Korngold achieved a pseudo-opera by force-feeding a soundtrack with Mendelssohn, in the manner of a Strasbourg goose. But Korngold wasn't the only twentieth-century composer intrigued by the possibilities for recycling the older music for A Midsummer Night's Dream. Benjamin Britten, the foremost Purcellian of the age, devised (with Peter Pears's help) a version of The Fairy Queen for modern orchestra and voices, first performed in 1967. Whereas Korngold was diligent in relating all the music to Shakespeare's play, Britten's long, lean cantata dispenses with all Shakespeare, dispenses with a good deal of Purcell as well. It has four parts: the first part, Oberon's Birthday, is Purcell's fourth-act masque; the second part, Night and Silence, is a peculiar conflation of Purcell's first- and second-act masques, in which the drunken poet segues into Night, Mystery, Secrecy, and Sleep; the third part, The Sweet Passion, is basically Purcell's third-act masque (the one designed to entertain Bottom), with an interpolation of the Plaint from the fifth act; the fourth part, Epithalamium, is the second half of the fifth-act masque, with most of the Chinese material deleted in order to highlight the invocation to Hymen. This scheme tends to turn The Fairy Queen into a vast symphony, with a first movement full of almost military pomp, a slow second movement, a scherzo, and a dramatic finale; the Plaint works as a contrasting element in the scherzo, the drunken poet as a contrasting element in the slow movement. Britten's friend Imogen Holst coedited The Fairy Queen with Britten; and the large-scale vocal-symphonic structure recalls that of her father Gustav Holst's Choral Symphony (1924), based on poems by Keats. Britten respected Purcell's key-relationships, except in the Dialogue of Coridon and Mopsa in the third part, where he transposed the piece so that it could be sung by mezzo-soprano and tenor instead of countertenor and bass—Britten (a fairly discreet homosexual) may have wished to avoid the imputation of a gay joke.