A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Reflections on Benjamin Britten’s Chamber Opera

Recebido em: 01 abr. 2019. Aprovado em: 04 dez; 2019. Publicado em: 14 abr. 2020. Abstract: Opera performances, located at the intersection of literature, theater, music and the visual arts, tend to fuse specificities of several art forms. This essay reflects on the libretto and score of the chamber opera A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1960), by Benjamin Britten (1913-1976), based on Shakespeare’s homonymous text (1595-1596), and analyses the 1981 operatic adaptation at Glyndebourne, directed by the renowned theatre director and régisseur Peter Hall (1930-2017). The intermedial dialogues among Shakespeare, Britten and Hall will be investigated in the light of theoretical perspectives by Linda and Michael Hutcheon, Claus Clüver, Jorge Coli, Freda Chapple and others.

Opera is a plurimedial art form that tends to combine and fuse elements from literature, music, theatre and the visual arts. From its inception in sixteenth-century Italy to late nineteenth century, when audiences crowded the sumptuous showrooms of theater buildings,   in the 20th century, the main highlights were the chamber opera A Midsummer Night's Dream (1960) by Benjamin Britten (1913-1976), and Lear (1978, by the German composer Aribert Reimann (n. 1936).
Throughout the centuries, many musical adaptations of A Midsummer Night's Dream (1595-1596 have emerged, because in this play music and dance are not mere embellishments, but essential elements alongside the rhythms and cadences of Shakespeare's poetry. Harold Brooks (2003: cxxii), in a section denominated "Lyricism, Music and Dance", which is part of his introduction to the Arden edition of the play, comments: "When the spoken verse is so various in its forms, and so often in a lyrical tone, the distance from dialogue to song is not great. And the songs and dances are no less an integral part of the drama than the set speeches".
In Shakespeare and Music: Afterlives and Borrowings, Julie Sanders (2007: 29) points out that "Shakespeare established his own precedent in the theater for the rich tradition of providing musical settings of his lyrics and verse". By inserting music and dance as indispensable parts of his play, the playwright has generated the impetus for operatic or semioperatic adaptations of Dream since the end of the seventeenth and throughout the eighteenth centuries. Like Brooks, Sanders believes that the musical elements in Shakespearean texts do not merely serve the function of dramatic punctuation or emotional enhancement, but are integrated into the playwright's dramatic design.
It is not surprising, then, that the impulse to adapt Dream to musical art forms has remained strong since the late seventeenth century, when scenic strategies borrowed from masques and other entertainments of the Stuart courts were used as formative elements (SANDERS, 2007).
The musical adaptations of Dream, which began to emerge shortly after the premiere of Shakespeare's play, with additional songs, dances and ballets, were so frequent at that time so as to elicit "the blurring of the dividing line between the operatic and the theatrical Shakespeare" (SANDERS, 2007: 32  Britten and Hall will be investigated and discussed.
Theoretical perspectives: the syncretic discourse of opera in performance According to Claus Clüver, "opera as a textual model is multimedial", since it is composed of "separable and separately coherent texts"; thus,    , whose suggestive subtitle reads "A conversational piece on music". He reports that in Strauss's opera the main characters are a poet, a composer and a countess, and that the love of the latter is disputed by the two artists who employ the artifices of their respective arts to seduce her. In this sense, the poet writes and recites a sonnet and, immediately, the rival musicalizes and sings the verses of the poem.

The countess is moved and starts to philosophize
about what she has just heard: Was it through words that he found the key for his music? Was music pregnant, waiting to sing the verses and embrace them? Has our language ever been infused by singing or does music draw its vital blood from words? One supports the other, one needs the other. In music, emotions cry out for language. And words crave for music and sound. (Qtd. in COLI, 2003: 13-14) 5 Continuing her meditation, the countess highlights: "Everything is mixed up, words are singing, and music is speaking" (Qtd. In COLI, 2003: 14) and, later, when she no longer can distinguish herself from the other elements of the operatic performance, she contends: "Their love is becoming prone to extremism in order to reach me, tenderly interwoven with verse and music. How can I tear this delicate fabric apart?
And am I not part of this texture myself" (Qtd. in COLI, 2003: 14). At this point it becomes evident that the character is aware that she herself is a being constructed of words and music, and that "sound, words, gesture, clothes, and scenery are the other threads of this framework. A living tissue, an indivisible unity that exists intensely for two hours" (Qtd. in COLI, 2003: 14).
The countess's discourse, which is too sophisticated for a lady of society, can be considered as a kind of Brechtian "song" that synthesizes Richard Strauss's point of view on the inseparability of words and music in opera performance. It should be noted that the recitatives, enunciated by the countess, open up space for reflections on the way the audience perceives the specificities of opera performance.
Based on the self-referential discourse of the opera Capriccio, Coli concludes that in opera performance, "music and word are not juxtaposed: 5 Coli quotes several passages from the opera Capriccio without making reference to the libretto by Clemens Krauss and Richard Strauss.

Opera as the art of adaptation par excellence
In the article "Adaptation and opera", Linda and Michael Hutcheon argue that the opera, from its very beginnings, evidences its inclination for adaptation. As it is a notoriously costly practice, librettists and composers generally prefer to adapt reliable and financially successful sources In face of this double vision, which involves the memory and the experience of the spectator at the moment of reception, the librettist is often accused of simplification, since the spectators think that the large cuts he is forced to make imply in loss of quality. However, compression is strictly necessary in operatic art, since it takes "much longer to sing than to say a line of text" (HUTCHEON, 2006;38).

Furthermore, it is important to mention that
Librettists interpret through the lenses of their knowledge and opinion of the text and its author, as well as with an eye to audience expectations and social custom (concerning the conventions of both the theater and the general society). In moving from interpretation to creation, however, librettists may treat the adapted text's words more as a reservoir of dramatic possibilities, for they must look now as well to opera's specific generic conventions. While these have always been flexible, they have varied according to the historical period. (HUTCHEON & HUTCHEON, 2017: 308-309) Concerning the libretto, written by Britten /

Pears in 1960, the composer, in a letter to William
Plomer in August 1959, expresses his misgivings for having to compress Shakespeare's play to make it fit for operatic performance: If I could sometime send you the cutting & cooking of Shakespeare I've been indulging in, with Peter's help, these last weeks, I'd love to, for a comment or two if you have them -a fascinating problem, only heart-breaking to have to leave out so much wonderful stuff -the comfort being that, if one didn't, it would play as long as the 'Ring'. (BRITTEN qtd. in PLANT, 2011: 11) 6 In this sense, a drastic reduction of

The libretto set to musical score by Britten
The second step of the creative process of an opera consists in the translation of the textual material into musical language, that is, the verbal narrative of the libretto is transformed by composers into vocal music -arias, duets and chorusesinstrumental music and recitatives. However, it is not 'absolute' music; the operatic composition is always music adapted to the text. In this sense, [...] it always has an extra-musical dimension because it is written to give voice, literally, to a dramatic text in words. There is both a vocal line and its orchestral music, and the relationship between the two can be of doubling, supporting, or even ironizing or contradicting. Orchestral passages that do not set words also have extra-musical associations from their very context within the opera, but in addition they also accrue meaning as the opera progresses. The form and function of all these kinds of operatic music are dependent on the specific historical time and place. Through their musical decisions, they must also give to all of these a rhythm and a pace, not to mention a certain emotional temperature. (HUTCHEON & HUTCHEON, 2017: 312) In Dream, Britten undertakes a radical reinterpretation of classical romantic opera, opting for innumerable innovations and a multiplicity of different musical styles: Puck, for example, plays a spoken rather than a sung role; the voice of Tytania has proximity to the eighteenth-century Händel castrati; and the choice of Alfred Deller, a countertenor of exceptional qualities in baroque music performance, to incarnate Oberon, the leading male role, is completely unusual.
In his critical comments on the process of creating the musical score, Britten points out that: Writing an opera is very different from writing individual songs: opera, of course, includes songs, but has many other musical forms and a whole dramatic shape as well. In my experience, the shape comes first. With the Midsummer Night's Dream, as with other operas, I first had a general musical conception of the whole work in my mind. I conceived the work without any one note being defined. I could have described the music, but not played a note. (BRITTEN, 2011: 57) The composer also speaks of his fascination