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Lecture series1 lecture

Musical Fairy Tales from Shakespeare to Sondheim

Professor Dominic Broomfield-McHugh · Gresham College

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About

Written in the era of the founding of Gresham College, Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream portrays the hypnotic dreaminess of a fairy world in which the real and the fantastic are blurred. This lecture explores how the innate musicality of Shakespeare’s original has provoked adaptations across the centuries, including Ashton and Balanchine’s ballets based on Mendelssohn’s incidental music for the play, Britten’s opera, Purcell’s masque The Fairy Queen, Henze’s Eighth Symphony and Elvis Costello’s Il Sogno.

Lectures

  1. Shakespeare’s Musical Fairies 2025-09-22 · Audio

Credits and licence

Institution
Gresham College
Speaker
Professor Dominic Broomfield-McHugh
Year
2025
Level
For everyone
Language
English
Subjects
Literature and writing, Art, architecture and design, Music
Source
Gresham College
Licence
Educational use (Gresham College's terms), as Gresham College states it. Gresham College's terms
Attribution
Gresham College states: "We positively encourage the use of the Gresham College lecture transcripts, audio and video files for educational purposes. However, we do not allow use of Gresham College materials for commercial, personal or institutional gain."
Who can watch
Gresham College gives no rating. Invisible Network shows it to Teens profiles and older, judged from what the source says about it. How courses are placed