Fairy and Human Mischief – Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream Translated into Music by Purcell, Mendelssohn, Thomas, Britten, Orff and Bentoiu
Fairy and Human Mischief – Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream Translated into Music by Purcell, Mendelssohn, Thomas, Britten, Orff and Bentoiu

Summary/Abstract: This paper looks at the comic vein in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream as a fruitful source for musical exploitation, with a special emphasis on mischief. The bard’s play is compared with six of the stage musical works it inspired across cultural borders. It shows how the rigours of the operatic tradition imposed various transformations from spoken to sung language, entailing a dramatic metamorphosis which results in the alteration or downright rewriting of the plot, or the reduction of the number of acts and characters. A semi-opera and three incidental music scores are also discussed in the light of their symbiosis with the play. Thematically, this study analyses the cocktail of Greek, Celtic and English mythology, the blend between pagan and Christian creeds and a number of disquieting topics such as dream patterns, power games, the war of the genders and the arbitrariness of love, with references to critics such as Peter Holland. Music can increase dramatic tension and character outline through tonal structure, rhythm, timbre, vocal virtuosity, etc. The paper analyses the felicitous entwinement between dramatic warp and musical invention.

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