King Arthur in Music

King Arthur in Music is the first book to be devoted to the subject. The range of musical material is too wide for a single author to tackle satisfactorily, and the nine contributors to this volume are experts in the very different fields involved. The first essay, by Robert Shay, deals with the late seventeenth century semi-opera King Arthur, while the final essay by William Everitt looks at the appearances of Arthur on stage and screen and the scores that have accompanied these. Between these two extremes, the main body of the book deals largely with opera as we now understand it, from Wagner’s ‘Tristan’ and ‘Parsifal’ to Harrison Birtwistle’s ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’. Some works have never been performed, such as Hubert Parry’s ‘Guenever’ and Rutland Boughton’s Arthurian cycle, while others have only recently been staged or revived, such as Isaac Albeniz’s ‘Merlin’ and Ernest Chausson’s ‘Le roi Artus’, both striking post-Wagnerian works in very different styles: ‘Merlin’, for instance, begins with a passage based on Gregorian chant. The range of music is therefore wider than one might at first suspect, and other aspects of Arthurian music are brought out in the introduction, which is a general survey of the field, and in Jerome V.Reel’s comprehensive listing of Arthurian musical items which is printed as an appendix. Contributors ROBERT ADLINGTON, RICHARD BARBER, WALTER A. CLARK, JEREMY DIBBLE, WILLIAM A. EVERITT, TONY HUNT, MICHAEL HURD, JEROME V. REEL, NIGEL SIMEONE, ROBERT SHAY, DEREK WATSON.