A Midsummer Night's Dream (Mendelssohn)

A Midsummer Night's Dream is a two-part musical work by Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy. The one-movement overture (Op. 21) Mendelssohn composed in the summer of 1826 at the age of 17 years, the multi-movement incidental music (Op. 61 ), however, only in 1842 at the request of the Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm IV, the music for William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream is one of Mendelssohn's most frequently performed works and has especially gained through the wedding march contained therein worldwide fame.

History

After Mendelssohn had read 1826 Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream in the Schlegel - Tieck 's translation, he finished the writing of the overture on August 26 in 1826. After the premiere in Abraham Mendelssohn house in the Leipziger Strasse 3, the former Prussian House, the first public performance took place in February 1827 in Stettin, conducted by Carl Loewe. The impetus for the composition of incidental music happened after a successful performance of Sophocles' Antigone in the New Palace in Potsdam with incidental music by Mendelssohn (Op. 55). Friedrich Wilhelm IV asked the composer, the music director of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra was time to write more incidental music for performances at the New Palace. The premiere took place on 14 October 1843.

In the era of National Socialism, as Mendelssohn's works in Germany could no longer be listed with several different composers replacement works with music Midsummer Night's Dream, including Carl Orff, who presented in 1939 a revision of the incidental music in 1917, and Winfried Zillig ( 1939).

Construction

Mendelssohn's Midsummer Night's Dream consists of eleven movements: