birthday music

To celebrate Shakespeare's birthday this morning - if indeed it is his birthday today - Radio 3 plays the scherzo from Mendelssohn's 'Midsummer Night’s Dream' and Arne's 'When Daisies Pied', sung by Elisabeth Schwarzkopf.

The song is another addition to cuckoo music (blogged here) and the verse from Love's Labour's Lost is one of the many references to the natural world in Shakespeare that sounds increasingly elegiac.