Purcell's The Fairy Queen is ostensibly based on Shakespeare's magical comedy, A Midsummer Night's Dream, but, as Gardner makes the obvious point in his essay which accompanies this recording, "It is perfectly possible for someone listening for the first time to be quite unaware that it was based on [the Shakespeare]." This would be an understatement of the first order. Not a single line of Shakespeare makes it into this semi-opera, and there are characters and situations which one will not find anywhere in the Bard's masterpiece (e.g., two Chinese characters and, I'm not joking, a dance for monkeys; I don't think in Purcell's day the monkeys had typewriters, by the way).

Not a bit of this matters. If one takes the work as a stand-alone piece and places as little emphasis as possible on the plot (or lack thereof), the take-away is a piece chock full of inventive music, memorable tunes, witty numbers, etc. As a good example, I give this month an excerpt from the "The Scene of the Drunken Poet", from the beginning of Act I. Here, the drunk in question in being tortured by fairies who have decided to punish him by pinching him 40 times. He eventually declares, in unsubtle exclamations, that he is...drunk, this declaration rhyming with a nice early use of the word Punk in modern English! The drunkenness itself is cleverly painted with the singer stuttering and stammering through his part. I know for a fact that Pete Townshend was influenced directly by Purcell's The Gordian Knot Untied, but I doubt that he was aware in 1964 of Purcell's stuttering of the very same consonant ("f-f-f-f-") which Townshend would memorably use to tell the establishment to "f-f-f-f-fade away"; Purcell uses it for the drunk to demand, drunkenly, to "f-f-f-fill the Bowl", before moving on to demanding a game of Blind Man's Bluff.