While Britten's only peer in English drama-through-music was probably unperturbed by a text which aped A Midsummer-Night's Dream without quoting a single line of Shakespeare, it is characteristic both of our time and of the man that Britten has worked on a text of almost formidable authenticity. The masterly abridgment and adaptation of the play, by the composer and Peter Pears, cannot concern us here, but it has helped to make possible highly integrated illuminations of some of the richest (and to a composer most hazardous) English verse. How Britten thrives on piquant juxtapositions of mood is a familiar wonder, but it is worth noting that the unity of (say) Winter Words is of a quite different order from that of the Nocturne: it is impossible to analyse musically what links the disconnected scenes into a coherent expression that is Hardy seen through Britten, whereas the common background of night and sleep imposes on poems from diverse sources a unity (not uniformity) of atmosphere that is naturally absorbed into the musical fabric. In the new opera, the three planes on which the fairies, the rustics and the lovers move demand radically differentiated musical idioms. The distinction is made absolute by numerous details, like Puck's spoken part (dancing takes over the interpretative role of melody) and Oberon's ‘supernatural’ casting as a countertenor, the tendencies towards a romantic Angst in the arioso of the lovers and towards a bucolic directness in the recitative of the rustics, and above all by orchestral identifications ranging from the wealth of percussion instruments associated with the supernaturals to the old trombone joke of the rustics' lion. We may regard this diversity as roughly analogous to that of the Hardy songs, with a composite meaning that is focussed in Shakespeare, but Britten also finds sources of intra-musical unity in the common backgrounds he draws to our notice, such as the Wood and Sleep.