Sigma Alpha Iota

sai-natiOnal.ORg WintER 2014 PAN PIPES 15 putting shaKespeare to musiC When you entombed in men's eyes shall lie. Your monument shall be my gentle verse,… You still shall live-such virtue hath my pen- —William Shakespeare, Sonnet 81, lines 8, 9, 13 By holliS thoMS R ichard Simpson (1820-1876), a significant Shakespearean scholar of the mid-19 th century, was also a prolific amateur composer who set all of Shakespeare's 154 sonnets to music. Published in 1868, his Philosophy of Shakespeare's Sonnets took an imaginative and expansive look at the complete cycle of the sonnets, suggesting its design exhibited "the gradual ascent of Love through each degree of its scale, from the first conception of fancy in the eyes to the final possession of the whole heart and intellect by ideal love." 1 Simpson placed the 154 sonnets into a Platonic philosophical scheme of six levels of love as exhibited in both the young man and the dark lady sections of the sonnets. 2 During 1861-1867, while he was writing his literary analysis of Shakespeare's sonnets, he set all of them to music. While his book on Shakespeare's sonnets became quite well known, his musical settings were private creative ventures known only by family and friends. Aer the publication of his literary analysis in 1868, he continued to revise a few of the sonnets or set some of them a second time. Aer his death in 1876, his wife, in 1878, had a selection of his compositions published, including thirteen of his sonnet settings: Sonnets 5, 6, 7, 27, 58, 59, 63, 71, 73, 81, 96, and two settings of 110. 3 His musical manuscript settings were eventually donated to the British Library (MS 52603-52605), where they have remained "unseen and unsung." 4 For me, as a composer, the phrase "unseen and unsung" would be disturbing, because there would be nothing worse than to write 700 pages of musical manuscripts only to have them forgotten. I did manage to find the 1878 privately published volume of select settings when doing research in the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, and, as I analyzed these thirteen works, I found them extraordinary miniatures worthy of in-depth study not only for their musical value but as they related both to Shakespeare's sonnets and to Simpson's own literary analysis of that incredible cycle. I thought that the investment of procuring copies of the 700 pages of manuscripts from the British Library would be the only way that I could do a complete analysis, and so I purchased the copies of Richard Simpson's musical manuscript settings richard Simpson: Composer lost, then Found Simpson's manuscript of Sonnet 1, British Library MS 52603. SIMPSON continued on page 16

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