proms guide

BERLIOZ: Roméo et Juliette

Shakespeare’s most lyrical play has generated much correspondingly lyrical music but, remarkably enough, not one great opera. There’s Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette, of course, but as a response to the challenge represented by the musical potential of Shakespeare’s tragedy it pales into insignificance beside three non-operatic scores based on the same subject - Prokofiev’s four-act ballet, Tchaikovsky’s “fantasy overture” and, the earliest and most inspired of them, Berlioz’s “dramatic symphony.”

Berlioz would not be surprised to learn that Romeo and Juliet still finds its most profound musical reverberations in the concert hall or ballet theatre rather than in the opera house. Having long intended to make an opera of it himself, when he finally settled down to write his Roméo et Juliette masterpiece he conceived the work as a large-scale choral symphony. This was not only because of his ambition to emulate Beethoven’s Ninth but also because of his discovery of a fundamental truth about Shakespeare’s poetic treatment of the relationship between Romeo and Juliet. “The very sublimity of this love opens pitfalls for any composer who attempts to paint it,” he wrote in a preface to the score. So, he said, he “gave his imagination greater freedom 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.” Only one of the characters in the play is given a voice - neither Romeo nor Juliet but Friar Laurence - and only in the choral finale.

If the symphonic structure of this Roméo et Juliette is not as clear as that of Beethoven’s Ninth, it is because Berlioz has a story to tell. But while there are some daring formal innovations on the way to his chorale finale, there are three purely orchestral movements roughly equivalent, though in a different order, to Beethoven’s Allegro, scherzo and Adagio. They are among the greatest of all Berlioz’s inspirations - the brilliant Capulet ball scene with its dramatically engineered climax, the miraculously scored “Queen Mab” Scherzo “as thin of substance as the air” and, above all, a slow-movement equivalent of Shakespeare’s balcony scene as melodious and as passionate in its instrumental discourse as any operatic love scene. Richard Wagner, who had the good fortune to be present at the first performance of Roméo et Juliette at the Paris Conservatoire in 1839, was never to forget it.

Gerald Larner ©2005