Purcell: Excerpts from The Fairy Queen; Odes and Elegies for Queen Mary - New York Ensemble for Early Music's Grande Bande, Frederick Renz

The Fairy Queen liner notes

In 17th-century England it was not the custom to ring, down the curtain between the acts of a play or an opera; instead, musical interludes -- were played both to keep the audience entertained while sets were changed and to bridge the moods of the acts. Much of the instrumental music included in the suites taken from acts 3 and 5 of Henry Purcell's The Fairy Queen on this recording, comes from these interludes, or "Act Tunes," as they were known. In the first version of The Fairy Queen, which premiered at the Queen's Theatre in Dorset Gardens in London, on May 2, 1692, there was no music at all in the first act. The four masques were inserted, one each, into the remaining, four acts of this five-act opera with dialogue. The first masque begins at the point where the spirits of Night, Mystery, Secrecy, and Sleep come in at King, Oberon's bidding, and sing, Titania to sleep, after the presentation of a group of fairy divertissements.