More than four hundred years have passed since William Shakespeare, the greatest playwright of all time, wrote A Midsummer Night's Dream. Ever since, this extraordinary work has enjoyed enduring success and has continued to inspire artists across every discipline: painting, dance, sculpture, cinema, poetry - and above all, music.

At times delightfully intricate, the plot gradually gives way to the enchanting atmosphere of its settings: magical forests, hedgerows shimmering with fireflies, castles, and grand halls. Within a timeless, elusive world, elves, fairies, lovers, dukes, duchesses, and humble craftsmen weave in and out of one another's stories, all irresistibly swept away by the intangible substance from which dreams are made.

While remaining faithful to the essential elements of Shakespeare's play and drawing on masterpieces from the musical repertoire - most notably Mendelssohn and Britten, alongside Purcell and Mozart - this production broadens its perspective by exploring dreams, and therefore unreality, as something intrinsically connected to the very nature of theatre.

The stage becomes the ideal gateway through which audiences can experience, in the immediacy of live performance, those surreal worlds that may exist above, below, and all around us, yet remain beyond the reach of everyday perception.

This production therefore seeks to symbolically - and quite literally - open the door to the realm of dreams, inviting us to discover that “life is far more than we imagine... and that every exit is an entrance somewhere else.”

A Venti Lucenti production featuring students from the project “All’Opera… Le scuole al Maggio!”
Commissioned by the Fondazione Teatro del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino.

New production by the Teatro del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, co-produced with Venti Lucenti.
In collaboration with the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino Academy.

A project of Fondazione CR Firenze, curated by Venti Lucenti.
In collaboration with the Fondazione Teatro del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino and the Department of Education, Vocational Training, Culture of Memory and Legality, and Equal Opportunities of the City of Florence (Le Chiavi della Città programme).

The ensemble of the Orchestra of the Accademia del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino is composed of young instrumentalists from the Youth Orchestra Lab (YOL), an artistic residency program for young musicians created by the Academy in collaboration with the Teatro del Maggio and in partnership with the Teatro Goldoni of Livorno, funded by the Regione Toscana with support from the European Social Fund. The artistic residency is part of Giovanisì, the Regione Toscana project dedicated to youth independence.

Special thanks to The Amenc Family Initiative for Art and The New Generation Foundation for their support of the Orchestral Ensemble of the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino Academy.

Illustration © Gianluigi Toccafondo

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