The RSC music scores fundamentally detract from our experience in the theatre Royal Shakespeare Company

nThe news that the Royal Shakespeare Company is making cuts to its music department, shrinking one of the last bastions of theatrical music composition, production and performance from a team of seven to four, appears to be the latest alarm for the place of live music and musicians in theatre. The RSC’s cost savings come at a time when orchestras for touring shows and West End musicals have been reduced from orchestral forces to a handful of players. Who needs live performers when technology can do it all for you?

It wasn’t always this way. There is a whole genre of theatrical music by composers from Purcell to Birtwistle which has rarely been presented as it was experienced by audiences from the seventeenth century onwards. This “incidental music” for the theater was not incidental at all, but was crucial to how drama was brought to life, from Shakespeare to Goethe. Working in collaboration with writers and directors to create the atmosphere of text and story results in scores such as Mendelssohn’s score for A Midsummer Night’s Dream or Gregg’s score for Ibsen’s predecessor Peer Gynt doing what film and video game composers do today.

The classic songs that Mendelssohn and Grieg presented in those scores—the orchestral scherzo from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the Morning Mood from Peer Gynt—would not exist without the plays that inspired them. But they are almost never heard in the theater now: you don’t see Shakespeare or Ibsen to the accompaniment of a large-scale symphony orchestra. Instead, when you listen to Grieg’s gorgeous oboe and flute tune in Morning Mood on a relaxing classical playlist, you immediately think of the early dawn light rising over the Norwegian fjord. But that’s not what this music is about. It’s actually an evocation of the scene in which Peer Gynt is stranded in the Moroccan desert: “Dawn. Acacia and palm trees. Peer sits in his tree using a cut branch to defend himself against a group of monkeys.” It has nothing to do with Norway at all.

And that’s the point: the inspiration in writing music for plays allowed composers to create new kinds of sound worlds in ways that differed from their music in concert halls in the same way. Sibelius’s score for Hofmannsthal’s Everyman is one of his most extreme orchestral visions, including a 10-minute piece that accompanies the main character’s isolation with a series of the most painfully dissonant semitones that he or anyone else has ever composed. Harrison Birtwistle found new vocal and theatrical rituals while working as Music Director of the National Theater in Peter Hall’s production of the Oresteia: the rhythm and speech rhythms of the choruses create a hybrid musical theater that is among the closest any production has come to recreating the spirit and text of the original ancient Greek drama.

This is the biggest idea of ​​all about theatrical music: the plays of writers from Sophocles to Shakespeare were never just spoken word. Word music, music composed around words, has always been fundamental to the art form: not “accidental,” but essential. You lose a lot more than just a few musicians when you hollow out the music department.

….

Bubera is back

But orchestral musicians still appear on stage in large numbers, but not always in the theatre: the Heritage Orchestra with Rosalía gave a memorable performance of Berghain at the BRIT Awards. Scale, ambition and drama, with Björk adding as Deus Ex Machine: Berghain was a four-minute multimedia performance in the tradition of the most ambitious and expensive theatrical productions ever produced. It was operatic, in other words—even if that song wasn’t actually an opera. Berghain deftly plays with all the connotations of dramatic music excess, but Rosalía’s Götterdämmerung is still a work in progress.

And anyway, if you really want your pop to be operatic, even Rosalía can’t compete with The GOAT: Barcelona. When Freddie Mercury and Montserrat Caballé came together in 1988 to make “Barcelona,” the song and album, the clichés of operatic exaggeration and the magic of pop collided to create the new musical power of popera. There’s nothing classier, more camp, or more glorious. How about turning Barcelona into a stage show with a full-sized non-negotiable symphony orchestra playing alongside a pop singer and an operatic diva? Now this would bring the musicians back to the stage.

….

It was Tom this week Listen to: Violinist Pekka Kuusisto plays The Lark Ascending, reimagining Vaughan Williams’ piece as a haunted folk ritual with the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra.