*The Tempest (opera)
The Tempest is an opera by English composer Thomas Adès with a libretto in English by Meredith Oakes based on the play The Tempest by William Shakespeare.
Meredith Oakes' libretto
As for the words, you don't get Shakespeare's; but you get something that effectively suggests them at key moments, written by Meredith Oakes in rhyming couplets of impactful clarity. Neat and direct.
— Michael White's review of the 2004 Royal Opera House premiere in The Independent [3]
The opera is a brilliant response to the play, rather than merely a setting of it. While entirely true to the spirit of Shakespeare's play, it is not contained by it. It is its own thing, and allows its own existence and resonance.
— Jonathan Kent, director of the 2006 Santa Fe Opera production [4]
Looking for ideas for a new subject, Adès saw Jonathan Kent's staging of Shakespeare's The Tempest at the Almeida Theatre in London in 2000.[5] For a new libretto, Adès turned to the experienced dramatist Meredith Oakes, whose work had included a short opera libretto for Miss Treat (2002); since the early 1990s, several original plays, translations and adaptations of classics and modern dramas; and, for television, the story line for Prime Suspect 4 (1995).
Rather than transfer Shakespeare's words directly into the libretto, Oakes has taken the approach of reducing much of the text to its essence, and she produces a compact libretto with the bulk of the text presented in the form of rhyming couplets. Many examples are given in the following plot synopsis, and they illustrate Oakes' technique but that does not always mean the complete removal of Shakespeare's text, as in the following example.
The result is that the original:
Full fathom five thy father lies
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes
in the libretto becomes:
Five fathoms deep
Your father lies
Those are pearls
That were his eyes
Much has appeared in print about the striking music composed for this opera. Ranging from the almost dissonant (parts of act 1) to the sublimely lyrical (the Miranda–Ferdinand love duet, rare in modern operas, and a quintet passacaglia in act 3), with surges and outpourings of emotion contrasting with harmonic clashes of tone and color, The Tempest is regarded as the composer's towering achievement to date. This is reflected in the following writers' statements:
The evening deservedly belongs to Adès, who himself conducts a score as orchestrally lush and evocative as vocally varied and articulate. The cumulative effect is by turns ethereal, witty, incandescent, often ravishing.
— Andrew Clements, Review of the 2004 Royal Opera House premiere[6]
... For one composer at least, contemporary lyric opera is still a viable medium. It looks like an opera and it behaves like an opera, offering a musical drama in which the traditional operatic virtues of musically delineated characterisation and musically satisfactory dramatic pacing are wonderfully sustained.
The musical action of the opera is continuous but is divided into a sequence of sharply distinct scenes. The techniques of pitch derivation found in earlier Adès scores are used again, so that instead of providing his characters with a set of musical identity cards there is a fluid, evolutionary system of characterisation in which vocal manner and accompaniment style are more important than leitmotifs. Qualities of place and status are as important as individual personalities, so the island is represented by evenly flowing accompaniments in woodwind and strings, while the world of the Milan court is represented by more declamatory writing in which the brass are often evident.
— Christopher Fox, The Musical Times, London, [northern] Autumn 2004.[7]