The Fairy Queen

It's the only way we can get more known.

The closing, opening, and interstitial music is from a public domain recording of Henry Purcell's The Fairy Queen, sourced from museopen.org.

Thank you for listening.

I have chosen the most fantasy-inspired musical composition by Purcell that I could find.

This is the Act I Overture from his 1692 semi-opera, The Fairy Queen.

which is loosely based on Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Like much of Purcell's music, this piece is charming and lighthearted, the perfect palate cleanser for what has been, honestly, kind of a stressful and exhausting month for me.

In the final five or six years of his life, Purcell composed music for approximately 50 theatrical productions.

The semi-operas of this period, Dioclesian in 1690, King Arthur in 1691, The Fairy Queen in 1692, are among the most ambitious works in the English Baroque repertoire.

They were not operas in the Italian sense.

The principal characters spoke rather than sang, while the musical numbers were assigned to allegorical or supernatural figures.