A play based on Shakespeare's comedy set to music by Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy
Five pairs of lovers are at the center of this fantastic erotic nightmare, which is about the changeability of feelings and how quickly love can turn into loathing or even hatred - with the corresponding consequences.
Theseus, the Duke of Athens, and Hippolyta, the Queen of the Amazons, want to get married. For their wedding, which will be accompanied by Mendelssohn's famous wedding march, craftsmen are preparing a play that revolves around the tragic ancient lovers Pyramus and Thisbe.
The craftsmen rehearse the drama in the forest near Athens, where things are not always right, however, as Oberon and Titania, the royal couple of the fairies, rule. And especially when the royal couple are at odds and the troll Puck is up to mischief, it is downright dangerous to be in this forest.
Hermia and Lysander, who flee from Athens into the forest for the sake of their love, followed by Demetrius and Helena - also in search of happiness in love ...
Felix Mendelssohn's music for "A Midsummer Night's Dream" was composed in two stages. The world of the fairies around Oberon, Titania and Puck, that of the craftsmen and the loving couples are already laid out in the overture from 1826, about which Robert Schumann wrote: "The bloom of youth is poured out like hardly any other work by the composer." Mendelssohn's incidental music, composed 17 years later, follows on seamlessly from the youthful composition.