BBCPO preview

L: “What a subject for an opera!”

The title of this preview is taken from Berlioz’s Memoirs where, writing about Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, he lists some of the attractions an opera composer would find in it - “the dazzling ball at the Capulets, where amid a whirling cloud of beauties the young Montague first sets eyes on ‘sweet Juliet’… the furious pitched battles in the streets of Verona… the glorious night scene on Juliet’s balcony, the lovers’ voices ‘like softened music to attending ears’… the dashing Mercutio and his sharp-tongued fantastical humour… the stately hermit, even in his cell caught up in the tragic conflict of love and hate…and then the catastophe, extremes of joy and despair… and, at last, the solemn oath sworn by the warring houses, too late, on the bodies of their children.” And that’s only a selection!

But, as far as I know, there is no great based on Shakespeare’s tragedy. Why is that?

G: That’s a good question and I hope we’ll be finding a few answers. The first clue is in the fact that the three indisputable masterpieces on the subject are Berlioz’s dramatic symphony (much of which we will be hearing tonight), Tchaikovsky’s fantasy overture and Prokofiev’s ballet none of them an opera. There must have been at least thirty Romeo and Juliet operas since Johann Gottfried Schwarzenberger’s opera seria of 1776 - the earliest I have been able to trace. The most successful of them are probably Bellini’s I Capuletti e i Montecchi, Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette and Zandonai’s Giulietta e Romeo but none of them can compare in terms of inspiration with Berlioz’s dramatic symphony, one of the greatest of all his works.

L: And the Bellini isn’t based on Shakespeare’s tragedy is it?

G: No, the libretto derives indirectly from the same Italian source as Shakespeare’s play but is very different from it. Not realising that, Berlioz was terribly disappointed when he went to see I Capuletti e i Montecchi in Florence in 1831 . He was expecting “a real Romeo at last - after all the lamentable attempts that had been made, a Romeo worthy of Shakespeare’s genius.” He hurried to the Pergola theatre and found that Bellini’s opera “contained no ball at the Capulets, no Mercutio, no garrulous nurse, no sublime soliloquy for Juliet as she takes the hermit’s phial, no duet in the cell between the banished Romeo and the disconsolate Friar, no Shakespeare, nothing, a wasted opportunity.”

L: So, if it meant so much to him, why didn’t Berlioz write a “real” Romeo opera when he had the opportunity?

G: He must have been thinking about a Romeo and Juliet opera ever since he had first seen the play, performed in English by the Kemble company, at the Odéon in Paris in 1827, when he had fallen in love with not only with Shakespeare but also with Harriet Smithson, the Irish actress who had played Juliet so beautifully. But other major projects intervened, including the Symphonie fantastique - during a period of disillusionment with Harriet - Lélio - part of his resumed courtship strategy - Harold en Italie, Benvenuto Cellini, and the Grande Messe des morts. His experience wth Benvenuto Cellini, his first real opera, was very discouraging. It was a disaster running for only four performance at the Paris Opéra, where it was shabbily performed.

L: But, surely, having been given a subvention of 20,000 francs by Paganini - a lot of money in those days - he didn’t have to worry too much about practical considerations like that.

G: That’s true but, for one thing, he wanted to avoid opera-house politics and, for another, he had begun to see Romeo and Juliet in a different light, as a way of combining his love of Shakespeare with his veneration for Beethoven. When Paganini presented him with that money - as a kind of apology for underestimating the greatness of Harold in Italy, which he had commissioned but never performed - he reminded his younger colleague that “Beethoven being dead, only Berlioz remains to make him live again.” How much that had to do with Berlioz’s decision to make his Roméo et Juliette a choral symphony broadly comparable to Beethoven’s Ninth we don’t know. But it does end with a large-scale choral finale and it does include three purely orchestral movements roughly equivalent, though in a different order, to the Allegro, scherzo and Adagio of Beethoven’s Ninth. He had also come to realise - and history has proved him right - that, as he wrote, “the very sublimity of this love opens pitfalls for any composer, who attempts to paint it.” He gave his imgination “greater freedom,” he said, “than the precise meaning of sung words would allow, turning instead to the language of instruments, a language richer, more varied, more flexible and by its very imprecision incomparably more powerful.”

Listen to this extract from Gounod’s balcony scene and compare it with Berlioz’s purely orchestral equivalent when you hear it in the concert:

CD1: track 23 - fade after 1’ 12” (CD1 from machine, insert CD2)

L: Of course, there are sung words in Berlioz’s Romeo and Juliet, most of them in Part I, before the story begins, and in the chorale Finale. In tonight’s performance, which includes only the instrumental movements, there will be no words at all. Are we missing much?

G: Well, it’s a more generous selection than three pieces we normally hear in concerts. Even so, inevitably, we miss things - not all of them, it must be said, among the most inspired moments in the work. This is just my opinion but I feel that Part I keeps us waiting too long to get into the action. I’m thinking of a very strange Prologue, a choral recitative that sets the scene, and the contralto soloist’s tribute to Shakespeare in a section headed Strophes. The best episode in Part I is a setting for tenor and chorus of Mercutio’s Queen Mab speech:

CD2: track 4 - fade at 1’ 11’

The consolation for losing that of course is that there is an even more brilliant orchestral version of the same thing in Part IV. Some years earlier Berlioz had suggested to Mendelssohn that the Queen Mab speech would make a wonderful scherzo and had then regretted it, fearing the Mendelssohn, the master of the elfin scherzo, would get in there first. One thing I really regret losing is the introduction to the love scene with its lovely nocturnal garden atmosphere and the distant voices of the revellers leaving the Capulet ball:

CD2: track 6 - stop at 2’ 12” (CD2 from machine, insert CD3)

L: What about the choral finale? Berlioz based his dramatic symphony on Garrick’s version of the play, the one performed by the Kemble company at the Odéon when he first saw it. But the Garrick version ends with the death of the two lovers, Romeo staying alive just long enough to speak to Juliet as she wakes up in the tomb. There is no reconciliation between the two families, as there is in the Shakespeare original. But at this point Berlioz turned from Garrick to Shakespeare so as to make a finale out of the reconciliation between the Montagues and Capulets, although it is brought about here by Friar Laurence rather than the Prince of Verona. So he must have thought it very important.

G: Well, indeed it is, since it gives him his choral finale equivalent to Beethoven’s Ninth. I must say, however, that I would willingly sacrifice all 18 minutes of the finale for an earlier and much short choral episode, Juliet’s funeral cortege - an event he found not in Shakespeare but in the Garrick version.

CD3: track 1 - fade at 1’ 37”

L: (winds up in her own way)