Composers Datebook

When Patrick Stewart began his role as Captain Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation, the Los Angeles Times called him an "unknown British Shakespearean actor." Ouch! That must have caused a wry smile to cross the face of this star actor of the Royal Shakespeare Company and Royal National Theater. In any case, in 1995, when Stewart played Prospero in Shakespeare’s “Tempest” at New York’s Public Theater, one reviewer said he acted “with white hot fury.” (Who knows, maybe he was thinking of that LA Times critic?) Composer Paul Morovec was in the audience for one of those New York performances, found Stewart “extraordinary,” and began writing a chamber work he entitled “Tempest Fantasy.” Moravec describes it as follows: "Tempest Fantasy is a musical meditation on various characters, moods, situations, and lines of text from my favorite Shakespeare play... Rather than trying to depict these elements in programmatic terms, the music simply uses them as points of departure for flights of purely musical fancy. The first three movements spring from the nature and selected speeches... The fourth movement begins from Caliban's uncharacteristically elegant speech from Act III, scene 2: ‘Be not afeard: the isle is full of noises, sounds and sweet airs that give delight, and hurt not.’” Paul Moravec’s “Tempest Fantasy” debuted in New York City on this date in 2003 and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2004.