Final Project

Watch any Opera created before 1920 and write a three page paper (minimum) with your personal research and comments on the “mise en scene“. What did you discover watching this opera? How do you think audiences reacted to it when it was originally presented? Why do you think this piece is important in the chronology of Opera? How is technology used in it? If you were a 21st century director, how would you turn this piece into a VIDEO GAME? 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYn8oJcszmE (The Fairy Queen)

The Opera I chose to watch and write a paper on was The Fairy Queen by Henry Purcell which was originally composed in 1692. It is a re-telling of the Shakespeare play A Midsummer Nights Dream. This opera is considered a semi-opera due to the fact that it has both spoken parts as well as singing and dancing. It is episodic nature as well and contained supernatural elements as did the original source work. Purcell stuck true to Shakespeare’s original play with the spoke parts but deviated and created music that eluded to the happenings of the play. Essentially the opera is centered around two fairy royals, Titania and Oberon, who happen to be married. The opera continues and shows the couple fighting over a male child that Queen Titania had kidnapped before the start of the opera. Like stated previously, the opera follows closely to the original play including all the major characters. A great deal of chaos ensues with multiple other story line arching across the opera all revolving around the fight between Oberon and Titania.

The particular version of this semi-opera that I watched was preformed and recorded in 2005. Though filmed thirteen years ago, the acting and the imagery were still pretty decent and true to what I imagine was Purcell’s intentions. However, the set was pretty simple, if not basic in nature. It was based between three rather plain tan walls with a changing sky view in the back behind them. There were no details in the walls, no decorations, and used very little in the way of propers. A great amount of detail in this rendition of the opera was focused primarily on the costumes and the makeup done for each character. Due this elaborate use of costume and makeup you can clearly pick out who is the human, who happened to be dressed more plainly, and those were of supernatural origin, who happened to be dressed in a fancier manner. The use of speaking and singing and were also simple ways to tell apart who was human and who was not. Sometimes with plays it can become hard to tell each character apart, but here it is pretty obvious the difference even when there are fifteen different actors on the stage. There appears to be little actual stage direction which was often seen in actual Shakespeare plays. It appears as if the actors were given leeway to do their own interpretations of the opera’s overarching theme, basically they looked as if they were doing what felt right in the scene rather than what a director told them to do. The most detail was put into the music. The bulk of the music appeared to be introduced by the Supernatural characters with the exception of a couple drunkards. Every major song was sung by either Titania or Oberon there are no exceptions. Given the structure of the music and who preformed, Purcell appeared to be very specific when it came to who was allowed to sing and how the music would be dispersed throughout the entire opera. The music in the Opera seems to help show the action for particular scenes or to help the audience pay more attention to the details of what was going on in front of their eyes. 

Overall I think this type of performance was widely accepted by any audience watching be it back when it was first created or in newer interpretations. The source material when it was originally written was rather well known given that it was Shakespeare’s play. It appears simple to follow despite a hectic story line that bounces between characters. The use of music to help connect and explain what has happened or will happen, I believe, would have been happily accepted. Since it is considered a semi-opera, it took speaking roles from a traditional play and mixed it would dancing and singing with would have added a different take on something traditional preformed as solely a spoken play. This particular opera was created, or written rather, in 1692. The first use of the term ‘opera’ was not seen until the mid-1600’s which makes The Fairy Queen an opera that occurred very early in the development of opera itself. This could account for the fact that it is a semi-opera and contains little to no use of machinery. However, this lack of machinery could also be due to the fact that the opera was written just before Purcell’s death and was lost until more recent times. No one is sure exactly how the opera was preformed nor how it was intended to be preformed. 

As a person who enjoys and has played a decent amount of video games in her time on this earth, there could be any number of different variants to The Fairy Queen. With just a slight change of context and point of view it could be easily turned into a horror and/or survival game where that is based around the child. In the game the stolen child could be trying to escape all these random supernatural creatures who are trying to capture him and give him to either Oberon and Tatiana. Through all of this he would be merely trying to survive and somehow make it home. Or it could be similar to a Japanese “Love Game” where there there is little in the way of actual game play. This type of game would be focused exclusively around the story and dialogue, as was with the performance I watched, with detailed pictures and many different options to choose from. Each choice would, or could, lead to many different outcomes that end the game. My favorite version, however, would have to be if the game was played through from Puck’s point of view. He is mischievous and odd and it would be nice to see how the whole story played if he was the main character, or the person playing was playing as Puck. It would be similar a story based games where choices have to be made in order to get different endings, but this time they are solely focused on Puck and his actions/choices. No matter what kind of game it would be made into, I believe that there will end up being plenty of action and a lot of choices to be made for the main player to keep them interested.