A Midsummer Night's Dream (Mendelssohn)

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Mendelssohn's music for A Midsummer Night's Dream spans the entire arc of his composing life, from a teenager's audacious overture to the incidental score he crafted at the height of his powers. At 17 years and 6 months old, Felix Mendelssohn finished a concert overture in E major that the music scholar George Grove would later call "the greatest marvel of early maturity that the world has ever seen in music." That was in August 1826. The score would eventually grow into a full theatrical companion, incorporating the famous Wedding March that has accompanied brides down the aisle for generations. How did a single overture written by a teenager become one of the most performed suites in the orchestral repertoire? And what drove Mendelssohn back to Shakespeare's fairy world sixteen years after he first set it to music?

• 2. A Teenager Reads Shakespeare

  ›

  It began with a German translation. In 1826, Mendelssohn read August Wilhelm Schlegel's rendering of Shakespeare's play, assisted by Ludwig Tieck. Schlegel was not a stranger to the Mendelssohn family: his brother Friedrich had married Felix's Aunt Dorothea, giving the translation a personal as well as literary significance. The overture that followed was a concert piece, not written for any stage production of the play. It was shaped by the aesthetic ideas of Mendelssohn's friend Adolf Bernhard Marx, whose suggestions influenced the instrumental effects that make the score so vivid. The biographer Heinrich Eduard Jacob later surmised that Mendelssohn had sketched the opening chords after hearing an evening breeze move through the leaves of the garden at the family's home. The overture also draws on Carl Maria von Weber's opera Oberon, sharing both its key and much of its orchestration with a passage from that work's second-act finale. Given that Weber had recently died, the borrowing reads as a deliberate tribute.

• 3. Fairies, Lovers, and Bottom's Bray

  ›

  Four quiet chords in the winds open the overture and set the supernatural tone immediately. The first theme, in E minor, belongs to the dancing fairies. A transition carries the listener into the royal world of the Athenian court, and the second theme represents the lovers. Then come the strings, imitating the "hee-hawing" of Bottom transformed into a donkey. A final group of themes evokes craftsmen and hunting calls, closing the exposition. In the development section the fairies take charge, while the lovers' theme turns to a minor key. The recapitulation restates the opening wind chords, passes through the fairies and Bottom's braying again, and ends with the fairies having the final word in the coda, mirroring their valedictory role in Shakespeare's text. The overture closes exactly as it opened, with those same four chords in the winds.

• 4. The Snowstorm Premiere

  ›

  The overture's public debut required Mendelssohn to travel 80 miles through a raging snowstorm to the city of Stettin, in what was then Prussia and is now Szczecin, Poland. The concert, on the 20th of February 1827, was conducted by Carl Loewe. Mendelssohn had turned 18 just over two weeks before. The evening asked an enormous amount of the young composer: he and Loewe performed as soloists in Mendelssohn's Concerto in A-flat major for two pianos and orchestra; Mendelssohn then played Weber's Konzertstück in F minor alone; and after the interval, he joined the first violins for a performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. The overture's first British performance came two years later, on the 24th of June 1829, at the Argyll Rooms in London. That concert was a benefit for victims of floods in Silesia, and the orchestra was assembled by Mendelssohn's friend Sir George Smart. Mendelssohn conducted it himself and also premiered Beethoven's Emperor Concerto in England that same evening. Afterwards, Thomas Attwood was given the overture's score for safekeeping. He left it in a cab, and it was never recovered. Mendelssohn rewrote the entire piece from memory.

• 5. A Royal Commission

  ›

  Sixteen years passed before Mendelssohn returned to the play. The occasion was a commission from King Frederick William IV of Prussia. By 1842, Mendelssohn had become music director of the King's Academy of the Arts as well as the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra. The king's appetite for music in theatre had been stirred by a successful staging of Sophocles' Antigone on the 28th of October 1841 at the New Palace in Potsdam, for which Mendelssohn had written the music, Op. 55. The king wanted more. A Midsummer Night's Dream was produced on the 14th of October 1843, also at Potsdam, with the same Ludwig Tieck who had helped translate the play serving as producer. The project made the overture, originally written as a standalone concert piece, the first of fourteen numbered movements in the new incidental score. Mendelssohn went on to write incidental music for two more works at the king's request: Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus, performed in Potsdam on the 1st of November 1845, and Jean Racine's Athalie, which opened in Berlin on the 1st of December 1845.

• 6. The Shape of the Score

  ›

  Act 1 of the play ran without music. The Scherzo, driven by chattering winds and dancing strings, bridges Acts 1 and 2. It leads straight into the first melodrama, where text is spoken over continuous music. Oberon's entrance brings a fairy march scored with triangle and cymbals. The vocal piece "Ye spotted snakes" opens the second scene of Act 2. The Nocturne, featuring a solo horn doubled by bassoons, accompanies the sleeping lovers in the interval between Acts 3 and 4. Act 5 carries the heaviest musical load: it includes a brief fanfare for trumpets and timpani, a parody funeral march, and a Bergamask dance that borrows Bottom's braying motif from the overture as its principal theme. The work closes with three brief epilogues. The final vocal number, "Through this house give glimmering light", is scored for solo soprano and women's chorus. Puck's famous speech "If we shadows have offended" is accompanied, as dawn breaks, by the same four opening chords from the overture, binding the entire score into a single arc. The music was dedicated to Dr Heinrich Conrad Schleinitz, described as a gifted amateur musician friend of Mendelssohn's.

• 7. The Wedding March and Its Afterlife

  ›

  The intermezzo between Acts 4 and 5 is what most people know best: the Wedding March, which the source describes as probably the most popular single piece Mendelssohn ever wrote and one of the most frequently heard pieces of music ever composed. The purely instrumental movements, including the Overture, Scherzo, Intermezzo, Nocturne, Wedding March, and Bergamask, are regularly performed together as a concert suite, though Mendelssohn himself never sanctioned that arrangement. In 1844 he made two sets of piano arrangements: one for solo piano covering three movements, another for piano duet covering five. Franz Liszt transcribed the Wedding March for solo piano, catalogued as S410; Sergei Rachmaninoff arranged the Scherzo; and Sigismond Thalberg and Moritz Moszkowski each contributed their own piano versions of movements from the score. In October 1992, Seiji Ozawa led the Boston Symphony Orchestra in a Deutsche Grammophon recording of the full score, with soloists Frederica von Stade and Kathleen Battle and the actress Judi Dench reciting dialogue from the play. Roberto Prosseda gave the first recording of Mendelssohn's solo piano arrangements in 2005, nearly a century and a half after they were written.