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Shakespeare & Beyond

Such Sweet Thunder: The musical sonnets in Duke Ellington's Shakespeare suite

Duke Ellington

Portrait of Duke Ellington, photographed by William P. Gottlieb at the Aquarium in New York, between 1946 and 1948. Library of Congress.

The connections between Shakespeare and almost any aspect of our culture are innumerable, including the special association between Shakespeare and jazz. In 2016, acclaimed jazz pianist Cyrus Chestnut composed “Father Time,” in response to Sonnet 12, for the Folger; he performed it again at the 2021 Folger Gala (it’s at 19:08). Last week, the Folger premiered an extraordinary Folger program, Autumn Leaves, which is available on demand through June 30, 2022. In it, Chestnut joins poets Kyle Dargan and Lenard D. Moore for an intimate improvisation of words and music, exploring the magic that happens when artists collaborate.

In 1957, Duke Ellington premiered and recorded a milestone in the story of Shakespeare and jazz, Such Sweet Thunder. A 12-song jazz suite written by Ellington and Billy Strayhorn, his arranger and writing partner, it includes 11 songs based on Shakespearean characters and a final one about Shakespeare himself. In 2019, on the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast, we talked to University of New Hampshire English Professor Douglas Lanier about Such Sweet Thunder, including its “musical sonnets.” Read the excerpt below and listen to the full podcast episode. Barbara Bogaev interviews Lanier.


BARBARA BOGAEV: How did Ellington and Strayhorn interpret the Shakespeare sonnets? Because they created these “musical sonnets” in this piece, and I’m not sure I know what that means either.

DOUGLAS LANIER: That’s a fascinating one. This wasn’t discovered until really about 10 years later, when Cleo Laine was recording her musical jazz tribute to Shakespeare, Shakespeare and All That Jazz. She decided she was going to sing sonnet number 40 over the music for “Sonnet to Hank Cinq.” She discovered that the words of the sonnet fit exactly the melody that Ellington had written, which means that what Ellington had done was to create a melody line that mirrors exactly the 14 line iambic pentameter that Shakespeare has. In other words, what he did was, he wrote 14 small melodies that were of 10 notes each.