Venus and Bacchus meet, and all the world
Stands still to watch the bliss of living gods."
The music here is very difficult; the rhythm changes often, every other bar, as does the key; the intervals are strangely unexpected, and the singer can look for no help from the orchestra. A passage marked "In regal martial style" ushers in the lovers, and we have a long vivid duet. Cleopatra sings a lengthy mystic solo, which is followed by an ominous chorus, at the end of which Antony seems to have died, for Cleopatra sings a very powerful dirge for him:—
Now all is finished, all is done,
My world is dead;
And he whose glory shamed the sun
Lies shamed instead.
These lips that frenzied him with love
Have death bestowed.
The Finale is marked "Marche Funèbre," and is a short chorus, dirge-like in feeling, rounding up the work effectively. It is a very interesting composition, difficult and most complicated, very restless and disjointed, to most ears singularly unmelodious and unsatisfactory, yet, at the same time, full of novel effects, and to that extent certainly worth study; but I suspect that none of it ever got on the Southport barrel organs.
Unfortunately, I cannot get hold of Dr Ethel Smyth's overture of this name, but Mr J. A. Fuller-Maitland, in his English Music in the Nineteenth Century, writes: "Ethel Smyth's genius lies in the direction of strong and even virile work; her overture 'Antony and Cleopatra,' given at the Crystal Palace and the London Symphony concerts, showed that she understood all the resources of the orchestra, and that she was no amateur." The last six words seem hardly necessary. The composer has since proved her worth in her two operas, The Wreckers and The Boatswain's Mate.
Schubert's setting of "Come, thou monarch of the vine" is not so successful as his "Who is Sylvia?" or "Hark, the lark." It is a straight, robust song, mostly in unison. There is a quite unnecessary second verse added by one "N. N." Other but not important settings of these words are by William Linley, 1815, for solo boy and male chorus; Bishop, 1837, for three male voices; and Weiss, 1863, for bass solo.
Michael Balling's music for Frank Benson's production of Antony and Cleopatra contains, among other very good music, a baritone song to these words, with male chorus. Unfortunately, he did not write an overture or entr'actes, but his Cæsar and Antony marches are full of contrasted character, and his "Rose Procession" for the last "Gaudy Night" is really beautiful. Sir Henry Bishop set these words to a S.A.T.B. quartet and full chorus, and by repeating each line several times, and most of the words pretty often, has made quite a long and uninteresting number out of it.
Thomas Chilcot in 1745 published a setting of these words for a tenor voice. It is a good florid song, with a running accompaniment for strings. The composer omits the fifth line of the lyric for some reason I cannot understand. Surely the poem is very short as it is. In setting it he certainly seems to have found it so, as he repeats several sentences. The line he cuts makes rather a good refrain—"Cup us till the world goes round"—and most composers make their effect here.
Miss Frances Allitsen has composed for Madame Clara Butt a "Scena"; the text chiefly from Shakespeare, the words of the aria by Thomas S. Collier. It is supposed to be the death scene of Cleopatra, and the words are a sad jumble of odd lines taken from here and there. The music is very pretentious, and obviously not written round Cleopatra, but round Madame Butt's exceptional voice. The prayer to Isis and Osiris, with its un-Shakespearian rhymes of "supplication" and "desolation," would sound quite right with small verbal alterations in any Methodist chapel. The aria is vocal and to a certain extent melodious in a "ballad concert" manner, but it is utterly lacking in dignity. A long recitative follows in which nearly every note has an accent on it; Cleopatra applies the asp to a tremolo accompaniment, and finally dies, singing a series of accented high notes, as if the asp were hurting a good deal; and a few bars of minor chords bring the work to a close.