Shakespeare and Dies Irae and Berlioz
This is completely nontechnical, but it’s been on my mind all morning. Feel free to fast-forward. 
So, one of my favorite plays of Shakespeare is Macbeth, and one of my favorite scenes is Act IV, Scene 1, in which the three witches make some very equivocal prophesies to Macbeth. These lines pop into my head pretty regularly:
Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn and cauldron bubble.
The witches generally speak in a four-foot trochaic meter. They’re pretty unusual in that regard; Shakespeare’s characters typically speak in iambic pentameter or in prose. But it’s effective: I have a terrible memory for verse, lyrics, prose, etc., and this has been stuck in my head for years. It sets an other-worldly mood when taken against the rest of the play’s dialogue.
This week I’ve been picking apart the Dies Irae as I’ve been attempting to learn Latin. Dies Irae (”Day of wrath”) is a part of the traditional Requiem mass for the dead used by the Roman Catholic Church. Something about it sounded amazingly resonant to me:
Dies iræ! dies illa
Solvet sæclum in favilla
Teste David cum Sibylla!
The trochaic meter is identical; it’s also a little unusual compared to other Latin verse with which I’m familiar, which handles meter and rhyming differently. This is part of the connection I was trying to make this morning.
But there’s more to it than just the meter. A 19th century French composer, Hector Berlioz, wrote a symphony called Symphonie Fantastique, the final movement of which is “Songe d’une nuit de sabbat”, which usually rendered in English as “Song of a Witches’ Sabbath”. This movement is one of my favorite works in all of music.
For me, there are two striking features of this final movement. One is the most amazingly perfect, major-mood melody that arises from the depth of the cellos and basses two-thrids of the way through the 15-minute piece. But right before that, the horns have a loud, evil-sounding version of the traditional Gregorian Dies Irae melody. You get the feeling that it is designed to rattle your teeth out of your head. The juxtaposition of these melodies makes for a pretty amazing effect.
OK, so this is why it has been stuck in my head all morning: I always envision the witches on the heath during the final movement of Symphonie Fantastique, and I wonder if Berlioz had that scene in mind himself. And, I wonder if Shakespeare had the Dies Irae in mind as he was composing the witches’ dialogue - he would have been acquainted with it, as far as I can tell, particularly if you believe Stephen Greenblatt’s assertion in Will of the World that Shakespeare was a closet Catholic.
OK, now back to our regularly scheduled programming.
Now playing, predictably enough: Mozart’s Requiem Mass
February 15th, 2007 at 3:54 pm
This will allow you to listen to the sound of these verses: MacBeth audiobook recorded by the BBC. In my oppinion the best Shakespeare audios available.
February 18th, 2007 at 4:03 pm
Thanks for the link! I have several plays on audio from various publishers (Arkangel, in particular, and a couple of others). I’ll definitely give these a shot when I run through my current queue.