Tuesday, October 15, 2013

Metropolitan Opera – Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. October 11, 2013.

Metropolitan Opera at Lincoln Center, Balcony (Seat F125, $62.5).

Conductor – James Conlon; Oberon (King of the Fairies) – Iestyn Davies, Tytania (Queen of the Fairies) – Kathleen Kim, Puck – Riley Costello, Lysander – Joseph Kaiser, Hermia – Elizabeth DeShong, Demetrius – Michael Todd Simpson, Helena – Erin Wall, Bottom – Matthew Rose, Quince – Patrick Carfizzi, Flute – Barry Banks.

Story.  Oberon and Tytania argue about the fate of a boy under Tytania’s protection.  Oberon sends Puck to fetch a magic flower which when applied to a person’s eyelids will make her fall in love with the first creature she sees.  He plans to steal the boy while Tytania is under the spell.  Meanwhile, the lovers Lysander and Hermia have escaped from Athens so Hermia doesn’t have to by forced into marriage with Demetrius, who loves her.  Demetrius is in turn pursued by Helena.  After seeing what has happened, Oberon asks Puck to make Demetrius fall in love with Helena.  Puck mistakes Lysander for Demetrius, and when Lysander sees Helena, he falls in love with her.  When Tytania falls asleep, Oberon puts the juice on her eyes, and when she wakes she sees Bottom, who has been transformed into an ass.  Bottom is one of six working men rehearsing a play in the forest.  Tytania thus falls in love with Bottom.  When Oberon finds out the spell was put on the wrong person, he also pours the juice on Demetrius’s eyes.  The result is both men are after Helena.  She thinks she is being mocked, and Hermia thinks she has been abandoned.  After the four quarrel, they fall asleep, and Puck fixes his errors with the antidote, and they reconcile.  Oberon also releases Tytania from her spell, and restores Bottom back to human.  The four lovers return to Athens, and after obtaining forgiveness, are married together with Theseus and Hippolyta.  The working men put on the play.  Afterwards, the three couples retire to bed.

For someone who knows the story, my summary above makes sense.  For someone unfamiliar with it: too bad.  Even though the opera’s plot is much simplified compared with the actual play, it is still quite complicated.  According to the Program Notes, the opera cuts down the number of lines (over 2000) by half, and reduces the number of acts from 5 to 3.  The six words that are added (“compelling thee to marry with Demetrius”) are sufficient to dispense of the entire first act, set in Athens, wherein Hermia’s father tries to force her into marriage.  The opera is sung in English, thus the Met titles are in Shakespearean language, something not easy to understand at the first encounter.  Fortunately the pace is reasonable, and being a comedy there really is no need to get every word down; so I followed along without too much difficulty.  I was quite sure I would find a couple of familiar quotes in the libretto, but to my surprise I didn’t recognize any.  A search of the web for quotes from this play also yielded some obscure references (e.g., “my soul is in the sky.”)

So much for the literary analysis.  I bought a ticket for this opera mainly because of the 25% discount offer I got in the mail.  Also, I have enjoyed most of my prior encounters with operas based on Shakespeare’s plays, so I regarded this as an opportunity to learn another of his works.  A couple of years ago I saw The Enchanted Island, an amalgam of The Tempest and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, so I was curious what the latter play really was about.  Comedies (be they plays, musicals, or operas) generally don’t work for me.  I don’t find them particularly amusing (perhaps timing is a real issue).  I felt the same way about Falstaff, and – alas – have similar feelings towards this one, despite some clever, light-hearted moments in the plot.

But there are a lot of good things I can say about the opera and the performance. First, the music was quite accessible.  It isn’t as straightforward as the other Britten opera I saw (The Rape of Lucretia, also based on a Shakespeare work), and there is more “tune” to the sung parts, but not overly mysterious.  The Program Notes also described the three “tiers” of beings and their corresponding music: the world of the fairies with high voices and harps, harpsichord, celesta, and percussions as the main instruments; woodwinds and strings for the lovers; and lower brass for the working men (rustics.)  Reality is slightly more complicated than that, but the guide helped me tremendously.  The Notes also talked about parodies of Donizetti’s mad scene, and that the play within the play also made fun of various composers, including Britten himself.  That is something I wouldn’t have caught by myself.  In any case, the mad scenes (e.g., where the four lovers quarrel) were quite enjoyable, and they were not that long that I felt embarrassed (as with the case of some Donizetti scenes.)

It was difficult for me to know if there were any headliners from the Oberon, Tytiana, the four lovers, and several of the rustics.  In the cast of character above I did add the role of Peter Quince who was not headlined in the Playbill.  I thought his importance is comparable to the other two that got mentioned.  The only artist I remember from my prior opera experience is Kathleen Kim, who sang the role of Oscar in A Masked Ball.  She did very well here also.  For once I wasn’t too confused by a male role sung by a countertenor.  Davies’s timbre was sufficiently different from Kim’s that I could tell them apart even though I couldn’t see who was doing the singing (given how far I was from the stage.)

As with Hamlet, I didn’t quite get why it was necessary for a play within a play.  To me it just added some thirty minutes to the whole thing.  Speaking of which: the opera is about 3 hours in length, with two intermissions the event lasted just short of 4 hours.

The staging is modernist and for most part is a stylized depiction of the forest.  The addition of a crescent moon made the scene a realm of the forests.

Overall this was a pleasant experience.  The Program Notes writer has a lot of great things to say about the opera, and the New York Times review is glowing.  I suspect I will only get to that level of sophistication after a detailed study of the work, which I probably won’t get to do.


I took the train in, and by the time I got home, it was after 1 am.

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