Benjamin Britten
A Midsummer Night's Dream

Shakespeare, as we know, has been an irresistible attraction for many opera composers; Rossini, Ambroise Thomas, Charles Gounod, Riccardo Zandonai, even a young Wagner and, first of all, Verdi; I'm surely forgetting many others, but at least among the composers "of the repertoire" only one has set Shakespeare to music in the original language and, above all, with the original texts. This is obviously Ben Britten who, by that point in his theatrical output, had already earned other singular distinctions: with The Rape of Lucretia, then Albert Herring and The Turn of the Screw, he had revived the Baroque concept of chamber opera, adapting it to the forms of the twentieth century. Billy Budd with its entirely male vocal cast, a rarity, and obviously Peter Grimes, the first great operatic success of the post-war era and the first English opera to enter the repertoire since Henry Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, dated 1689...

At the close of this long cycle, fifteen years of fervent theatrical activity, Britten set the Midsummer Night’s Dream to music, cleverly summarizing it along with the faithful Peter Pears, while keeping Shakespeare's verses unchanged. The final result is a structurally rather complex opera and, I would say, also difficult (and expensive) to stage worthily, mainly because it requires a vastly large vocal cast, with four boy sopranos, not to mention a spoken role (Puck) and especially a myriad of soloists in every possible register of the lyrical voice: two basses, a bass-baritone, two baritones, three tenors, a contralto, a mezzo-soprano, two sopranos, and, last but not least, a countertenor no less in the role of Oberon. This speaks volumes about the composer's very ambitious intentions, of which this is the most sumptuous opera vocally, scenically, and musically; a journey between musical dimensions, to be discovered and appreciated without haste, enjoying moment by moment the infinite subtleties and theatrical strokes of genius that Benjamin Britten was capable of.

To tell the truth, that particular structure, with three "planes of existence", corresponding to as many musical styles that interact with each other is not entirely new to me: Richard Strauss had already experimented with something quite similar with Ariadne auf Naxos, but in Midsummer Night’s Dream, we witness a much more fluid and cyclical alternation, with very different dynamics and much more blurred boundaries between the three "dimensions". But let's take a step back: I mentioned a countertenor, to make it brief, a male voice that sings in the same register as a mezzo-soprano or even a soprano, like the famous castrati of the past. The era of the castrati in opera was probably concluded by Giacomo Meyerbeer with his Crociato in Egitto, dated 1824; Benjamin Britten, once again a pioneer, was among the first to reintroduce this type of vocality in theater, this time achieved only through a particular singing technique. And to this androgynous Oberon is matched Titania, a coloratura soprano role, another "ancient" vocality, which refers back to that Baroque period that Britten so often revisited and renovated; these are two parts that, precisely because of their stylistic peculiarity as well as technical difficulty, cannot do without "specialized" interpreters of the highest quality to work properly.

And the music that accompanies them is minimal, nocturnal, mysterious, and seductive, as good as it gets for emphasizing the supernatural nature of these characters; in such sounds, Britten moves as naturally as an eagle in the sky, creating pages of absolute charm like "Over hill, over dale", the fairy chorus, curiously, lively, martial in rhythm and "I know a bank where the wild thyme blows", Oberon’s enchanting cantata, which maximizes the allure of the countertenor voice, and achieves perfection if interpreted by Alfred Deller, the original performer of this role; unlike other countertenors, who often sound fake, annoyingly "angelic" and "feminine", full of grimaces and affectations, his singing is absolutely clear, his voice sounds ethereal in an absolutely natural, unartificial way, and above all the timbre is unmistakably masculine, fascinatingly pushed to the highest limit. Titania, on the other hand, finds her moment of glory, ironically, in the grand scene of "falling in love" with Bottom transformed into a donkey, which is almost a mini-opera in itself, so dynamic and well-developed is this comic idyll, which Britten fills with innumerable subtleties, including the sparkling coloraturas of Titania, especially in the radiant mini-aria "Be kind and courteous to this gentleman".

The four lovers, with their passions and misadventures comically amplified, are distinguished from the nighttime spirits not so much by the music that accompanies them (with subtly romantic accents and definitely closer to traditional opera) but by the vocalities, decidedly more "concrete", more earthly than those of Oberon and Titania; indeed we have a soprano, a mezzo-soprano, a tenor, and a baritone who, at the mercy of the whims of Oberon and Puck, give life to a good-natured, sagacious parody of traditional melodrama. And even more parodistic is the characterization of the rustics, a handful of picturesque and ungraceful basses and baritones (plus a little tenor from operetta), with their funny folk tunes. The distinctly comic nature of these characters should not deceive, they are not "easy" parts because Britten sets them vocally to a true "recitar cantando", halfway between opera and prose, which requires excellent acting skills to be fully appreciated, in all its vivid colors caricaturesque.

And these unlikely characters reach the apex in the final mini-opera, "Pyramus and Thisby", a brilliant, hilarious parade of clichés of various composers from Donizetti to Wagner to Leoncavallo, even reaching Alban Berg, triumphantly sealed by a mockingly, irresistibly catchy little song, where in theory there should be a heartfelt, tragic lament. And it is simply grandiose that Ben Britten, so bitter and existentialist in his "serious" production, could also express himself with absolute mastery in such a context, a sign of a multifaceted artistic personality, full of humor and irony (which can also be perceived in some moments of Peter Grimes, in that case, of course, it is black and disenchanted humor). After this Midsummer Night’s Dream, Britten would distance himself from opera for a decade, dedicating himself to other projects (two years later his monumental War Requiem would see the light); and such an inspired, deep, musically idea-laden path as the one outlined by Britten from 1945 to 1960 could not have had a better ending than this.