Honorary Research Fellow of the Shakespeare Institute Catherine M.S. Alexander explores the musical response from composers to Shakespeare's play.
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A Midsummer Night’s Dream has elicited a musical response from composers for over three-hundred years. As originally written by Shakespeare, probably in 1595, it includes five musical scenes plus indications of trumpets and windhorns that are integral to the plot (unlike some contemporary plays where such moments were simply add-ons to entertain the audience and were irrelevant to the action). Shakespeare’s original musical collaborators have never been identified but in recent years such accomplished and varied theatre composers as Raymond Leppard, Thea Musgrave, Johnny Dankworth, Stephen Oliver, Guy Woolfenden, Mia Soteriou and Paul Englishby have been engaged for the task.
From the middle of the nineteenth century, however, it has been Mendelssohn’s music that has most often accompanied the songs, dances and shifting moods of the play. First written as an overture in 1826 then significantly extended in 1842 as incidental music for a commissioned royal performance at Potsdam, when German enthusiasm for Shakespeare was at its height, it is undoubtedly the best known Dream music not least because of the enduring popularity of the Wedding March, the intermezzo between Mendelssohn’s acts four and five. It reached a wide audience too, arranged by Korngold, in Max Reinhardt’s 1935 film of the play. The year before, Sternberg’s film The Scarlet Empress (with Dietrich as Catherine the Great) had used some Mendelssohn as did Woody Allen in A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy of 1982. The music has been used for ballet too, most significantly for The Dream choreographed by Frederick Ashton for the Royal Ballet in 1964 to commemorate Shakespeare’s 400th birthday.
William Shakespeare
But Dream has a significant musical life beyond performances of the play and the proliferation of Mendelssohn. Its structure and variety offer much to a composer: there are three distinct plot strands (the court, the workers, the fairies) with distinct characters and settings in each; there is a mixture of ‘real’ and the imaginary or supernatural; there are distinct moods or tones (threat, romance, comedy), plus there are ‘ready-made’ song lyrics and much rhyming text. These elements can be extended, omitted, manipulated and exploited to create new musical works. Then of course there is the appeal of the title of the work: the magical and festive associations of midsummer night and the potential of the shifting interpretation of dreams. From the opening scene to the epilogue seven characters speak of dreams, concluding with Puck’s suggestion that it is the audience ‘who have but slumbered here / While these visions did appear.’
Benjamin Britten’s 1960 opera retained the three groups of characters but focussed on the fairies. With a libretto adapted from Shakespeare by Britten and Peter Pears it opens with Titania’s fairies in a woodland setting which remains the location for much of the action (and establishes a tone of dream fantasy) that is maintained until the final celebration of three marriages in the Duke’s court and concludes with Puck’s speech to the audience.
Conversely two eighteenth century sung satirical burlesques, Richard Leveridge’s The Comickal Masque of Pyramus and Thisbe (1716) and John Lampe’s Pyramus and Thisbe (1745) focussed solely on the play within a play of Act 5. In the first half of the eighteenth century competition between theatres and performers – particularly between English and Italian singers – was intense. Both Leveridge and Lampe introduced a fictional composer, Mr Semibreve, plus two other speaking roles whose function was to interject facetious comments on the style and actions of what were parodies of Italian opera and to encourage the establishment of English opera.
Audience tastes were changing mid-century and were more amenable to spectacle, pantomime and opera. Even so, when the great Shakespearian actor, manager and promoter of Shakespeare David Garrick staged his 1755 opera, The Fairies, based on Dream, he acknowledged that the tension between English and Italian musicians was still in evidence when he delivered the prologue to the show:
Excuse us first for foolishly supposing
Your countryman could please you in composing;
An op’ra too! – played by an English band,
Wrote in a language which you understand –
I dare not say WHO wrote it – I could tell ye,
To soften matters – Signor Shakespearelli.
David Garrick's 1755 opera The Fairies
Nevertheless Garrick imported two Italian singers (Signor Guidani as Lysander and Signora Passerini as Hermia) who were well received, a young French singer (Miss Poitiers as Helena) and used a troop of boys (probably William Savage’s choir from St Paul’s Cathedral). The music was composed by John Christopher Smith, a pupil of Handel and later his secretary, and the text written by Garrick. He cut Shakespeare’s original, excluded Bottom and co and the Pyramus and Thisbe play, but added song lyrics based on the verses of Milton, Waller, Dryden, Hammond and Lansdowne, and borrowed songs from four other Shakespeare plays: ‘Where the bee sucks’ from The Tempest; ‘Sigh no more, Ladies’ from Much Ado About Nothing; and lesser known pieces from Henry VIII and Love’s Labour’s Lost. Horace Walpole caught some of the contradictions of the work: ‘Garrick has produced a detestable English opera … it is Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, which is forty times more nonsensical than the worst translation of any Italian opera-books – But such sense and such harmony are irresistible!’
While The Fairies was broadly well received Garrick’s production of the play (with George Colman) eight years later was a failure. While not sung-through it retained thirty-three of the opera’s songs, used a heavily cut text that kept only eighteen lines from the fifth act, and closed after two nights. Nevertheless much of the text was re-used by Frederick Reynolds for his Covent Garden production of 1816 that introduced new music for the songs composed by Henry Bishop and existing tunes borrowed from Smith, Arne, Handel, and R.J.S. Stevens.
However, predating Leveridge, Lampe, Garrick/Smith, Bishop, Mendelssohn and Britten, the first musical response to Dream was Purcell’s Fairy Queen that opened on 2 May, 1692. Although Shakespeare was frequently performed after the Restoration (not least because few plays had been written during the interregnum) A Midsummer Night’s Dream was unpopular and rarely staged. One of the few records is Samuel Pepys’s diary comment of 1662: ‘To the King’s Theatre where we saw Midsummer Night’s Dream, which I had never seen before, nor ever shall again, for it is the most insipid ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life…’ The reaction to Purcell’s semi-opera – or hybrid or even variety show – on the other hand was very different as evidenced by the contemporary account by the book-keeper/prompter John Downes:
The Fairy Queen, made into an Opera, from a Comedy of Mr. Shakespears: This in Ornaments was Superior to the other Two [King Arthur and The Prophetess]; especially in Cloaths, for all the Singers and Dancers, Scenes, Machines and Decorations, all most profusely set off; and excellently perform’d, chiefly the Instrumental and Vocal part Compos’d by the said Mr. Purcel, and Dances by Mr. Priest. The Court and Town were wonderfully satisfy’d with it; but the Expenses in setting it out being so great, the Company got very little by it.
Oberon, Titania and Puck with Fairies Dancing by William Blake, c. 1786
As Downes suggests, much of the success was due to the elaborate staging made possible by the technical developments in the Dorset Garden Theatre, the most advanced in London. Its design is sometimes attributed to Sir Christopher Wren – he was certainly ordered to inspect the building for ‘His Majesty’s safety’ since ‘information hath beene given that there is a defect in a Wall’ – and it included traps, flying systems and early lighting technology allowing for transformations and special effects that were new to English audiences. Thus in Fairy Queen ‘Two great Dragons make a bridge on the River’ during a scene change in act 3, swans could glide into view then turn into fairies and, in act 4, ‘A Sonata plays while the Sun rises, it appears red through the Mist, as it ascends it dissipates the Vapours, and is seen in its full Lustre; then the Scene is perfectly discovered, the Fountains enrich’d with gilding, and adorn’d with Statues ... In the middle of the Stage is a very large Fountain, where the Water rises about twelve Foot.’
Henry Purcell
The show used a heavily adapted, modernised text, usually now attributed to the actor/manager Thomas Betterton (and occasionally the poet and playwright Elkanah Settle), who condensed the action of the five acts to a single day and manipulated the structure so that the Pyramus and Thisbe scene took place in the third act. Purcell and his librettist cut Hippolyta and Philostrate and introduced new, non-Shakespearian characters that expanded the range of musical possibilities. The Drunken Poet and Coridon and Mopsa, a couple of haymakers, facilitated musical comedy for example, and Juno the goddess of nature who appears in a flying chariot delivers an epithalamium. Each act contained a number of songs and dances (none of them Shakespearian) and concluded with a masque.
The dancer and choreographer Josias (or Joseph) Priest was closely associated with Purcell: Dido and Aeneas was staged at his boarding school in Chelsea, performed by his pupils, possibly the premiere of the show, and he also choreographed King Arthur, The Indian Queen, and Dioclesian. In Fairy Queen Oberon and Titania were played by ‘little children of about 8 or 9 years of age act[ing] the prettiest that can be imagined’, perhaps from Priest’s classes, and it is likely that the fairies, too, were played by children. Other dancers were clearly adults: Haymakers, Greenmen, ‘The Followers of the Night’, Chinese women and men, and Monkeys. There was a range of dance style from rustic and grotesque to the courtly or exotic and the show concluded with twenty-four dancers in the finale.
The technically complex and extravagant setting, the costumes, the requirements for actors, singers, dancers, adults and children, and musicians almost bankrupted the Dorset Garden Theatre and it is unlikely that a modern staging will ever replicate the original production. While the performance history of Fairy Queen is patchy (not least because Purcell’s autograph full score was lost for two hundred years) the first expensive components have proved surprisingly adaptable and can be manipulated without affecting the joy of Purcell’s baroque music. It has been performed with a severely cut text, Shakespearian rather than restoration language, a simplified set without masques and transformations, movement delivered by actors and singers rather than dancers, and with or without children. The running order can be manipulated too, returning Pyramus and Thisbe to act five for example, without affecting the sense of the whole.
The most original response to Dream, in that it adds to rather than simply interprets Shakespeare with allusions to both contemporary and classical culture, Purcell’s Fairy Queen endures as a delightful and entertaining take on an Elizabethan play.
Catherine M.S. Alexander Honorary Research Fellow, Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham
Until retirement Dr Alexander was a Fellow of the Shakespeare Institute of the University of Birmingham where she now holds an honorary research fellowship. She writes and lectures on Shakespeare, the arts and education.
