Wednesday, September 28, 2016
Just the libretto, music and videos soon
BENJAMIN
BRITTEN – PETER PEARS – A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM – LIBRETTO - 1960
There is little to say about the
libretto of this opera adapted from the eponymous play by William Shakespeare.
Their adaptation is essentially a shortening of the text but it is mostly a
text that comes directly from Shakespeare’s play, hence in Shakespeare’s
language which is poetical, musical and extremely rich, in the case of this
comedy, in humor, even satire of both society and the practices or customs of
the dramatic stage in Shakespeare’s time. The social criticism can be just
implied though not directly expressed. It is the case of marriage practices. For
both the wealthy and the powerful marriage was a family business: the father
authorized, hence gave consent, to a marriage if it fitted his economic or
social interests, particularly his influence and power.
This compulsory consent up to the
age of twenty-one in a time when life expectancy was twenty nine years, was
duly enforced with a minimum age for the marriage of girl in Shakespeare’s time
between ten and thirteen with only one obligation: consent from the father, a
parent, the guardian or some official if the previous ones were absent. In the
play the law that is criticized is Athenian and the father can require death
for a daughter who refuses to marry the man this father has chosen, with for
the Duke of Athens the possibility to commute this death penalty into a life
“imprisonment” in the temple of some goddess that will impose celibacy and
virginity.
It is well understood that economically
the men and the women are from the same social condition, meaning wealthy.
That’s the part Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears cut off, hence the whole
beginning of Shakespeare’s play. There will only be some allusions to it,
especially at the end but it will have little value since the young people have
solved their own problem with a little help from their friends the fairies.
This choice is wise since such a situation does not speak to us any more except
when we are considering the practice of forced marriages in some foreign
civilizations and within the context of some religions in the world,
particularly in the Moslem world.
The play starts in the forest and
will stay in the forest till the second and last scene of the third act. This
is also a wise choice because it makes the play even lighter than in
Shakespeare’s version. It becomes a real entertainment that could be seen as a
masque or even a pantomime due to the fairies and magic. Puck, Oberon and
Titania are all beings of the underworld, which used to be a difficult subject in
Elizabethan times, but which is today banal and common place though generally
in children’s literature. Harry Potter is today a master in the field but he is
not alone. Some may say that Harry Potter is not really for children but rather
for young adults. Let’s say some people are precautious and we can consider a
fifteen year old person either an older child or a younger person, not yet an
adult but not far from it. The text of the libretto is very systematically
ambiguous between a sexy reading or just a farcical reading. Of course as soon
as it is set to a stage some choices are necessary that make this ambiguity
either a pun-like discourse, playing on words, or a choice towards one interpretation.
That’s why we can hesitate in front of this libretto: is it a children’s piece
of literature and entertainment, or is it a farce based on innuendo, ambiguous
meanings and erotic situations and language. That’s the main merit of this
libretto. It really let the conductor and director free to go one way or the
other.
One thing is sure in the
libretto. Since most of the opera takes place in the underworld, in a forest,
during one night, the midsummer night, Saint John’s day and night, with
celebrations generally around or on the Summer solstice, a festive period in
the fertile and happy direction, we can consider we are in foreign territory
and thus we, the audience, are the foreigners. But in this foreign territory we
have four young people, two women and two men, who are spending the night there
more or less by accident and who are going to be the victims of tricks, pranks
and mistakes from Puck and Oberon. These four are the first group of
foreigners, or strangers. The second group counts six artisans, craftsmen or
tradesmen from Athens Athens
But in Shakespeare’s time fairies
and fairyland would have been seen, understood and even by some resented as
some strange and foreign underworld not to be mentioned. This dimension
disappears in modern times and Benjamin Britten and his partner Peter Pears
(who sang the part of Lysander, one of the two young men lost in the forest)
play on this fairyland as an estrangement for the audience and the last scene
brings the audience back to earth with yet another estrangement with the play
in the play that brings on the stage a lion, talking mind you, the moon, also
talking and a wall that has a lot to say. Estrangement inside the bringing back
of the audience from a long and previous estrangement of another sort, more
magical. The whole play works because of these dimensions and the opera here
amplifies this aspect by cutting off the opening part in the Duke’s palace in Athens
In other words, a good libretto
for a modern opera that can be read in many different ways.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU
# posted by Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU @ 1:17 PM 
