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Incidental Music to A Midsummer Night’s Dream
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Incidental Music to A Midsummer Night’s Dream Jakob Ludwig Felix Mendelssohn was born in Hamburg on February 3, 1809, and died in Leipzig on November 4, 1847. He wrote the Overture (Op.21) to Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 1826, at the age of 17. It was first performed publicly in February 1827. Fifteen years later, in 1842, Mendelssohn was asked by Friedrich Wilhelm IV, King of Prussia, to compose incidental music to the play to complement his earlier overture. He wrote the Incidental Music (Op. 61) in 1843. It was first performed on October 14, 1843, in the Royal Theatre of the New Palace in Potsdam as part of a new production of the play. The music selected at this weekend’s concerts runs about 30 minutes in performance. Mendelssohn’s score calls for 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, ophicleide (a now-obsolete brass instrument replaced in orchestras by the tuba), timpani, percussion (cymbals, triangle), and strings. The Cleveland Orchestra has played selections from Mendelssohn’s Midsummer Night’s Dream music on numerous occasions. The two most complete presentations in recent years were those of May 1999 at the Allen Theatre (under Christoph von Dohnányi) and July 2001 at Blossom (under Jahja Ling).
The Cleveland Orchestra has recorded selections from A Midsummer Night’s Dream on two occasions: in 1941 with Artur Rodzinski and in 1967
with George Szell. (The recording with Szell was used as part of the soundtrack to the 1982 Woody Allen film A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy.)
Felix Mendelssohn started reading Shakespeare as a child during the 1820s. His family spent long hours reading through or acting out entire plays in the German translations by August Wilhelm Schlegel and Ludwig Tieck, two important Romantic literary figures. The Mendelssohn family had a close personal connection to these translations: Felix’s aunt Dorothea was married to A.W. Schlegel’s brother Friedrich, one of the leading German philosophers of the time. None of the plays captured the young Mendelssohn’s imagination more than A Midsummer Night’s Dream, or Ein Sommernachtstraum in the version he first encountered. In a letter written in mid-summer of 1826, the 17-year-old composer told his sister Fanny: “I have grown accustomed to composing in our garden; there I’ve completed two piano pieces in A major and E minor. Today or tomorrow I am going to dream there the Midsummer Night’s Dream. It is, however, an enormous audacity...” The overture was completed less than a month later. Mendelssohn moved in the world of Oberon and Titania, the fairy rulers of the enchanted woods near Shakespeare’s Athens, with the grace and ease of an elf. The four opening chords of the overture, played by the woodwind and horns, made history with their delicate orchestration. In each chord, some new instruments are added, gradually expanding the range. The chords are all major with the exception of the third one, which is minor; a subtle interplay between the modes is thus introduced that will continue throughout the overture. After this exceptional opening, we hear music that will forever be associated with Puck and the other elves and spirits in the forest. The fairy music is complemented by a more majestic, “earthly” melody, which turns out to be a quote from Carl Maria von Weber, whose own Oberon -- not based on Shakespeare -- was premiered the same year (1826) just two months before Weber’s death at age 40. A third theme invokes the “hee-haw” of Bottom, the artisan-actor who, by magic, suddenly grew a donkey’s head and then proceeded to sweep fairy queen Titania off her beautiful feet. The three themes act out their own little comedy, evolving, interacting and enchanting the listener. If we are to single out one detail, it must be the ending, where “earthly” theme becomes absolutely celestial, played very softly and slowly by the violins as an exceptionally touching farewell gesture. *** The years passed. The child prodigy grew up and became one of Europe’s greatest musical stars. As composer, conductor and pianist, Mendelssohn was much in demand both on the Continent and in England. His Walpurgisnacht cantata, his oratorio St. Paul and his Scottish Symphony are but a few of his triumphs through the year 1842. From 1835 he served as music director of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, though he took a leave of absence in 1840 when Friedrich Wilhelm IV, King of Prussia, invited him to Berlin to revitalize the musical life of the capital. Among other things, he was asked to write incidental music for several plays produced at the court theater. The King loved Greek tragedy, and therefore Mendelssohn’s first project was Sophocles’ Antigone in 1841. The second, the following year, was the object of Mendelssohn’s adolescent passion: A Midsummer Night’s Dream. What’s more, the composer -- now 33 years old -- got to collaborate with Ludwig Tieck, the poet and Shakespearean translator who was also in the King’s service. Tieck was the director of the new production which opened at the New Palace in Potsdam on October 14, 1843. Mendelssohn provided 11 musical numbers to be performed between the acts and at appropriate moments during the play. Some of these involve solo singers and chorus, others are “melodramas,” that is, instrumental music intended to accompany the recitation of the play. At this weekend’s concerts we hear a selection of the purely instrumental movements. The most striking thing about this music is how effortlessly Mendelssohn picked up where he had left off 16 years earlier. If the Overture was an evocation of the magic woods where the action takes place, the “Nocturne” takes us right back there with the sound of the solo horn. It wasn’t for nothing that the natural (valveless) horns of the time were called Waldhorn (forest horn) in German: they were the quintessential symbol of nature in German Romanticism. This exquisite movement belongs to the scene where the two pairs of lovers fall asleep, succumbing to Puck’s magic spell. The Scherzo continues the tone of the early Overture with a portrait of Puck, in rhythms that can truly be called “sprightly.” Puck’s words “I am that merry wanderer of the night, I jest to Oberon and make him smile” may be all the commentary one needs. The “Intermezzo” (Allegro appassionato) shows the lovers in distress as the intrigue of the play unfolds. Hermia, deserted by Lysander, goes in search of her beloved. At the end of the movement, the scene suddenly changes and a rustic dance melody takes us to the rehearsal of Pyramus and Thisbe by Bottom, Quince, and their friends. The “Wedding March” celebrates the triple nuptials of Theseus and Hippolyta, Lysander and Hermia, and Demetrius and Helena, at the end of the play, as it has just about every wedding in the last 150 years. It is a true “pomp and circumstance” march (this expression, taken up by Elgar, is also Shakespearen in origin, coming as it does from Othello). The brief “Finale” recapitulates music from the Overture, and ends with the same magical chords with which Mendelssohn had started his Shakespearean adventure as a teenager. ***
(from On Wings of Song, Wilfrid Blunt’s 1974 biography of Mendelssohn) What a pity that your glorious music should have been wasted on such a silly play! (one audience member to Mendelssohn after the premiere of A Midsummer Night’s Dream) |
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