Synopsis

For their February 2013 cover story, the editors of BBC Music Magazine, came up with a list of the 50 most influential people in the history of music. Bach was on it, as you might expect — but so was Shakespeare.

Any music lover can see the logic in that, and cite pieces like Mendelssohn’s music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream or Tchaikovsky’s Overture-Fantasy Romeo and Juliet, or all the great operas based on Shakespeare’s plays, ranging from Verdi’s Falstaff to a recent setting of The Tempest by Thomas Adès.

And speaking of The Tempest, in New York on today’s date in 1981, Sharon Robinson premiered After Reading Shakespeare, a new solo cello suite she commissioned from American composer Ned Rorem.

“Yes,” Rorem said, “I was re-reading Shakespeare the month the piece was accomplished… Yet the experience did not so much inspire the music itself as provide a cohesive program upon which the music be might formalized, and thus intellectually grasped by the listener.” Rorem even confessed that some of the titles were added after the fact, “as when parents christen their children.“  

After all, as Shakespeare’s Juliet might put it, “What’s in a name?”

Music Played in Today's Program

Ned Rorem (1923-2022): After Reading Shakespeare; Sharon Robinson, cello; Naxos 8.559316