Opera: Baroque Romp

It was a five-hour spectacular, and London had never seen anything like it. Right there on stage, swans were transformed into fairies, a bridge dissolved, Phoebus galloped through the clouds in a chariot drawn by four white horses. There were waterfalls, fountains, fireworks, peacocks, monkeys, exotic wild life, Chinese dancers, assorted spirits and nymphs, gods and goddesses, all swirling before the eye in a riot of color and fantasy.

Natural Addition. The year was 1692. The production was Composer Henry Purcell’s The Fairy Queen, an adaptation of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Called “semi-opera,” it was a kind of kaleidoscopic revue for which Purcell wrote some of his freshest and most delightful music, ranging from simple roundelays, jigs and folk songs to the most elaborate canons, miniature symphonies and exercises in counterpoint. It was the smash hit of the season. Three years later, at the age of about 36, Purcell died (allegedly from pneumonia contracted when he returned home from a drinking bout one wintry night to find that his wife had locked him out). With him disappeared all trace of The Fairy Queen for more than two centuries. Then, in 1901, a copy of the score was unearthed in the Royal Academy of Music, and several attempts were made to readapt Shakespeare’s comedy to the score—with no success.

Now, with appropriate ebullience, The Fairy Queen has suddenly sprung to life again. Premièred last week in Munich’s quaint, century-old Gärtner-platz Theater, the new adaptation by French Set Designer-Director Jean-Pierre Ponelle proved to be the most engaging discovery of the season. Boldly cutting the Bard’s text, Ponelle fashioned a crazy-quilt mixture of opera, drama, slapstick, ballet, pantomime, skits, sight gags and fantasy into a free wheeling baroque romp. The production, which took Ponelle a full 15 months to make ready, masterfully recreates Purcell’s shadowy stage world with its strange netherworld creatures slinking through a sepia-tone forest primeval, goblins and centaurs lurking in the trees under a Venetian-blue sky, dense with astrological symbols. Coupled with the buoyant, richly varied music of Purcell, the theatrical impact of The Fairy Queen, as one critic said, “makes it a natural addition to the repertory of any opera house in the world.”

Something for Everyone. The open ing-night audience awarded the production an ovation that one critic cited as “unprecedented in the annals of this theater.” Raved the Münchner Merkur: “This presentation satisfies every one: the musical connoisseur, who for once has the rare chance to experience genuine baroque theater; the music lover, who rarely has the opportunity to listen to a whole evening of Purcell; and finally the spectator, whose desire to be stunned, transposed and enchanted is just as fulfilled as his want for laughter and humor.”