Three years after producing the first ‘real’ opera in English, Purcell produced Faerie Queen (1692), not by any definition an opera. It’s usually termed a ‘semi-opera’, much more in the then English tradition, providing music and songs in masques to accompany other performances.
In this case, the partner performance was Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream. It’s often described as ‘incidental music to a version’ of Shakespeare’s play, but it’s a work in itself, with a (crazy) half-plot, and over the years it departed further and further from the Dream we know. So it’s a challenge for directors then and now. Most productions now (as then) focus on the masques, which variously hint at the original play, but like it, combine beauty and pathos with ‘common-people’ comedy.
There's a brief musical guide to the piece in the Guardian, including this insight:
The score is, however, integral to the drama rather than subordinate to it. The musical numbers, proliferating as the work progresses, are primarily linked with the idea of magic, which Purcell, in a stroke of genius, associates with nature, perceived throughout as being at once mutable and glorious.
Modes of production
Masques had their rules.
The English tradition of semi-opera, to which The Fairy-Queen belongs, demanded that most of the music within the play be introduced through the agency of supernatural beings, the exception being pastoral or drunken characters. All the masques in The Fairy-Queen are presented by Titania or Oberon.
Read the detailed interleaving of these threads here . And note the ways William and Mary are woven into the fabric.
The kings of England were traditionally likened to the sun (Oberon = William. Significantly, William and Mary were married on his birthday, 4 November.). The Chinese scene in the final masque is in homage to Queen Mary's famous collection of china. The garden shown above it and the exotic animals bring King William back into the picture and Hymen's song in praise of their marriage, plus the stage direction bringing (Mary's) china vases containing (William's) orange trees to the front of the stage complete the symbolism.
(And Bottom...?)
This work is most often produced as a standalone semi-opera, sometimes with a superimposed story riding out the fairly bizarre plots implied by the various largely unconnected masques. For one such production, in full on YouTube, click here. It uses no spoken text at all – from Shakespeare or elsewhere. Confused? This review of the production (conducted by Nikolaus Harnoncourt) makes sense of it! .
O let me weep
Yvonne Kenny explains and then sings the aria here – this famous song is here presented as Titania’s lament at her distancing from Oberon. But it has many uses in the various productions.
A brilliant adaption was produced by Opera2day in the Netherlands in 2007, setting the music and songs into a drama of young love in a high school. Here’s the link: . To read the ingenious plot adaption, go here . Sadly, that production is no longer available in full, but the ways the production uses two of Purcell’s most famous songs are here and here .
Our production
By contrast, we’re showing the famous Glyndebourne production that reinserted (most of) the Shakespeare play into the masque Purcell had prepared. For an example of how this happens, here’s ‘If Love’s a Sweet Passion’, in the context of the confused lovers’ pursuit through the woods while Titania entertains Oberon.
Familiar? This production was livestreamed during the first lockdown – for lots more about it, see our 2020 blog post here. And in 2017 when we were focussing on baroque opera, we viewed segments.
Go here for the Glyndebourne ad - and here for their excellent website synopsis specifying the interleaving of play and masque.
Glyndebourne offers a detailed account here of the way the masques and music are placed.
Review here - and lots more on our 2020 blog post.
And yes – here’s ‘O let me weep’, from this production.
And for those who really want to read a libretto (in this case it's anonymous)
Click here for the complete libretto of the masques. And here for the masques inserted in (some of) Shakespeare's words.
And for those who want to listen to the lovely music without distraction from the stage performance, here's a YouTube with just the full masque-music. John Eliot Gardiner conducting and wonderful solos from English Baroque Soloists. Click SHOW MORE to get a list of the amazing lineups of movements and songs if you want to follow how it is fitted into the Glyndebourne version we're showing. Or just play it for pleasure.
Today's trivia:
And that Landseer painting in the NGV? There's a marvellous account here (by Ted Gott, Senior Curator, International Art, National Gallery of Victoria) of the history of the painting, the belief in fairies in Victorian England and the relationship of Melbourne to art and Shakespeare at the time of the NGV purchase. (Streeton declared, 'from a fine art viewpoint the painting is trivial. It reminds one of an American observation regarding certain English pictures of the time. The commentator said that they ‘resembled dictionaries,’ being ‘blistered all over with facts.')
And Lewis Carroll's meeting with the painting? Gott quotes him, 'Called at Ryman’s [James Ryman’s Gallery in Oxford] to see “Titania”, painted by Sir E. Landseer. There are some wonderful points in it – the ass’s head and the white rabbit especially’. And the essay concludes, 'This encounter with Landseer’s painting has been recognised as planting the seed for Carroll’s development of his immortal White Rabbit character in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865).'
Lyn, 15/5/22
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