About this Piece

Felix Mendelssohn’s score for William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is probably the most famous incidental music ever written. The Overture and the 13 pieces written for the play bookend Mendelssohn’s career. He composed the Overture as a 17-year-old whose talent had already surpassed that of his teachers. The incidental music, commissioned 17 years later in 1843 by the King of Prussia, was, along with the E-minor Violin Concerto and the F-minor String Quartet, one of the final enduring works composed in the years before Mendelssohn’s untimely death from a pair of strokes in 1847.

The Mendelssohn household at Leipziger Strasse No. 3 was a hub of intellectual and cultural activity, often visited by figures like Alexander von Humboldt and G.W.F. Hegel. Mendelssohn’s grandfather Moses Mendelssohn was of one of the brightest stars of the German Enlightenment, and his father, Abraham, one of Berlin’s most successful bankers. In an effort to assimilate into German culture, Abraham converted the family from Judaism to Protestantism and changed their last name to Bartholdy, though it’s unclear whether the conversion substantially changed the family’s standing.

Felix and his sister Fanny were inordinately gifted musicians, and their sister Rebecca an adept linguist who could read Homer in the original Greek. The children were tutored in English, French, and German, and when they weren’t playing or making music, they read voraciously. Of course, one of their favorite authors was Shakespeare, and Felix and his sisters would read the plays aloud, acting out the different parts.

One of the plays they performed frequently was A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with its captivating fairies, elves, and magic spells. When a translation of the play by August Wilhelm Schlegel (whose brother married Felix’s aunt), made with the help of Ludwig Tieck, became part of the Mendelssohns’ library in 1826, Felix began to appreciate the play’s musical potential, and he began composing what would become the Overture. The translations had been painstakingly executed, free from the rigid constraints of French classical dramaturgy (under which previous translations had labored), and full of rich poetic imagery, just the stuff to stoke the fires of Felix’s imagination.

The Overture opens with four of the most evocative chords in music. In his hagiography of the composer, Heinrich Eduard Jacob claimed that Mendelssohn scribbled the chords after hearing an evening breeze rustle the leaves in the garden of the family’s home. Whatever their inspiration, they beguilingly invite the listener into the magical forest outside Athens where the comedy plays out. Scurrying staccato strings depict the fairies darting through the woods before the full orchestra proclaims the noble lovers’ music. A series of accented, fortissimo chords in the low strings and brass pound out an earthy rhythm for the Mechanicals before the orchestra gives us a musical picture of Bottom, braying after Puck’s mischievous magic has transformed him into an ass. After a development section, Mendelssohn recapitulates the theme for the lovers, Bottom’s hee-hawing, and the fairy music before a passage of gentle modulation in the winds opens the coda. The strings play a serenely beautiful transformation of the lovers’ theme before the Overture closes as it opened, with those four magical chords.

The Overture premiered in Stettin (now Szczecin) at a concert conducted by the composer Carl Loewe in February 1827. The concert was Mendelssohn’s first public appearance, and it also featured the composer and Loewe as soloists in the A-flat-major double piano concerto and Mendelssohn alone at the keyboard for Weber’s daunting F-minor Konzertstück; after intermission, he joined the first violins for a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth. This musical extravaganza, along with the earlier success of the Op. 20 octet, vaulted the 18-year-old Mendelssohn to the forefront of musical Germany.

By August 1843, when he was invited to pick up where his Overture had left off, Mendelssohn was seen as a conservative for his obsession with Bach and his unwillingness to wear his heart on his sleeve as did his contemporaries Berlioz and Liszt. But the King of Prussia, Frederick William IV, liked Mendelssohn’s music and enjoyed drama, especially plays of Greek antiquity. A successful adaptation of Sophocles’ Antigone for the stage of the royal palace in Potsdam in 1841 led to a series of invitations from the king to compose incidental music, resulting in scores for Racine’s Athalie, Sophocles’ Oedipus, and Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

For the performance at Potsdam on October 14, 1843, Mendelssohn returned to his Overture for inspiration, using its themes to craft an integrated score for the play. The original Overture precedes Act I. The Scherzo, with its sprightly scoring dominated by chattering winds and dancing strings, acts as an intermezzo between Acts I and II, introducing the forest outside of Athens, filled with fairies on Midsummer’s Eve.

The Scherzo leads directly into the first Melodrama of the score, as Puck warns a fairy from Titania’s retinue that Oberon is irritated with her for stealing a boy he had wanted as a henchman and will arrive shortly. A fairy march accompanies Oberon’s entrance, scored with triangle and cymbals.

The first of the score’s two vocal pieces, “You spotted snakes,” opens Act II’s second scene, as Titania’s attendants sing incantations to protect their Queen as she sleeps. Oberon enters the glade, and an eerie ascending figure in the first violins accompanies him as he drips nectar onto the sleeping Titania’s eyelids, casting a spell that will cause her to “wake when some vile thing is near” and fall in love.

An Intermezzo, following the close of the second act, depicts Hermia’s apprehension when she believes her beloved Lysander has forsaken her, an agitated allegro to accompany her search through the woods for him. This yields to a quaint march as the Mechanicals enter the glade where, unbeknownst to them, Titania sleeps. As they begin rehearsals for the play Pyramus and Thisbe, Puck steals in, accompanied by the fairy music from the Overture. He transforms Bottom’s head into a donkey’s, and everyone flees. Bottom thinks his fellow actors are trying to scare him, so he starts to sing to show them he’s not afraid.

The tranquil Nocturne, with its solo horn doubled by bassoons, plays as the lovers sleep between Acts III and IV. We hear only one melodrama in Act IV, accompanying Oberon’s undoing of the spell he cast on Titania. Mendelssohn recalls the eerie violin figure that accompanied the original incantation, inverting it as Oberon undoes the spell. The melodrama closes with the Nocturne reprised as Oberon invites his wife to dance as the mortal lovers sleep.

The intermezzo between Acts IV and V is none other than the famous Wedding March, perhaps Mendelssohn’s most famous tune. It accompanies a triple wedding, as Demetrius and Helena, Lysander and Hermia, and Theseus and Hippolyta all marry. Three trombones sound a fanfare before the whole orchestra resplendently celebrates the end of the night’s confusion as the right couples are married.

The fifth and final act contains more music than any other, as the Mechanicals perform at the wedding feast. A brief fanfare for trumpets and timpani introduces the prologue to Pyramus and Thisbe. A grotesque parody of a funeral march, in which Mendelssohn mocks mourning in carnivalesque fashion, accompanies the death of the title characters, whose epilogue Theseus declines to see in favor of a Bergomask dance. The dance uses Bottom’s braying from the Overture as its main thematic material.

The play itself has three brief epilogues. The first, spoken by Puck, takes the listener from the celebration of the banquet back to the mystery and shadows of the enchanted forest with a reprise of the theme of the Wedding March and the fairy music of the Overture. After Puck’s speech, Oberon and Titania begin the incidental music’s finale, “Through this house give glimmering light,” a chorus for the fairies with solos for the two singers. As the chorus, which recalls the Overture’s fairy music, dies away, Puck begins his famous “If we shadows have offended,” his final lines accompanied by the four chords as day breaks. The score ends as it began; the chords, once pregnant with events to come, have borne their fruit, now evoking hazy memories of the comedy they introduced. —John Mangum