The Tempest: Suite

The suite opens with music built to introduce a play, not a symphony: a slow, ceremonial introduction followed by a movement Locke actually labeled "The Tempest," full of jagged, unsettled string writing meant to conjure the shipwreck that opens Shakespeare's story. From there the suite moves through a sequence of short dances and character pieces, many in the stately duple or triple patterns typical of English theater music of the 1670s, alternating slow and fast tempos so that no single mood settles for long. Listen for sudden dynamic contrasts and rough, almost primitive-sounding dissonances in the storm music, which stood out to Locke's contemporaries as unusually bold word-painting for the period. Elsewhere the string writing turns graceful and dance-like, offering interludes that would have accompanied masque-style entertainments layered into the play's spectacle. Because this is theater music strung together rather than a symphonic argument, listeners should follow it as a set of scenes rather than a single unfolding narrative, each movement brief, vivid, and self-contained, ending almost as soon as its character is established.

Locke wrote this music for a lavish 1674 operatic adaptation of Shakespeare's "The Tempest," staged in London with elaborate scenery and stage machinery designed to show the shipwreck and magical transformations of the plot. The production, adapted by Thomas Shadwell, folded songs, dances, and instrumental scene-setting into Shakespeare's text, and Locke's contribution supplied the instrumental framework, including the vivid depiction of the storm itself. The music survives among the first published English theater scores, printed not long after the production, which helped preserve it when so much incidental music of the period was lost. Modern performers have since drawn a concert suite from these theatrical numbers, and it now serves as an entry point into English Restoration stage music, valued for its directness and its glimpse of how a London audience in the 1670s expected a storm, a spirit, or a dance to sound.