LITERATURE INTO MUSIC: MUSIC INSPIRED BY THE WORKS OF THOMAS HARDY: PART II: MUSIC COMPOSED AFTER HARDY'S LIFETIME

Part I of this article was published in the Autumn 2013 issue. It covered music composed during Hardy's lifetime. This second article covers music composed thereafter, coming right up to the present day. The focus is again on music by those composers who wrote operatic and orchestral works, and only mentions song settings of poems, and music in dramatisations for radio and other media, when they were written by featured composers. Hardy's work is seen to have inspired a wide variety of music, from full-length operas and musicals, via short pieces featuring particular fictional episodes, to ballet music and purely orchestral responses. Hardy-inspired compositions show no sign of reducing in number over the decades. However despite the quantity of music produced and the quality of much of it, there is not the sense in this period that Hardy maintained the kind of universal appeal for composers that was evident during the last two decades of his life.