From 29 March to 7 April 2012 the University of North Carolina School of the Arts presented William Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, featuring the American premiere of the incidental score composed by Erich Wolfgang Korngold. This page presents information related to that landmark production, inlcuding original press releases, links to radio interviews, and reviews and commentaries by the Korngolds, who attended the opening night performance, and by Troy Dixon, who attended the last day performances.
Update: UNCSA’s production received a Regional Emmy Award in January 2014 – see below.
Background on the theater genre
The following is adapted from a radio interview with John Mauceri, presented by Triad Arts Up Close on WFDD radio 88.5 FM, Wake Forest Univesity, North Carolina, US. Used with permission.
“One of the things that makes the Much Ado About Nothing production at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts so special is that we’ll be giving people an experience that has not been accessible anywhere in the world for maybe 80 years. That experience is to go to a play – not a musical, not an opera, not a ballet, but a play – and there’s an orchestra in the pit that plays an overture, and then the curtain goes up and people talk. They don’t sing – they talk. And at certain points in the play the music from the orchestra pit describes a scene change, or underscores a particular dialogue scene, or characterizes somebody who walks on or off the stage like a leitmotiv technique from Wagner.
“This type of theater experience was an equal partner in the great theaters of Europe where one third of the year was ballet, one third of the year was opera, and one third was theater. The big theater houses had orchestras on contract, so composers were writing music to accompany the great epic plays, whether that’s Beethoven for Goethe’s Egmont (music composed in 1810), or Schubert with Rosamunde (1823), or Mendelssohn for A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1842), or right up through Sibelius whose last greatest work is The Tempest (1926). Even Haydn’s Symphony No. 60 in C major, Il distratto (“The Distracted One,” composed by 1774) was actually cobbled together by Haydn from music that he wrote to a comedy called Il distratto – so Haydn was part of this theater genre also. So we see the history of this tradition, but no one can experience it anymore.
“When most people think of Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, they think of an orchestra performing it. For example, a few years ago the Winston-Salem Orchestra performed the play – cut down – with students from the School of the Arts that gave the audience some idea of how the music worked with the play, but they were still looking at an orchestra on the stage, not watching a play on stage with orchestral support. Imagine hearing the overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream and then the curtain goes up and we’re hearing the words of Shakespeare. Now that’s what used to happen.
“All of this eventually became movie music, by the way, because the composers who were ultimately successful in creating the sound of Hollywood and how music works in dramatic movies were the composers who were trained in this very style of theatrical music that was part of a centuries old tradition in Europe. And we have to say Europe specifically because American composers had never seen anything like this because we didn’t have that same tradition in the United States of America. But a Max Steiner, or an Erich Wolfgang Korngold, or a Miklós Rózsa, or a Dimitri Tiomkin, or any of those first, hugely successful composers in the era of sound films from the 1930s knew this tradition well, and they understood what the gestures were. The gestures come out of Wagner, of course, and they come out of a history of which Wagner is really the most important, but which continued on to Richard Strauss and Mahler. But before them was Beethoven and Schubert.”
John Mauceri, interviewed by David Ford
The original audio interview as broadcast on 15 & 16 March 2012
can be heard at the WFDD website.

Korngold and Shakespeare Reunited
by Kathrin & John Hubbard

UNCSA’s Production
by Troy O. Dixon

Our original, pre-production advertizement:
UNCSA presents the American Premiere of Shakespeare’s
MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING
featuring a new edition of Korngold’s COMPLETE incidental music
The University of North Carolina School of the Arts (UNCSA) will present the American premiere of Shakespeare’s spirited comedy Much Ado About Nothing with Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s complete score in a fully staged production March 29-April 7.
Press Release
UNCSA details
our website Feature article
Much Ado is a Regional Emmy Winner
The University of North Carolina School of the Arts’s 2012 production of the Shakespeare classic Much Ado About Nothing was honored in January 2014 at the 28th Midsouth Regional Emmy Awards. The Nashville/Midsouth Chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, which serves North Carolina, Tennessee and northern Alabama, awarded the Regional Emmy Award in the category of “Arts Programming” for UNCSA’s broadcast of the Much Ado About Nothing production on UNC-TV on 9 April 2013. The award for the School of Drama’s landmark production follows on the heels of numerous accolades in the media for the premiere recording of Korngold’s complete incidental music to the play – as used in their production – released on theToccata Classics label in 2013.
UNCSA Press Release (9 Dec 2013)
Emmy nomination article (8 Jan 2014)
John Mauceri’s webpost