Boulez

Among the least creditable episodes in the history of the Prix de Rome, a prize every young French composer seriously coveted, was the failure of the competition jury to recognise the extraordinary quality of Berlioz’s cantata La Mort de Cléopâtre in 1829. Determined to win it, the indigent Berlioz finally succeeded with La Mort de Sardanaple on his fourth attempt in 1830. But he had to suppress his natural genius in such a way as to cause no offence to the venerable and for the most part reactionary members of the panel. While it is true that he took liberties with the prescribed Cléopâtre text on the previous occasion, it is also true that the subject inspired him, as he told his sceptical father, “with many things which seem to me great and new and which I didn’t hesitate to write down. That is where I went wrong.” [“beaucoup de choses qui me paraissent grandes et neuves, et que je n’ai pas hésité à écrire; et c’est là mon tort.”]

It is unmistakably clear from the intensely dramatic character of Cléopâtre that Berlioz was a born opera composer. Even so, although he had already written much of a three-act opera, Les francs-juges (known to us only by its overture and a few fragments recycled elsewhere), and although he was seething with ideas for more, it wasn’t until nearly ten years later that he completed his next work in the series and saw it staged. Benvenuto Cellini, set in Rome and based on the memoirs of the great 16th-century sculptor, was first performed at the Paris Opéra in 1838 – with, however, little success. The first-night audience booed the opera and applauded only the overture, a brilliant conception which has retained its popularity as a concert piece ever since. Six years later, in an effort to extract more value from a score which he rightly thought had been unfairly treated, he turned back to Benvenuto Cellini for material for the concert overture Le Carnaval romain, which proved even more popular than the opera overture itself.             

Berlioz’s greatest achievement in opera was Les Troyens, a work of epic proportions based on a libretto compiled by the composer from Virgil’s Aeneid and completed after two years of concentrated work in 1858. Never performed complete in Berlioz’s lifetime, and for 100 years after that, it was long known mainly by excerpts that could be presented in the concert hall, one of the most frequently heard being the “Royal Hunt and Storm”[ Chasse royale et orage]. Even without the chorus of nymphs and fauns which briefly adds a dimension of wildness to the scene in the original score, it is an irresistible masterpiece of nature music, beginning and ending in serene tranquillity but passing through a raging storm in the meantime.

Belioz’s last opera, Béatrice et Bénédict, was also his last tribute to Shakespeare, the “guiding light of my life” ( “l’expliquateur de ma vie”] as he put it. Based on Much Ado About Nothing, it was written between 1860 and 1862 as an essentially light-hearted diversion from an accumulation of personal and professional problems. While the libretto, compiled by the composer himself, might be a disappointingly thin version of Shakespeare’s comedy – “Much Ado About Nothing without the ado,” someone unkindly put it    – the music most delightfully captures its comic spirit, not least in the wittily scored repartee of the Overture. The Sicilienne introduces an attractive dash of Iitalian local colour between the two acts.

As Pierre Boulez has pointed out, for Berlioz there was no hard and fast dividing line between the concert hall and the theatre. While he could scarcely have made an opera out of his passion for the Irish actress Harriet Smithson, whose Juliet and Ophelia had played such an important part in arousing his enthusiasm for Shakespeare at the Théâtre de l’Odéon in 1827, he could make a symphony out of it, as he did in his Symphonie fantastique in 1830. Headed “episode in the life of an artist,” [“épisode de la vie d’un artiste”] it is a highly theatrical confession expressing not only the artist’s love but his also his disillusionment and his drug-induced nightmare vision of the fatal consequences. At the same time it is a symphony conceived in the Beethoven tradition and one of the most astonishing achievements, decades ahead of its time, in 19th-century music.

When it was first performed, under the title “Return to Life,” [“le retour à la vie”]    beside the Symphonie fantastique in 1832, Lélio was presented as the sequel to the earlier work. Apart from the introductory spoken monologues, Berlioz wrote nothing new here: all six vocal and instrumental numbers make use of material composed over the previous three or four years – an economy justified by the autobiographical orientation of the work. Much the longest is the last, an extraordinary “Dramatic Fantasy on The Tempest” [“Fantaisie dramatique sur La Tempête”] inspired by the composer’s identification of Shakespeare’s Ariel with his flighty pianist lover Camille Moke, who had not only caused his disillusionment with Harriet Smithson but had also helped him recover from it.

By the time of that first performance, incidentally, a new episode in the life of the artist had opened. Camille had married another musician and Harriet, who happened to be present at the concert in the Conservatoire, was to become his wife less than a year later.

While Lélio allows occasional glimpses of Berlioz’s potential as a song composer, his masterpiece in this area is his collection of six Théophile Gautier settings, Les Nuits d’été completed nine years later. If it is not strictly classifiable as a cycle, the present version is certainly the first of all sets of songs with orchestra – another concept decades ahead of its time.

Gerald Larner © 2009