ShakespeareFest: A Teenager Depicts a Dream

"Musical prodigies ... are probably no longer so rare; but what this little man can do in extemporizing and playing at sight borders on the miraculous, and I could not have believed it possible at so early an age." "And yet you heard Mozart in his seventh year at Frankfurt?" said Zelter. "Yes", answered Goethe, "... but what your pupil already accomplishes, bears the same relation to the Mozart of that time that the cultivated talk of a grown-up person bears to the prattle of a child."

This exchange between the great German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and the German composer and conductor Carl Friedrich Zelter concerned Zelter's pupil, a 12-year-old named Felix Mendelssohn. Mendelssohn was a prodigy in every sense of the word: a talented painter, conversant in several languages, a scholar of classical literature. He certainly knew his Shakespeare very well, and he was only 17 when he penned his Midsummer Night's Dream overture, a groundbreaking work on so many levels. It's been called the greatest piece of music ever written by someone so young, which is plausible but disputable; what's not disputable is that with this work Mendelssohn invented a genre, the Shakesperean Fantasy-Overture, that would inspire a host of other 19th century composers, including Berlioz, Tchaikovsky, Dvorak, and Richard Strauss.

The piece begins with four chords that represent the fairies, followed by scurrying violins. These violins represent both the rapid movements of the fairies and the tension in the fairy realm due to the conflict between its king and queen, Oberon and Titania.

With this music Mendelssohn helped define the character of fairies. We envision them as the size of fireflies, humanoids with wings, frequently played by children onstage. This conception is reinforced by much of the artwork depicting fairies in the 19th century. But this vision of them is very different from how Shakespeare envisioned them, and it’s not supported by a close reading of the text. Shakespeare’s fairies were shapeshifters, so they certainly could be small (Mercutio describes them in Romeo and Juliet as being “In shape no bigger than an agate-stone”), but in Midsummer Night’s Dream Puck tells a story in which a woman mistakes him for a three-foot stool. More seriously, Titania describes how the conflict between her and Oberon has changed the climate to the point where humans can’t tell the seasons apart, crops are ruined, the habits of livestock change and ruin the ecosystem, and the air quality is affected so that “rheumatic diseases do abound.”

Midsummer Night’s Dream was one of the first plays to be produced following a spread of plague that closed London’s theaters for two years. This seems to be Shakespeare’s playful way of dealing with something that could not be less playful: the seemingly arbitrary nature of the universe, which allowed thousands to die by this invisible force at a time when all they knew about the plague is that it was highly contagious. He also extends this idea to cover the inexplicable way humans behave when they’re in love. In the universe of Midsummer Night’s Dream, if anything happens you can’t explain, whether it’s an environmental phenomenon, a medical issue, or someone acting irrationally because love has addled them, there’s a one-size-fits-all explanation: Blame the Fairies!

It’s likely that in the original production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the servant fairies were played by the same men who played the “rude mechanicals”, the rough tradesmen who are also amateur actors preparing a play for the King’s wedding. They were decidedly not little girls with wings! In fact, there was a time in 17th century England in which fairies were considered demons. 

But Mendelssohn was composing at a time when the fairies’ menace was downplayed in favor of their being a part of a Romanticized view of nature, which he largely conformed to when he used the overture as the basis for a full set of incidental music for the play, which he did when he was 33, near the other end of his short life. But the overture is a wilder beast, in which we hear the fairy music lead into the depiction of the Athenian royals (Mendelssohn seemed to be aware that in most productions the roles of Titania, Oberon and Puck were played by the same actors who portray Hippolyta, Theseus and Philostrate), with its depiction of Theseus’ hunting horns, and the music of the lovers, a series of descending motifs that seems to illustrate the endless cycle of falling in love due to forces beyond their control (pretty savvy for a 17-year-old), the “rude mechanical” music that evokes the braying of the donkey that Bottom briefly and partially transforms into, and, perhaps most remarkably, some daringly long passages where not much happens on the surface, a hypnotic depiction of a warm summer night glistening with possibilities that suddenly erupt without warning, like a lucid dream state. 

The familiar concert suite extracted from the incidental music also includes the Scherzo that creates a new theme for Puck as he prepares to girdle the earth in forty minutes; a melodramatic Intermezzo that brings us back to Earth, a reminder of the very real emotional stakes involved in this fantastical scenario; the Nocturne, a meditation on nature restored to its rightful order; and finally the Wedding March, which has been used by countless real-life lovers entering into their own fever dream adventure of matrimony – the irrational act that could only be the fault of the fairies, and only keenly observed enough by a preternaturally perceptive teenager.