Sounds and atmospheres of Britten’s enchanted forest

By the time Benjamin Britten composed A Midsummer Night’s Dream, he had been a successful opera composer for over fifteen years. Many of his major dramatic works had established his reputation as one of the most original British artists of his generation, one of the few to popularize opera in English. He did so by choosing subjects derived from well-known writers such as Henry James and Herman Melville. Yet, he had never faced the challenge of writing an opera based on a Shakespeare text until 1959, when he was commissioned to write a new work to be performed the following year at the Aldeburgh Festival. Due to the short deadline for the composition, Britten had to depart from his usual working habits: Instead of requesting a new libretto to be written from scratch, he decided to revise Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream turning it…