Thou Art Translated

Thoughts on Benjamin Britten’s opera on Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream
by Patrick Summers

art by Pattima Singhalaka

Benjamin Britten’s (1913–76) graceful opera on Shakespeare’s (1564–1616) A Midsummer Night’s Dream is, for a “grand” opera, a largely quiet work. Certainly, it contains lively and entertaining passages, but its greatest effects are on the other end of the scale. Each of its acts, with the exception of the third, begins and ends quietly, musically limning the unique pleasures of drifting off to sleep or of peacefully awakening. Britten felt that a “holy triangle” exists between composer, performer, and listener, all of whom have a responsibility to one another. The listener’s responsibility, he thought, was “some preparation, some effort, a journey to a special place, some homework on the program perhaps, some clarification of the ears and sharpening of the instincts.” *

Musically, A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a long distance from last season’s Billy Budd. The opera is Britten’s homage to two historic compatriots: William Shakespeare and composer Henry Purcell (1659-1695), whom he revered. During the 1930s the young Britten realized and scored varied collections of Purcell’s songs—both sacred, Harmonia Sacra, and secular, Orpheus Brittanicus. Prior to the career of Britten himself, Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas was the last great opera in British English. Britten’s 1960 opera on Shakespeare’s Dream shares many qualities of Renaissance and Baroque opera, with its music that projects emotions but does not portray them, though it does so with an utterly unique and modern menu of sounds.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream, like Mozart’s 1790 opera, Così fan tutte, is a comic love story with a dark side. Modern tales of love tend to imply that there is a single love for every desiring person, a “soul mate.” Shakespeare’s comedy and Mozart’s opera imply something more complex and, to some, disturbing: that love is a dreamlike state close to madness, and under the right influences we could be capable of loving more than one person, as we are all subject to the cyclical transformations of nature. Madness is closely aligned with love in Shakespeare’s play, and in many operas, as love is, like the tides and the weather, affected by the moon, the Latin word for which, luna, sources the words “lunacy” and “lunatic.”

Verdi’s Otello, Falstaff, and Macbeth, Berlioz’ Beatrice and Benedict, and a few others notwithstanding, operas based on the Bard of Stratford-on-Avon have been a decidedly mixed bag. Nevertheless, Shakespeare’s effect on opera is incalculable. His bold dramatic strokes and universality of emotion can be felt in nearly every opera ever written. His dazzling language plays the same dramatic role as music should play in an opera (and he invented nearly ten percent of the words he wrote). To translate a great play onto the operatic stage, most of the words must be cut, and into the void left by their absence music must flow. The mere “setting” of words to music is not enough; the music must tell us something words cannot, and that is a daunting task when the words are by William Shakespeare. Though the Shakespeare operatic adaptations number in the thousands—there are several hundred of The Tempest alone—most are sadly forgotten, so weakly does their music sustain the absent language.

Benjamin Britten at his desk in Crag House, Aldeburgh, 1948-1950. Courtesy of the Britten-Pears Library.

Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream seems to do the impossible; it weds twentieth-century music to a sixteenth-century play, cuts the text in half, and creates an enjoyable and wholly different new work. Britten’s opera is essentially three free-standing one act operas that meet at the end. Shakespeare’s play is book-ended by the “real” world, opening in Theseus’ court and ending with his wedding. Co-librettists Britten and tenor Peter Pears heighten the dreamlike state by removing the play’s opening scene entirely, summing it up with the only completely invented line in the opera, “compelling thee to marry with Demetrius,” and only in the final scene are we allowed to wake into the reality of the court. The key to the opera’s success, as with any literary adaptation for the stage, is that it is not merely a musical setting of the play, but rather is another work entirely, striking a rare balance between authenticity to the original and authentic originality as an opera. Britten said he did not “find it daunting to be tackling a masterpiece which already had a strong verbal music of its own.” Music has its own inner life and expresses diverse emotions. Where words are specific; music is tenuous and ambiguous, and it must organically assume its role in the opera house.

Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is about metamorphosis and transcendence—or translation in the Elizabethan sense. It plays on the dueling perceptions of reality and fantasy: the persistent chasm between perception and knowledge. The whole point of opera and theater is, naturally, non-reality, and theater itself is a form of falsity transformed: the singers you see in this performance are translated from themselves into the characters, the individual musicians of the orchestra into one larger entity. The drama’s lovers, heartsick at what they cannot understand, teeter on the brink of madness; the fight between Oberon and Titania has an effect on nature itself. Bottom, the weaver, who “translates” threads into garments, is the only human character who can see the fairies. He literally transforms into an ass to be doted on by the voluptuous Titania, herself altered by magic. The lover’s affections are utterly transformed, with Oberon’s herbal assistance, to devastating effect, until the ultimate translation is achieved: the world of night and dreams transforms into an enlightened day of happiness. Here we have a dreamlike work of art, Shakespeare’s play, transformed into another art form full of strange and sweet noises, Britten’s opera. This double dose of two great imaginations invites yet another transformation: for you, the audience, to enter into the trance of it all, to feel, perhaps, “that you have but slumbered here, whilst these visions did appear” (Act V, sc. i). It is a play within a play within a play within a play, all mirrored, endlessly repeating. A creative illusion, Shakespeare’s Dream is at once irrational and risky, but also moving and transformative, and often ridiculous.

Opera is regularly maligned for having “implausible” plots, a charge almost never leveled at Shakespeare, though most of his plots are, comparatively, just as improbable. Why? The honest poetry of Shakespeare’s language, its immediate brilliance, brings us along and makes the impossible not only probable, but inevitable. Music can do the same, but it is a much more ethereal art, and historically, opera audiences have been notoriously literal and conservative about scenic elements. Audiences in Shakespeare’s time watched plays will all-male casts under full daylight with only the merest suggestion of scenery. Shakespeare’s language conveyed physical and social context, playing exactly the role music has in an opera. For example, the thunderous thwack of a chord that opens Verdi’s Otello expresses all we need of the excised first act of Shakespeare’s play, the physical elements translated into sound, preparing us for the parallel emotional storm that follows. Incidentally, the word thwack is the subject of an interesting dialogue in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, and also appears in Twelfth Night.

Robert Orth (Demetrius) and Patricia Johnson (Helena) in the 1993 HGO production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Photo by Jim Caldwell.

Britten’s opera has unusual scoring: double flutes, clarinets, and horns, with single oboe, bassoon, trumpet, and trombone. There are also two harps, harpsichord, celeste, strings, and an ingenious combination of percussion instruments. With this small battery of instruments, Britten masterfully scores an enormous range of sounds, with four distinctly different sonic worlds for the underworld of the fairies, the lovers, the rustics, and the elevated noble world of the royal couple Theseus and Hippolyta. Britten’s single Shakespearean score—his opera The Rape of Lucretia took as its source the eighteenth-century French play by Andre Obey, not Shakespeare’s narrative poem—opens in “deepening twilight,” with translucent and mysterious chords in the strings that sound at once like moonlight and fog, and we are immediately in the magical world of the fairies, led by the four who are named after tiny things one might encounter in a forest: Cobweb, Peaseblossom, Mustardseed, and Moth.

The first text of the opera perfectly illustrates Britten’s homage to older forms, “Over hill, over dale, thorough bush, thorough briar. Over park, over pale, thorough flood, thorough fire” (“thorough” meaning “through”, but nevertheless pronounced with two syllables). This text is written in one of the oldest and rarest of poetic metrical patterns, cretic dimeter, with a “strong-weak-strong” emphasis of three syllables, which is trickier to set to music than Shakespeare’s more commonly-used iambic pentameter, with its 10 syllables of alternating strong-weak emphasis. Britten sets the mysterious meter on notes of equal length that melodically rise and fall, with percussive accents in the orchestra, giving the words an other-worldly quality that he sustains through all of the scenes with the fairies. What could so easily become a pastiche renaissance opera is instead an absolutely new work full of inventive surprises to the ear. Oberon’s mischievous servant Puck is perfectly characterized with a scampering and jagged high trumpet and pitched drum, while the powerful Oberon is set with celeste, percussion, and solo strings, giving him a constant air of calm mystery. The musical setting of the princess Titania is perhaps the most baroque of all of the roles; her music has the complete set of musical affects, from high melismatic showpieces to music with erotic overtones, Purcell or Handel re-imagined and re-harmonized into warmly languorous phrases.

Britten modernizes older musical forms throughout the opera, and never more so than in the music of the lovers’ quartets. Their entrance music is based on a very old musical device called the cambiata, comprised of four tones, in this case two descending followed by two ascending: two couples seeking to find each other. The cambiata is used most famously to open the finale of Mozart’s Symphony No. 41, the Jupiter, though Britten’s is an upside down version of Mozart’s. The tension of this musical device is sustained for a long time and used inventively until it is finally released by the sublime quartet in act three in which the lovers awake from their tortured dreams to find the world restored to normalcy. Their beautiful cascading ascensions of, “And I have found Demetrius/Fair Helen/Lysander/Sweet Hermia like a jewel,” with a delightful harmonic surprise each time the word “jewel” is sounded, are unpredictable even after hundreds of hearings.

The rustics enter to the tones of a blustering trombone or comic bassoon, and their scenes are filled with witty musical touches: Bottom, prone to malapropisms, misreading his script, pronounces “Odorous” as “Odious”, and dutifully sings a wrong note, an A flat, on the wrong word, only to quickly correct both note and word to A natural. The most famous part of the play and opera, the play-within-a-play Pyramus and Thisbe, becomes a riotous opera-within-an-opera, and a parody of the major operatic event of the time of the opera’s conception, the Covent Garden performances of the Australian soprano Joan Sutherland that propelled her to superstardom, as Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor. Britten’s operatic version of Pyramus and Thisbe is a miniature bel-canto opera that hilariously sends up not only Sutherland, but the whole genre, in the sincerest form of flattery.

Patrick Summers
Houston, Texas
August 7, 2008

The title “Thou art translated” is taken from Act II, scene ii of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Peter Quince sees Bottom in his enchanted form of an ass and exclaims: “Bless thee, Bottom, bless thee! Thou art translated.”

* Benjamin Britten, Britten on Music, edited by Paul Kildea (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 261