News that the Royal Shakespeare Company is going through with cuts to its music department, shrinking one of the last bastions of theatre music composition, production and performance from a team of seven to just two, sounds the latest alarm for the place of live music and musicians in theatre. The RSC’s cost-saving comes at a time when bands for touring shows and West End musicals have been reduced from orchestral forces to handfuls of players. Who needs live performers when technology can do it all for you?

It wasn’t always this way. There’s a whole genre of theatre music by composers from Purcell to Birtwistle that’s rarely, if ever, performed as audiences experienced it from the 17th century onwards. This “incidental music” for the theatre wasn’t incidental at all – it was crucial to how drama was brought to life, from Shakespeare to Goethe. Working in collaboration with writers and directors to create the atmosphere of text and story makes scores like Mendelssohn’s for A Midsummer Night’s Dream or Grieg’s for Ibsen’s Peer Gynt predecessors to what film and video game composers are doing today.

The classical hits that Mendelssohn and Grieg made in those scores – the orchestral scherzo from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Morning Mood from Peer Gynt – wouldn’t exist without the plays that inspired them. But they’re almost never heard in the theatre now: you just don’t see Shakespeare or Ibsen with the accompaniment of a full-scale symphony orchestra. Instead, when you hear Grieg’s sublime flute and oboe melody in Morning Mood on a relaxing classical playlist, you instantly think of dawn’s early light rising above a Norwegian fjord. But that’s not what this music is about. It’s actually an evocation of the scene in which Peer Gynt is stranded in the Moroccan desert: “Dawn. Acacias and palm trees. Peer is sitting in his tree using a wrenched-off branch to defend himself against a group of monkeys.” Absolutely nothing to do with Norway.

And that’s the point: the inspiration of writing music for plays allowed composers to find new kinds of soundworlds in ways that their music for concert halls doesn’t in the same way. Sibelius’s score for Hofmannsthal’s play Everyman is one of his most extreme orchestral visions, including a 10-minute piece that accompanies the main character’s desolation with the most achingly dissonant chain of semitones that he, or anyone else, ever composed. And Harrison Birtwistle found a new sonic and theatrical ritual when he was working as the National Theatre’s musical director on Peter Hall’s production of The Oresteia: the percussion and speech-rhythms of the choruses creating a hybrid music-theatre that’s among the closest that any production has come to recreating the spirit and letter of original Ancient Greek drama.

That’s the biggest idea of all about theatre music: plays by writers from Sophocles to Shakespeare have never just been about spoken word. The music of the words, and music composed about the words, has always been fundamental to the artform: not “incidental”, but essential. You lose a lot more than a few musicians when you hollow out a music department.

….

The return of popera

But orchestral musicians are still making it on stage in vast numbers, just not always in the theatre: the Heritage Orchestra performed with Rosalía in that unforgettable staging of Berghain at the Brit awards. Scale, ambition and drama, with added Björk as deus ex machina: Berghain was four minutes of multimedia performance in the tradition of the most ambitious and expensive theatrical spectacles ever created. It was operatic, in other words – even if this track isn’t actually, you know, an opera. Berghain plays virtuosically with all the signifiers of music-dramatic excess, but Rosalía’s Götterdämmerung is still a work-in-progress.

And anyway, if you really want your pop music to be operatic, even Rosalía can’t compete with the Goat: Barcelona. When Freddie Mercury and Montserrat Caballé got together in 1988 to make Barcelona, the song and the album, the cliches of operatic excess and pop glamour supercollided to create the new musical force of popera. There is nothing finer, more camp, or more glorious. How about turning Barcelona into a stage show with a non-negotiable full-size symphony orchestra playing alongside the pop divo and operatic diva? Now that would bring back musicians to theatreland.

….

This week Tom has been listening to: the violinist Pekka Kuusisto play The Lark Ascending, reimagining Vaughan Williams’ piece as a haunted folk ritual with the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra.