Excerpts from A Midsummer Night's Dream
Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847)
As a boy of seventeen, Felix Mendelssohn was entranced by Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, which he read with his sister Fanny (herself a talented composer). Almost at once he composed a brilliant overture for the play for two pianos, so that he and Fanny could play it for their own pleasure and that of others in the cultivated family circle. Seventeen years later he composed incidental music for the entire play, drawing upon thematic material already conceived for the overture, expanding it into separate numbers, and adding much more. The resulting music is Mendelssohn's most popular work, and rightly so, for the wonderfully imaginative way that he combined all the levels of the drama-Oberon and Titania, with their elves and sprites, the aristocratic Athenians, and the comic rustics-in music of extraordinary freshness and color.