BRITTEN AND SHAKESPEARE: DRAMATIC AND MUSICAL COHESION IN ‘A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM’

Abstract

IT IS perhaps surprising that Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream, undoubtedly the most successful Shakespearian opera to employ Shakespeare's original text as the sole basis for its libretto, has not been studied in greater depth to reveal the precise manner in which the librettists' reorganization of the play was dictated by the interests of operatic cogency. Although widely praised, the libretto compiled by the composer and Peter Pears has mostly been accorded a summary treatment of which Michael Kennedy's comments are a good example: 'In their masterly adaptation of Shakespeare's play as an opera libretto, Britten and Pears needed only to invent one line and to omit about half the textl As Boito did with Othello, they have concentrated the essentials of the action into a superb framework for It is remarkable that an opera employing no more than half the text of a Shakespeare play as its libretto should produce a coherent and powerful dramatic effect, and the purpose of the present essay is to examine both the textual and musical means by which that cohesion is achieved. In his personal introduction to the opera's first performance, Britten comments on the many difficulties involved in the operatic presentation of Shakespeare and stresses the importance of faithfulness to the original play.2 One of the most interesting features of Shakespeare's play is its continuous action, reflected in the First Quarto edition (1600) by the complete absence of act and scene divisions. The unconventional plot develops by juxtaposing several self-contained groups of characters; and because both lovers and rustics are ignorant not only of each others' existence but also of the fairies' presence, certain aspects of dramatic sequence are rendered relatively unimportant. For this reason, A Midsummer Night's Dream lends itself particularly well to flexible treatment, and Britten's decision to exploit Shakespeare's carefully controlled dramatic contrasts as the foundation for his own musical structure results in a close relationship between unifying elements in both libretto and music. Apart from the framing of its central woodland setting by static scenes at Theseus's Athenian court, Shakespeare's play contains no clear symmetrical structure (see Table I). Theseus and Hippolyta are removed from the bulk of the action and unaffected by the magic of Oberon (although it is implied that their marriage cannot take place until the dispute between Oberon and Tytania is resolved): they