This is the midsummer time, time for vacation & relax. It is also a time for dream, a midsummer night's dream. Shakespeare wrote a lot of tragedies, but they are too heavy for most people. It is this Midsummer Night's Dream makes him a great playwright of comedy. Since its first performance in 1596, it continues to capture people's imagination & attention. The plot of the play is a mixture of mytholody, fairly tale, romance, jealousy, mischief, etc. After all, it is like a dream. It does show that our love affairs tend to go astray, go blind pursuit & wake up to the reality eventually. It may be the most popular play of Shakespeare. They are numerous music, opera & ballet performed every year based on this play. The most popular one is Mendelssohn's Incidental music of Midsummer Night's Dream. He composed the overture of it when he was 17 years old. He eventually finished the other part of the music 16 years later by the request of German Kaiser. The most famous pieces are the following:
1. Overture
2. Scherzo
3. Nocturne
4. Wedding March
Wedding March is traditionally played in a wedding ceremony after the couple make the vow & parade down the aisle. It was started by Queen Victoria in 1858 by marrying her eldest daughter. From then on, it becomes a tradition.
Mendelssohn was a German with Jewish blood. However, he converted to a Lutheran christian. Even with this conversion, he was still shuned by people like Wagner & Hitler's Nazis. Most of the discrimination occurred after his death. He is generally considered the most fortunate composer in history. He came from a rich jewish family, have happy family & marriage. He was a child prodigy & a good painter, got acquantance with Gothe, Humboldt, Liszt, Chopin, German Kaiser and Queen Victoria etc. All in all, he lead a very happy life. No wonder his music is gay, lively & merry with romantic mood. If you listen to his Violin Concerto & Italian Symphony, you will surely appreciate his romantic quality. He also selflessly revived the music of Bach & Schubert to a new height.
He was very close to his sister Fanny. He died due to heart-broken one month after her death . His another sister Rebecca married Dirichlet, a great German mathematician. Most of us are familiar with Dirichlet, a person credited with modern definition of Function. It is interesting to know that Dirichlet's doctoral advisors were Simeon Poisson & Joseph Fourier, two heavy weights in electromagnetics.
Poisson's equation with no charge is Laplace's equation. We all know that they can be deduced from Maxwell's equations. But in history, it was the reverse procedure. Maxwell got to know all these equations & summed up with his great four equations. Fourier developed Fourier series & integral via his study on heat transfer. He worked under Napoleon on the expedition to Egypt. It was a failure campaign with some valuable bonus to the history. It was during this expedition that French army discovered Rosetta Stone. It is displayed in British Museum these days. The Rosetta Stone is a piece of rock that contains the same text with three different languages: hieroglyphic, Demotic (ancient Egyptian) & Greek. It is surely an open-sesame to understand Egyptian hieroglyphics which was undecidered at that time. It was a breakthrough event in history. I was in the British Museum several years ago & touched the stone to feel the history, a unique experience. Napoleon was graduated from the French academy of artillary. He was an expert of gun warfare. Fourier at that time was solving heat problems of French guns in the field of Egypt. He developed the famous Fourier series & the concept of representing any non periodic function with Fourier series. His work increased the efficiency of guns, influenced the campaign & the mathematics. As we all know, Napoleon was defeated in Egypt not by British army, but by British navy, lord Nelson in Battle of the Nile. Nowaday we go to Trafalgal square in London, a statue high up in the column is (you guess it right) Nelson. French army shouldn't feel bad on Egyptian expedition & Fourier certainly must be proud of his work. He also discovered in 1824 the so-called GreenHouse Effect which becomes a very important subject these days.
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