Shakespeare and Music — Edition Insights

A Composer's Technical Eye

Wilson writes with the authority of a practitioner. When analyzing the finale of Nicolai's The Merry Wives of Windsor, he traces the choral fugue in detail: 'Fenton takes the answer, then Dame Quickly, then Mistress Ford. At first the orchestration is very light, but as the rest join in it grows heavier.' He names specific contrapuntal devices—stretto, counter-subject—and draws parallels to Mozart's 'Jupiter' Symphony and Bach's B minor Mass. These passages are among the most vivid in the book, showing a writer who hears the score in his mind. Yet the same technical confidence leads him to sharp dismissals: Adam's one-act Falstaffe is 'very light and fairly melodious, but quite unambitious,' and a Hatton song is condemned as inferior to the composer's own 'Simon the Cellarer.' Wilson's judgments are never neutral; he writes as a critic with firm tastes.

Shakespeare's Stage Directions as Musical Cues

Wilson pays close attention to the original texts, noting where Shakespeare specifies music or song. In A Midsummer Night's Dream, he observes that Mendelssohn's music is 'possible to use nothing but' but that English productions typically add numbers by Cooke and Horn. He does not simply list these additions; he evaluates their fit. The book's structure—a play-by-play catalogue—means that musical references are extracted from their dramatic context and treated as standalone artifacts. This approach reveals Wilson's assumption that the plays are vehicles for musical performance, not literary works to be read. His commentary on Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus is similarly oriented toward practical staging, though the excerpts provided offer only glimpses of these sections.

A Polemical Voice in a Reference Work

Despite its encyclopedic format, Shakespeare and Music is not a dry reference. Wilson's prose is opinionated and occasionally sarcastic. Of a song he cannot find in Shakespeare's plays, he writes: 'I don't think the words are Shakespeare's, in spite of the printed title-page before me.' He then imagines a violent response: 'if I had been the boy I should have given the singer prussic acid.' This personal tone extends to his praise: the Nicolai fugue is 'a stroke of genius that could only have occurred to a supreme mind.' The memoir prefacing the book notes that Wilson was known to 'hosts of friends in Bohemian circles,' and his writing carries the confidence of a man accustomed to strong opinions. Readers should expect a study that blends scholarship with subjective critique.

Wilson's book is best approached as a period document: a composer-critic's personal tour through Shakespeare's musical landscape. His technical analyses reward readers with some knowledge of music theory, while his blunt judgments offer a glimpse into early twentieth-century performance culture. The play-by-play structure makes it easy to dip into specific entries, but the cumulative effect is of a single, forceful voice rather than a neutral survey.

Shakespeare’s songs always felt like borrowed echoes, notes left hanging in the air of the Globe. Wilson’s patient ear for those fugues reminded me of another quiet record, the slow-burning chronicle of opera’s own arrival in New York, Chapters of Opera Being historical and critical observations and records concerning the lyric drama in New York from its earliest days down to the present time — Edition Insights. Both simply listen, and remember.