A Midsummer
Night’s Dream
B r o u g h t
t o
L i f e.
When the BSO performs
Mendelssohn’s classic incidental music,
visions do appear.
By Martha Thomas
About three-quarters of the way into Mendelssohn’s
incidental music, Op. 61, to A Midsummer Night’s
Dream, there’s a blast of trumpet and the orchestra
strikes up a tune as familiar to audiences as the
birthday song. Wedding March, Felix Mendelssohn’s
celebration of the play’s multiple marriages, takes
audiences by surprise, says BSO Music Director
Marin Alsop, who will be conducting the piece
May 29 –June 1. “There’s always a slightly comic
moment when it turns up,” she says.
W
While the wedding march (familiar to many as the jubilant recessional played after a bride and groom have sealed
their vows) is iconic, it’s just one element of Mendelssohn’s
incidental music that will be recognized by symphony audiences. The composer wrote the opening Overture, op. 21, as
a response to one of his favorite Shakespeare plays when he was
17 years old. He completed the work some 16 years later, in 1842. It’s filled with
scampering sprites, regal flourishes, suspenseful buildups, and even references to
the troupe of buffoonish traveling actors who perform one of the bard’s most hilarious plays-within-a-play, The Most Lamentable Comedy and Most Cruel Death
of Pyramus and Thisbe.
Most performances of Mendelssohn’s piece require audiences to imagine the
stage action— the young lovers who escape to the forest, the fairy king playing
tricks on his inamorata, the transformation of Bottom, the weaver, into an ass.
But the BSO production will involve a handful of actors delivering the speeches
in this fantastical comedy.