A Midsummer Night's DreamNew production

A «weak and idle theme, no more yielding but a dream» is how Puck describes the Midsummer Night’s Dream in his final speech, simultaneously raising the question: Who was actually dreaming here? Was it the young lovers, or the craftsmen who were lost on stage in the nocturnal realm of the elves? Or was the audience in the hall also slumbering? That the theater is a place of dreams is something Shakespeare arguably demonstrates in no other play as clearly as in his popular Midsummer Night's Dream. The composer Benjamin Britten, whose works repeatedly dealt with the subconscious, with the repressed and the taboo, also concentrated fully on the shadowy side of humanity in this chamber opera. He completely eliminated the first act of Shakespeare's play, which is set in the sunlit reality of the court of Athens. Instead, spherical string sounds lead directly into the world of the fairies, which is also given its own musical color by a coloratura soprano, a countertenor, and children’s voices. It isn't only the two young couples from the Athenian upper class who stray into this midsummer, sultry realm of nature, where the elf-king couple Oberon and Tytania reign. They are joined by six craftsmen there to rehearse a profoundly tragic comedy on the occasion of the wedding of the ruling couple Theseus and Hippolyta. On behalf of Oberon, who has quarreled with his wife Tytania, and with the help of a magic juice, the spritely Puck completely upsets this nocturnal gathering. The antics culminate in wedding festivities and the performance of the craftsmen’s comedy Pyramus and Thisbe, which Britten designed as an artful parody of the Italian opera genre. Members of the International Opernstudio now bring the work, first performed in 1960 in Britten's birthplace of Aldeburgh, to the stage of Theater Winterthur.