page_title: The Fairy-Queen
section_title: Performance history
hierarchical_section_title: The Fairy-Queen / Performance history
caption_attribution_description: Engraving by William Dolle first published in the libretto of The Empress of Morocco, 1673, showing Dorset Garden Theatre
context_page_description: The Fairy-Queen is a masque or semi-opera by Henry Purcell; a "Restoration spectacular". The libretto is an anonymous adaptation of William Shakespeare's comedy A Midsummer Night's Dream. First performed in 1692, The Fairy-Queen was composed three years before Purcell's death at the age of 35. Following his death, the score was lost and only rediscovered early in the twentieth century.
  Purcell did not set any of Shakespeare's text to music; instead he composed music for short masques in every act but the first. The play itself was also slightly modernised in keeping with seventeenth-century dramatic conventions, but in the main the spoken text is as Shakespeare wrote it. The masques are related to the play metaphorically, rather than literally. Many critics have stated that they bear no relationship to the play. Recent scholarship has shown that the opera, which ends with a masque featuring Hymen, the God of Marriage, was composed for the fifteenth wedding anniversary of William III and Mary II.
  Growing interest in Baroque music and the rise of the countertenor contributed to the work's re-entry into the repertoire.
context_section_description: Following Purcell's premature death, his opera Dioclesian remained popular until well into the eighteenth century, but the score of The Fairy-Queen was lost and only rediscovered early in the twentieth century. Other works like it fell into obscurity. Changing tastes were not the only reason for this; the voices employed had also become difficult to find. The list of singers below shows the frequent employment of the male alto, or countertenor, in the semi-opera, a voice which, after Purcell, essentially vanished from the stage, probably due to the rise of Italian opera and the attendant castrati. After that Romantic opera emerged, with the attendant predominance of the tenor. Until the early music revival, the male alto survived mainly in the ecclesiastical tradition of all-male church choirs and twentieth-century American vocal quartets.
  However, Purcell's music (and with it The Fairy-Queen) was resuscitated by two related movements: a growing interest in Baroque music and the rise of the countertenor, led by pioneers such as Alfred Deller and Russell Oberlin. The former movement led to performances of long-neglected composers such as Purcell, John Dowland, John Blow and even George Frideric Handel, while the latter complemented it by providing a way of making such performances as authentic as possible as regards the original music and the composer's intentions (less true for Handel, where countertenors appear as castrati replacements). This has led to The Fairy-Queen's increased popularity, and numerous recordings have been made, often using period instruments. The format of the work presents problems to modern directors, who must decide whether or not to present Purcell's music as part of the original play, which uncut is rather lengthy. Savage calculated a length of four hours. The decision to curtail the play is usually taken together with the resolution to modernise to such an extent that the cohesion between music, text and action sketched above is entirely lost, a criticism levelled at the English National Opera's 1995 production directed by David Pountney. The production was released on video the same year, and revived by the company in 2002. A bold approach was taken at the Brazilian Opera Company's 2000 staging by Luiz Päetow, with the libretto becoming unstuck in time.
  In July 2009, two months before the 350th anniversary of Purcell's birth, The Fairy-Queen was performed in a new edition, prepared for The Purcell Society by Bruce Wood and Andrew Pinnock, which restored the entire theatrical entertainment as well as the original pitch used by Purcell. The performance by Glyndebourne Festival Opera with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment conducted by William Christie was repeated later that month at the Royal Albert Hall as part of the BBC Proms.
  In June 2016, the opera was performed by the Hungarian State Opera, in a new, neo-noir production directed by András Almási-Tóth
caption: The Queen's Theatre, Dorset Garden where The Fairy-Queen was first performed.
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