Overture: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Op.21

The Midsummer Night’s Dream Overture is one of the wonders of the musical world - a spontaneous invention by a seventeen-year-old boy so enchanted by Shakespeare as to find the ideal match of orchestral sound and poetic image. It is true of course that Mendelssohn was an experienced composer by then, having completed no fewer than thirteen sinfonias for strings, a full-scale Symphony in C minor, four concertos, a few stage pieces and a wide range of songs, piano and chamber works (including the famously precocious Octet in E flat, Op.20). Few composers of any age, however, have been so successful in creating an orchestral score that so perfectly reflects the literary inspiration behind it while at the same time shaping a construction that is entirely convincing on its own, purely musical terms.

The magic scene is set by the four harmonically simple and yet highly evocative woodwind chords that open the work. But that is not their only function: they reappear as a structural signpost between the end of the development and the beginning of the recapitulation; they round off the structure as they are recalled in the closing bars; and they are echoed in a variety of more or less direct allusions at many points between. The first entry of the violins in pianissimo staccato figuration is, on the one hand, an effective simulation of pattering fairy feet and, on the other hand, a regular first subject in E minor - to be supplemented a little later by a distinctly human outburst of joy on the whole orchestra fortissimo in E major. There is a similar contrast in the second subject between the quietly romantic melody representing Shakespeare’s lovers and the rustic dance that follows on stamping brass, boisterous wind and strings, and violins braying like Bottom in his ass’s head.

Most of these themes are resourcefully developed in an enchantingly scored middle section before they are reintroduced in something like their original form in a recapitulation regular in all respects except that, to give the work a late lift, the outburst of joy is held in reserve until near the end. It is recalled again, but now as a distant and nostalgic memory, just before a last evocation of the “horns of elfland” in the closing echo of the four woodwind chords.

It is no less of a miracle, incidentally, that at exactly twice the age he was when, for no particular occasion, he wrote the Overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Mendelssohn was able to recapture his youthful freshness and write the inspired incidental music for a production of the play at Potsdam in 1843.