You’re 17. You’ve just read “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” for the first time and are overwhelmed. So you sit down and compose a 12-minute orchestral overture capturing the magic, the confusion, the hilarity, and the romantic craziness that pours out of Shakespeare’s comedy.
You are Felix Mendelssohn, and you’ve just begun a career that will bring you eternal fame as one of the great composers in a time of great composers. George Grove, a future music scholar, will call your overture “the greatest marvel of early maturity that the world has ever seen in music.
While operas based on Shakespeare are numerous—Verdi alone scored a trifecta with “Macbeth,” “Otello,” and “Falstaff”—orchestral compositions based on or inspired by Shakespeare are fewer than one might assume. Mainstream repertoire includes two musical paraphrases of “Romeo and Juliet”—Tchaikovsky’s overture and Sergei Prokofiev’s ballet. Less known is Berlioz’s choral symphony, “Roméo et Juliette.”
Then, there is Mendelssohn, who wrote not only this concert overture, but who, 25 years later, added another 40 minutes of music as accompaniment to a stage performance of the play. The resulting suite, which concludes with the composer’s famous “Wedding March,” is used by theater companies to this day.
Yet the Overture to “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” performed by itself, stands out for perfectly embodying elements of Shakespeare’s story without the use of words. Anyone familiar with the play who listens to Mendelssohn’s musical treatment might well surmise, from the softly scurrying violins and the booming “hee-haw,” that here is Queen Titania protected by her fairies, and there is Bottom turned to a donkey by Puck. While the whole plot cannot, of course, be conveyed solely in musical notes, the lightness and purposeful indirection is unmistakably Shakespeare’s magical comedy.
It opens quietly, with four chords in the woodwinds that establish the key of E major. At 0:28, the violins begin their fairy dance in E minor; this will be the first subject of a perfectly constructed sonata form—a structure that presents several musical subjects, develops them (alters or expands them), and then recapitulates them, transformed. Transitional music at 1:16 announces the royal entourage of Athens, and at 2:15 love music emerges. At 3:00 comes a dramatic buildup of symphonic forces, leading at 3:15 to the braying of poor Bottom. The ensuing closing theme sounds the calls of hunting horns, and at 4:01 we plunge into the development with the recurrence of the fairy strings.
From this point on, it is easy to follow the juxtaposition of themes until at 6:23 the recapitulation is announced by the return of the opening chords. This final section will emphasize the love music, though, at 8:20, Bottom brays again. At 10:48 the royal court music is transformed into a sleepy sonic veil of love. At last, we hear those opening four chords one last time.
