Roi Lear

King Lear Overture Op. 4

Andante non troppo lento ma maestoso - allegro disperato ed agitato

Had Verdi actually completed his long-cherished Re Lear project, or had Britten not rejected the King Lear idea he seriously considered at one time, the situation might be different. But the fact is that - in spite of the success enjoyed by Aribert Reimann’s Lear opera in the 1980s - there is no greater score inspired by Shakespeare’s tragedy than Berlioz’s Grande ouverture du Roi Lear.

Faced by what Verdi described as “this vast and intricate” subject, Berlioz in his maturity might have made an opera worthy of it. But in 1831, when he wrote the Grande ouverture, his next orchestral work after the Symphonie fantastique, he had neither the experience nor the temperament to apply himself to such a demanding task. He had first read King Lear in Florence a couple of weeks earlier. He was on his way back to Paris from Rome - where he should have been in residence at the French Academy in the Villa Medici - determined to find out why his fiancée Camille Moke wasn’t writing to him and prepared to lose his hard-won Prix de Rome in the process. Sitting by the Arno, he was overwhelmed by Shakespeare’s play: “I cried out aloud in the face of this work of genius; I thought I would burst from enthusiasm, I rolled convulsively around in the grass…to appease my rapture.” A few days later he received a letter from Camille’s mother informing him that her daughter was marrying someone else. The revelation drove him into an alternately murderous and suicidal rage.

Within less then a week, however, Berlioz was in Nice, his will to live restored and in such a positive frame of mind that before he returned to Rome a month later he had completed his Roi Lear Overture. Not surprisingly in the circumstances, it is a highly dramatic inspiration, reflecting not only his reactions to Shakespeare’s tragedy but also his own bitter experience of betrayal. He left no detailed programme linking the events in the play with those in the overture, but it is fairly clear from clues he let slip here and there that the grim opening recitative on lower strings represents Lear himself. The lovely melody introduced by oboe over pizzicato strings, after some development and repetition of the recitative, is generally assumed to portray his compassionate daughter Cordelia. Towards the end of the slow introduction - which lasts not far short of half the length of the whole piece, incidentally - the drum rolls accompanying an emphatic recall of the recitative signal Lear’s entry into the council chamber. This we know from an observation made by Berlioz himself.

The Allegro disperato ed agitato is based on a similar contrast between the dramatic and the lyrical, the latter again with Cordelia’s oboe in a prominent role. Its main themes undergo an eventful development at the stormy heart of which - as we know from another observation made by the composer - Lear appears, by way of an agitated version of his recitative, in his madness. In the raging coda Cordelia too is sucked into the whirlpool.

Conducting his Roi Lear overture more than thirty years after its composition, Berlioz “was surprised,” he said, “to find that I couldn’t stop tears coming to my eyes. I said to myself that Father Shakespeare wouldn’t curse me at all for having dared to give expression to his old Breton king and his gentle Cordelia.”

Gerald Larner ©2006