Taken on its own merits, the aria is a splendid coloratura piece whose runs and trills perfectly complement its text. Almost as if taking Puck's "I'll put a girdle round the earth in forty minutes!" for her own, Philene sings, "En riante, je parcours le monde, plus vive que l'oiseau, plus prompre que l'éclair!" - "While laughing, I transverse the world, livelier than a bird, quicker than lightning!" She describes how, accompanied by a band of frolicking sprites, she wings her chariot along directly behind Phoebus (remember Phoebus, of The Fairy Queen?) as daylight comes to the earth: they are there in the dancing of flowers in the dawn, in the foam of waves, in the mists and woods and meadows. No creature of night is this Titania, but a ripple of joy across all nature...and without any mention of a persnickety husband.
The tables turn in Carl Maria von Weber's 1826 Oberon, which is not based upon Shakespeare at all but -- by virtue of its having a British librettist (yes, the opera is in English, and had its world premiere in London) -- tacks on the Oberon myth to a German story drawn from a thirteenth-century French text, Huon de Bordeaux. In this opera, Titania does not get to sing at all, though Oberon takes a prominent role, along with Puck (scored for a female alto).
In some ways the set-up resembles that of an early French opera, the sort in which the gods create a kind of thesis argument in the prologue and then humans act out the argument as the body of the opera. Here, Oberon and Titania have not quarreled over a page, but over whether man or woman is the more inconstant in love. Within an otherwise Elysian fairyland, Oberon awakens from restless dreams, tormented by the vow he and his wife have taken, not to meet again until some couple can be found who swear steadfast devotion. Puck tears in to inform Oberon that Huon, a Burgundian knight, has been ordered by Charlemagne to conquer Baghdad and to take Rezia, the caliph's daughter, as his bride. (As any follower of chivalrous tales knows, this means that Huon and Rezia must be true to each other thereafter, and indeed they are bound to each other even before they meet by magically seeing each other in the same vision.) There follows a plot that could only be done justice by Cecil B. DeMille, which probably explains why this opera has rarely been performed. Let me point out here that just the supporting players, aside from the dozen-odd leads, include "elves, nymphs, sylphs, genii, mermaids, spirits of the air, water, earth, and fire, mermen, retinue of the caliph, ladies attendant on Rezia, black and white servantsof the harem, slaves, dancers of both sexes, a Janissary band, watchmen, Moorish boys, corsairs, the retinue of Charlemagne, pages, nobles, priests, choirboys, halberdiers, etc." (yes, the cast list says "etc." and in fact the above list forgets to include the cast's two pirates!).
