Midsummer Opera on Zoom
December 22nd, 2022, 6pm to 8.30pm
Nillumbik U3A's Tuning into Opera group will
celebrate our summer solstice,
in a Zoom-viewing of this gorgeous production of
Benjamin Britten’s most gorgeous opera,
Midsummer Night’s Dream.
The Zoom link will be available to group members,
who can forward it to friends.
the f King of Shadows. Watch for ways Britten picks out special phrases and celebrates
The context?
Benjamin Britten is the composer, and William Shakespeare, the librettist – heavily edited by Britten and his partner, tenor Peter Pears. (For more about Britten, scroll through our earlier blog posts.)
They had to produce a new opera in a hurry, as the Aldeburgh festival was apparently lacking a centrepiece. So the idea of a readymade libretto was attractive. But more so was the making of magic in music. Britten and Pears reduced the play by half (deleting the first act entirely and subtly replacing it with one line!) But they hardly altered the words they kept from Shakespeare, celebrating how musical were the words of the Bard.
You know the play; here's the synopsis of the opera version.
Stylistically, the work is typical of Britten, with a highly individual sound-world – not strikingly dissonant or atonal, but replete with subtly atmospheric harmonies and tone painting. The role of Oberon was composed for the countertenor Alfred Deller.
Countertenor? That's highly unusual for an opera lead since the days of castrati stars in the baroque operas. In scoring for countertenor, Britten was characterizing the King of Shadows, as nonhuman, a little evil?, certainly strange, and possibly sexually ambivalent? Listen to Deller’s Oberon welcoming Puck, and telling him about the bank whereon the wild thyme grows. Here’s a more wicked Oberon from American countertenor David Walker in a Central City Opera's (Colorado) 2002 production.
Unlike all Britten's other operas, this one had no leading role for Pears. the lead went to a countertenor, highly unusual in current opera. So Pears won the mortal Lysander - who thereby acquired some lovely music. Pears also sang the comic drag role of the mechanicals' Flute/Thisbe, whose lament is seen as a parody of a Donizetti "mad scene".
The music makes the fairies a powerful presence, and their king a complex character. Britten gives a musical style to each of the three worlds in Shakespeare's play. There's heavy boot treads and wild confusion for the Mechanicals, and some great bass singing for Bottom. Lyrical tunes and musical drama for the mortal lovers.
Listen for how he picks out special phrases and celebrates them with repetition, even sometimes taking the lines entirely out of context. Here’s Peter Pears singing Lysander with the famous line from Shakespeare about the course of true love never running smooth. There follows the “I swear to thee” duet with Hermia (Josephine Veasey), the phrase pounding in repetition - as they embark on a journey of infidelity.
The final act centres around a lovely complex quartet, weaving confusion and happiness – derived from Helena’s two simple but simply complicated lines ‘And I have found Demetrius like a jewel,/Mine own, and not mine own.’ Watch it here.
For those who want to explore the opera further in the context of Britten’s other operas, this piece is a good read and listen.
Other Dreams
We're showing a classic production by Peter Hall for Glyndebourne opera, in its first appearance (1981). It has played in Glyndebourne four times since – images here. Peter Hall saw the play as all about shadows – brilliant, sparkling, semi-human shadows in the woods conspiring and confusing the humans. Oberon is the King of Shadows and Titania their queen.
Peter Hall's production is one of the most praised, and least complex, of recent experiments with this opera. Most recently, and controversially, the ENO took The Dream into the dark world of schooldays paedophilia and evil. Here’s Guardian.
Other productions have strayed further from Shakespeare: Baz Luhrman’s OA production (State Theatre 2010) dropped the drama into the British Raj with the fairies as Indian gods, substituting colour and action for nocturnal dreaminess. Review here Interesting discussion here.
And so goodnight unto you all.
Thus the solstice is properly celebrated.
Want a replay of the finale?
Lyn: 3 Dec 2022