At 09:36 AM 5/24/2004 -0500, Tom Bishop wrote:
>Spenser doesn't seem to have been much used as a source-text for
>song-setting in general, let alone opera, which is an intriguing fact
>given the general ransacking of Elizabethan poetry for texts and
>probably bears closer thinking about in terms of the "musicality" and
>"music-availability" of lyric verse. Does Spenserian verse come
>already too beset with inner accompaniments that pre-empt a
>composer's intervention ("Sweete Themmes, runne softly til I end my
>song")? Why, in the general appropriation of Ariosto, for one, for
>opera seria by Handel and others, is Spenser set aside? Does allegory
>somehow disable musical (or dramatic) representation? Off the top of
>my head, I know (of) only a few musical settings of Spenser, and one
>of them (by Fenno Heath) was specifically commissioned (by Bart
>Giamatti) on a set text (FQ I.xii.38-39). The other is the famous and
>haunting piece for double choir by William Harris, based on the
>"Hymne of Heavenly Beautie". Edmund Rubbra also set five Amoretti
>(2,4,6,43, 68) as songs for tenor solo, but I haven't heard them.
A couple months ago I read the following:
Corse, Larry E. "'A straunge kinde of harmony': The Influence of Lyric
Poetry and Music on Prosodic Techniques in the Spenserian Stanza." Diss.
North Texas State University, 1972.
If Corse was right, Spenser's text ought to have been very settable, since
his prosody incorporates the techniques of poetry that was composed for
singing. Corse also mentions that in Spenser's day, there were already
musical settings of stanzas from Orlando furioso, but these were madrigals,
not musical narratives.
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David Wilson-Okamura http://virgil.org [log in to unmask]
East Carolina University Virgil reception, discussion, documents, &c
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