Any opera lover will recognize at least one of the layers of the "Mad Queens," for the repertoire is full of mad scenes for unhinged sopranos - both mad, angry, scorned, hell-bent and otherwise.
Ghosts have been frequenters of dramatic stages since ancient greece. They come in as many varieties as the coloratura-firework-flinging-arabesques of the aforementioned Queens.
And Tempests - from the great floods, Homer & Virgil's maelstroms to Shakespeare and beyond - have fired our collective imaginations and presented myriad opportunities for creative exploration.
The "great globe itself" is one of many familiar quotations from Shakespeare's great play, The Tempest, and 3 vocal chamber works setting Shakespeare are at the heart of Opera Roanoke's "Tempests, Ghosts & Mad Queens" program this weekend. Our guest host from the Spirit World, Edgar Allan Poe, will try to put these pieces in context, lover of Shakespeare that he was (and is)! But here's a quick primer.
Famous songs & quotes form The Tempest:
Where should this music be? I’ th’air or th’earth…
Full fathom five thy father lies...| Nothing of him that doth fade | But doth suffer a sea-change | Into something rich and strange...
Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows…
But you, o you,| So perfect and so peerless, are created | Of every creature’s best…
Be not afeard: the isle is full of noises… |...that, when I waked, | I cried to dream again…
In a case of "meaningful coincidence" The Tempest features a Masque - a "play within the play" if you will. Here are some of the lines from within that Masque:
What harmony is this? | Marvelous, sweet music…
You are three men of sin …
Our revels now are ended… | The cloud-capped towers… | the great globe itself…
We are such stuff as dreams are made on…
O brave new world…
Let us not burden our remembrance w | A heaviness that’s gone
Other interesting observations, from our eccentric friend and romantic scholar,
H.L. McCrea:
The Tempest is full of visions & dreams, phantasmagoria, “magic” and “madness.” It is also an archetypal journey through exile and trials to a homecoming, another variation on the "eternal return" or the "return of the hero - ine / exile..."
The exiled & deposed king Prospero is a student of alchemy, "magic" or the so-called “occult arts” and has become a sorcerer. Shakespeare thus spins out a filament of an esoteric thread reaching back to the ancient world, and reappearing dramatically in the romantic era of Poe, Byron, Coleridge, Goethe, Novalis and Nerval...
Frye says this play is a paradox of reality & illusion in drama... like the dream... from Euripides to Pirandello... It is a story of moral & spiritual rebirth… rituals of initiation…baptism…ancient mystery dramas…
The Tempest contains a central Masque and is like the masque in its use of elaborate stage machinery and music...
One theory holds that Shakespeare's play was modeled on a Virginia-bound ship wrecked in the mysterious Bermuda triangle...
Frye concludes his excellent introduction to The Tempest (The Pelican Shakespeare edition by comparing Shakespeare's play to Mozart's ultimate fantasy.
"The Tempest in short is a spectacular and operatic play, and when we think of other plays like it, we are more apt to think of, say, Mozart's Magic Flute...
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