Hanry Purcell's "The Fairy Queen"

×

Expand

Image courtesy of Festival Castell Peralada

The Fairy Queen is a baroque semi-operatic work in five acts, composed in 1692 by English musician Henry Purcell. His boundless imagination produced in this opera musical numbers associated with Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream throughout the work, only to flee from it at certain moments. In fact, it would be legitimate to say that the relationship with the play was just a pretext to give light and sense to his genius. It is precisely in this atypical structure that stage director Joan Anton Rechi saw an opportunity to invoke the feedback between audiences and artists at the Festival.

The opera is presented as a fairy tale, a dream, at once a homage to opera and to the theater and conversely the possibility of dreaming away mid-summer nights in Peralada. Dreams in operatic form, into which we sink through the gardens. A dream space opened up by a landscape of desire and freedom. Authors and composers wander lost through the gardens half-way between dream and reality, seeking inspiration to bring back the great nights, characters from the most iconic operas seen at the Festival await their turn on stage. All in all a theatrical exercise with the marvelous music of Purcell as its background. And that is the effect of operatic theater within the theater, a device also explored by Shakespeare in his works, and that this opera is rich in.

For more music events check our online events calendar.