William Shakespeare's play The Tempest has influenced music, literature and art in varied ways in the 400 years since it was written.
Music
The Tempest has more music than any other Shakespeare play, and has proved more popular as a subject for composers than most of Shakespeare's plays. Scholar Julie Sanders ascribes this to the "perceived 'musicality' or lyricism" of the play.
Two settings of songs from The Tempest which may have been used in performances during Shakespeare's lifetime have survived. These are "Full Fathom Five" and "Where The Bee Sucks There Suck I" in the 1659 publication Cheerful Ayres or Ballads, in which they are attributed to Robert Johnson, who regularly composed for the King's Men. It has been common throughout the history of the play for the producers to commission contemporary settings of these two songs, and also of "Come Unto These Yellow Sands".
The Tempest has also influenced songs written in the folk and hippie traditions: for example, versions of "Full Fathom Five" were recorded by Marianne Faithfull for Come My Way in 1965 and by Pete Seeger for Dangerous Songs!? in 1966.
Ludwig van Beethoven's 1802 Piano Sonata No. 17 in D minor, Op. 31, No. 2, was given the subtitle "The Tempest" some time after Beethoven's death because, when asked about the meaning of the sonata, Beethoven was alleged to have said "Read The Tempest." But this story comes from his associate Anton Schindler, who is often not trustworthy.
Incidental music Among those who wrote incidental music to The Tempest are: Arthur Sullivan: his graduation piece, completed in 1861, was a set of incidental music to "The Tempest". His score was still in use half a century later to add atmosphere the Old Vic's 1914 production. Ernest Chausson: in 1888 he wrote incidental music for La tempête, a French translation by Maurice Bouchor. This is believed to be the first orchestral work that made use of the celesta. Jean Sibelius: his 1926 incidental music was written for a lavish production at the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen. An epilogue was added for a 1927 performance in Helsinki. He represented individual characters through instrumentation choices: particularly admired was his use of harps and percussion to represent Prospero, said to capture the "resonant ambiguity of the character". Malcolm Arnold, Lennox Berkeley, Hector Berlioz, Arthur Bliss, Engelbert Humperdinck, Mary McCarty Snow, Willem Pijper, Henry Purcell, and Patsy Rogers.
Opera At least forty-six operas or semi-operas based on The Tempest exist. In addition to the Dryden/Davenant and Garrick versions mentioned in the "Restoration and 18th century" section above, Frederic Reynolds produced an operatic version in 1821, with music by Sir Henry Bishop. Other pre-20th-century operas based on The Tempest include Fromental Halévy's La Tempesta (1850) and Zdeněk Fibich's Bouře (1894).
In the 20th century, Kurt Atterberg's Stormen premiered in 1948 and Frank Martin's Der Sturm in 1955. Michael Tippett's 1971 opera The Knot Garden contains various allusions to The Tempest. In Act 3, a psychoanalyst, Mangus, pretends to be Prospero and uses situations from Shakespeare's play in his therapy sessions. John Eaton, in 1985, produced a fusion of live jazz with pre-recorded electronic music, with a libretto by Andrew Porter. Michael Nyman's 1991 opera Noises, Sounds & Sweet Airs was first performed as an opera-ballet choreographed by Karine Saporta. The three vocalists, a soprano, contralto, and tenor, are voices rather than individual characters, with the tenor just as likely as the soprano to sing Miranda, or all three sing as one character.
The soprano who sings the part of Ariel in Thomas Adès's 2004 opera The Tempest is stretched at the higher end of the register, highlighting the androgyny of the role.
Luca Lombardi's Prospero was premiered in April 2006 at Nuremberg Opera House. Ariel is sung by 4 female voices (S,S,MS,A) and has an instrumental alter ego on stage (flute). There is an instrumental alter ego (cello) also for Prospero.
Kaija Saariaho has set six fragments of The Tempest as accompanied arias between 1993 and 2014, and published them as The Tempest Songbook. The work is not intended as a music theatre piece, but it has been staged for instance by Gotham Chamber Opera at the Metropolitan Museum in 2015, in a collage containing also the incidental music for The Tempest attributed to Purcell (Saariaho's work exists in settings for both modern and Baroque instruments).
Choral settings Choral settings of excerpts from The Tempest include Amy Beach's Come Unto These Yellow Sands (SSAA, from Three Shakespeare Songs), Matthew Harris's Full Fathom Five, I Shall No More to Sea, and Where the Bee Sucks (SATB, from Shakespeare Songs, Books I, V, VI), Ryan Kelly's The Tempest (SATB, a setting of the play's Scene I), Jaakko Mäntyjärvi's Full Fathom Five and A Scurvy Tune (SATB, from Four Shakespeare Songs and More Shakespeare Songs), Frank Martin's Songs of Ariel (SATB), Ralph Vaughan Williams' Full Fathom Five and The Cloud-capp'd Towers (SATB, from Three Shakespeare Songs), and David Willcocks's Full Fathom Five (SSA).
Orchestral works Orchestral works for concert presentation include Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's fantasy The Tempest (1873), Fibich's symphonic poem Bouře (1880), John Knowles Paine's symphonic poem The Tempest (1876), Benjamin Dale's overture (1902), Arthur Honegger's orchestral prelude (1923), Felix Weingartner's overture "Der Sturm", Heorhiy Maiboroda's overture, and Egon Wellesz's Prosperos Beschwörungen (five works 1934–36).
Ballet Ballet sequences have been used in many performances of the play since Restoration times. A one-act ballet of The Tempest by choreographer Alexei Ratmansky was premiered by American Ballet Theatre set to the incidental music of Jean Sibelius on 30 October 2013 in New York City.
Stage musicals Stage musicals derived from The Tempest have been produced. A production called The Tempest: A Musical was produced at the Cherry Lane Theatre in New York City in December 2006, with a concept credited to Thomas Meehan and a script by Daniel Neiden (who also wrote the songs) and Ryan Knowles. Neiden had previously been connected with another musical, entitled Tempest Toss'd. In September 2013, The Public Theater produced a new large-scale stage musical at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, directed by Lear deBessonet with a cast of more than 200.
Heavy metal
In August 2010, the renowned Brazilian heavy metal music band Angra released the album Aqua, conceptually based on Shakespeare's The Tempest. The album has 10 tracks and tells the journey of Prospero as he passes through the entire work.
According to the band's guitarist and founder, Rafael Bittencourt, the album adopts the element of water as the focus of the most diverse transformations in life, which is represented by Prospero's desires and actions against his enemies:
Literature
Percy Bysshe Shelley was one of the earliest poets to be influenced by The Tempest. His "With a Guitar, To Jane" identifies Ariel with the poet and his songs with poetry. The poem uses simple diction to convey Ariel's closeness to nature and "imitates the straightforward beauty of Shakespeare's original songs". Following the publication of Darwin's ideas on evolution, writers began to question mankind's place in the world and its relationship with God. One writer who explored these ideas was Robert Browning, whose poem "Caliban upon Setebos" (1864) sets Shakespeare's character pondering theological and philosophical questions. The French philosopher Ernest Renan wrote a closet drama, Caliban: Suite de La Tempête (Caliban: Sequel to The Tempest), in 1878. This features a female Ariel who follows Prospero back to Milan, and a Caliban who leads a coup against Prospero, after the success of which he actively imitates his former master's virtues. W. H. Auden's long poem The Sea and the Mirror is in three parts, Prospero's farewell to Ariel referring to the matters unresolved at the end of the play; a reflection by each of the supporting characters on their experiences and intentions; then a prose narrative "Caliban to the Audience" which takes a Freudian viewpoint, seeing Caliban as Prospero's libidinous secret self.
The book Brave New World by Aldous Huxley references The Tempest in the title, and explores genetically modified citizens and the subsequent social effects. The novel and the phrase from The Tempest, "brave new world",The Tempest 5.1.183 has itself since been associated with public debate about humankind's understanding and use of genetic modification, in particular with regards to humans.
Postcolonial ideas influenced late 20th-century writings. Barbadian George Lamming's 1960 The Pleasures of Exile reflects upon Caliban in the context of the author's feelings of alienation. Aimé Césaire of Martinique, in his 1969 French-language play Une Tempête sets The Tempest in a colony suffering unrest, and prefuiguring black independence. The play portrays Ariel as a mulatto who, unlike the more rebellious black Caliban, feels that negotiation and partnership is the way to freedom from the colonisers. Roberto Fernandez Retamar sets his version of the play in Cuba, and portrays Ariel as a wealthy Cuban (in comparison to the lower-class Caliban) who also must choose between rebellion or negotiation. Barbadian poet E. P. Kamau Brathwaite in his 1969 poem "Caliban" identifies the character with the history of colonialism, between the first voyage of Columbus through to the Cuban Revolution. Jamaican-American author Michelle Cliff's No Telephone to Heaven (which is also a literary response to Jane Eyre) has a protagonist who identifies with both Caliban and Miranda. And the use of Ariel in postcolonial thought is far from uncommon: the spirit is even the namesake of a scholarly journal covering post-colonial criticism. The figure of Caliban influenced numerous works of African literature in the 1970s, including pieces by Taban Lo Liyong in Uganda, Lemuel Johnson in Sierra Leone, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o of Kenya's A Grain of Wheat, and David Wallace of Zambia's Do You Love Me, Master? In 1995, Sierra Leonean Lemuel Johnson's Highlife for Caliban imagined Caliban as king of his own kingdom.
A similar phenomenon occurred in relation to feminist ideas in late 20th-century Canada, where several writers produced works inspired by Miranda, including The Diviners by Margaret Laurence, Prospero's Daughter by Constance Beresford-Howe and The Measure of Miranda by Sarah Murphy. Other writers have feminised Ariel (as in Marina Warner's novel Indigo) or Caliban (as in Suniti Namjoshi's sequence of poems Snapshots of Caliban).
As part of Random House's Hogarth Shakespeare series of contemporary reimaginings of Shakespeare plays by contemporary writers, Margaret Atwood's 2016 novel Hag-Seed is based on The Tempest. The 2019 novella Miranda in Milan by Katharine Duckett also reimagines the events which might occur after the end of the play.
Visual art