone ever attempt to set a Bernard Levin article to music? What pleasure that would have given the wise, sad, splendid old polymath!
But I am getting off the point. According to Robb, in the 19th century alone, 56 operas and three ballets were composed on Hugo texts. Others were planned, including a setting by Mussorgsky of Hugo's early novel Han d'Island. Hugo, who was very keen on money (someone wrote a poem about his miserly habits) and anxious at all times to protect his copyrights — though by no means scrupulous in pinching material from others, especially his poor, mad brother, locked in a padded cell — went to the trouble of bringing lawsuits against Donizetti over Lucrece Borgia and Verdi over Rigoletto, taken from Le Roi s'amase. A full list of musical settings of Hugo texts is given in Grove's Dictionary, VIII, 769-70, and occupies two columns of small type. Notre Dame de Paris has been the most popular, followed by Ruy Bias. Few of Hugo's writings have failed to strike some spark in musical minds — someone even wrote a symphonic poem inspired by Le Rhin, a travel book powered by Hugo's chauvinistic belief that France ought to own all the territories to the west of the river, a reminder that Hugo's father was one of Napoleon's generals. Honegger sketched an opera on Notre Dame and Aurie wrote film music on it, as he also did on Ruy Bias. Among those who tackled major texts or wrote songs from Hugo's vast output of poetry were Mendelssohn, Chabrier, Saint-Saens, Massenet, Delibes, Liszt, Franck, Bizet, Rachmaninov, Faure, Widor and scores of people I've never heard of. Hugo himself wrote the libretto of an opera, E.smeralda, based on Notre Dame, by a woman, Louise Batin (1805-77), with Berlioz producing.
Byron and Scott also notched up impressive scores as progenitors of music. Berlioz worshipped Byron, and Le Corsaire and Harold en Italic are among his best works. Tchaikovsky wrote a Manfred symphony. Everyone from Mendelssohn, Schumann and Wolf to Balakirev and Mussorgsky turned his poetry into songs and at least 40 operas were based on his works, Sardanapalus being the most popular, with eight versions. (Oddly enough, only three composers picked his Don Juan') In Scott's case, Ivanhoe and Kenilworth proved the most popular texts for opera librettos. Scott was in Paris in 1826, shortly after his disastrous financial crash, and saw a weird production of Ivanhoe made from Rossini's music without his permission. He wrote: 'superbly got up but . . sadly mangled . . . the dialogue, in part, nonsense'. I counted 55 operas based, some remotely, on Scott's works.
But Shakespeare, as one would expect, beats them all. By 1970, there were just under 200 operas based on his plays and poetry, and the total has now probably passed the 200 mark. They include the three Verdi masterworks, Macbeth, Otello and Falstaff, the last a triumph of musical verbalism of great ingenuity, particularly since The Meny Wives, on which it is based, is greatly inferior to the two Henry BA, in which Falstaff rides supreme. Verdi also thought of doing King Lear, but nothing came of it —what an astonishing work that would surely have been! Rossini also wrote an Otello, produced at Naples in 1816, but pushed into oblivion by Verdi. It is disappointing that Wagner, having written an early opera on Measure for Measure in 1836 — never performed now — refused to return to Shakespeare for inspiration. Wagner could have written a superb Antony and Cleopatra — so might Mahler, of course. It would be fascinating to know if Shakespeare himself sang or played. Music pervades his plays, and I suspect productions in his day were full of song and dance.
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