ADRIÁN VARELA
A Midsummer Night's Dream
Felix Mendelssohn
Mendelssohn wrote a magnificent overture to the Shakespeare play as a teenager, which he tacked to the front of a considerable body of incidental music written some 16 years later for use with the play. The incidental music is symphonic, vocal, and also serving as links in and out of action, to be played under and around actor’s lines.
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While this rich variety works well in those few cases where the play can be put on with full orchestra and chorus, it goes without saying that it is out of the strictly symphonic numbers that selections must be made for an orchestral concert. This leaves us namely with the Overture, Scherzo, Nocturne, Wedding March and Dance of the Clowns.

The Overture, when put alongside the other movements like this, seems massively oversized. On its own, it functions as a perfect, almost meaty piece of music with recognisable classical form. But some of the characters contained within are also depicted in the Scherzo, which makes a much better companion to the other shorter movements, thus rendering the programming of both the Overture and the Scherzo in this respect, redundant and lopsided. In the Scherzo we find faries, Puck, Bottom, and the Athenians chasing each other in the woods within the first 60 seconds of the movement. Having said that, it’s amusing to hear how Mendelssohn’s donkey evolved over time.
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If the Scherzo is a good first movement, the Nocturne is a perfect second. To finish the Wedding March seems more appropriate than the Dance of the Clowns, which again rehashes some of the earlier material, and is far too short to stand alone as a movement in a suite.
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Mendelssohn’s Wedding March from ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ has been appropriated the world over for actual weddings, as has Wagner’s from ‘Lohengrin’. Because of their use in real-life weddings, Mendelssohn’s has acquired the same pomposity and solemnity that comes more naturally to Wagner’s: a sense of aplomb, seriousness and heaviness in accord with the grandness of the occasion.
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But I think this is wrong, especially in a concert context. Mendelssohn’s March is still Mendelssohn, and still comes out of ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, a setting Wagner would never have considered (and didn’t) as a suitable subject to tackle. Wagner despised the new wave of what he saw as efette Jews, and everything their ‘degenerate art’ stood for -we all know where this devolved to later. I believe that playing the Mendelssohn Wedding March with anything less than the same lightness of sound and purpose as we do the rest of ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ is a betrayal, not wholly unlike the incongruous sight of a mass-produced Che Guevara T-shirt.
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