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.
I'd be interested in any additions people know of to the catalogue of
Spenser settings.
Tom
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