Sigh. A Midsummer Night’s Dream? Really? Fine, let’s just get this over wi––humping bunies!!(??)
Thank heaven for William Christie. Even though it’s Jonathan Kent’s direction, I still will forever associate watching rabbits bonk with the Les Arts Florissants maestro, who led this Glyndebourne production (which later docked at BAM) from the pit and on Opus Arte DVD. Not for nothing are the first sung words of the semi-opera “Come, come, come, come.” This is Purcell after dark, baby…
Actually, Midsummer and its inherent bawdiness, wife swapping and sexual rompage suits itself well to Purcell’s music and to this opera. Even though I hate the play almost as much as I hate its corresponding Yankee Candle scent, The Fairy Queen is still really enjoyable. One of the best things it has going for it is that it doesn’t set Shakespeare’s text outright, much like Thomas Adès would do centuries later with The Tempest (another Shakespeare play I’m none too keen on…ironically both Midsummer and Tempest collided for the Met’s Enchanted Island earlier this winter, also conducted by Christie and, were it not for the maddening libretto, would have eliminated all of the suck from both). It leaves the music less beholden to the text, and it’s some of Purcell’s most Italianate work—warming up the White Cliffs of Dover with some sun-baked peaks from somewhere around Sorrento. It’s unlikely that Vivaldi ever became acquainted with Purcell’s works, but his own operas (tantalizingly on the horizon) owe much to choruses like “Come, all ye songsters of the sky.”
Handel certainly had knowledge of Purcell, and it was the latter’s work that allowed the former to flourish in his England period. Here you also hear Purcell’s hand at the English secular choral tradition. There’s a gleaming pierce of the trumpet and a great deal of sophisticated ensemble artistry that is a far departure from the chamber-ish works of Monteverdi or Cavalli. In fact, while Henry is musically in Italy, he’s more formally partying it up with Lully in Versailles. It’s no great surprise, as Purcell is known to have arranged at least one song by Lully and, if there was not a Creation-of-the-Earth style collision when the two composers came together on the page, then there were at least sparks that never quite died down.
But then, there’s Britishisms so Anglican that you know immediately which Isle’s shore you’ve reached. “Sing while we trip it upon the green” prances as if around a maypole, weaving multi-part harmonies around a springy pole rooted in a non-courtly dance number out of John Playford or Samuel Pepys or even a contemporary of Shakespeare’s, Thomas Morley. The vocal lines are even more sophisticated than King Arthur—though both share characteristics like a stammering aria and a predilection for wide-ranging English folk idioms. As Purcell expert Curtis price notes in Grove, “Purcell was writing for a small nucleus of professional singers (each taking several different roles) rather than for the actor-singers who bore the brunt of the solos in King Arthur and the many plays for which he provided music.”
The virtuosic nature of the work extends into more mellow numbers like “Hush, no more,” a lullaby that is so lightly underscored and so quietly sung that you’d think John Cage had found a Delorean and gone back to 17th-century England to talk to Purcell about the spaces in between. It creates a nice balance and a full range of musical colors to offset the Baroque sensibilities of the work, which also dovetail nicely with Shakespeare’s fanciful plot devices and exotic setting of a fairy-infested woods.
With so much musical love, and the right performance, the fornicating, floppy-eared, lusty lapins are just gravy.
