After seeing Christopher Alden's thought-provoking production of A Midsummer Night's Dream at the English National Opera--seeing it twice, I might add--I realized how little, relatively speaking, has been written about it compared with Britten's other operas. Philip Rupprecht hardly mentions it in Britten's Musical Language; Carolyn Seymour devotes eighteen pages to it in The Operas of Benjamin Britten but that chapter doesn't seem central to the arc of the volume.
One of the more satisfying treatments I've found is in Daniel Albright's Musicking Shakespeare, which I hadn't encountered before now. It's densely written, very much in lit crit style, but very insightful, particularly when it comes to the range of musical styles represented in the opera.
Says Albright:
"The smaller fairies and the fairy rulers and the mechanicals and the Athenian lovers all inhabit different musical spaces, different musical centuries; they scarcely speak the same tongue. Oberon, fluent in florid Purcellian, seems to have trouble making his wishes clearly known to Puck, an English speaker who can’t sing (or, more exactly, can only impersonate singing); and between Oberon and Lysander, who knows pidgin Italian Opera as taught by Wallace, Balfe, and Sullivan, there seems no possibility of communication at all. This Babel of musical languages mirrors the fundamental property of Shakespeare’s play: garbling."
He concludes that "Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a series of tumbles: first it falls from occluded chamber music into opera; then it falls from opera into minstrel show... I believe that, in the Pyramus skit, Britten is not just making a joke about opera but declaring that opera is itself a joke. Opera is flamboyant and meretricious and slightly smelly, at once the grandest of arts and beneath art."
Not being a native speaker of the language of opera myself, this Brittenish ambivalence makes some sense to me. Despite having been a keen opera-goer and opera listener over the past two years, I still haven't come to terms with the core repertoire of the genre. I leap uneasily from early to late and do my best to ignore most of what is in the middle. Does that make me a proper opera devotee or not? Perhaps I can settle for being an improper devotee... and perhaps, given my enjoyment of the Alden production, this is exactly what I am.
On the theme of fannish acculturation, I'm very much looking forward to Claudio E. Benzecry's upcoming book, The Opera Fanatic. Ethnography of an Obsession. His earlier article on the same theme, exploring the culture of fans queuing for standing room at an opera house in Buenos Aires, rang true to me based on my limited experiences at the Proms and (once) at the Met. It was, after all, a friend that I met in the Day Tickets queue who first encouraged me to try getting into opera, and made the idea of going to a performance at the Coliseum (a place I'd never heard of before that day) seem not so intimidating at all. Expect a review of this book as soon as I can get hold of it
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