Shakespeare's Equal?

When British Composer Benjamin Britten decided last October to write an opera on Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream, he faced a prickly problem: how to remain faithful to the original and yet cut the play by roughly one half. Last week, at England's Aldeburgh Festival, Britten's eagerly awaited Dream was greeted with salvos of critical applause. The composer, with the aid of Singer-Librettist Peter Pears, had solved his problem so brilliantly, reported a TIME correspondent, that "it becomes hard to imagine hearing the words again merely spoken without feeling a sense of loss."

Musically. Britten's Dream was divided into three parts--The Fairies, The Lovers, The Rustics. In the supernatural passages Britten concentrated on fantastical sounds: mysterious tinklings of the celesta, curious patterns of bells, vocal parts accompanied only by harps and percussion. To place the world of the fairies at a clear remove from the world of mortals, Britten wrote the part of Oberon for countertenor (Alfred Deller), a high-pitched, constricted voice never heard in modern opera, and Titania for high soprano (Jennifer Vyvyan). The music of the lovers, on the other hand, was mainly characterized by throbbing, Wagnerian chords while the music for the rustics was simple and zestful--as broadly comic as Shakespeare's own words.

Wrote the Daily Express' Noel Goodwin: "The foremost British composer since Shakespeare's own day here meets our national genius on equal terms."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.