Le Carnaval romain, overture, Op.9

Our rather less extensive but very much quicker circumnavigation of the globe starts in Paris. Or should that be Rome? Certainly, Hector Berlioz spent most of his life in Paris but his opera Benvenuto Cellini, from which the music of Le Carnaval romain Overture is taken, is set in Rome. Disappointed by the reception of the opera, Berlioz wrote the overture as a concert piece to demonstrate that given a decent conductor - the composer himself directed the first performance of the overture in Paris in 1844 - his Benvenuto Cellini music could be brilliantly effective. He chose two contrasting kinds of material from the opera, a vigorous saltarello from the carnival chorus “Venez, venez, peuple de Rome” (Come, come, people of Rome) and a lyrical duet for Cellini and his beloved Térésa “Ô Térésa, vous que j’aime plus que ma vie” (O Térésa, you whom I love more than my life). The way he uses them is both inspired and eccentric. He opens the work with a brief taster of the saltarello dance tune and then, after an sudden silence, introduces the expressive melody of the love duet on cor anglais. The dance music returns - this time to be presented in full and, at its climax, to be combined with the love duet, the broad outline of which is imposed by woodwind on the saltarello rhythms continuing elsewhere in the orchestra.

Berlioz has long been a favourite in this country but more for his orchestral music, the Symphonie fantastique above all, than for his operas. The situation is no better in France: in fact, it was not a French company but Scottish Opera that gave the first complete performance of Berlioz’s two-part epic, Les Troyens - in 1969, a hundred years after the composer’s death. He had better luck in his lifetime with his last opera, the Shakespearian comedy Béatrice et Bénédict, but his first, Benvenuto Cellini - based on an episode in the life of the 16th-century Italian sculptor - was such a disaster when it opened in Paris in 1838 that he was deterred from writing for the theatre for twenty years. He had every right to be disappointed. Benvenuto Cellini contains, as he said, “a variety of ideas, an energy and exuberance and a brilliance of colour… which deserved a better fate.”

In 1844, in an effort to rescue some of those ideas from their undeserved fate, Berlioz compiled the concert overture, La Carnaval romain (Roman Carnival) from material in the opera. The brilliantly exuberant saltarello, which is briefly anticipated in the opening bars, derives from the carnival chorus “Venez, venez, peuple de Rome” and the lovely cor anglais melody comes from a duet for Cellini and his beloved Térésa, “Ô Térésa, vous que j’aime plus que ma vie.” At the climax of the overture the two main themes are most effectively combined.

There is no more exciting beginning to any overture, and none more artfully frustrating: a few bars of exhilarating dance music, a few bars of expectant trills on the strings, a few bars of impatient activity on woodwind - then, after stubborn intrusions by horn and clarinet, silence.

Happily, the melody which follows on cor anglais is so beautiful that the ear is entirely reconciled to the abrupt change of subject. At the same time, those instruments which are involved with neither the new theme nor its counterpoint - percussion, obviously, but horns and trumpets too - do not conceal their eagerness to get on with it. In fact, their attitude prevails and the tempo of the opening bars is not only restored but sustained to the end of the work. The problem now is how to recall the cor anglais melody and integrate it with the dance material without holding things up again. What happens is that, just at the point where the cor anglais melody seems irretrievably lost, bassoons first and then trombones and upper woodwind assume the responsibility of imposing its broad outline on the saltarello rhythms continuing elsewhere in the orchestra - with the effect this time not of halting progress but of propelling it irresistibly towards the closing bars.

The two main themes of the Carnaval romain overture derive from Berlioz’s opera Benvenuto Cellini - the cor anglais melody from a duet for Cellini and Térésa “Ô Térésa, vous que j’aime plus que ma vie” and the dance from the carnival chorus “Venez, venez, peuple de Rome.” First performed with Berlioz himself conducting at a concert in Paris in 1844, Le Carnaval romain secured a success which compensated at least in part for the failure of Benvenuto Cellini itself, under less authoritative direction, in the same city six years earlier.

Claude Debussy (1862-1918)

La Mer

trois esquisses symphoniques

De l’aube à midi sur la mer

Jeux de vagues

Dialogue du vent et de la mer

Debussy completed the orchestration of La Mer at Eastbourne in 1905. He had started the work two years earlier while on holiday at Bichain in Burgundy, which is about as far from the sea as one can get in France. But, as the composer explained, he had “an endless store of memories of the sea and, to my mind, they are worth more than the reality, whose beauty weighs down thought too heavily.” Besides, La Mer is not just an exercise in observation. Declared enemy of the symphony though the composer was, Debussy’s “three symphonic sketches” are at least as symphonic as picturesque. At the same time, while the imagery is clearly inspired by the movement of the sea and the changing light, it is more often a case of generalised atmosphere than specific detail.

Certainly, no one listening to the first movement, “From Dawn to Midday on the Sea,” could seriously claim, as Erik Satie so wittily did, to have “a particular liking for the little bit at a quarter to eleven.” It is safe to assume only that the movement opens in darkness and ends under the bright sun of midday – and that those two events correspond to the slow introduction, where several of the main thematic features begin to take shape, and the expansive coda, where the most important of them emerges in full glory. The intervening structure is divided into two parts, one a little quicker than the other. The first floats in on rippling violins and violas and more deeply undulating cellos. They bring with them a variety of themes which are to be combined in a brief but extraordinary climax of conflicting rhythms. The second surges forward on a handsomely harmonised entry of eight cellos and, after its central climax, recalls on cor anglais and muted trumpet a theme first heard on those same instruments in the slow introduction. This theme, it turns out, when it appears transformed in chorale form on four horns in the coda, is the theme intended from the start to carry the sunrise message of the whole movement.

The central scherzo, “Games of Waves,” is so flexibly constructed that it seems to proceed on spontaneous impulse and so resourcefully scored that it seems to reflect every chance change of wind, current or light. Broadly, however, it is in three parts, the first of which presents an apparently infinite variety of thematic ideas – a dance on the cor anglais, a quicker flight of trills and triplet figures on the violins, a kind of bolero with its melodic line carried by cor anglais again under a rhythmic ostinato on flutes and clarinets. These are developed in the middle section, where another new theme makes its entry in the form of a trumpet call to urge the movement towards its climax. Debussy’s melodic invention is still not exhausted: in what might otherwise be called a recapitulation second violins and cellos introduce a waltz that rises through the strings in ever increasing animation before the wind drops and leaves the sea comparatively becalmed.

There is little calm in the last movement, which opens with the low rumble of an approaching storm on cellos and basses and a gust of wind on woodwind. As well as its descriptive function, however, the “Dialogue of the Wind and the Sea” has a long-term structural duty to perform. Within a few bars it recalls two motifs from the beginning of the work, including the muted trumpet theme which was converted to the midday horn chorale at the end of the first movement.

The main theme of this third movement, which is shaped as a rondo, is the chromatic melody on woodwind that seems to be running before a swift but capricious wind. The first episode recalls the trumpet theme, but at the bottom of the pitch range this time on bassoons and pizzicato cellos and basses, without relaxing the pressure until a distant echo of the chorale version of the same theme is heard on four horns. The chorale appears once more towards the end of the movement where – intoned by the whole of the brass section in counterpoint with the wind-swept rondo theme on woodwind – it fulfils its long-destined function of tying the whole work, symphony and seascape, indivisibly together.

Here I am again with my old friend the Sea. It is still unfathomable and beautiful. It is one of the things in nature that really put you in your place. The trouble is, no one has enough respect for the Sea… It shouldn’t be allowed, those bodies disfigured by everyday life soaking themselves in it: but, really, all those arms, those legs moving in such ridiculous rhythms, it’s enough to make the fish weep. In the Sea there should be nothing but Sirens. But how can we expect those admirable creatures to come back to waters frequented by such bad company?

(Debussy to Jacques Durand, Le Puys, near Dieppe, 8 August 1906)