# Musical Fairy Tales from Shakespeare to Sondheim

- 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](https://www.gresham.ac.uk/watch-now/series/musical-fairytales)
- Licence: [Educational use (Gresham College's terms)](https://www.gresham.ac.uk/terms-and-conditions)
- Who can watch: Teens profiles and older (sources give no ratings; placed by Invisible Network from the source's own words)

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](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/learn/gresham/series-musical-fairytales/6c4a53bc3a51) (Audio)