14 Jul 2010
The Fairy Queen at Glyndebourne on Blu-Ray
This Glyndebourne production is, as far as I know, the first recording of any semi-opera that manages to impart a strong sense of what this peculiar, and peculiarly British, genre is like.
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The anonymous 1691 adaptor of A Midsummer Night’s Dream cut out some of Shakespeare’s text, and added elaborate masque scenes which Purcell set to music. Sometimes the masque scenes actually have some relation to the events in the play: the scene in which the fairies torment the drunken poet (in Act 1, added in 1692) can be understood as a sort of prehistory of the processes of absurd invention that lead Peter Quince to write the Pyramus and Thisbe skit; and a later masque can be understood as a monstrous expansion of Shakespeare’s insecticidal charm (“You spotted snakes with double tongue”). But it would be easy to listen to all two hours of Purcell’s music without understanding that it had anything to do with A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
The curtain rises, and we are in Shakespeare’s Act 1, with wigs and costumes in eighteenth-century style, as Athenian justice condemns the love of Lysander and Hermia; but soon the janitorial crew takes over—it turns out that Peter Quince and his gang are window washers, theatre electricians, sweepers, and so forth. All this runs by at spanking pace, with many delightful touches, as when the scene ends in a blackout from an electrical malfunction, and we are in the world of Purcell’s first-act masque, the scene with the drunken poet. The poet is played by the actor who plays Bottom, Desmond Barrit, a superb comedian, but a mediocre singer, and the scene is funnier when more strongly voiced. Also, it would make more than to have Peter Quince at the clavier (so to speak) in this scene, since he’s the poet of the horny-handed. As in his audio recording, Christie takes enormous rhythmic liberties with the score (“I’m drunk as I live boys, drunk”), to brilliant effect, making the poet’s song into a sea-shanty in which the whole earth is the ship on which the drunkard sways.
For the rest of the semi-opera, we are in a world of dreams shadowing into nightmares: the fairies have black raggy wings; a giant spider swaths Titania in silk and dangles her in the air. In the more cheerful masques in the later acts, there is only occasionally a sense of good-natured fun—more often there is a certain lurid glare, a frantic, slightly brittle attempt at funning, as when music celebrating the earth’s generative energies is mimed by actors in bunny suits madly copulating in many different positions. I like this effect, perfectly in tune with the play’s sour epilogue (not here performed):
Obe.: Ladies in Dreams shall have their Fortunes told;
The Young shall dream of Husbands, and the Old
Their Youthful Pleasure shall each Night repeat.
Tit.: Green-Sickness Girls, who nautiate wholesom Meat,
How they their Parents, and themselves may cheat.
Obe.: Widows, who were by former Husbands vex’d,
Shall dream how they may over-reach the next.
The only real miscalculation here, I think, is moving of the Pyramus and Thisbe skit from Act 3 to Act 5. This is, of course, where Shakespeare puts it, but The Fairy Queen’s climax is supposed be the masque set in China, a deliberately fake version of an age of old where nobody works and everybody has a good time all day. This production de-sinifies the masque, for no good reason: instead of Chinese lovers, we have Adam and an extremely flirtatious Eve. The benediction of Purcell’s incomparable chaconne shouldn’t be spread over an audience that has recently laughed at Bottom’s death scene.
Daniel Albright