What is Mendolssohn’s Midsummer Night’s Dream?
Coming for tomorrow’s concert? Then, you might have asked the above. The problem is that the plot is interlocked you might need to “study” the story closely to fully appreciate 3 interlocking stories in a short 70-80 minutes incidental music by Felix Mendolssohn.
So here’s the summary:
10 seconds
3 stories: Love quadangle with 2 pairs of lovers, powerful fairies and love potions, workers entourage to perform for the Duke interlockes, but ends happily with everyone thinking that their predicament was just a dream.
2 minutes
A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a romantic comedy by Shakespeare about 4 young greek lovers, a group of jokers, and their encounters with kings and gods and fairies in a moonlit forest.
Girl (Hermia) don’t want father’s arranged marriage with handsome guy, ran away with lover guy, threatened to be exposed by jealous girl for handsome guy, but handsome guy reject jealous lover.
Fairy King wants Fairy Queen’s changeling. Fairy Queen disobeys, so Fairy King asks servant to find a magic juice to apply to Fairy Queen’s eyes so that she will fall in love with the first thing she sees when she wakes up (the love-in-idleness juice). Fairy King intends for her to fall in love with a vile creature.
Fairy King saw handsome guy rejecting jealous lover, instructs servant to put juice on handsome guy, but servant got it wrong and put it on lover guy, who then falls in love with jealous girl! Then servant also applies to correct person, but now, both guy fighting over jealous girl, but jealous girl don’t believe coz both originally don’t like her.
Six lower class jokers arrange to perform a play for the Duke’s wedding (Athen Duke marry Amazon Queen). During rehearsal, one joker (Nick Bottom) stumbled into Fairy King’s servant and had his head turned into a donkey. His companions fled, but Fairy Queen woke up and saw him! She treated the donkey-headed Nick as a lover and in showing him attention unwittingly handed the changeling to Fairy King. Fairy King, now happy, instructs the removal of the potion from Fairy Queen and lover guy, but remained on handsome guy so that he may love jealous girl.
Then the story comes together with everyone thinking it must have been a dream. Duke decided to have a combine wedding, of him and Amazon Queen, lover guy and girl (overriding girl’s father), handsome guy and jealous girl. Nick woke up with his donkey head gone, the jokers performed for the Duke. Ends with fairy blessings.
More than 2 minutes and I suggest you read the references below.
The staging tomorrow will include an orchestra, female chorus, 2 soloists (Fairy 1 and Fairy 2 🙂 by Yap Shing Min and Phua Ee Kia respectively) and probably most entretainingly our narrator William Ledbetter, who would put in the “comedy” as much as the orchestra / choir will put in the “romantic” to Shakespeare’s romantic comedy.
Sample of the music can be heard from this CD on Amazon.com.
By the way, SISTIC servers has been flaky – just come to the box office to get your tickets! And I still have special discount tickets (2 left) if you can grab more people to come together.
Reference: wikipedia | kennedy center | sistic
