A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Benjamin Britten [1913 – 1976]
In Ted Huffman's production, the magical realm of the elf-king Oberon is a place of poetry and mystery, a place of dreams and theatre at the same time. Here, it often takes only simple means to awaken the imagination: a moon, a ladder, or even a whimsical, mischievous spirit named Puck, who flies through the air in shorts and a top hat... Conductor: Dalia Stasevska, Director: Ted Huffman; with Iestyn Davies, Jami Reid-Quarrell, ensemble soloists and the children's chorus.
Scarcely any other work of world literature breathes music in the same manner as William Shakespeare's “A Midsummer Night's Dream”. Elves dance through the night in the summery enchanted forest and sing the fairy queen Titania to sleep. Music accompanies the wedding celebration of the royal couple Hippolyta and Theseus, as well as the young lovers Hermia and Lysander, and Helena and Demetrius – when they have finally found each other in the midsummer's night after an erotic cycle of desire and disappointment, of confusion and disarray. And music rings out in the crassly humourous game in the play “Pyramus and Thisbe”, performed by six "highly skilled" craftsmen.A Midsummer Night's Dream has inspired musicians for centuries. Yet the work only became a permanently successful opera a good 360 years after it debuted on stage, with Britten's musical version that debuted in 1960. He had arranged the original text by Shakespeare and scored it as a light, fairy tale-like and frequently witty masterwork with references to opera history.
It is staged by young American director Ted Huffman, who after a series of directorial works in France recently made a name for himself in the German-speaking world with his staging of Händel's RINALDO in Frankurt, MADAMA BUTTERFLY at the Opernhaus Zurich, and SALOME at the Oper Köln.
Werkinfo:
Opera in three actsLibretto by Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears after William Shakespeare's ComedyFirst performed on 11 June, 1960 at the Aldeburgh FestivalPremiered at the Deutsche Oper Berlin on 26 January 2020