This wasn't where I was going to start. It's not early or very recent, it doesn't produce the Proustian rush of memory that some songs do. But it is important to me and it is beautiful and it is the opera that makes all the duff ones worthwhile as far as I'm concerned.
I'm still dubious about opera, partly because I can't really appreciate or understand all the effort that goes into producing it. I very much enjoy being told a story but for me the music is normally pretty, ha ha, incidental.
What I have found is that the more productions I see of a particular piece, the more important and memorable the music becomes - partly just through reinforcement, partly because I am concentrating less on who is stabbing who and partly because it is the bit that doesn't change between versions. The opera I have seen done most often is Benjamin Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream.
It's my favourite too. It benefits greatly from Shakespeare's play, inheriting a familiar story, strong characters and a beautiful, compelling English libretto that mixes mortal wit and passion with eldritch poetry. As an opera it has other advantages. Opera isn't reality - people are singing for God's sake - and it suffers when forced to portray the humdrum. Dream not only takes us, the mortal audience, into an escapist love story, it shows us a whole new fantasy world order where the realms of Athens and Faerie intertwine under the trees. And Britten's music wonderfully evokes this fantastical setting. The opening, a sliding sinewy chorus of twisting branches and swaying boughs, brings the forest to life immediately and pushes us deep within.
My favourite part, the extract I have chosen, as it were, Kirsty, is from the beginning of Act III where the lovers awake from the muddled madness of the previous night, calmed and remedied. It is the emotional catharsis of the piece, the resolution of the drama. In the play, this scene features quite a blustery piece of exposition, with Demetrius explaining to the Duke that everything has been fixed. But the opera shows us the emotional journey. One small line from the play is taken and magnified, echoing around the lovers, first as realisation, then as growing wonder and finally, unifying and mutual bliss, as they each declare their chosen partner "mine own and not mine own".
Out of context it might seem a disturbing or sceptical analysis of a relationship, dwelling on ideas of possession and ownership. But really it's a beautiful, arresting thought, hinting at the mysterious and inexplicable alchemy that binds us to another and them to us. The act of falling in love is often a solitary, internal process, beset by doubts - this moment in the opera shows us the transcendent, wonderful instant of reciprocity, when the jewel we have found sings back our own thoughts.
For all that, the piece, and the moment, is not without its problems - both the play and opera ask that we conveniently forget that Demetrius preferred Hermia to Helena before the Fairies chemically overrode his desires and one might be left hoping, for his sake, that the effect is permanent. I've a hankering, now I think about it, to see a production where Demetrius visibly and knowingly resigns himself to the narrative inevitability, not coerced by magic, but submitting to the needs of the many.
But of course, to us as much as to the Faeries, these mortal lives and loves are mere playthings and, at the end, the four lovers are paired correctly to our satisfaction.
All is well and as it should be.
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