The United Company spent £3,000 on it. That was a staggering sum in 1692, enough to buy a substantial London house several times over, and it went on stage machinery, costumes, dancers and fountains. There was a Chinese garden, swans that turned into fairies, a dance of six monkeys and, for the finale, a grand masque of Juno and Hymen. One contemporary report called it the best and most elaborate show of its kind. It was a hit with audiences. Because of the huge costs, it was rather less of a hit with the company’s accountants.
At the centre of the spectacle was a play everyone knew. The adapter, whose name has not survived, took Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, trimmed and modernised the text, and kept the lovers, the fairies and the mechanicals. What he added were five masques, one at the end of each act, and that is where Purcell came in. (He set not a single line of Shakespeare. The masques were all new verse, which says something about how the 1690s regarded the Bard: a source, not a scripture.)
The masques
Each masque is a self-contained entertainment, only loosely tied to the play.
Act I: the drunken poet. The fairies torment a drunk, stammering poet, a comic scene in which Purcell gets the singer to stutter in time to the music. It is often thought to be a dig at a real contemporary writer.
Act II: Night. Titania’s fairies lull her to sleep with a sequence for Night, Mystery, Secrecy and Sleep. See, even Night herself is here is among the most beautiful music Purcell wrote: hushed, slow, with muted strings.
Act III: love songs. If love’s a sweet passion is a duet-like song that became one of the period’s big hits. A dance for haymakers adds some rustic comedy.
Act IV: the seasons. Oberon celebrates Titania’s birthday with a sunrise masque. Phoebus the sun god arrives, and Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter each get a song. The trumpets come out for Now the night is chased away.
Act V: the Chinese garden and Hymen. The most exotic scene, with a Chinese man and woman, the monkeys and a wedding masque for Hymen. For a 1693 revival Purcell added The Plaint, “O let me weep,” a lament for soprano and violin over a ground bass that rivals Dido’s.
Two hundred years missing
Then the music vanished. After Purcell’s death the theatre’s full score went missing, and in 1701 the company was placing newspaper advertisements offering a reward for it. Nobody claimed the reward. For two centuries The Fairy Queen survived only as scattered songs.
The score finally turned up in the library of the Royal Academy of Music in London in the early 1900s. It was a lucky find, and it changed how people saw Purcell: not only as the composer of Dido, but as a master of large-scale theatre.
A note on the name
The title refers to Titania, Shakespeare’s queen of the fairies. It has nothing to do with The Faerie Queene, Edmund Spenser’s enormous Elizabethan epic poem, though search engines (and the occasional bookseller) still mix them up.
Hearing it
It is a lot of music, about two hours, and works well as a sequence of masques without the play. William Christie and John Eliot Gardiner both recorded it, and Christie’s 2009 Glyndebourne staging, filmed and released on DVD, gives a good idea of the original extravagance. Start with the Night masque, preferably late in the evening, and with the lights low.