Dance of the Fairies (The Fairy Queen)

The Fairy Queen is Purcell's largest stage work and, strictly, not an opera at all: a semi-opera of 1692, in which an anonymous adaptation of A Midsummer Night's Dream is spoken by actors while the music happens around it, in masques at the end of each act. None of Shakespeare's characters sings. This struck later ages as perverse and is one reason the piece went unheard for two centuries.

The score was lost after Purcell's death — genuinely lost, not merely neglected — and turned up again only in 1901, in the library of the Royal Academy of Music. The Restoration audience had paid for spectacle: swans that turned into dancers, a fountain, a Chinese garden in the fourth-act masque. The dances survive the loss of the machinery better than one might expect.

The Dance of the Fairies is one of them, and short. Purcell's instrumental writing here is at its most economical: a few bars, a clear shape, no argument. The theatre around it has vanished. The tune has not.