Fairies in Opera, Part 3 - Continental Titanias

As is a feature of most fairy operas, fairies affect human fate by delivering magical potions or objects. In this opera, the magical object is a horn that Oberon personally gives to Huon to enable him to summon magical powers whenever such assistance is needed (the three-note horn is a musical motif that occurs in the work's overture, now themost well-known music from the opera.) He also gives Huon a free lift to Baghdad, where Rezia is on the verge of being married against her will to a Persian prince, Babekan. A subplot, somewhat similar to the secondary couple of Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail, is that Huon's sidekick, Sherasmin, falls in love with Rezia's faithful maid, Fatima. Huon stabs Babekan, whose Turkish followers then attack him, but Sherasmin blows the horn and the Turks are petrified, enabling the two couples to escape by ship.

But now they have to reckon with Oberon's trials. Puck brings forth a variety of nature-related spirits who sink the ship (the librettist knew his fairy lore: as a "good fairy," Puck is quite explicitly not permitted to do so dirty a deed himself. In the Met's 1918 edition; he sings to the spirits -- who are eager to whip up even worse damage -- "your task will be, at most, to wreck a bark upon the coast, which simple fairy may not do, and therefore I have summoned you"), and the two sets of lovers wind up on a rocky seashore. In the confusion, the magical horn goes missing. When Huon trudges off in search of food, Rezia is captured by pirates. Deliberately too late, Oberon now arrives in a seashell craft. Waving their lily wands (and this, decades before Oscar Wilde was even born) the fairy king and Puck spirit Huon away and transform the barren seascape into a garden populated by singing mermaids, and dancing elves and sylphs also bearing lily wands; thus does Act II end with the fairy world in good cheer while the mortals are cast into danger.

Act III takes place eight days later, and finds Fatima and Sherasmin united as gardeners of the emir of Tunis, each falsely claiming to have been unfaithful during the interim, to get a rise out of the other. Rezia is now in the possession of the emir, while Huon pops up suddenly out of nowhere after having been in a magical sleep

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