A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Op. 61: Excerpts

Program notes

About the Work

Mendelssohn wrote music for Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream twice, at either end of his career. In 1826, aged seventeen, he composed an overture. It was a concert piece, complete in itself and not tied to any staging of the play.

Many years later the overture found its play. King Frederick William IV of Prussia commissioned him to write music for the whole play. The result was the incidental music Op. 61, composed for a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream that opened at Potsdam on 14 October 1843. Mendelssohn took his youthful overture as the starting point and added thirteen further numbers: interludes to be played between the acts, settings of the songs in the play, and short passages of music to accompany the action and the spoken text. He bound the new pieces to the old by drawing on themes from the overture throughout, so that music written by a boy of seventeen and music written by a man in his thirties sound like a single work.

The score calls for two solo women’s voices and a women’s chorus as well as the orchestra. The Berliner Philharmoniker perform excerpts, with a soprano, a mezzo-soprano and a choir; at the time of writing the orchestra had named neither the singers nor the numbers chosen. The notes below describe the movements most often heard in concert.

What to Listen For

Scherzo. The first interlude, played after Act I. The first act is set in Athens, by day and among humans; this music opens the door to the forest, the night and the fairies. It is quick, light and dominated by chattering woodwinds.

“Ye spotted snakes”. The song with chorus with which the fairies sing their queen, Titania, to sleep. This is one of the numbers that needs the singers.

Intermezzo. Played after Act II, as Hermia, abandoned in the wood, goes anxiously in search of Lysander. A restless little figure is passed between woodwinds and violins over trembling strings. Then the mood changes and a rustic march brings on Bottom and his fellow tradesmen.

Nocturne. Music for the sleeping lovers at the end of Act III. The melody is given to a solo horn, supported by the bassoons.

Wedding March. The interlude between the last two acts, and by a wide margin the most familiar music Mendelssohn wrote: it has accompanied weddings around the world ever since.

Finale. “Through this house give glimmering light”, for soprano and women’s chorus, in which the fairies bless the house. If the performance includes it, listen at the very end for the four woodwind chords that began the overture, which return to close the circle.