Queen Mab's speech in Romeo and Juliet

Charles Gounod's opera Romeo and Juliet included a version of Shakespeare's Queen Mab speech. In the summer of 2020, the Met Opera Global summer camp created a marvellous writing prompt - what does the Queen Mab speech inspire you to create? Here's what I found.

When You Dream

When you dream, don't imagine

You're quite alone

Expect the Night Queen, in her starry wrap and gaunt face,

Swaying like cobwebs, dusty, shimmering

Over night-time lids and liquid skin,

And then you dream, of warm summers

And warm butter,

Of butterflies waltzing in creeks of light,

Perhaps of witches, hair sweeping and reaching

Towards the moon in ancient song.

Broomsticks and cat fur brushing your hands

Perhaps you see James Watson and Francis Crick

Walking by the rushes of another pond,

Daisies floating in the summer sun,

When those two dreamed, with eyes intent,

Of gypsy horns and twisted cells.

Sometimes it's anger behind your eyes,

Swirling and swelling in rhythms intense,

Soon to be cooled by the morning blues,

Blacks fading to rainbow, the gleaming dews.

Beware the Queen!

Since Life first was birthed,

She only changed,

So that we might dream in another dawn.

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Two Friends in Kyiv

Sviatoslav Playing the Bandura, drawn by Tintin When the Ukrainian Orchestra performed ‘Ode to Joy’ in Kiev Square on March 10, 2022, to mark World Happiness Day, I looked at the photograph and thought once again of Sviatoslav and Blahovista. Less than a year ago, these two kids living in Kyiv, Ukraine, were sharing music, art and love with children across the world, courtesy the Met Opera Global Summer Camp. Blahovista had photographed herself in that Square, when she showed off the city to fellow campers. Here in Kolkata, as the spring froths around us, spraying the new-made green with jets of colour and life, I remember the summer when this brother and sister had introduced themselves and their world to my son Tintin and to opera loving friends from every continent. When you’re less than ten years old, it’s a long way from Kolkata to Kiev. But in the summer of 2020, when the Met Opera summer camp went online and ‘Global’, all of that changed. Each time camp ends, th...

Papageno's Birds

‘Papageno, that’s my name, catching birds, that’s my game’. As Papageno introduces himself in Mozart’s ‘Magic Flute’, we are invited – not to catch – but to observe the birds in our own backyard. In the winter of 2020, for the first time in many years, I don’t have to go in to work. So, I watch the sun in its short path across the sky and I watch the birds that have chosen to winter in the field outside our home. This land, cultivated part of the year, and flooded during the rest, has escaped the hatchet of urbanization. Here in the wintertime, as I first learned in 2020, a number of birds show up – a few dozen egrets, a handful of ducks and half a dozen cranes. I fish out an old pair of binoculars. The ducks swim in and out of the wetland reeds. The egrets settle at the edges. The cranes are huge and when I watch them fly close, they look primitive. I imagine myself in a younger, warmer, wetter world, staring at the creatures that dominated those skies, destined to be the ...

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