La mort d’Ophélie Op.18 No.2 (1842)

Ophelia meant more to Berlioz than perhaps any other composer. Certainly the “thunderbolt” discovery of Shakespeare by way of the William Abbott company’s productions of Hamlet and Rome and Juliet at the Théâtre de l’Odéon in Paris in 1827, with Harriet Smithson in the roles of Ophelia and Juliet, was to have a profound and lasting influence on both his artistic development and his personal life. Two of his greatest works, the Symphonie fantastique and Roméo et Juliette, were direct results of that experience, as was his marriage to Harriet in 1833. La mort d’Ophélie was written in its original voice-and-piano version in 1842 when, as far as Berlioz was concerned, his marriage was over. Through Ernest Legouvé’s paraphrase of Gertrude’s “There is a willow grows aslant a brook” (Hamlet Act 4, Scene 7) this “ballade”, as the composer called it, is a memorial to the Harriet he had once loved. Beginning with an allusion in the vocal line to the idée fixe from the Symphonie fantastique, it is an extraordinary construction that gradually assembles the “melodious lay” Ophelia chanted as she sank to her “muddy death”.