A Shakespeare Music Catalogue I

The five volumes of A Shakespeare Music Catalogue provide scholarship with an invaluable reference tool: a comprehensive and detailed documentation of all music - published and unpublished, from Shakespeare's day to our own - in any way related to Shakespeare's life and work. No single work has ever before attempted to draw together such a mass of information, from all countries of the world, on this neglected aspect of Shakespeare's dramatic art and cultural influence.

The music includes operas, ballets, overtures, tone-poems, songs, and various types of incidental music (for stage, radio, film, and television productions). Each composition is cited with information on its vocal and instrumental requirements, its publication history, and, when known, its first performance. The first three volumes deal with music and musical stage-directions for the plays (arranged alphabetically) and settings of the sonnets and narrative poems. The fourth volume contains indices: of Shakespeare's titles and lines, the titles of musical works, and composers, arrangers, editors, librettists, etc. The final volume provides a further, and unprecedented, research tool: a selected, annotated bibliography of writings, in all languages, on the subject of Shakespeare and music.

For the first time, readers of the Catalogue will have ready access to the broad range of musical works inspired by Shakespeare and to the diversity of critical viewpoints they have provoked. Theatrical directors will be able to consult it for appropriate music; musicologists and cultural historians study the history of taste; literary scholars examine any play or plays from a thoroughly documented musical standpoint. The Catalogue brings together the work of many scholars in the field, and goes far beyond existing available data.