A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Glyndebourne, July 2023
Posted on 4 July 2023In earlier operas such as Peter Grimes and Turn of the Screw, Britten had already shown a striking musical ability to interleave scenes of innocent joy with others of dark and mysterious intensity, so he was ideally suited to turning Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream into an opera. It was first performed at Aldeburgh in 1960 with Britten’s partner Peter Pears singing the role of Flute the bellows mender, one of the ‘rude mechanicals’. See my review in The Article.