A Midsummer Night's Dream

“The wood—dark night” Benjamin Britten wrote at the top of his draft score of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1960). While Shakespeare’s comedy is anchored in the rational, human world of Athens, Britten’s “slightly large chamber opera” cuts the cord, plunging the audience straight into the fairies’ night-time woodland, where rules and restrictions give way to instincts and desires. Created for Benjamin Britten’s own Aldeburgh Festival in Suffolk, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1960) is opera up close—Shakespeare distilled and intensified. Expertly filleting and reshaping the original text (adding just a single line), Britten and Peter Pears created a darker Dream, its focus not the quartet of young lovers, but warring fairies Oberon and Tytania, their bitter conflict balanced by the broad comedy of Bottom and the “rude mechanicals”. Britten creates distinct soundworlds for his three groups of characters. The “Rustics” are painted in muddy, earthy shades of low brass and woodwind—forthright and unambiguous. Their play within a play is a brilliant comic set piece: the composer caricaturing both “serious” operatic style and the troupe’s misguided attempt to achieve it. Swathes of strings and woodwind give us pastel-coloured, interchangeable lovers, their “endless melody” a contrast to the quasi-Baroque formality of the fairies’ music: glittering strangely in celesta, harp, harpsichord and tuned percussion. A countertenor Oberon crowns the effect, his ravishing incantation, “I know a bank”, a microcosm of the opera’s unsettling beauty.