When British Composer Benjamin Britten decided last October to write an opera on Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream, he faced a prickly problem: how to remain faithful to the original and yet cut the play by roughly one half. Last week, at England's Aldeburgh Festival, Britten's eagerly awaited Dream was greeted with salvos of critical applause. The composer, with the aid of Singer-Librettist Peter Pears, had solved his problem so brilliantly, reported a TIME correspondent, that "it becomes hard to imagine hearing the words again merely spoken without feeling a sense of loss."...
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