Shakespeare Goes to Opera:
A Discussion led by Peter Gordon and Kingman Lo
Date & Time: 19.00-20.15 | Wednesday, 14 September 2016
Venue: Room 307-8, 3/F, British Council, 3 Supreme Court Road, Admiralty, Hong Kong
Speakers: Peter Gordon, Editor, Asian Review of Books
Kingman Lo, Director General, Musica Viva
Language: English
FREE admission, registration required.
No playwright has served as repeatedly as operatic inspiration as William Shakespeare. This session will look at four of the Bard’s greatest nineteenth-century operatic hits, two each from France and Italy: Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette, Ambroise Thomas’s Hamlet, and Giuseppe’s Verdi’s Macbeth and Otello — all in preparation for a mid-September production by Musica Viva of the best-known scenes from these operas.
None are merely plays set to music. Plays of this complexity cannot be translated directly to opera: they have been streamlined with characters cut and action re-arranged. We’ll look at the differences and similarities — from plot to actual words — between the original plays and the operas and discuss how the music enhances and changes the experience. The session will include operatic versions of “Parting is such sweet sorrow”, “To be or not to be”, “Out damn spot and Otello’s monologue — which became a love duet.
