Felix Mendelssohn Melusine (Die schöne Melusine)" (1830). A contemporary writer considered these works as "perhaps the most beautiful overtures that, so far, we Germans possess". Mendelssohn also wrote in 1839 an overture to "Ruy Blas", commissioned for a charity performance of Victor Hugo's drama (which the composer hated) His incidental music to "A Midsummer Night's Dream" (Op. 61), including the well-known Wedding March, was written in 1843, seventeen years after the Overture. The Violin Concerto in E minor, Op. 64 (1844), was written for Ferdinand David. David, who had worked closely with Mendelssohn during the piece's preparation, gave the premiere of the
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