Literature & Music

It's not unusual for artists to take inspiration from works outside their own discipline, but some artists take this concept more seriously than others.

One example is singer-songwriter Loreena McKennitt. She has set both the poem The Highwayman by Alfred Noyes (albeit with a couple a stanzas edited out of the middle) as well as Prospero's speech from The Tempest to music. Both links take you to YouTube.

The Highwayman:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=teq2m0BN-Wo

Prospero's Speech:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sc5WPpqn13k

Does anyone else know of any other musicians who have done this? I'd love to find more music with literature for lyrics.

Edited to add:
I forgot that Loreena McKennit also set The Lady of Shallot by Alfred Lord Tennyson to music until a looked through the suggested videos:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttv0ljOiPSs&feature=fvwrel

Classical music abounds in these. Songs by Beethoven, Schubert, and many other composers set poems by Goethe. Other examples are innumerable, many in English. I would venture that all the songs from Shakespeare's plays have been set to music multiple times. I myself in my misguided youth set a poem of Edna St. Vincent Millay to music but believe me it is not on You Tube. I can't even remember the name of the poem, though I remember the tune and words.

Many opera librettos are adapted from plays and novels, but that doesn't count. A few operas set plays literally or almost literally, the most famous probably being Richard Strauss's Salome which used a German translation of Oscar Wilde's Salomé for its text. Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande is a setting of Maurice Maeterlinck's play of the same name, with substantial cuts (because it takes a lot longer to sing something than to say it and the opera is long enough, as many have complained). Richard Strauss also set the poet Hugo von Hoffmansthal's play Elektra, though it was adapted to some extent, by von Hoffmansthal himself. This started a productive partnership that resulted in several great operas by the two geniuses. In English, Samuel Barber's opera Antony and Cleopatra, written for the opening of the new Metropolitan Opera House in New York in 1966, used Shakespeare's text but the libretto was later adapted to some extent by Franco Zefirelli. A famous collaboration in English was W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman's brilliant libretto for Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress, a case where the libretto may outshine the music in some estimations (at least mine).

double post deleted

There are also many symphonic works that include text, often taken directly from literature. Beethoven's Ninth Symphony famously sets in its final movement Schiller's Ode to Joy. Another example, among many, is Dmitri Shostakovitch's Babi Yar symphony (number 13), which sets five poems (one per symphonic movement) by Soviet poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko.

Works that are primarily choral, like Carl Orff's Carmina Burana and Catulli Carmina also include Edward Elgar's The Dream of Gerontius. Carmina Burana sets to music a collection of medieval lyrics from Switzerland, Catulli Carmina the lyrics of Roman poet Gaius Valerius Catullus. The Dream of Gerontius is a choral setting of the poem of the same name by John Henry Newman, a Victorian writer.

On a more popular level, Natalie Merchant, formerly of 10,000 Maniacs but now a soloist, has a double album called Leave Your Sleep, for which she has set to music poems of Robert Graves, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Edward Lear, Ogden Nash, Robert Louis Stevenson and others.

Contemporary and pop settings are fun to search out, and may appear in unexpected places.

Some pop/rock songs that come to mind, although they are abstractions/retellings of the literary works:

Leonard Cohen and Sharon Robinson's "Alexandra Leaving" is based on C. P. Cavafy's elegiac poem, "The God Abandons Antony."

Link to a live performance here

Also: Crash Test Dummies's "Afternoons and Coffeespoons," which retells T. S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and Paul Kelly's "Everything's Turning to White," which is based on Raymond Carver's short story "So Much Water So Close to Home."

Stevie Nicks did a pretty straight telling of Poe's "Annabel Lee," which is more in line with the OP's examples. Speaking of Nicks, her song, "The Highwayman," has always reminded me of Noyes's poem, I think because of the the song's sad tone and the ultimate futility of the relationship represented. It's not a direct parallel, though.

Thanks for starting this thread!

Pete Seeger did a well-known arrangement for some lyrics apparently written by King Solomon.

Iron Maiden recorded The rime of the ancient mariner. Well, far from all of it, but it's still close to 14 minutes.

Iron Maiden have also written several songs that source classic scifi stories.

Another very famous example, though not actually using any lyrics, but fun because it goes first one way, then the other, is Janacek's string quartet "The Kreutzer Sonata", which was inspired by a short story by Tolstoy. Tolstoy, of course, took his title from a violin sonata by Beethoven.

>8 Waywiser_Tundish:
If you're going to bring in Solomon, I suppose the Psalms count as well - where would we be without Boney M?

>9 andejons:
I believe Roger McGough did the whole text of "The wreck of the Hesperus" in one minute. It's on YouTube somewhere.