Incidental Music, music written expressly for a dramatic performance, which seldom survives the play for which it was intended. It can be seen first in Elizabethan drama and also in classical Spanish drama. Shakespeare's plays demanded a good deal of music, not only for interpolated songs, for sonnets (a word probably derived from
sonata), and for tuckets (from toccata), but also for interludes and dances. There must have been music at the opening of
Twelfth Night and in the last acts of
A Midsummer Night's Dream and
Much Ado about Nothing. In Spain, the plays of
Calderón, Lope de
Vega, and many other playwrights continually call for music of various sorts; yet they have too much action and spoken dialogue to be classed as operas. In English Restoration plays Purcell's music for such dramatists as
Beaumont and
Fletcher,
Congreve, and
Dryden marks an important historical advance in the use of music in the theatre. During the 18th century the popularity of
ballad opera and other types of light operatic entertainment in which the music, though often trivial, was none the less essential prepared the way for developments in the 19th by enlarging and improving the orchestral resources of the theatre. Overtures and musical interludes between the acts became customary, and it was not long before playwrights inserted not only songs and dances and processions to music, but scenes of excitement or pathos in which the spoken words were accompanied by an orchestral undercurrent. The
melodrama developed from this.
From the beginning of the 19th century, major composers were supplying scores which have also survived independently, including Beethoven's overture for the 1810 production of Goethe's
Egmont, Schubert's music for Helmine von Chézy's ephemeral
Rosamunde (1823), Schumann's score (1848–9) for
Byron's Manfred, and Mendelssohn's full incidental music for
A Midsummer Night's Dream. By the second half of the century incidental music was established as a separate category of some importance, with such works as Bizet's music for Daudet's
L'Arlésienne (1872) and Grieg's for
Ibsen's Peer Gynt (1876). Everywhere
poetic drama, in particular, was provided with some form of music, often by famous composers. In pre-Revolutionary Russia, Balakirev wrote music for
King Lear (1861) and Tchaikovsky for
Hamlet (1891); and the Soviet Union has maintained the traditions of using large-scale orchestral forces in the serious theatre. The cinema has claimed the best of modern American incidental music, although early productions of plays by Eugene
O'Neill had interesting scores.
In England incidental music was rarely taken seriously until the 20th century, though music was commissioned from Sir Arthur Sullivan for productions of Shakespeare between 1862 and 1888, as well as for
Tennyson's The Foresters in 1892 and Comyns Carr's
King Arthur in 1895. A revival of
The Tempest in London in 1921 in which some of Sullivan's music was used, together with some new and very striking music by Arthur Bliss, showed how good Sullivan could be at theatre music of this kind. Other music of quality was produced mainly for academic performances—Stanford's for
Aeschylus' Eumenides (1885) and
Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus (1887) in
Cambridge; Parry's for productions of
Aristophanes in
Oxford between 1883 and 1914; and Vaughan Williams's for Aristophanes'
Wasps (1909), also in Cambridge. Stanford also provided good incidental music for two London plays, Tennyson's
Queen Mary (1876) and
Becket (1893), in which Henry
Irving appeared.
The incidental music by Norman O'Neill for plays at the Haymarket was slight but combined a special aptitude for the requirements of the stage with graceful, sometimes fanciful invention, particularly in the scores for
Maeterlinck's The Blue Bird (1909),
Barrie's Mary Rose (1920), and Ashley
Dukes's The Man with a Load of Mischief (1925). Elgar wrote music for the London production of
Yeats's Diarmuid and Grania (1902) and for
The Starlight Express (1915). Other outstanding composers of incidental music at this time were Armstrong Gibbs—for Maeterlinck's
The Betrothal (1921); Eugene Goossens—for
Maugham's East of Suez (1922), Margaret Kennedy's
The Constant Nymph (1926), and Dodie Smith's
Autumn Crocus (1931); Frederic Austin—for the
Čapeks' The Insect Play (1923) and a revival of
Congreve's The Way of the World in 1924; and, most important of all, Delius—for Flecker's
Hassan (1923). Benjamin Britten wrote the music for the London productions of
Priestley's Johnson over Jordan (1939), Ronald Duncan's
This Way to the Tomb, and Webster's
The Duchess of Malfi (both 1945); and before turning his attention to film music during the war years, William Walton provided a score for John
Gielgud's production of
Macbeth in 1942.
In recent years companies who regularly use incidental music have tended to employ a small instrumental ensemble or some form of recorded score. Until it closed in 1963 the
Old Vic had a flexible chamber group and commissioned music from a number of distinguished contemporary composers. These include John Gardner (Marlowe's
Tamburlaine, 1951); Malcolm Arnold (
The Tempest, 1954); Peter Maxwell Davies (
Richard II, 1959); Thea Musgrave (
A Midsummer Night's Dream, 1960); Michael Tippett (
The Tempest, 1962); Elizabeth Lutyens (
Julius Caesar, 1962; also Aeschylus'
Oresteia for the
Oxford Playhouse company at the Old Vic, 1961). The company's resident composer George Hall wrote incidental music for Ibsen's
Peer Gynt in 1962: the National Theatre in Oslo had also commissioned a score from Harald Saeverud in 1947. When Peter
Hall became director of the
RSC in 1960, Raymond Leppard was appointed music adviser and there too outstanding composers were employed: Lennox Berkeley (
The Winter's Tale, 1960), Humphrey Searle (
Troilus and Cressida, 1960), and Roberto Gerhard (
Macbeth, 1962). As resident composer Stephen Oliver provided an effective score for the RSC's adaptation of
Dickens's Nicholas Nickleby (1980) as well as for a number of Shakespeare productions.
Taped electronic music has proved increasingly useful.
Brook's chilling accompaniment to his production of
Titus Andronicus ( Stratford, 1957) and Leppard's enchanted music for
The Tempest ( Stratford, 1963) are notable examples.
