A Midsummer Night's Dream (Mendelssohn)

On two occasions, Felix Mendelssohn composed music for William Shakespeare's play A Midsummer Night's Dream (in German Ein Sommernachtstraum).

[3] While a romantic piece in atmosphere, the overture incorporates many classical elements, being cast in sonata form and shaped by regular phrasings and harmonic transitions.

Heinrich Eduard Jacob, in his biography of the composer, surmised that Mendelssohn had scribbled the opening chords after hearing an evening breeze rustle the leaves in the garden of the family's home.

[3] Also, Mendelssohn liberally used a theme borrowed from the Act II Finale of Carl Maria von Weber’s opera Oberon.

Given that Mendelssohn’s overture has the same key and largely the same orchestration as that section of the opera, it was likely meant to be a tribute to the recently deceased Weber.

The overture was premiered in Stettin (then in Prussia; now Szczecin, Poland) on 20 February 1827,[4] at a concert conducted by Carl Loewe.

The vocal piece "Ye spotted snakes" ("Bunte Schlangen, zweigezüngt") opens act 2's second scene.

After Puck's speech, the final musical number is heard – "Through this house give glimmering light" ("Bei des Feuers mattem Flimmern"), scored for solo soprano and women's chorus.

Puck's famous valedictory speech "If we shadows have offended" is accompanied, as day breaks, by the four chords first heard at the very beginning of the overture, bringing the work full circle and to a fitting close.

The music was dedicated to a gifted amateur musician friend of Mendelssohn's, Dr Heinrich Conrad Schleinitz.

The purely instrumental movements (Overture, Scherzo, Intermezzo, Nocturne, "Wedding March", and Bergamask) are often played as a unified suite or as independent pieces, at concert performance or on recording, although this approach never had Mendelssohn's imprimatur.

[10] In October 1992, Seiji Ozawa and the Boston Symphony Orchestra recorded another album of the full score for Deutsche Grammophon; they were joined by soloists Frederica von Stade and Kathleen Battle as well as the Tanglewood Festival Chorus.

In 1996, Claudio Abbado recorded an album for Sony Masterworks of extended excerpts with Kenneth Branagh acting several roles from the play, performed live.

[11] The overture is scored for two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, ophicleide, timpani and strings.

The ophicleide part was originally written for English bass horn ("corno inglese di basso"), which was also used at the first performance and the London premiere in 1829;[6] the composer subsequently replaced this instrument with the ophicleide in the first published edition,[12] though Hogwood points out that it is unclear whether this was "an artistic or executive decision".

[6] The incidental music adds a third trumpet, three trombones, triangle, cymbals, soprano, mezzo-soprano and women's chorus to this scoring.

In 1844 Mendelssohn arranged three movements for piano solo (Scherzo, Nocturne, Wedding March), which received their first recording by Roberto Prosseda in 2005.

Slightly better known is the composer's own arrangement, also made in 1844, of five movements for piano duet (Overture, Scherzo, Intermezzo, Nocturne, Wedding March).