Meet Oberon & Tytania, now starring in "The Crown" on Netflix

I'm putting off til next week my planned post on the love-sick lovers of A Midsummer Night's Dream, because I thought of the perfect way to explain the relationship of the King and Queen of Britten's
Fairyland.

Alfred Deller and Jennifer Vyvyan as Oberon and Tytania

That, of course, would be Oberon and Tytania. When we meet them, we sense that the honeymoon is over...

....WAY over...

In point of fact, they're having a "row" (that's the Athenian word for a spat; I'm fluent in Fake Greek), making a scene right there in front of all the other fairies. It's all about Tytania's little human infant, a changeling child, newly orphaned after the death of his mortal mother. Oberon says "I want him"; his wife, no shrinking violet, basically tells him to go jump in the lake.

If you want to know precisely what this supernatural marriage is all about, I have a perfect analogy to render. You people all watch "The Crown", right? You like opera and classy stuff like that - of course you watch it, and are busy perusing all the announced cast changes for Season 3.

It's this simple: Tytania is Elizabeth and Oberon is Philip. Yes, yes, Oberon's a king and Philip isn't, but I'm not referring to titles - it's the dynamics of the marriage I have in mind. Oberon's frustration with Tytania's high-handedness in laying down the law mirrors the manner in which young Prince Philip chafes at being unable to have his way.

Each husband attempts his small rebellions. Philip parties at all hours with slightly unsavory companions, fomenting rumors of infidelity, whereas Oberon hatches a slightly malicious plot to punk Tytania by dosing her with some potent nectar that will famously result in her brief crush on a donkey.

The analogy holds in the scene in which Oberon and Tytania drop their quarrel. They dance a grave dance of reconciliation; it's sedate and serious. This Queen does not leap into her King's arms; there are no passionate declarations of love; no locking of lips. It truly reminds me of that moment in Season 2 of "The Crown" in which Elizabeth and Philip lay their cards on the table in a solemn meeting of minds.

Elizabeth reminds her mate that they don't have the remedies available in normal marriages that have become dysfunctional.

No divorce for them - ever. Not in the cards. They have to stick it out for the good of the monarchy and the good of the nation, so (she urges) they may as well make the best of things.

Fairyland is its own type of "nation", and Oberon and Tytania must face the same reality: they can never part. Indeed, this truth is brought home in their initial duet back in Act 1. The very fact that they are fighting is wreaking havoc with Nature. The seasons don't change on schedule; crops are rotting in the fields; livestock is dying.

Thus, that studied dance of reconciliation is their wordless coming to terms and the equivalent of their human counterparts' pow-wow.

BY THE WAY - isn't it odd, in light of that aforementioned crisis of rotting crops and dead livestock, that NONE OF THE OTHER CHARACTERS EVER MENTION IT?  Sounds to me like Duke Theseus might be a tad concerned with the prevailing pestilence assailing his realm, but I guess he's got a lot on his mind with his marriage to Hippolyta coming up...

Finally, allow me to mention a couple of points on Britten's conception of Oberon as a counter-tenor.
In this day and age, when Baroque opera has become a staple rather than an oddity, you can shake a tree and three or four counter-tenors will fall out of it. They're everywhere, and they're making a living.

In 1960 (the year Britten's Midsummer premiered), however, they were quite uncommon. The composer really wanted his fairies to come across as non-human creatures, the idea being that if fairies were real, you and I might find them rather disturbing. The aural "strangeness" of the counter-tenor timbre automatically set Oberon apart from the tenors, baritones and basses that opera-goers always expect to hear.

The nature of Oberon's vocal color actually creates an issue in live performance, particularly in a large hall. Since Tytania is sung by a "normal" coloratura soprano, balance between the voices can be tricky. Of course, the work was written for a hall with a seating capacity of only 300, in which case Oberon's lines would be easily heard.

The role was created for Alfred Deller, who was supposedly as horrible an actor as he was accomplished as a singer. Deller told an amusing story illustrating the confusion with which many music-lovers greeted his unfamiliar style of vocalizing. After one performance, a German woman came backstage to greet the artist. This dialogue ensued:

WOMAN: Herr Deller, you are... eunuch?
DELLER: Madam, I believe you meant to say "unique".

I imagine it wasn't the first or last time he had occasion to trot out that punchline. Well, why not? It's a pretty good line.

The unsettling innocence of Britten's "Midsummer" Fairies

As mentioned in last week's post, Benjamin Britten's opera A Midsummer Night's Dream opens with the supernatural. Rather than delay the appearance of the fairies with a lengthy expository first act set in Athens (as in Shakespeare's play), the composer chose to plunge us immediately into a world of magic and spells and fanciful winged creatures.

"Fairy Twilight" (John Anster Christian Fitzgerald)

Forget every image you've ever had of fairies, from Tinkerbell to the Tooth Fairy to Pinocchio's Blue Fairy to the Dew Fairy in Humperdinck's Hansel and Gretel (although, as we shall see below, Britten seems to have tipped his cap to the latter in a sly homage). Conventional "fairy music" is typified by the Overture to Mendelssohn's "Midsummer Night's Dream" music: delicate, ethereal and rapid, depicting tiny sprites darting here and there at lightning speed. Above all, they are cute. So are Britten's fairies obese and sluggish and repulsive?

No, no, and no! Puck boasts that he can "put a girdle about the earth in forty minutes"; let's see Tinkerbell beat that. And since children are generally cast as Peaseblossom, Cobweb, Mustardseed and Mote, the cuteness angle is covered.

But Britten's music is as far removed from Mendelssohn's sound-world as sushi is from cotton candy. Listen to the orchestral introduction to Act 1. For opera lovers accustomed to Puccini, Verdi and Mozart, the music is fairly daunting: not exactly atonal, but odd, tuneless and non-functional. Unrelated major triads are connected by mysterious, sinewy glissandi in the strings.

The sound is primordial, primeval, unsettling. "Oh no", wails the conservative listener, "it's crazy modern music with no melody! Why, why, why?"

If that's your gut reaction, let me flip your sensibilities upside down. Remember, what takes place in this forest is a "dream" -  it's right there in the title!

And we dream when we're asleep.

And when we sleep, many of us....

....SNORE.

Listen again. Sliding up, sliding down; sliding up, sliding down. Get it now?

The orchestra is snoring. The forest is snoring. You and I, and all the mortals who enter the forest, are asleep!!

Yes, it's unsettling - it's also funny! Once you get the "joke", you can't help but smile. But on to the fairies themselves.

There is a unison chorus of Tytania's fairies, singing of the life they lead:
Over hill, over dale,
Thorough bush, thorough brier,
Over park, over pale,
Thorough flood, thorough fire,
I do wander everywhere.
Swifter than the moon’s sphere.
And I serve the Fairy Queen,
To dew her orbs upon the green, etc.

These verses have proven popular with several composers. (The first line is actually used in "The Caisson Song", though I suspect any allusion to Shakespeare is unintentional.) It will be useful to contrast some settings with Britten's, to better understand what he was trying to achieve in his operatic version. Here are three choral settings worth noting; the links will take you to YouTube performances.

A. Ralph Vaughan Williams. This 1951 composition is lilting and graceful. However, the composer doesn't appear to have had fairies in mind as much as a jolly group of outdoorsy British men and women out for a tramp in the countryside. They sound... mortal.

B. J. L. Hatton. This British composer was a contemporary of Mendelssohn; his setting seems an attempt to emulate Mendelssohn's elfin lightness. But again; it's more a virtuoso choral vehicle than music suitable for a music drama.

Amy Beach, a gifted American composer with whom we should all be more acquainted, has a simply gorgeous and ethereal version imbued with grace and lyricism.

With all those more or less conventional settings in your ear, now go back to the Britten link above and listen to this "Over hill, over dale". (I begins about 90 seconds in.)

Big, big difference.

The descending and ascending scale-figures clearly remove these fairies from either the 19th-century world of Victorian Romanticism or the Disney ideal of winsome sweetness. Those scales mesh nicely with the "snoring" motion of the orchestra; we are still sleeping, still dreaming. Their vocal line is simple, yet the rhythm lacks symmetry and the phrases are irregular; the effect is slightly stringent and harsh, yet also full of child-like innocence.

As for Hansel and Gretel, I hear a veiled reference in this phrase of our fairies:

This is so similar to the Witch's "Hocus-pocus" spell in Humperdinck's opera that I doubt it's a coincidence, particularly as both operas deal with magic spells being cast in the forest.

The piquant off-beat charm of the fairies continues with this tune which is truly catchy despite harmonies that refuse to support "normal" tonality:

Humor, catchiness, charm - all of these qualities are assigned to the magic beings in Britten's Midsummer forest; yet the sound of them creates a highly original conception of what a "fairy" is. As we'll see, these beings are less cuddly than mischievous; less precious than weirdly innocent.

In coming posts, we'll examine the King and Queen of Fairyland, Oberon and Tytania.

Next week: what the lovers learn in their dreams

Nighty-night: Britten's "A Midsummer Night's Dream"

“I love the silent hour of night, For blissful dreams may then arise, Revealing to my charmed sight What may not bless my waking eyes.” (Anne Brontë)

“And sleep, that sometime shuts up sorrow's eye, Steal me awhile from mine own company.” (William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream)

“Dreaming gives a chance for your subconscious mind to work when your conscious mind is happily asleep. If I don’t sleep, I find that in the morning I am unprepared for my next day’s work… but dreams release many things which one thinks had better not be released.” (Benjamin Britten)

"Asleep" (Rupert Bunny)

Benjamin Britten joked that he chose Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream for the 1960
Aldeburgh Festival because it came with a ready-made libretto. It's funny because, in reality, transforming an Elizabethan play into a workable libretto is a complex task.

The truth is that, given Britten's track record of subject material, Midsummer was an entirely predictable choice; one that fit him to a T. Browse through the composer's catalogue of recent works, and one theme stands out:

The night.

Night time, with its companion themes of sleep and dreams, appears to have occupied a position somewhere between fascination and obsession with Benjamin Britten. Midsummer is the fourth major work written within a handful of years to deal with the subject, the other three being:

• The Serenade, Op. 31 for tenor, horn and strings (1943). This is a cycle of six poems dealing with both romantic and disturbing aspects of the night by prominent British poets, framed by a prologue and epilogue for solo horn. The finale, a setting of an ode by Keats, clearly relates sleep with death, as indicated in the opening lines:

O soft embalmer of the still midnight! Shutting with careful fingers and benign Our gloom-pleas'd eyes, embower'd from the light, Enshaded in forgetfulness divine;

• The opera The Turn of the Screw (1954) is a ghost story about a malevolent spirit, Peter Quint, who strives to possess the soul of a child named Miles. At one point, Quint calls out to Miles:

I am the hidden life that stirs
When the candle is out;
Upstairs and down, the footsteps
barely heard.
The unknown gesture, and the soft,
persistent word,
The long sighing light of the
night-winged bird.

• Britten's Nocturne, Op. 60 (1958) is another song-cycle for tenor voice with chamber instrumental accompaniment. Like the Serenade, it consists of settings of poems by distinguished British poets exploring the by-now familiar theme of nocturnal musings. It ends with a sonnet of Shakespeare full of yearning and desire:

All days are nights to see till I see thee,
And nights bright days when dreams do show thee me.

Britten's leanings toward night time, sleep and dreams affects his approach to the play. He dispenses with Shakespeare's first act, the scenes in which we meet the three groups of human characters (nobles, lovers and tradesmen) in the "wide-awake" real world of Athens. Instead, the composer chooses to have the curtain rise on those supernatural beings who dispense spells while we sleep, the fairies. Last to appear in the play,. Oberon, Tytania and their fairy retinue are the first on stage in the opera; we are immediately plunged into the eerily sleepy ambience of the woods, where drowsy young people hide from reality to resolve their various issues and conflicts.

This is where our idiom "Let me sleep on it" comes from; as Benjamin Britten posits in his quote at the top of this post, sleep is where our subconscious continues to work on our problems while we yield to the so-called REM stage of deep sleep. We've all experienced it.

A Midsummer Night's Dream is an amusing object lesson on the mysterious curative and healing powers of sleep.