Recent entries like the Hamlet of Brett Dean and the Antony and Cleopatra of John Adams may be turning the tide, but historically, composers have been wary about setting Shakespeare’s plays to music in English, and rightly so. To date, just one—Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream—has won a place in (or on the fringe of) the “canon.” Maybe that’s why, alas, the prodigiously talented British composer Thomas Adès wrote his opera The Tempest to a verse paraphrase by the Australian playwright Meredith Oakes. You’ve heard of the baby and the bathwater? If Adès, who is conducting the Vienna State Opera performances in English, is lucky, the native German speakers there will take less issue with the language. In any case, they should be hearing a magnificent performance, headed by baritone Adrian Eröd, a company mainstay, as the castaway magus Prospero and Caroline Wettergreen, who will be scraping the chandelier in the stratospheric role of Ariel, the Nature spirit tethered to Prospero’s commands. —Matthew Gurewitsch