Roméo et Juliette — Hector Berlioz | The Gerald Larner Programme Note Archive

dramatic symphony after Shakespeare’s tragedy

Part I

Allegro fugato

(fighting - tumult - intervention of the Prince)

Prologue:

“D’anciennes haines endormies” (contralto & chorus)

Strophes:

“Premiers transports que nul n’oublie” (contralto)

“Bientôt de Roméo la pâle rêverie” (tenor & chorus) -

Scherzetto:

“Mab!” (tenor & chorus)

“Bientôt la mort” (chorus)

Part II

Andante malinconico e sostenuto - Allegro -

Larghetto espressivo - Allegro

(Romeo alone - sadness - distant sounds from the ball -

great ball at the Capulets)

Part III

Love Scene:

Allegretto -

“Ohé Capulets” (male chorus)

(serene night - the silent and deserted Capulet garden - young Capulets, leaving the ball, pass by singing fragments of the dance music) -

Adagio

Part IV

Scherzo: Prestissimo - Allegretto - Prestisssimo

(Queen Mab or the Dream Fairy)

Part V

Juliet’s funeral procession:

“Jetez des fleurs” (chorus)

Part VI

Romeo at the Capulet tomb:

Allegro agitato e disperato -

Largo - Allegro vivace ed appassionato assai

(Invocation - Juliet awakes - delirious joy, despair,

last agonies and death of the two lovers)

Finale

“Quoi! Roméo de retour!” (chorus)

(the crowd hurries to the cemetery - scuffle between Capulets and Montagues) -

Recitative and aria of Father Laurence:

“Je vais dévoiler le mystère” (bass & chorus) -

“Pauvres enfants” (bass) -

“Mais notre sang rougit leur glaive” (bass & chorus) -

Oath of reconciliation:

“Jurez donc par l’auguste symbole” (bass & chorus)

Hector and Harriet

The story of Berlioz’s relationship with the Irish actress Harriet Smithson, whose Ophelia and Juliet so enchanted him in Paris in 1827 and who became his wife six years later, would not be out of place among the most extravagant examples of sentimental fiction. It was more than just a romantic episode in the composer’s life, however. The whole experience - the “thunderbolt” discovery of Shakespeare by way of the Charles Kemble company’s productions (in English) at the Théâtre de l’Odéon, the passion aroused in him by the pathos of Ophelia and Juliet, his projection of their poetic aura onto the actress who so beautifully embodied them - was a significant event from every biographical and musical point of view. Next to his reverence for the Beethoven symphonies, it was one of the most profoundly formative factors in Berlioz’s artistic development.

Berlioz had been planning some kind of musical realization of the Romeo and Juliet theme for a long time, probably since he first saw the play. But other major projects intervened, including the Symphonie fantastique (during a period of disillusionment with Harriet), Lélio (part of his resumed courtship strategy), Harold en Italie, Benvenuto Cellini, and the Grande Messe des morts. So it wasn’t until 1839 that he was able to apply himself wholeheartedly to the project. The immediate stimulus was a gift of 20,000 francs from Paganini, who had commissioned Harold en Italie in 1834 but had rejected it and had realised what a mistake he had made only when he first heard it in Paris at the end of 1838. This subvention of conscience money set Berlioz free from other worries and, starting with Roméo seul in January 1839, he completed his “dramatic symphony” less than eight months later.

Although Paganini made no stipulation as to what Berlioz should do with the 20,000 francs, he did remind his younger colleague that “Beethoven being dead, only Berlioz remains to make him live again.” How much that had to do with Berlioz’s decision to make his Roméo et Juliette a choral symphony broadly comparable to Beethoven’s Ninth can only be a matter for conjecture. But it does end with a large-scale choral finale and it does include three purely orchestral movements roughly equivalent, though in a different order, to the Allegro, scherzo and Adagio of Beethoven’s Ninth. It is true that there is nothing in the Beethoven equivalent to Berlioz’s Part I, with its combative orchestral fugue and its vocal Prologue, or the episodes set in the Capulet tomb between the Scherzo and the Finale, but Beethoven didn’t have a story to tell or a famously tragic death scene to translate into musical terms.

Romeo and Juliet

Part I As the composer’s own commentary indicates, the opening Allegro fugato represents the tumult caused on the streets of Verona by the fighting between Montagues and Capulets and, on the solemn entry of lower brass and horns, the intervention of the Prince with his grim warning to the feuding families. The following Prologue sets the scene in a curious choral recitative which, though comparatively dispassionate in itself, introduces colourful anticipations of two items of orchestral material to be featured later on - a snatch of dance music from the Capulets’ ball and an emotional fragment from Romeo and Juliet’s love scene. If the solo contralto’s Strophes are less functional in the long term, they do at least give expression to the reverence for Shakespeare shared by Berlioz and his librettist Émile Deschamps. Mercutio’s Queen Mab speech, for example, they clearly could not resist, since it is set here as a tenor Scherzetto and later as an orchestral Scherzo.

Part II The first of the purely orchestral movements, a symphonic Allegro with a slow introduction, finds Romeo alone and in melancholy mood. There is no equivalent for this episode in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet: like several other apparent anomalies in Berlioz’s account of the story, it derives from the Garrick version of the play that the Kemble company presented in Paris in 1827. In this case Romeo’s adolescent fantasies are fixed not on “fair Rosaline” but on Juliet, who is presented as his first love - presumably because it was thought to makes a young Montague’s passion for a daughter of the Capulets all the more poignant.

As is vividly indicated by the unaccompanied violin line, so uncertain in metre and tonality, Romeo is wandering aimlessly and disconsolately round the Capulet palace before the ball. A vague anticipation of the beginning of Tristan und Isolde - the 26-year-old Richard Wagner was in the audience at the first performance of Roméo et Juliette at the Paris Conservatoire - the tentative violin line gives way to a more firmly defined woodwind theme which is then developed by the strings. After a fairly brief and distant pre-echo of the Capulet festivities, the tempo drops to Larghetto espressivo for an even more poetic melody on an oboe expressing Romeo’s love for Juliet. The ball itself is a brilliant episode of lively dance music which is combined at its climax with the oboe melody stoutly sustained on woodwind and brass. In spite of fugal hints of Montague-Capulet strife, a later and more intimate allusion to the oboe melody suggests that the fatal attraction is mutual.Tristan und Isolde - the 26-year-old Richard Wagner was in the audience at the first performance of Roméo et Juliette at the Paris Conservatoire - the tentative violin line gives way to a more firmly defined woodwind theme which is then developed by the strings. After a fairly brief and distant pre-echo of the Capulet festivities, the tempo drops to Larghetto espressivo for an even more poetic melody on an oboe expressing Romeo’s love for Juliet. The ball itself is a brilliant episode of lively dance music which is combined at its climax with the oboe melody stoutly sustained on woodwind and brass. In spite of fugal hints of Montague-Capulet strife, a later and more intimate allusion to the oboe melody suggests that the fatal attraction is mutual.

Part III The Love Scene, the equivalent to Shakespeare’s balcony scene, is the most eloquent vindication of Berlioz’s contention that “instrumental language is richer, more varied, less restricted” than vocal word-setting and “incomparably more potent.” It is a “serene night in the silent and deserted Capulet garden,” as we hear in a magically atmospheric introduction enhanced rather than disturbed by the distant voices of Capulets leaving the ball. The protagonists are Romeo, represented by an ardent melody on horn and cellos, and Juliet, represented - after Romeo’s cello recitative and some initial indications of alarm - by a fervent inspiration on flute and cor anglais. Neither of these is presented as the main theme, however: the rondo shape assumed by the movement from this point on is based on a symbolic and highly melodious combination of features from both the Romeo and the Juliet themes. Surely the greatest of Berlioz’s slow movements, this Adagio clearly owes much to Beethoven but just as clearly anticipates both Wagner and Tchaikovsky.

Part IV Mercutio’s Queen Mab speech -

She is the fairies’ midwife, and she comes

In shape no bigger than an agate stone -

occupies no more than forty lines in Shakespeare’s text and, for all its verbal virtuosity, is not an essential item in the story. As material for a symphonic scherzo on the other hand, it was irresistible: Berlioz had drawn the passage to Mendelssohn’s attention as long as eight years earlier and had regretted it ever since, fearing that the master of the elfin scherzo would get in first. Berlioz’s Queen Mab is a magically scored Prestissimo “as thin of substance as the air” up to the melodious little serenade in the middle. On its return it assumes a more substantial sound as Mab performs the mischief described in the tenor’s Scherzetto in Part I. A soldier dreams of horn calls and percussion cannonades and utters a snore on the lowest note available to the bassoon. Mab finally evaporates to the unreal sound of antique cymbals.

Part V Berlioz’s original plan for the work included a second Prologue outlining the tragic events to follow in Parts V and VI. On second thoughts he omitted it, feeling perhaps that it would be better to get on with the action. So the mercurial Scherzo is separated only by a short pause from the deeply serious expression and comparatively severe texture of the next section where the, to all appearances, dead Juliet is carried to the Capulet tomb. Beginning as a fugal march with the laments of the mourners intoned on one note, it ingeniously reverses the respective roles of instruments and voices before the funeral march briefly returns on strings and woodwind. The crescendo on repeated notes at the end is strangely expressionistic in effect.

Part VI There is no funeral march in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet but there is in the Garrick version where, in a radical rather than merely decorative departure from the original, Juliet wakes up in time for one last dialogue with Romeo before they both expire. Unauthentic inspiration though it is, it provided Berlioz with the material for one of the most daringly dramatic of all his orchestral pieces.

It begins with vivid suggestions of Romeo’s desperate efforts to enter the Capulet tomb and, registered by quietly mysterious wind and string chords alternating with silence, the awesome atmosphere he finds inside it. Enshrined at the heart of the piece is Romeo’s “Invocation” as he contemplates Juliet’s apparently dead body - a lament scored in the sombre colour of lower woodwind and horn in unison and including a poignant allusion to Juliet’s theme from the Love Scene. Believing her to be dead, he swallows poison to the pre-Wagnerian accompaniment of a descending chromatic tremolando on cellos. So when Juliet wakes up to the scarcely perceptible sound of a solo clarinet, it is too late and the following frenzied celebration, with another allusion to the Love Scene, is in vain. Romeo’s death is signalled by quietly wriggling double basses and Juliet stabs herself after a shrill outcry on unaccompanied violins.

Finale The Garrick version of Romeo and Juliet ends with the death of the lovers. Determined to have his choral finale, however, Berlioz now reverts to the Shakespearian original and the closing reconciliation of the two families, although in this case it is Friar Laurence and not the Prince who brings them together. For most of this ambitiously proportioned movement the chorus is divided into two - Capulets on one side, Montagues on the other - which gives the composer scope for some complex and vividly argumentative contrapuntal textures, most effectively of all in “Mais notre sang rougit leur glaive” after Laurence’s comforting aria in memory of the lovers. Having set them apart, he can then bring them conclusively together in the Oath of Reconciliation which, with the addition of a third chorus to support Laurence’s pleas, is a culmination as monumental as anything in even the most grandiose of operatic finales.