As an opera composer, Henry Purcell is best known for a single piece: the drama Dido and Aeneas, which dates from around the 1680s. Strictly speaking, it's the only opera Purcell ever wrote.
In 17th-century England, musical theater in which all the dialogue is sung — that is to say, opera — hadn't really taken hold. Londoners got a taste of real opera for the first time in 1674, when a French production was staged at the Duke of York's wedding. But no one seemed to like it. Instead, the English preferred a kind of hybrid: a mix of brief musical numbers and songs inserted into a more traditional stage play, dominated by spoken dialogue. This was what Londoners expected, and as a result, it became the formula composers followed for several decades.
But in the 1690s, Purcell came up with four dramas that reversed that process. Music became the main focus; the spoken passages served more as a dramatic framework for a series of elaborate songs, ensembles and choruses. These pieces were called semi-operas, and the most lavish of them all was The Fairy Queen, first performed at London's Dorset Garden Theatre in 1692. The production was so lavish they had to organize additional performances the following year just to cover the expenses.
It might be called a "semi-opera," but The Fairy Queen requires a whole crowd of performers — essentially three separate casts comprising singers, actors and dancers. Purcell based the piece on Shakespeare's popular play A Midsummer Night's Dream, but altered it at will to make room for self-contained musical masques (or scenes) in each of its five acts, along with a wholesale cutting and updating of the Bard's language.
Even if it doesn't follow Shakespeare to the letter, The Fairy Queen features something for almost everyone. First, there's the music, some of Purcell's most inventive. And there are scenes of slapstick and drag, a drunken poet or two, dancing monkeys, swans and, true to the original, Bottom the weaver, donning the head of an ass.
On World of Opera, host Lisa Simeone presents a production of The Fairy Queen from this summer's 2009 BBC Proms Music Festival at London's Royal Albert Hall. The semi-staged production, by the Glyndebourne Festival Opera, marks the 350th anniversary of Purcell's birth. Conductor William Christie leads a cast of 39 singers, actors and dancers and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment in a new performing edition of the opera, which requires reverting to a much lower standard pitch (the note A = 405 cycles per second) and even the construction of some new (old-style) instruments.
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