dramma per musica

Kim Witman of the Wolf Trap Opera Company is celebrating today’s announcement of the WTOC 2010 season by doing guest blog posts and interviews in a few places across the blogosphere. I’m very honored that Kim chose dramma per musica as the site to host her introduction to the third of the company’s three offerings this summer–and one of my personal favorites–Benjamin Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Kim, it’s all yours.

Happy 50th Birthday to Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Creating an opera from an iconic play is risky business.  More than 300 operas have been written on Shakespeare plays, and only a few have made their way into the “standard” canon.  By my completely subjective count, I’ll name three by Verdi – Macbeth, Otello & Falstaff – and Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette.  You might add Thomas’ Hamlet and Nicolai’s Merry Wives.  What the operas on this list have in common is the freedom that can come with translation.  Creating a libretto from a play is not as easy as it looks (don’t try this at home…), and I believe that the success of Shakespeare vehicles in Italian, French and German owes a lot to non-English-speaking librettists doing what they do best – hacking away and creating a new text that’s suitable for singing.

It was brave and rare of Peter Pears to trim away almost half (well, over a third to be sure) of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Could you imagine how difficult it would be to decide what to cut?  Thank goodness a man of the theatre wasn’t too squeamish to do what needed to be done, or we’d need a Wagner-sized meal break in the middle of this opera.  (Pears only added a single line of his own to the original Shakespeare.  Know what it is?)

Benjamin Britten composed the whole thing in about 7 months.  It was decided at the end of the 1959 Aldeburgh Festival season that a new opera was needed to celebrate the opening of the new Jubilee Hall the next year.  Pears gave Britten the edited play in October, and it was finished in late spring, in time for the June premiere.  Not a bad year’s work.

For those who love their Shakespeare in its purest form, Britten’s opera can be an enigma.  The beauty of the composer’s art is how music’s timing and texture tells the story in purely nonverbal terms.  A singer has additional expressive tools at his command, but an actor has more significantly more control over the pacing of his delivery.  If you, as a theatre-goer, have developed your own ideas about Midsummer, you may find they don’t merge well with Britten’s choices.  Does that mean you should stay away from this opera?  Of course not – it’s just advisable to open yourself up to yet another way of entering this magical world.

Terry Teachout (in Opera News) called Midsummer “the wisest – and the most lovable” of Britten’s operas.  It’s one of the few we can program in our theatre, limited as we are by the size of the pit.  (Our constraints force us to put the harps, harpsichord and celesta outside the pit on the floor with the audience, but we prefer to think that it adds to the exoticism of the orchestrationJ We produced Midsummer only once before at The Barns, in 2001, when our cast included Anna Christy as Titania and Lawrence Brownlee as Flute (I cherish my photos of Larry with a mop on his head.)  We’re thrilled to bring the mysterious Athenian woods back inside the magical wood of The Barns!

(The line that librettist Pears added was “Compelling thee to marry with Demetrius”  – a clarification in the first scene between Hermia and Lysander.)

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Be sure to visit Kim’s blog to read the rest of her guest posts and to learn more about WTOC’s 2010 season.