A Midsummer Night's Dream (Mendelssohn) Midsummer Night's Dream" in 1842, 16 years after he wrote the Overture. It was written to a commission from King Frederick William IV of Prussia. Mendelssohn was by then the music director of the King's Academy of the Arts and of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra. A successful presentation of Sophocles' "Antigone" on 28 October 1841 at the New Palace in Potsdam, with music by Mendelssohn (Op. 55) led to the King asking him for more such music, to plays he especially enjoyed. "A Midsummer Night's Dream" was produced on 14 October 1843, also at Potsdam. The producer was Ludwig Tieck.
A Midsummer Night's Dream first bliss of new and reunited lovers. The wedding of Theseus and Hippolyta and the mistaken and waylaid lovers, Titania and Bottom, even the erstwhile acting troupe, model various aspects (and forms) of love. Both David Wiles of the University of London and Harold Bloom of Yale University have strongly endorsed the reading of this play under the themes of Carnivalesque, Bacchanalia, and Saturnalia. Writing in 1998, David Wiles stated that: "The starting point for my own analysis will be the proposition that although we encounter "A Midsummer Night's Dream" as a text, it was historically part of an aristocratic