Shakespeare and Verdi at the Theater

The New York Review of Books looks at the ties between Verdi and Shakespeare.

From the article...

Verdi adored Shakespeare. Besides the three operas he took from him—Macbeth, Otello, and Falstaff—he considered (though briefly) doing a Tempest or Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet. He considered for a very long time, and came near to creating, an opera from his favorite play, King Lear. He did not take lightly the duty of being true to Shakespeare. When he read the score of Ambroise Thomas’s Hamlet, he said of the librettists, “Poor Shakespeare! How they have mistreated him!” He did not mean to mistreat the great dramatist himself.

Hundreds of operas were derived from Shakespeare’s plays—even more than from the works of Schiller, Goethe, or Walter Scott. Phyllis Hartnoll and her collaborators in Shakespeare in Music counted over 180 Shakespeare operas, but admitted they were missing some. The editors of The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare claim the number is closer to three hundred. Most of the Shakespeare operas in nineteenth-century Italy, France, and Germany were taken from the plays indirectly, from parallel sources, or from poor translations. Rossini’s Otello (1816), for instance, was based on a French adaptation of Shakespeare’s own Italian source, Cinthio’s Hecatommitthi. Bellini’s I Capuleti ed i Montecchi (1830) came from a play by Luigi Scevola. Verdi was the first Italian composer who worked hard to get back to Shakespeare’s authentic text.