Four Shakespeare Songs

Composer: MÄNTYJÄRVI, Jaakko
  • Written in 1984, Four Shakespeare Songs is a set of four choral settings of passages from Shakespeare’s plays:
    1. Come Away, Death (Twelfth Night; a lament of unhappy love)
    2. Lullaby (A Midsummer Night’s Dream; sung by fairies to their Queen)
    3. Double, Double Toil and Trouble (Macbeth; three witches chant the ingredients of a magic potion that they are brewing)
    4. Full Fathom Five (The Tempest; a comforting yet ghoulish description of how the body of a drowned man is transformed into treasures of the sea and how mermaids ring funeral bells for him)
  • For the texts, Mäntyjärvi notes, “I was studying [Shakespeare’s plays] in depth at the time of writing this music, in connection with my intermediate-level university studies in English.”1

Sources

  1. Jaakko Mäntyjärvi, “Four Shakespeare Songs,” Music Finland (1999), accessed February 26, 2025, https://core.musicfinland.fi/works/four-shakespeare-songs.

Cut IDs

24633 21249