Content area
Full Text
Franco Zeffirelli's adaptation of William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet never apologizes for being a movie and not a play.1 From its opening panoramic shot of fair Verona to its closing procession of chastened Capulets and Montagues filing past the bodies of the young lovers, it ransacks cinematic art for pictorial and musical equivalents to Shakespeare's words.
In many ways closer to the Czinner 1966 filmed ballet than the 1954 Renato Castellani version, this is a movie of the play that draws heavily on an operatic sensibility. Its director, who has indicated a preference for "movies in opera to opera in movies,"2 came to filmmaking from a brilliant career in the Italian opera and the New York Metropolitan, besides stage experience with Romeo and Juliet at the Old Vic in 1960. His musical director, Nino Rota, has combined careers as an operatic composer (e.g., Aladino e la lampada magica) and as a film musician with scores for such movies as the 1956 Paramount War and Peace and the Zeffirelli 1966 Taming of the Shrew. Not surprisingly, the artistic background of these two men has resulted in a film unusually sensitive to the interplay between words and music. When several years ago Charles Hurtgen called for "greater control by a single comprehensive mind"3 in the music for Shakespeare films, he might well have been anticipating Zeffirelli and Rota.
Of course Romeo and Juliet invites musical notation. As a "sonnet play," its verbal lyricism has encouraged stage directors like Harley Granville-Barker to speak of "word-music." Casting about for metaphors to describe Benvolio's shift in tone when addressing Lady Montague, Granville-Barker comes up with "from wood-wind, brass and tympany to an andante on the strings."4 Direct calls for music in the text certify to the presence of live musicians onstage in the Elizabethan playhouse. The music for the Capulet ball and the consort accompanying Paris to the Capulet household ("The County will be here with music straight, / For so he said he would") hint at a musical presence now lost. Romeo, Juliet, and Mercutio all rely on familiar musical conceits: "the silver sound of music"; "the music of sweet news"; and "run through the ear with a love song." Romeo's early morning departure from Juliet sets up an...