Incidental music is music composed to accompany a play, a film, or a television program. It does not form an essential or dominant part of the presentation for which it is composed, but it may serve to heighten emotion or add atmosphere. Incidental music for stage plays also includes music played between acts. Pieces of music composed for this purpose may be referred to as act tunes or entr’actes. A piece of music serving to introduce a play is called an overture. Some incidental music has become famous as an independent composition. One example is the Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg’s incidental music for Henrik Ibsen’s fantasy drama Peer Gynt (1876).
Many drama experts believe that incidental music was included in both the tragedies and comedies of ancient Greece. It occurred at certain crucial points in the plays—for example, in the intervals between acts and as an instrumental accompaniment to the chanting of the chorus, a group of singers and dancers who commented on the action on stage. The later Roman comedies also included some incidental music, especially those of the playwright Terence (see Terence ). In medieval times, many religious dramas in Latin were sung throughout, like an early form of opera. But as plays in other languages, such as French, German, and English, came to be written, there was a greater emphasis on spoken dialogue, and music became less important—that is, it became “incidental.” Mostly it was used to accompany stage business and entrances and exits. Instrumentalists and choruses provided incidental music in both medieval miracle plays, which dramatized the lives of saints, and mystery plays, which dramatized Biblical events.
The earliest surviving nonreligious plays with music date back to the late 1200’s. But from the late 1400’s, incidental music began to develop as we know it today. It was first used in comedies in Italy but soon spread to other countries. For a long time, incidental music was reserved for comedies and lighter plays. Later, such music came to be used in a broader range of drama, such as William Shakespeare’s Hamlet (“Ophelia’s song”) and Othello (Desdemona’s “Willow song”).
During the 1600’s, plays in France by such writers as Moliere and Jean Racine included incidental music. From 1664, Moliere’s musical collaborator was the French court composer Jean-Baptiste Lully. In England, such composers as Henry Purcell and Matthew Locke wrote incidental music for both old and new plays.
From the 1700’s, the composition of incidental music for new plays began to decline in many countries. But many famous composers wrote incidental music for older plays. The English composer Thomas Arne was one of several composers who wrote incidental music for Shakespeare revivals in the early 1700’s. In Germany and Austria, the practice of writing incidental music for new plays survived longer. The Austrian composers Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Joseph Haydn and Germany’s Ludwig van Beethoven all wrote music for new plays. The overtures from Beethoven’s incidental music for Egmont (1788), by the German author Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and The Ruins of Athens (1812), by the German playwright August Kotzebue, are still often heard as concert pieces.
In the 1800’s, most of the best incidental music accompanied productions of older plays. Composers wrote music in the style of the day and did not attempt to reflect the period of the play concerned. Examples include the German composer Felix Mendelssohn’s incidental music for Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, partly written when Mendelssohn was only 17, and the Russian composer Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky’s music for Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The revival of Greek plays led to the composition of incidental music for these performances. In 1909, the English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams wrote incidental music for a Cambridge University production of The Wasps by the ancient Greek dramatist Aristophanes.
In the 1900’s, the use of incidental music for plays largely disappeared. But composers of incidental music found new outlets in providing scores for films, television plays and other programs, and radio dramas. The English composer William Walton wrote incidental music for films and plays, notably his music for the motion-picture adaptation of Shakespeare’s history play Henry V (1944).
