World Premiere: October 14, 1843

Most Recent HSO Performance: January 9, 2014

Instrumentation: 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba (ophecleide) timpani, triangle, cymbals and strings: violin I, violin II, viola, cello, and bass

Duration: 20'

Selections from the Incidental Music to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Op.  61 (1842)

Felix Mendelssohn

(Born February 3, 1809 in Hamburg Died November 4, 1847 in Leipzig)

Berlin in the 1820s was a populous, densely packed city with few open spaces, “a city without lungs,” wrote the art historian Karl Scheffler. Abraham Mendelssohn, father of Felix and a wealthy banker, was one of those who could afford to live beyond the city gates, where the open country made life more pleasant. The Mendelssohn home was a mansion, a small palace really, set on ten verdant acres. The residence boasted a hall for theatrical productions, while the garden house was arranged so that its large interior could be used for concerts with an audience of several hundred. There were, in fact, regular Sunday afternoon musicales in the Mendelssohn household, with Felix and his older sister, Fanny, being regular participants. (It was for these events that Mendelssohn composed and — a luxury rare among composers — heard his early music performed immediately, including the dozen lovely Symphonies for Strings.) Also on the grounds was a beautiful garden, a magical place for young Felix, where the warm days of summer were spent reading and dreaming. In later years, he told his friend the English composer William Sterndale Bennett about an evening in July 1826, “It was in that garden one night that I encountered Shakespeare.”

Felix and Fanny were enamored in those years of reading the works of Shakespeare, who, next to the arch-Romantic Jean-Paul, was their favorite writer. Shakespeare’s plays had been appearing in excellent German translations by Ludwig Tieck and August Schlegel (father Abraham’s brother-in-law) since the turn of the century, and the young Mendelssohns particularly enjoyed the wondrous fantasy world of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The play inspired the already accomplished budding composer, and plans began to stir in his imagination. Early in July, he wrote in a letter, “I have grown accustomed to composing in our garden. Today or tomorrow I am going to dream there [the music to accompany] A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream. This is, however, an enormous audacity....” Within a few days, however, he had embarked on his “audacity,” and was writing an Overture to the play. By August 6th, the work was done. On November 19th, Felix and Fanny played the original piano duet version of the score on one of their Sunday musicales, and a private orchestral performance followed before the end of the year. In February, the work was first played publicly in Stettin. It immediately garnered a success that has never waned.

By 1842, Mendelssohn was the most famous musician in Europe and in demand everywhere. He was director of the superb Gewandhaus Orchestra in Leipzig, a regular visitor to England, and Kapellmeister to King Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia in Berlin. For Mendelssohn’s Berlin duties, Friedrich required incidental music for several new productions at the Royal Theater, including Sophocles’ Oedipus and Antigone, Racine’s Athalie and Shakespeare’s The Tempest and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This last would, of course, include the celebrated Overture which Mendelssohn had written when he was seventeen, exactly half his age in 1842. He composed the twelve additional numbers of the incidental music the following spring, creating a perfect match for the inspiration and style of the Overture. The premiere of the new production in November was an enormous triumph.

The Entr’acte/Intermezzo to Act III is a swift and agitated piece that depicts the desperation of Shakespeare’s pairs of lovers caused by a magic spell that has made one of the men fall in love with the wrong woman; the movement concludes with a bumptious country dance to accompany the entry of the Rustics whose style recalls moments from Der Freischütz by Mendelssohn’s friend, Carl Maria von Weber.

The Nocturne evokes the magic slumber of the lovers in the moonlit forest in Act III, Scene 2 through the burnished sonorities of horns and bassoons.

The Scherzo, the Entr’acte to Act II, is the music that, in the words of Sir George Grove, “brought the fairies into the orchestra and fixed them there.” Its winsome grace and incandescent sonorities defined in large part the idea of delicacy in music, and there has never been another major composer (only Saint-Saëns and Berlioz come close) who was so well able to conjure exactly this mood in his works.

The majestic Wedding March, the Entr’acte to Act V, accompanies the festive triple wedding of Theseus and Hippolyta, Demetrius and Helena, and Lysander and Hermia.

Of this beautiful music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Charles O’Connell wrote, “There is a magic in it ... an elfin gaiety, a diaphanous delicacy, an ethereal quality compounded of dew and honey and the nectar of flowers, the scents of flowers on warm midnight airs, the rhythm of flowers and tiny feet dancing ’neath the towering blades of grass. There are pranks and clowning, true love and black magic, pathos and the pleasant, impossible conceits of a poet’s imagination.”

©2022 Dr. Richard E. Rodda