Purcell's five-act 1692 The Fairy Queen is an adaptation of Shakespeare's play, but if you would expect to find any of Shakespeare's main characters singing, you'd be mistaken. Virtually every Shakespearean role is taken by actors. The actual music of the "opera" consists of a series of masques performed in honor of Titania, Oberon, and love itself, by fairies, nymphs, spirits of the night or seasons, several characters drawn from Roman mythology (a typical feature of masques of that period), plus several other characters invented purely by its anonymous and sometimes quite irreverent librettist.
Act I opens with Hermia's refusal to wed Demetrius, her elopement with Lysander, and the scorned Helena's renewed desire to make Demetrius love her; Titania also leaves Oberon, in a huff. All this is acted, not sung. The first musical vocalizations occur when a chorus of fairies surrounds a drunken "scurvy Poet" and pinches him "for his Crimes, his Nonsense, and his Dogrel [sic] Rhymes." It is as if whatever music follows is presumed to have been written by a more supernatural hand than that of a commercial hack. Act II certainly proceeds with far more celestial-minded poetry and also a fairy dance, all to please Titania, as the spirits of Night, Mystery, Secret, and Sleep come forth to pay tribute to the powers of dreams and slumber. It is during this act that Secret sings one of the most famous airs from the opera, "One charming night." But it is not until this act that the royal couple first quarrels outright over who should own an Indian boy whom Titania has taken as a page, and this act is also where Puck's first mis-sprinkling of the magic herbal juice occurs. What Nature would will, and what is actually happening, are thus at odds. Act III finds Bottom, transformed into an ass, in Titania's arms, and they are thereby entertained in an allegorical manner by a nymph who brackets the humorous quarreling of a mortal rustic couple, Coridon and Mopsa, with songs about the pain and deception of love. By the end of Act IV, order is restored to Oberon's household as well as to Shakespeare's confounded mortal pairs, Lysander and Hermia, and Demetrius and Helena; and the fairies celebrate the dawn with a masque concerning Phoebus and the four seasons. In Act V, Juno and Hymen (god of marriage) appear to bless the couples, and quite out of left field but obviously supplied to create additional "color," a Chinese man and woman appear to sing about kindness being far more valuable than fame, pride, ambition, or beauty. It is here that another famous freestanding recital piece finds its operatic roots: "Hark now the Echoing Air a Triumph sings," where heaven itself is said to delight in the lovers' respective unions. The opera ends with Hymen's tribute to a Nuptial-Night that each couple shall enjoy with each setting of the sun upon a new Wedding-Day. One departs the work with a sense that the Midsummer's Eve of misdirected love was a distinct aberration to every order of Nature well beyond that of the fairy world, and that peace to the very universe has now been restored.
