Deryk Barker raises the fascinating point:

>To get back to music: I'm amazed that people think that a great poem is
>a necessity for a musical setting.  If the poem is that great, will music
>*add* anything to it? (I recall reading once that 2nd-rate novels made the
>best movies....)

Well, great poems *have* had great settings.  Second- and third-rate
poems have had great settings as well.  Mahler set the final scene of
Goethe's Faust magnificently, in my opinion.  Vaughan Williams set any
number of great poems very well indeed.  Poulenc's literary taste was
almost impeccable.  Hindemith's Rilke settings strike me as almost tours
de force, so intractable to musical setting does the poetry seem.  On the
other hand, so many of Brahms's texts are terrible.  I've never thought
much of Mahler's poetry as such.  Schubert's "Die Taubenpost" is a
wonderful song set to one of the most ridiculous texts ever.  I think
in all cases, the music either sells or does not sell the text.

I don't believe it's a matter of adding anything to the text.  A musical
setting becomes something different from the text itself.  A bad setting
of a Shakespeare sonnet doesn't say much about the quality of the poetry.
On the other hand, a good setting probably gives you a different experience
than the sonnet alone.  To me, it seems a more emotional, less rational
experience.  Milton's "Hymn on the Morning of Christ's Nativity" tended
to go right by me, until I heard Vaughan Williams's setting.  The poem
became for me less of a "document" and more rapturous.  VW's music also
highlighted the poet's craft with rhythm and rhyme.  In short, the music
opened up the poem to me as something alive rather than something to be
studied.

Movies, on the other hand, require action and image.  The vocabulary is
storytelling, rather than pure language.  These qualities tend to be found
more in the pulps than in high-art literature.  Nevertheless, I would say
that the scripts of Jacques Prevert have great quality.  I also confess
that I quite like the early Marx Brothers scripts (before Thalberg got his
mitts on them):  Animal Crackers, Monkey Business, Horsefeathers, and Duck
Soup.

"Come, my dear Kapellmeister!  Let the violas throb!  My regiment leaves at
dawn!"

Steve Schwartz