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. What is it about Shakespeare’s fairies that have inspired such diverse musical responses?

This lecture was recorded by Professor Dominic Broomfield-McHugh on 22nd September 2025 at Conway Hall, London.

Dominic Broomfield-McHugh is Gresham Visiting Professor of Film and Theatre Music. He is also Professor of Music at the University of Sheffield and is a graduate of King's College London. His scholarship focuses on the American musical on stage and screen, and he has published eight books including Loverly: The Life and Times of 'My Fair Lady' (OUP, 2012), The Letters of Cole Porter (Yale, 2019) and The Oxford Handbook of the Hollywood Musical (2022). He is Associate Producer of the PBS documentary Meredith Willson: America's Music Man and has appeared on all the main BBC television and radio stations as well as NPR in America. He has given talks and lectures at the Sydney Opera House, New York City Center, the Library of Congress, New York Public Library, Sadler's Wells, and Lincoln Center, among many others.

The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/watch-now/musical-fairies

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Shakespeare’s Musical Fairies - Dominic Broomfield-McHugh

Gresham College Lectures

Shakespeare’s Musical Fairies - Dominic Broomfield-McHugh