Wilson Kimber, Marian. “Reading Shakespeare, Seeing Mendelssohn: Concert Readings of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ca. 1850-1920.” The Musical Quarterly 89: 199-236.
Packed with concrete detail, Wilson Kimber’s essay gives a comprehensive overview of readings of Shakespeare’s play accompanied by Felix Mendelssohn’s incidental music composed for the play, which created in effect a melodrama (for melodrama, see the earlier entry on the Tennyson/Strauss Enoch Arden).
Many Victorian commentators viewed A Midsummer Night’s Dream as unstageable, in that the stage could not adequately depict fairyland, thus destroying the beauty or magic of Shakespeare’s play (or “poem”). The solution? “Concert readings,” a form which, it was believed, could enhance appreciation of both Shakespeare’s text and Mendelssohn’s music.
Thus, concert readings were, in part, an attempt at a solution to the aesthetic problems posed by the critics…. Transferred to the concert hall, Mendelssohn’s music provided with readings presented a novelty for concertgoers that was a far less expensive undertaking than an actual theatrical performance. Having the text of the play allowed conductors to program more selections from the incidental music, including those not typically heard in concerts, the sections of melodrama where text was spoken during the music.
Thus a reading of the play would offer the audience Shakespeare’s poetry stripped of any danger of theatrical excess, while Mendelssohn’s music could evoke a fairy world in the listener’s imagination without vivid reality impinging on the dream-like state.
Wilson Kimber focuses on the actress Fanny Kemble’s readings of Shakespeare’s play to Mendelssohn’s music (premiered in New York, 1850, and in London in 1852, accompanied by “fifty instrumentalists and a chorus of twenty”) and on reciters who followed in her footsteps (Fanny Clifton Stirling, Mary Frances Scott-Siddons, George Riddle, David Bispham). One interesting observation Wilson Kimber makes in the course of this history concerns Victorian elocution’s association with music:
Although the most common term for the performances of Kemble and others was “reading,” the actual sound of their performance would have been far from that—a stylized performance that had many of the characteristics of music. Elocutionary practices of the Victorian period created Shakespeare “readings” that in no way resembled a natural speaking voice, but took place in a formal recitation style; nineteenth-century reviews of actors and elocutionists frequently describe their speech as “musical.”
Wilson Kimber then goes on to describe how “[p]eriod acting treatises and elocution books included extensive analogies to music.”
The essay concludes with an examination of the decline of the concert reading as embodied in the performances of Kemble et al. Wilson Kimber notes that even in Kemble’s day critics grumbled about what they regarded as the excessive length of the performance. Also, such concert readings were taxing on the performer, who had to contend with length, speaking over a piano, organ, or orchestra, in often large halls, and with having to perform all the parts, which put such readings beyond the abilities of all but the most skilled actor-reciters.
More interestingly, the concert readings’ hybrid form was a target of criticism. Complaints were made about the spoken text “interrupting” the music, implying that one went either to listen to music or see a play, not both at once. Instead of enhancing Shakespeare’s and Mendelssohn’s work, such as pairing now seemed to devalue by simultaneously distracting from both. This not only marks a shift away from the pairing of music and recitation, but as Wilson Kimber notes, forms part of larger cultural shift away from oratory as a major cultural phenomenon in social life.
