A Midsummer Night's Dream (Mendelssohn) other section in the second theme, including Bottom's braying. The fairies return, and ultimately have the final word in the coda, just as in Shakespeare's play. The overture ends once again with the same opening four chords by the winds. The Overture was premiered in Stettin (then in Prussia; now Szczecin, Poland) on 20 February 1827, at a concert conducted by Carl Loewe. Mendelssohn had turned 18 just over two weeks earlier. He had to travel 80 miles through a raging snowstorm to get to the concert, which was his first public appearance. Loewe and Mendelssohn also appeared as soloists
A Midsummer Night's Dream Oberon is a "horrid brute". Towards the end of the 19th century, Georg Brandes (1895–6) and Frederick S. Boas (1896) were the last major additions to "A Midsummer Night's Dream" criticism. Brandes' approach to anticipates later psychological readings, seeing Oberon's magic as symbolic and "typifying the sorcery of the erotic imagination". Brandes felt that in the play, Shakespeare looks inward at the "domain of the unconscious". Boas eschews the play as ethical treatise or psychological study and instead takes a more historicist and literal approach. To Boas the play is, despite its fantastical and exotic trappings, "essentially English and Elizabethan".