Story and text based on A Midsummer Night's Dream
by William Shakespeare
First performance: Queen's Theatre, London; May 2, 1692

Program Notes by Martin Pearlman

Henry Purcell's dramatic works come from a narrow window of time when English audiences favored a type of theater that does not fit our usual categories.  His only true opera, Dido and Aeneas, is a small work written for a girls' school, but, because it is an opera -- and a beautiful one -- that is the work that is heard most often.

His larger-scale works, such as The Fairy Queen, have long been called "semi-operas," a name which tells us more about what they are not than about what they are.  These are plays with substantial musical entertainments, or masques, inserted into them.  They are thus neither plays nor operas but hybrids of the two.  Much of the time the musical entertainments are only marginally related to the play and do not further the action.  They might occur, for example, when a character calls for an entertainment or calls for music to put herself to sleep.  In other words, they are usually separable entertainments which characters may ask for but do not necessarily participate in.  Typically in a theater piece such as this, there is a cast of speaking actors and a separate cast of singers, although occasionally a minor character in the play might take part in the music. 

The Fairy Queen is based on Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, but, as was common at the time, the play was significantly altered to suit the tastes of Restoration audiences.  Here an anonymous adapter edited Shakespeare's play, adding lines and stage directions of his own, deleting many of Shakespeare's lines, modernizing and changing some of them, and creating occasions for the musical masques to be inserted, usually toward the end of each act.  But with so much music in the play, parts of the story had to be simplified and the sequence of some events altered.  When The Fairy Queen was first produced in 1692, the underlying Shakespeare play was still recognizable, but by the second production in the following year, when more music was added and more of the play was cut and rearranged, it would have been difficult in places to follow the story, unless one already knew it. 

The original 1692 production was lavish and expensive:  "The Fairy Queen," one of Purcell's contemporaries wrote, was "made into an Opera, from a Comedy by Mr. Shakespeare:  This in Ornaments was Superior . . . especially in the Cloaths, for all the Singers and Dancers, Scenes, Machines, and Decorations, all most profusely set off, and excellently perform'd, chiefly the Instrumental and Vocal part Compos'd by the said Mr. Purcel, and the Dances by Mr. Priest.  The Court and Town were wonderfully satisfy'd with it; but the Expences in setting it out being so great, the Company got very little by it."  No doubt, it was to help offset some of the initial expense that the production was remounted the following year "with Alterations, Additions, and several new Songs."

The title of the work associates it with Spenser's The Faerie Queene, written a century earlier, about the same time as Shakespeare's play.  Spenser's allegorical epic was very much a part of the propaganda surrounding Elizabeth I, tying her ancestry to the legendary King Arthur and mythologizing the virtues of the Virgin Queen.  In Shakespeare's play too one can see the cult of Elizabeth, the "fair vestal" and "the imperial votaress."  A Midsummer Night's Dream was not an extremely popular play in Purcell's time, and one wonders whether the theater's choice of that play may have been an attempt to apply Elizabethan imagery to the then current Queen Mary. 

The music

The drama of The Fairy Queen is in five acts preceded by instrumental music.  The "first and second music," consisting of two pieces each, were played as the audience took their seats.  Then the overture, beginning with its trumpet fanfare, would announce the beginning of the drama.  Between the acts are instrumental "act tunes" meant to be played during scene changes.

The music of Act I consists of an entertainment for Titania's beloved Indian boy.  This masque includes the comical "Scene of the Drunken Poet," in which fairies in the wood pinch their drunken victim, until he admits that he's "a scurvy poet."  Originally this first act had no music at all and consisted only of spoken dialogue to introduce the action of the play.  The music was inserted for the 1693 revival, but adding that much music required severe cuts to the dialogue and made the drama much less coherent.  Nonetheless, this music is normally included in performances of The Fairy Queen, since it is Purcell's music and not the disfigured Shakespeare that audiences come to hear.

The music in Act II is played in order to entertain Titania, the queen of the fairies, and to help her go to sleep.  It ends with airs for Night, Mystery, Secresy and Sleep, followed by a bizarre, dream-like "Dance for the followers of Night."  It conjures up a stillness and magical atmosphere that seems to come from the world of Renaissance mysticism and is reminiscent of the inspired contemplation in Dürer's famous engraving "Melencolia."

The masque in Act III takes us to a much more worldly place, as Titania calls for music to entertain her new lover, Bottom, the rustic who has been magically endowed with the head of an ass.  Starting with a song about love and a brief scene for the fairies, the music appropriately turns to more boorish fare with "The Dialogue between Coridon and Mopsa" and the "Dance for the haymakers."  The somewhat extraneous air, "Ye Gentle Spirits of the Air," was inserted for the 1693 revival.

Act IV begins with a three-movement symphony in the Italian style.  In the music that follows, Oberon and Titania, king and queen of the fairies, are reconciled after their quarrel, and their reunion is celebrated with a sunrise and the rebirth of the world.  All nature is now in order once again, and there follows a masque of the four seasons.

Having celebrated all nature, Act V now expands to encompass the whole world.  It begins with an epithalamium, or wedding song, sung by Juno herself, who descends in a chariot drawn by peacocks.  She cautions the reunited lovers: "Thrice happy Lovers, may you be / For ever free, / From that tormenting Devil, Jealousie."  Oberon then asks to hear the Plaint, "Let me weep."  The lament is hardly appropriate at this point, but it was inserted in later productions because of its popularity.  He then conjures up a "new Transparent World" to celebrate the fairy queen and the universal harmony that has come about through their reconciliation.  With that begins the most expansive and most miscellaneous masque of the entire drama.  We are first taken to China and then to the sleeping, disillusioned god of marriage, Hymen, who slowly comes to agree that this is finally a marriage worth celebrating.  The work ends with a joyous dance and chorus.

The music of The Fairy Queen

First Music: Prelude and Hornpipe
Second Music: Air and Rondeau
Overture

ACT I

Masque for the Indian boy

Duet:  "Come let us leave the town"
Scene of the drunken poet

First Act Tune:  Jig

ACT II

Masque for Titania, the fairy queen

Air:  "Come all ye songsters"
Prelude
Trio:  "May the god of wit inspire"
Echo (instruments)
Chorus:  "Now join your warbling voices"
Solo and chorus:  "Sing while we trip it"
Fairies' Dance

Masque for sleep

Air for Night:  "See even Night herself is here"
Air for Mystery:  "I am come to lock all fast"
Air for Secresy:  "One charming night"
Air for Sleep (and chorus):  "Hush, no more"
Dance for the followers of Night

Second act tune:  Air

ACT III

Masque for Bottom

Song and chorus:  "If Love's a Sweet Passion"
Symphony while the swans come forward
Dance for the fairies [the swans having turned into fairies]
Dance for the green men [savages frighten away the fairies]
Song:  "Ye gentle spirits of the air"
Dialogue between Coridon and Mopsa
Song:  "When I have often heard young maids complaining"
Dance for the Haymakers
Song and chorus:  "A  thousand ways we'll find to entertain the hours"

Third Act Tune:  Hornpipe

ACT IV

Symphony:  Introduction-Canzona-Largo-Allegro-Adagio-Allegro

Masque for Oberon and Titania

Soprano and chorus:  "Now the night is chas'd away"
Duet:  "Let the fifes and the clarions"

Masque of the seasons

Entry of Phoebus
Song:  "When a cruel, long winter"
Chorus:  "Hail! great parent"
Song (soprano):  "Thus the ever grateful Spring"
Song (alto):  "Here's the Summer, sprightly, gay"
Song (tenor):  "See, see my many colour'd fields"
Song (bass):  "Next, Winter comes slowly"
Chorus:  "Hail! great parent"

Fourth Act Tune:  Air

ACT V

Prelude and epithalamium for Juno:  "Thrice happy lovers"

Song:  The Plaint

Masque of celebration

Entry dance
Symphony
Song (Chinese man):  "Thus the gloomy world at first began to shine"
Solo (Chinese woman) & chorus:  "Thus happy and free"
Song (Chinese man):  "Yes, Daphne"
Monkeys' dance
Song:  "Hark, how all things in one sound rejoice"
Song and chorus:  "Hark! the echoing air"
Duet (two sopranos) & chorus:  "Sure the dull god of marriage does not hear" 

Scene for Hymen and two sopranos

Prelude
Song of Hymen:  "See, I obey"
Duet (sopranos):  Turn then thine eyes"
Hymen:  "My torch indeed will from such brightness shine"
Trio:  "They shall be as happy as they're fair"

Chaconne:  Dance for Chinese man and woman

Chorus:  "They shall be as happy as they're fair

Orchestration Chart

© Boston Baroque 2020

Boston Baroque Performances

The Fairy Queen

March 3 & 4, 2006
NEC’s Jordan Hall, Boston, MA
Martin Pearlman, conductor

Soloists:
Robert Pinsky, narrator
Amanda Forsythe, soprano
Kristen Watson, soprano
Ryland Angel, countertenor
Frank Kelley, tenor
David Kravitz, baritone

September 30, 1988
NEC’s Jordan Hall, Boston, MA
Martin Pearlman, conductor

Soloists:
Laurence Senelick, narrator
Nancy Armstrong, soprano
Sharon Baker, soprano
Drew Minter, countertenor
Frank Kelley, tenor
James Maddalena, baritone

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