Backstage at MIDSUMMER: A Chat with Tytania

I checked in with Emily Hindrichs, who will sing the role of Tytania in A Midsummer Night's Dream on Friday and Sunday nights.

JD: Emily Hindrichs, we're delighted to have you back at Seattle Opera's Young Artists Program for another colorful character, after you wowed us last year as that punk pyro Fire-boy in L'enfant et les sortilèges (left, menacing Elizabeth Pojanowski's Enfant) among other roles. Tell us what you've been doing since then.

EH: I spent a summer at the Tanglewood Music Festival in Lenox, Massachusetts, bought my first house, and promptly left it to work at English National Opera this spring, where I got to wear another amazing wig, though it was more traditional than Fire's red mohawk.

JD: Shakespeare's words and Britten's music have a reputation of being pretty hard-core. Do you find performing Tytania in Midsummer more challenging than other opera roles? If so, does that make it more fun, or is it hard work?

EH: Tytania has long been a dream role of mine. Britten and Pears adapted Shakespeare for the opera and, in a sense, they did most of the work for us already. The text setting is very precise, so the singer's hardest task it to figure out how to make that character relevant through their language.

Emily Hindrichs as Tytania tells her fairies how to treat her new beloved, Bottom-with-the-head-of-an-ass:

Be kind and courteous
to this gentleman; hop in his walks
and gambol in his eyes;
feed him with apricocks
and dewberries,
with purple grapes, green figs,
and mulberries; the honey-bags
steal from the humble-bees,
and for night-tapers crop
their waxen thighs
and light them at the fiery
glow-worm's eyes.

JD: Tell us a little about your character. What motivates a Fairy Queen?

EH: Tytania and Oberon's conflict is all about power - he has it, she takes it, he wants it back. Peter Kazaras puts these two characters on more equal footing by allowing Tytania to recognize Oberon's deception in the third act before they reconcile. I think this makes their relationship more interesting because it keeps that thread of tension going - you know this isn't the last time they'll fight or make up.

JD: What's your favorite part of the show?

EH: The first conflict at the top of the show - call me biased, but I like the music for the fairies the most.

JD: What's next for you? Do you have a website where your fans can track your activities?

EH: I'm singing with the Seattle Symphony and Music of Remembrance in
May - all of that information is on my website, www.emilyhindrichs.com.

Backstage at MIDSUMMER: A Chat with Flute/Thisbe

Our first weekend of A Midsummer Night's Dream went over well, according to the Seattle Times and The Gathering Note. Over the next couple of days I'm going to be chatting with some of the performers about their experience with the show: today, tenor Alex Mansoori, who plays Francis Flute the Bellows-Mender and, as Flute, Thisbe.

JD: Alex, Seattle Opera has been proud of your work this year as a Young Artist, as Lensky in Tatyana's Letter, Loge/Mime in Siegfried and the Ring of Fire, and now your show-stealing performance as Flute/Thisbe. ("I kiss the wall's hole!" seems to slay them every night.) But this is not your first engagement with Seattle Opera: tell us about your ancient history with us.

AM: My time with Seattle Opera starts out when I was 11 in the children's chorus of Carmen. I sang "The Star Spangled Banner" for my audition. After that, I was in Turandot and was one of the six children in Werther. It's nice to be back in familiar stomping grounds.

JD: Most performers might consider Shakespeare's words and Britten's music a daunting challenge. What's the trickiest thing about performing in Midsummer?

AM: The hardest part is singing Britten's difficult music while running around the stage. On top of that, the Rustics also have to be in tune with each other and the Maestro to stay together. It takes a tremendous amount of focus.

JD: You're obviously a gifted comedian. But is there anything more to Flute/Thisbe than sheer silliness?

AM: Well, I think whenever I'm doing a comic role, the challenge (and what is funniest) is making the character real, and not campy. The audience can tell the difference between a realistic reaction in a comedic role and an actor asking for a laugh. That's a fine line, and it gets even smaller when you're a man playing a woman.

Alex Mansoori sings Thisbe's "Passion", which ends the play:

Asleep, my love?
What, dead, my dove?
Pyramus, arise!
Speak, speak. Quite dumb?
Dead, dead? A tomb
must cover thy sweet eyes.
These lily lips, this cherry nose,
these yellow cowslip cheeks,
are gone, are gone:
Lovers, make moan:
His eyes were green as leeks.
Tongue, not a word:
Come, trusty sword;
come, blade, my breast imbrue:
And farewell, friends!

JD: What's your favorite part of the opera?

AM: There are so many! I love the play, especially since the audience has seen it building the entire show. I also really love the children's chorus at the end of Act II because the music is elegant and beautiful.

JD: What's next for you? Do you have a website where your fans can track your activities?

AM: I head to San Francisco for the summer, as a member of the Merola Opera Program. Then I'm back in Seattle for a second year with the YAP. And check out www.alexmansoori.com!

Photo by Rozarii Lynch

Brava and best wishes, Margaret Gawrysiak!

This afternoon’s performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream will be mezzo soprano Margaret Gawrysiak’s last appearance at Seattle Opera...for a little while, at least! Margaret sings Hippolita in this weekend’s Midsummers (Rose Beattie takes over the role next weekend) and then dashes off to begin rehearsals of L’enfant et les sortilèges/Gianni Schicchi at Opera Company of Philadelphia, where she’s making her debut in the same roles she sang for Seattle Opera’s YAP last season: Mère/Tasse/Pâtre/Libellule and Zita. (Above, Margaret as Zita, surrounded by her oddball relatives, menaces the Schicchi of Michael McGee.) You can find more information about Opera Philly’s production HERE.


Margaret is finishing up her second year with Seattle Opera’s Young Artists Program. Her warm, rich, mezzo, thrillingly easy high notes, and fearless stage presence have made her a favorite with our audiences in such roles as Dinah in Trouble in Tahiti (left), Olga in Tatyana’s Letter, Mother and the Witch in Hansel and Gretel, and (in our adaptations of Wagner’s Ring operas for children) Flosshilde the Rhinedaughter, Rossweisse the Valkyrie, Fafner the construction worker and giant dragon puppet-head...


...and of course Erda the earth goddess (right, with Thomas Forde as Wotan). I’ll never forget Maggie’s performance as Enfant’s teacup, singing its demented pidgin-French Chinese gobbledygook and dancing the foxtrot with Noah Baetge’s teacup—-a definitive performance, and I can only hope they’ll be able to reach such heights of delicious lunacy in Philadelphia!

Above, Margaret Gawrysiak as Maman, in L'enfant, greets David Korn as the Child and Elizabeth Pojanowski as the wounded Squirrel.

A Full Day of Opera

Whoof! It’s been a busy 24 hours in the whirligig life of this opera educator: last night, the first performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream played at Bellevue’s Meydenbauer Center to a warmly receptive audience (including the opera club from Inglemoor High School, dressed to the nines). Then, this morning, Seneca Garber and I hosted our Teacher Training Workshop for The Marriage of Figaro, for teachers in our Experience Opera program. The teachers are now charged with taking the fruits of the morning, the zillions of ideas about Figaro and ways of introducing it to young people that were tossed around at that workshop, back to their schools and getting their classes ready to come experience the opera on the mainstage in a few weeks.


After the workshop I dashed over to McCaw Hall for Das Rheingold at SIFF Cinema, a beautiful HD presentation with Dolby sound of a recent performance at the new opera house in Valencia, Spain. SIFF Cinema’s state-of-the-art equipment makes it a great place to watch both movies and these increasingly popular operas-on-a-movie-screen. The audience today (and for those who go to the second showing, tomorrow afternoon) enjoyed an exciting Das Rheingold conducted by Zubin Mehta and starring Stephen Milling, the mighty Danish bass who has often sung Fasolt in Das Rheingold at Seattle Opera (right, Milling as Hunding at Seattle Opera). In the Valencia production, he sang Fafner and thus got to murder his brother Matti Salminen as Fasolt (for those of you who can tell Fasolt and Fafner apart!). The production is a blend of breath-taking projected visuals and acrobats doing amazing things as Alberich’s hoard and as Valhalla, and reminded me greatly of the theater of Robert Lepage, whose production of Bluebeard’s Castle/Erwartung just wowed Seattle Opera audiences. Its most stunning images echoed recent science fiction movies: the descent into Nibelheim was a nightmare perhaps inspired by The Matrix, and Erda’s apocalyptic vision of world-destruction transformed Planet Earth into the volcano planet from Revenge of the Sith. Would Richard Wagner have liked it? “Kinder, schafft neues!” he said: Make it new!

And now (I’m posting this blog from backstage at the Theatre at Meydenbauer Center) for our second performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream!

Midsummer Night's Dream: Preview Video

Click here to watch this exciting new preview video for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, running now through April 5th at Bellevue's Meydenbauer Center.

More Midsummer Night's Dream Photos

Check out all of the dress rehearsal photos for our Young Artists Program production of Benjamin Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream (which open's TONIGHT!) by clicking here.

HD Opera at SIFF Cinema

The Seattle International Film Festival will be showing a series of High-Definition opera and ballet transmissions at their home theater, SIFF Cinema, which also happens to be the theater in McCaw Hall where we host Seattle Opera's pre-performance lectures and post-performance Q&As. For a complete schedule of the SIFF "Command Performances in HD", go to SIFF OPERA SCHEDULE.

The series gets going tomorrow, with a screening of the new Das Rheingold from Valencia's Palau de les Arts 'Reina Sofia,' in what sounds like an intriguing production by Spanish theater group La Fura dels Baus. (Above, what I'm guessing are Fasolt and Fafner from their Das Rheingold.) Valencia's Ring is still being created (the Götterdämmerung is to be produced this summer), but it's garnered plenty of interest so far: check out Mark Swed's review of this screening at LA TIMES. There's also promotional material about the show at EMERGING PICTURES.

Photos from our Second Dress Rehearsal

Rozarii Lynch took more great photos at the final dress rehearsal of A Midsummer Night's Dream last night:

Emily Hindrichs, as Tytania, intends to raise the orphaned changeling boy as her own. Emily, who sported a red mohawk as Feu (as well as Princesse/Rossignol and Nella/Lauretta) in ENFANT/SCHICCHI in last season's Young Artists Program, recently made her English National Opera debut as the Queen of the Night in Mozart's Magic Flute.



Helena (Michelle Trovato) and Demetrius (Michael Krzankowski) are reunited in love by the end of the opera, thanks to Oberon's magic love-juice.



Hippolita (Rose Beattie) and Theseus (Jeffrey Beruan) are Headmaster and new Headmistress at the school of Athens, in this production.



Alex Mansoori as Thisbe spoofs a well-known Russian diva's recent Metropolitan Opera mad scene staging. (At the first Midsummer performance, in Aldeburgh in 1960, Peter Pears in this role famously poked fun at Joan Sutherland's Lucia.)



I'm happy to report that the opera really came together at last night's rehearsal--it helped to have a big invited audience laughing at all the jokes--and we're looking forward to a terrific opening tomorrow.

MIDSUMMER DREAMERS: The Mechanicals

Any production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, whether play or opera, climaxes in the (hopefully) hilarious performance of Pyramus and Thisbe, a play-within-a-play or opera-within-an-opera prepared by the six Mechanicals and offered as entertainment for the triple wedding of Theseus with Hippolita, Hermia with Lysander, Demetrius with Helena. The Mechanicals (so called because they’re “Hard-handed men that work in Athens here, / Which never labor’d in their minds till now”) are a spectacularly unimaginative troupe of would-be artists, and their production is always (in a play) a parody of bad Shakespeare, or (in an opera) a parody of bad opera.

Of all the characters in Midsummer, I love the Mechanicals most of all; but that’s probably because I work in a theater, and recognize in them myself and my colleagues. Most of their dumb ideas are things I’ve proudly suggested to people, at auditions, rehearsals, and late-night production meetings!

Britten sets the six mechanicals as two tenors (Flute/Thisbe, Snout/Wall), two baritones (Starveling/Moon, Bottom/Pyramus) and two basses (Snug/Lion, Quince/Writer-Director) so he can build a variety of fun ensembles playing with all those different layers of sound. He has the two basses sing absurdly low, at points, and many times asks Flute to sing up high in falsetto, especially when he’s in drag as Thisbe. Since Shakespeare wrote the Mechanicals’ lines in clumsy prose (except for the dreadful poetry of their play), Britten was never tempted to give them catchy tunes. Instead, their music is built from a couple of core motifs, which become running gags as we hear them again and again throughout the show.

For instance, when Flute is trying to get into the character of Thisbe, at their first rehearsal, he repeats the line “Ah, Pyramus, my lover dear, thy Thisbe dear and lady dear!” several times while Quince is calling roll and handing out parts to the other Mechanicals. The joke here is that Flute, who should be the company’s diva-goddess, is a terrible singer who can’t figure out what pitch he should start on:


(Ian Bostridge; Colin Davis with the London Symphony Orchestra, Philips 454 122-2)

Britten then takes the almost-tune that Flute was trying to sing, and makes it into one of the principal motifs of the Mechanicals’ scenes. You hear, it, for example, played by the trumpets as the Mechanicals begin the Bergomask dance they perform in lieu of the Epilogue to their play:


(Philips 454 122-2)


Above, the opera-within-an-opera in the famous Robert Carsen production.

Although Benjamin Britten was an extremely complicated man who created some of the twentieth century’s darkest opera tragedies, it’s good to hear him laughing at himself and the world in Midsummer, his greatest opera comedy. I’ll never forget the ordinarily sober audience at the Metropolitan Opera House laughing ourselves silly at Midsummer’s opera-within-an-opera. We certainly hope our YAP production, which opens tomorrow, will satisfy on this count. Our Mechanicals include Young Artist Alex Mansoori (whose antics as Mime brought down the house in our previous production, Siegfried and the Ring of Fire) as Flute, YAP Alum Marcus Shelton as Snout, Marc-Antoine d’Aragon as Starveling, Jeffrey Madison as Bottom, YAP Thomas Forde as Snug/Lion (who’s moved on from growling as a bear, in Siegfried and the Ring of Fire, to roaring as a Lion in Midsummer!) and Jonathan Silvia as Quince.

One last thought for those studying up before attending A Midsummer Night’s Dream: you can find the libretto of the opera, as adapted by Britten and Pears from Shakespeare’s play, here at LIBRETTO.

Last Night's MIDSUMMER Rehearsal

Last night was our first dress rehearsal of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Some photos taken at the rehearsal by Rozarii Lynch, to whet your appetites for the show:

A tender moment for Lysander (Bray Wilkins) and Hermia (Elizabeth Pojanowski), who plan to elope from Athens to avoid the harsh law which will force her to marry Demetrius:



Puck (David Hogan) likes Oberon's (Anthony Roth Costanzo) plan to be avenged upon Tytania:



Bottom agrees to take on the role of Pyramus, to the delight of his fellow actors (l to r, Marcus Shelton as Snout, Thomas Forde as Snug, Marc-Antoine d'Aragon as Starveling, Alex Mansoori as Flute, Jeffrey Madison as Bottom):



Her Fairy Attendants are amused by Tytania's (Megan Hart) sudden passion for Bottom:



"I say I love her more than you can do!" Lysander (Bray Wilkins) and Demetrius (Michael Krzankowski) put Helena (Vira Slywotzky) on a pedestal, while Hermia (Elizabeth Pojanowski) watches in annoyance:



Pyramus and Thisbe whisper through the chink in a wall (Alex Mansoori, Marcus Shelton, and Jeffrey Madison):



As you can see from the photos, Peter Kazaras's production (designed by Donald Eastman, with costumes by Heidi Ganser and lighting by Connie Yun) sets the opera in a British boarding school, where Shakespeare's aristocrat/lovers are teachers and his fairies are students.

More coming soon!

The Seattle Opera Blog Gone 'Wordle'

With just about everyone talking about "Wordle" today, I thought, for fun, I would share a couple of Wordle images based on the most used words on this blog. For those who maybe don't know, Wordle is a toy for generating "word clouds" from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.


You can see the Seattle Opera Blog's 'Official' Wordle image by
clicking here. ENJOY!

MIDSUMMER DREAMERS: The Duke and Duchess-to-Be

Shakespeare opened his Midsummer Night’s Dream with a scene to make any feminist cringe: not only has Theseus, Duke of Athens, conquered Hippolyta, the Amazon warrior queen, and forced her to marry him, but a few moments later an old patriarch named Egeus bursts in and demands the right, by “ancient privilege of Athens,” to have his daughter killed if she refuses to marry the man her father chooses. The play seems to be about a world where men are winning, hands down, the eternal war of the sexes. But later on, we find that it’s more complicated than that; the story ends with the two female leads (Hermia and Helena) getting what they want, while the desires of the men are ridiculed, transformed, and/or frustrated. Meanwhile, in the world of the Fairies, a different battle of the sexes ends with the queen being ridiculed and the king getting what he wants. So...exactly who wins the war, men or women? No easy answers, in Shakespeare!


Above, Theseus conquers Hippolyta (from a Grecian urn).

For me, the character whose motivation has always been the most obscure is Hippolyta, who weds Duke Theseus in the final scene. Is Hippolyta getting what she wants? Shakespeare doesn’t explain exactly what Theseus means when he tells Hippolyta he “woo’d her with my sword”; but when we first meet them, it’s clear that he’s impatient to get into bed with her, whereas she’s in no rush. In the first lines of the play, they both draw metaphors for the moon, which separates and will unite them. Theseus’ moon is a miserable old spinster, frustrating a young man from spite, whereas Hippoyta’s moon is Diana, the chaste huntress:

THESEUS
Now, fair Hippolyta, our nuptial hour
Draws on apace; four happy days bring in
Another moon: but, O, methinks, how slow
This old moon wanes! she lingers my desires,
Like to a step-dame or a dowager
Long withering out a young man's revenue.

HIPPOLYTA
This day will quickly steep itself in night;
This night will quickly dream away the time;
And then the moon, like to a silver bow
New-bent in heaven, shall behold the night
Of our solemnities.

Or, to translate from Shakespeare to the language of images:

Theseus' moon:

Hippolyta's moon:

Although Benjamin Britten cut Shakespeare’s first scene from his opera, he kept these famous lines for the introduction of Hippolita (Britten also changed Shakespeare’s spelling!) and Theseus in his Act Three. As voice-types, he chose a regal bass and a husky alto; but the music for these two characters is orchestral as well, a wedding of strings and brass in the orchestral interlude immediately preceding their entrance.

ENTRANCE OF HIPPOLITA AND THESEUS


(Brian Bannantyne-Scott; Philips 454 122-2)

Theseus’ brassy fanfares may sound royal and pompous, but they are, in fact, the echoes of barking dogs! Britten’s inspiration for this musical figure was a passage he had to cut, where Theseus and Hippolyta discuss the music of such a cacaphony:

THESEUS
We will, fair queen, up to the mountain's top,
And mark the musical confusion
Of hounds and echo in conjunction.

HIPPOLYTA
... Besides the groves,
The skies, the fountains, every region near
Seem'd all one mutual cry: I never heard
So musical a discord, such sweet thunder.

As for the beautiful string theme you heard in that passage, I’ve always thought it represented Hippolita, her beauty and her mixed emotions about her rapidly approaching marriage. If she was lukewarm about wedding Theseus at first, and saw the moon as Diana, the chaste huntress-goddess of the Amazons of her youth, by the end she’s ready to move on: of Robin Starveling the Tailor’s performance as Moon, in the Mechanicals’ Most Lamentable Comedy and Most Cruel Death of Pyramus and Thisbe, Hippolita comments: “I am weary of this moon. Would he would change!”

Jeffrey Beruan plays Theseus in Seattle Opera's production; the role of Hippolita is shared by Rose Beattie and Young Artist Margaret Gawrysiak.

MIDSUMMER DREAMERS: The Lovers’ Quartet

Most people who go to A Midsummer Night’s Dream identify with the four young lovers, Hermia and Lysander, Helena and Demetrius. For them, the magical forest is a sort of “School of Love,” like you often find in opera comedies: all four head for the forest when overwhelmed by wild passion; they get into all sorts of terrible trouble while there (amusing Puck, and many generations of audiences, to no end); and eventually they emerge from the forest, a little wiser and more mature.

Like the lovers’ quartet in that other great “School of Love” opera Così fan tutte (another favorite of ours at Seattle Opera’s Young Artists Program!), part of the joke is that it’s hard to tell these young people apart. “I’ll take the tenor, you take the baritone,” we had the two sisters say (in our supertitles) the last time we produced Così. And that’s really about the size of it: Helena is a soprano, Hermia a mezzo; Lysander is a tenor, Demetrius a baritone. The girls are easier to distinguish because Helena is (theoretically) taller than Hermia; also, Helena is a lot more masochistic (and usually gets more laughs, and more audience sympathy) than Hermia. With the boys, it’s anybody’s guess which is which. It’s brilliant of Shakespeare to make them interchangeable, because it’s so true to human life. You know the type: they’re around twenty years old, they wear hoodies and jeans everyday, have iPods permanently attached to their ears, carefully cropped beard-stubble, and do their utmost to look like and speak like all the other guys.

So rather than create strongly individual music for each of them, Britten treats them musically as one character. At the beginning of the opera, when they’re all wild emotion (Helena loves Demetrius, who loves Hermia, who loves Lysander, who—-for the time being—-requites Hermia’s illicit passion), Britten gives the mezzo and tenor a bizarre duet of vows and protestations: a couple in love, not with each other, but with love itself:

I swear to thee, by Cupid's strongest bow,
By his best arrow with the golden head,
By the simplicity of Venus' doves,
By that which knitteth souls and prospers loves,
And by that fire which burn'd the Carthage queen,
When the false Troyan under sail was seen,
By all the vows that ever men have broke...

(Ruby Philogene and John Mark Ainsley; Colin Davis with the London Symphony Orchestra, Philips 454 122-2)

Do you hear how each time one interrupts the other to begin a new vow, they introduce a new harmony? Musically, that’s an extremely rude thing to do when someone’s trying to sing a duet with you! Britten uses it here to show how little attention Hermia and Lysander are paying to each other.

Matters devolve, from that duet, to the great quartet of chaos that comes mid-way through Act Two. At this point in the story, things are hopelessly confused: both boys have magically fallen out of love with Hermia and in love with Helena, and the two girls, former friends, blame each other. Britten sets the scene as a kind of fugue, with all four voices overlapping, the words coming at break-neck speed:


Lovers' Quarrel


(Janice Watson, Ruby Philogene, John Mark Ainsley, and Paul Whelan; Philips 454 122-2)

Musically that quartet is an enormous challenge-—and it doesn’t make it any easier when you’ve got a Director like Peter Kazaras, who’s asked our singers to have a pillow-fight while they sing this complicated music! The lovers’ Act Three quartet, sung after waking up to sunlit maturity, is less frantic, although its long soaring melodies pose a different kind of challenge:

“And I have found Demetrius like a jewel: mine own, and not mine own...”


(Janice Watson, Ruby Philogene, John Mark Ainsley, and Paul Whelan; Philips 454 122-2)

Above, the reconciled lovers at Glyndebourne Opera in 2006.

In Seattle Opera’s Young Artists production, baritone Michael Krzankowski sings Demetrius, tenor Bray Wilkins sings Lysander, mezzo-soprano Elizabeth Pojanowski sings Hermia, and sopranos Vira Slywotzky and Michelle Trovato share the role of Helena.

MIDSUMMER DREAMERS: The Children’s Chorus

Traditionally, Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream was always produced with lots of children as the fairies. (Since Peter Brooks’ famous Stratford-upon-Avon production, in 1970, theater companies around the world have gotten farther and farther away from that traditional Midsummer.) Benjamin Britten, who loved working with kids, wrote an extremely challenging and important role for children’s chorus in his Midsummer opera.

Britten was himself both a child prodigy and a gifted teacher, and he understood this fundamental law of music-making: young people rise to the challenge. That is, unless an adult says “This music is way too hard, kids will never be able to sing or perform it”, the kids will probably just go about the business of singing or performing it to the best of their ability. They don’t know it’s too hard! With that philosophy, Britten was able to get amazing things out of young musicians, and to this day his students are leaders in the musical life of Great Britain and the world.

His chorus of Fairies, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, has to sing lots of those distinctive, unusual Benjamin Britten melodies, as for example in this little march where they’re all bowing and introducing themselves to the ass-headed Bottom, singing the words “Hail, mortal”:


(New London Children’s Choir and Robert Lloyd; with Colin Davis and the London Symphony Orchestra, Philips 454 122-2)

A minute later they all grab recorders and wood-blocks and perform a little woodsy forest concert for Bottom’s amusement. And at the end of the opera, the kids join their voices to those of the Fairy Queen and King, Tytania and Oberon, to pronounce their blessing on the marriages of the three mortal couples. This slow, graceful procession, to a dance rhythm known as the “Scotch step”, is as magical an incantation as Shakespeare’s beautiful words:

With this field-dew consecrate,
Every fairy take his gait;
And each several chamber bless,
Through this palace, with sweet peace.
And the owner of it blest
Ever shall in safety rest.

(New London Children’s Choir, Sylvia McNair, and Brian Asawa; Philips 454 122-2)

Above, the final benediction as seen recently at Houston Grand Opera.

Seattle Opera’s children’s chorus is prepared by our Chorusmaster, Beth Kirchoff. The eight children singing in A Midsummer Night’s Dream range in age from 9 to 13 years old. They include accomplished string players as well as singers. One of our kids has appeared with 5th Avenue (Whistle Down the Wind); one was a supernumerary on Seattle Opera's mainstage; and one was recently featured in his school's performance of our previous Young Artists production, Siegfried and the Ring of Fire.

MIDSUMMER DREAMERS: The Fairies

Because Britten’s Midsummer Night’s Dream may be unfamiliar to Seattle audiences, I thought I’d use this blog, over the next few days, to introduce this opera's characters and some of its music. (You may already know the characters, since Shakespeare’s play is performed and studied frequently here in Seattle!) If you’re like me, you’ll find Britten’s music attractive enough at first, but not necessarily overwhelming; but then, on a second or third hearing, something will click, and a slow-burn affection will burst into wildfire enthusiasm.

When he wrote A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in 1959 and 1960, Britten had just taken a trip around the world which greatly broadened his already-broad musical interests. In particular he had been blown away on hearing the Balinese Gamelon orchestra, in Indonesia, and by going to traditional noh drama, in Japan. Techniques and tricks from these Asian musical and dramatic traditions influenced the way he wrote operas after that. Also, in Midsummer, Britten wanted to create a musical world as rich and diverse as the real world he had just explored. Shakespeare’s cast list, with its three contrasting groups of Fairies, Aristocrats, and Rude Mechanicals, gave him the opportunity to explore, as it were, three distinct musical nations. Britten’s own cast list for Midsummer ended up including every voice type available in 1960.

His music for the Fairies was the most unusual, as it featured the countertenor voice, which had emerged as the early music movement gathered steam after World War II. Britten wrote the role of Oberon, King of the Fairies, for Alfred Deller, whom you can hear on the Decca/London recording conducted by Britten. A countertenor is a male singer who’s developed his falsetto range, and so can sing notes usually sung by an alto or contralto. Britten’s choice gives Oberon a fascinatingly unsettling sound, beyond male and female, a dream-spirit of pure libido. Britten also writes for him extremely lush music, as when he describes Tytania’s forest bed-bower: “And there the snake throws her enamell’d skin, / Weed wide enough to wrap a fairy in.”

from Oberon’s aria “I know a bank”


(Brian Asawa; with Colin Davis and the London Symphony Orchestra, Philips 454 122-2)


ABOVE: Rupert Everett as Oberon and Michelle Pfeiffer as Titania in the 1999 film of Midsummer by Michael Hoffmann

To make a fitting consort for this strange creature, Britten turned to the coloratura soprano. Tytania, the Fairy Queen, is Oberon’s wife and enemy (as the opera begins). Her lover is Nick Bottom, the guy with the ass’s head, played by the bass: so in their love scene you get the highest voice mating with the lowest voice:

BOTTOM: Let none of your people stir me; I have an exposition of sleep come upon me.
TYTANIA: Sleep thou, and I will wind thee in my arms.
Fairies begone, and be all ways away.
So doth the woodbine the sweet honeysuckle
Gently entwist...


(Robert Lloyd and Sylvia McNair, Philips 454 122-2)

Do you hear, in that example, how the clarinet illustrates the twisting of the vines Tytania describes? I love the verdant sensuality of the music Britten wrote for Shakespeare’s verdant, sensual language with Oberon and Tytania. But our other principal Fairy character, Puck (left, as illustrated by Arthur Rackham), is anything but verdant and sensual. Puck is full of irony and mischief, and Britten calls for his role not to be sung, but spoken instead, by an actor. Musically, his character is denoted by the jazzy trumpet and drums that always accompany him:

Puck: “Through the forest have I gone”


(Carl Ferguson, Philips 454 122-2)

Our Seattle Opera Young Artists Program production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream will star Anthony Roth Costanzo, recent winner of the Metropolitan Opera National Councils Award, as Oberon; Young Artist Megan Hart and Young Artist Alum Emily Hindrichs as Tytania; and the talented Seattle actor David Hogan (most recently seen as Ishmael in Book-It’s Moby-Dick) as Puck.

Come back to this blog tomorrow to continue exploring the marvelous musical world of Britten’s Midsummer!

Entering Britten's Magical Forest

Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream begins in the sunlight court of Theseus, Duke of Athens, and, famously, the action only really gets going when everybody heads for a nearby magical forest. After a wild night of mischief, misunderstandings, and mayhem they return to the court the next morning: so the action of the play has been a journey into the forest, into the dream, the night, the moonlight, the unconscious, and then a return; there and back again.

But when Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears adapted Shakespeare's play for the libretto of their opera, they cut the entire opening scene. Their opera begins in that unconscious forest of dreaming, and Britten opens his opera with one of music's most marvelous depictions of sleep, with the entire string section snoring in yawning glissandos, as we the audience enter this magical forest:

A Midsummer Night's Dream: Opening of Act One

(Colin Davis and London Symphony Orchestra, Philips 454 122-2)

By opening his opera with that music, and taking us immediately into that magical forest, Britten turns Shakespeare's there-and-back-again journey inside out. Britten's is a post-Freudian Dream, where the unconscious world is in the foreground. All his operas criss-cross some boundary between two worlds: the ship and the sea, in Billy Budd, or the living and the dead, in Turn of the Screw. In Midsummer Night's Dream, we emerge from the dream-world of the forest only for the final scene at the court of Theseus; and even that scene concludes, when all the mortals have gone to bed, with the return of the fairies, who scatter dust, magic, dreams, and benedictions throughout the house.

Britten's Operas at Seattle Opera

I'm very excited that we're preparing Seattle Opera's first-ever production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, one of Benjamin Britten's most intriguing (and, in the opinion of many, accessible) operas. Britten wrote more than a dozen operas during his extremely productive life; Seattle Opera, which was founded four years AFTER the first performances of A Midsummer Night's Dream, has produced several of Britten's best-known works.

First came Peter Grimes, presented in 1982, in a now legendary production starring the great Canadian tenor Jon Vickers. I was a little kid at the time, but later heard great war stories about that production from Seattle Opera's beloved Archie Drake, who played Captain Balstrode--and who was only a few years younger than Benjamin Britten, and born in the next little fishing village on the English North Sea coast, just north of Britten's hometown.

Seattle Opera produced Britten's Turn of the Screw for the first time in the 1993-94 season, starring Peter Kazaras as Peter Quint. Kazaras, who sang a wide variety of tenor roles at Seattle Opera and other leading opera houses around the world, made something of a career specialty singing Britten's music. He starred as Captain Vere in Seattle Opera's next Britten production, Billy Budd in 2001. Christopher Maltman won Seattle Opera's Artist of the Year award that season for his house debut as Billy Budd.

Seattle Opera's Young Artists Program presented Turn of the Screw in 2006, and is currently rehearsing A Midsummer Night's Dream. And it's not just because Peter Kazaras is the program's Artistic Director! Britten's operas are terrific choices for a Young Artists program, because he tends to write ensemble operas, which showcase a variety of talents; his music, while easier to sing than some opera (such as Wagner or Verdi) from a strictly physical point of view, is nevertheless fiendishly challenging as music, to get the notes and rhythms accurate; and even if you perform his music flawlessly, that isn't enough, because every one of his operas is a true musical drama, and singers who take on Britten must be phenomenal actors, and able to deal with the fearsome challenges of singing opera in English, as well.

Bottom and the Ass's Head

Seattle Opera's Young Artists Program is finishing up studio rehearsals and about to move into the theater for technical rehearsals of A Midsummer Night's Dream, Britten's amazing Shakespeare opera. For me, the great iconic image of Midsummer is always the Beauty & the Beast moment, the fairy queen in love with a man with a donkey's head. But it's one thing to render this image as an image (see above), and something else when you have to come up with a costume piece for a theater production.

For Heidi Ganser, our costume designer for Midsummer, the Donkey Head worn by Nick Bottom the Weaver in Act Two began as one of her many costume sketches for the large cast of Midsummer:

Seattle Opera's expert crafts specialist, Lia Nouwen, is an experienced maker of giant animal heads for opera singers: in last year's Young Artists Program production of Ravel's L'enfant et les sortilèges, both Elizabeth Pojanowski and David Korn wore the giant Squirrel head created by Lia. She started building Bottom's Donkey Head out of foam:
Singing the role of Bottom in our production of A Midsummer Night's Dream is baritone Jeffrey Madison, who showed up in Seattle for rehearsals back in February, and was promptly taken to the costume shop for a Donkey Head fitting:

Since then, in consultation with Ganser and with Stage Director Peter Kazaras, Lia has added a mesh which conceals Jeffrey's face, but leaves him able to see and hear. Interestingly, the mesh has the effect of forcing Jeffrey to act his part with his entire body, since his face is concealed; and it also forces his onstage colleagues (including soloists from our kids' chorus, who play Moth, Cobweb, Peaseblossom, and Mustardseed) to interact with the Donkey's Head, not Jeffrey's.

The Marriage of Figaro: Speight's Corner

In this video, General Director Speight Jenkins and Education Director Perry Lorenzo discuss the character development and our cast for one of Mozart’s most popular operas, The Marriage of Figaro.

Click here to watch video

Lorenzo da Ponte

A fabulous book about the life of this wonderful librettist is by Rodney Bolt called The Librettist of Venice. Bolt follows the life of Da Ponte, which is a better story than any of the operas that he ever worked on in his life. As a young boy he entered the seminary and became a priest, but was known as a great lover. Through his life he adventured all over Europe and eventually he settled in New York and he brought opera to America for the first time. As a professor of literature at Columbia University he was the first Jewish born instructor, as well as the first ordained priest. Bolt gives us all the details of this wonderful life! You can get your copy from Amusements, Seattle Opera's gift shop here: Amusements

Return of Ulysses Hits Seattle

It was fun this weekend to hear yet another Monteverdi opera here in Seattle (we had Monteverdi's Orfeo a few weeks ago): Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria, the first-ever production by Seattle's newest opera company, Pacific Operaworks. A co-production with South African and Dutch partners involving puppets, opera singers, and video footage, Ulisse was an exciting kick-off for this new company. They still have a couple of performances; for more information, go to Pacific Operaworks.

Welcome to Our New Public Blog

Welcome to our new blog. Seattle Opera now is launching our new public blog, with myself, Perry Lorenzo, and with Jon Dean and Seneca Garber. We will be sharing opera stories, opera books, opera history, and all sorts of opera goodies. We are just playing with the first postings now, so stay tuned for more exciting articles.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream with Director Peter Kazaras

Watch Director’s Talk Video for Benjamin Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In this exclusive video, Director Peter Kazaras talks about the costume designer, conductor, and cast members and the developement of this exciting new production.

Click Here to Watch Video