A Midsummer Night's Dream (Mendelssohn) form and shaped by regular phrasings and harmonic transitions. The piece is also noted for its striking instrumental effects, such as the emulation of scampering 'fairy feet' at the beginning and the braying of Bottom as an ass (effects which were influenced by the aesthetic ideas and suggestions of Mendelssohn's friend at the time, Adolf Bernhard Marx). Heinrich Eduard Jacob, in his biography of the composer, said that Mendelssohn had scribbled the chords after hearing an evening breeze rustle the leaves in the garden of the family's home. The overture begins with four chords in the winds. Following the first
A Midsummer Night's Dream essay "does not (seek to) rewrite "A Midsummer Night's Dream" as a gay play but rather explores some of its 'homoerotic significations' ... moments of 'queer' disruption and eruption in this Shakespearean comedy." Green does not consider Shakespeare to have been a "sexual radical", but that the play represented a "topsy-turvy world" or "temporary holiday" that mediates or negotiates the "discontents of civilisation", which while resolved neatly in the story's conclusion, do not resolve so neatly in real life. Green writes that the "sodomitical elements", "homoeroticism", "lesbianism", and even "compulsory heterosexuality"—the first hint of which may be Oberon's obsession with