The incidental music for A Midsummer Night's Dream was commissioned by King Frederick William IV of Prussia in 1842, seventeen years after the Overture was written.
Composition History
Mendelssohn composed the Overture to A Midsummer Night's Dream at age seventeen in 1826, and then the incidental music in 1843.
Compositional Technique
The young Mendelssohn used a Beethovenian classical orchestra for his Overture, employing refined violin divisions, sound pointillism, and acoustic illusions to evoke the fairy world.
Composer Biography
Felix Mendelssohn was the grandson of Moses Mendelssohn, a great Jewish philosopher of the Enlightenment (Aufklärung).
Critical Reception
Hector Berlioz, a rival composer, was charmed by Mendelssohn's work, saying of the incidental music, 'I have never heard anything so profoundly Shakespearean'.
Composer's Artistic Vision
Mendelssohn, a polyglot and prodigy, was considered uniquely qualified to set Shakespeare's supernatural night to music, with his 'fairy-like writing' and 'elf-like staccatos'.
Composition History
Mendelssohn's Overture to A Midsummer Night's Dream was first performed privately in Berlin in 1826 and publicly in Stettin, Germany, in 1827.
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