Romeo & Juliet feature

With all due respect to Bellini, composer of the most successful of the dozens of operas about Romeo and Juliet, it has to be said that the three indisputable masterpieces inspired by the unhappy story of the young lady and gentleman of Verona are a dramatic symphony, a fantasy overture and a ballet. Perhaps it is no more than a matter of luck: if any one of Berlioz, Tchaikovsky or Prokofiev had written an opera on Romeo and Juliet rather than the works they did write, or if Verdi had taken an interest in the subject before he felt he was too old to do it justice, there might now be an opera equal in stature to Shakespeare’s tragedy.

“What a subject for an opera!” exclaimed Berlioz in his Memoirs:

How it lends itself to music! To begin with, the dazzling ball at the Capulets, where amid a whirling cloud of beauties the young Montague first sets eyes on “sweet Juliet” whose constant love will bring her to the grave; the furious pitched battles in the streets of Verona, with the fiery Tybalt presiding like the personification of Revenge; the glorious night scene on Juliet’s balcony, the lovers’ voices “like softened music to attending ears” uttering an ecstasy as radiant as the watchful moon shining its benediction upon them; the dashing Mercutio and his sharp-tongued fantastical humour; the cackling nurse; the stately hermit, even in his cell caught up in the tragic conflict of love and hate…and then the catastophe, extremes of joy and despair drained to the dregs in the same intensity…and, at last, the solemn oath sworn by the warring houses, too late, on the bodies of their children.

Berlioz had seen Harriet Smithson as Juliet at the Odéon in Paris in 1827 and had conceived as profound a passion for the play as for the actress. Now, in Florence four years later, he had been urged to go and see Bellini’s I Capuleti e i Montecchi at the Pergola and was looking forward to “a real Romeo at last - after all the lamentable attempts that had been made, a Romeo worthy of Shakespeare’s genius.” He hurried to the theatre. “What a disappointment!” he recalled, “The opera contained no ball at the Capulets, no Mercutio, no garrulous nurse, no sublime soliloquy for Juliet as she takes the hermit’s phial, no duet in the cell between the banished Romeo and the disconsolate Friar, no Shakespeare, nothing, a wasted opportunity.”

We now know, of course, that Romani’s libretti for Nicola Vaccai’s Giuletta e Romeo and Bellini’s I Capuleti e i Montecchi are based not on Shakespeare but on Foppa’s libretto for Niccolò Zingarelli’s Giulietta e Romeo, which is indirectly derived from the same 15th-century source as Shakespeare’s tragedy. But if Berlioz’s criticism of Bellini’s opera is ill-founded, it is a no less vivid indication of the opportunity Shakespeare’s play seemed to offer the opera composer.

Significantly, when he was presented with the opportunity himself - with ample free time guaranteed by a gift of 20,000 francs from Paganini in 1838 - Berlioz did something different. Though he must have been influenced by the recent failure of Benvenuto Cellini at the Paris Opéra, in choosing to write a Romeo and Juliet for the concert hall rather than the opera house he had fundamentally sound artistic reasons.

Based not on Shakespeare’s original text but on Garrick’s acting edition (it alludes to Garrick’s interpolated last farewell for the lovers in the Capulet tomb, although it ends with the reconciliation which Garrick, like most opera librettists, left out), Berlioz’s “dramatic symphony” is an inspired but curiously inconsistent work. It is scored for orchestra, three vocal soloists (two of whom act as narrators), semi-chorus (which also does some narration) and double chorus (representing the feuding families); there are no solo parts for Romeo, Juliet or any of Shakespeare’s characters apart from Friar Laurence. Mercutio’s ”Queen Mab” is an orchestral scherzo as brilliant as any by Mendelssohn - to whom Berlioz mentioned the idea in Rome in 1831, immediately wishing he hadn’t when it occurred to him that Mendelssohn might do it first - and the love scene is a slow movement of the highest lyrical quality with not a word to be heard after the atmospheric offstage farewells of the departing Capulets.

So, after berating Bellini, together with Zingarelli and Vaccai, for “writing Romeo’s part for a woman” which he considered as absurd as making Moses or Othello ”a piping treble,” Berlioz scored his Romeo for cellos and his Juliet for woodwind. His explanation of this apparent anomaly is both interesting and relevant:

Since the very sublimity of this love opens pitfalls for any composer who attempts to paint it, he [Berlioz] has given 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 in such circumstances.

Aware that Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet has all the scenes, characters and situation an opera composer would want, he evidently came to realize that it already has its music in the poet’s ecstatic language. A prudent composer, as Berlioz said, should “try a new approach.” As history has shown, rather than set music to music, he should create a different but equivalent music.

Shakespeare too was aware that music in Romeo and Juliet would be superfluous. In this most lyrical of his plays - one full of musical metaphors, moreover - there are few cues for songs and instrumental music: as the First Musician says, after the apparent death of Juliet, “Faith, we may put up our pipes and be gone…it’s not time to play now.”

Of course, there has long been an urge in the theatre to add more music, particularly at this emotionally ambiguous point in the fourth act. Thomas Arne wrote a dirge for Juliet ”Ah, hapless maid“ for the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, in 1750, and William Boyce was only the first of several composers to set the immortal lines ”Rise, rise, rise, heartbreaking sighs” interpolated by Garrick for the same purpose in his rival production at Drury Lane. Literally hundreds of composers have supplied incidental music for the play, from Edward German to Richard Strauss, from Englelbert Humperdinck to Darius Milhaud, but not one example has achieved any kind of independent life in the concert hall or even become standard in the theatre - not even the entrance music written by Laurence Olivier (with help from a Mr Steinert) for himself as Romeo at the Geary Theatre, San Francisco, in 1940.

Romeo and Juliet opera scores have proved to be not much more memorable than the incidental music. Some have enjoyed brief periods of favour - Napoleon I, whose taste in music was not of the best, was apparently taken by two of Zingarelli’s Romeo arias - but, apart from I Capuleti e i Montecchi, of the more than twenty operas written between Johann Gottfried Schwanenberger’s opera seria (1776) and Boris Blacher’s radio opera (1943) only Charles Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette (1867) and Riccardo Zandonai’s Giuletta e Romeo (1922) have retained any kind of place in the repertory.

Neither Gounod’s sanctimonious tendency nor Zandonai’s crude verismo is ideally appropriate to the subject but, of the two, Gounod is much the more interesting composer in this context. He recalled that as a student he heard Berlioz rehearsing Roméo et Juliette and hid himself “in a corner of the hall and listened intoxicated to this strange, violent, impassioned music which opened before one such new and exotic horizons.” So, although it might be regretted that Gounod’s librettists interpolated a wedding service, complete with responses, the composer’s delicate setting of Mercutio’s “Queen Mab” (the first in an operatic context) resounds to his and, surely, Berlioz’s credit. Similarly, if the ballet in the fourth act, introduced for the Paris Opéra in 1888, is irrelevant, the garden scene is exquisitely lyrical.

Berlioz was also an influence on Tchaikovsky’s fantasy overture, the most popular of all Romeo and Juliet orchestral works. Berlioz conducted his dramatic symphony on both his trips to Russia - in St Petersburg in 1847, when he made a deep impression on the influential Vladimir Stasov, and in Moscow in 1868, when Tchaikovsky fell under his spell. It was out of this background that in 1869 Mily Balakirev, probably at Stasov’s suggestion, insisted that Tchaikovsky too should write an orchestral piece based on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.

Though the work gave Tchaikovsky much trouble, achieving its present, perfectly integrated form after two more or less drastic revisions, the garden-scene element (the second subject in structural terms) was there from the start: a shy but ardent declaration of love on the English horn answered by tender whispers on muted violins and developed with mounting intensity on woodwind against passionate sighs on solo horn.

It is not surprising that this most beautiful of Tchaikovsky’s melodic inspiration was taken up by the pop world - first perhaps in “Love within my heart is born” in 1953. Romeo and Juliet were no strangers to this world, of course. Stephen Foster has asked “Wilt thou be gone love?” a hundred years earlier. John Prindle Scott in 1919 had celebrated Romeo in Georgia (“When de moon am shinin’in de dusky southern skies”) and Cole Porter in 1936 had written Goodbye, Little Dream, Goodbye: “Was it Romeo and Juliet who said when about to die ’Love is not all peaches and cream’?” Not long ago Dire Straits hit the top ten with Mark Knopfler’s Romeo and Juliet: “a lovestruck romeo sings a streetsuss serenade.”

The Dire Straits song includes a brief parody of Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story, which is, of course, the Romeo and Juliet story presented in terms of gang warfare in the West Side of New York City. Like Frederick Delius’s A Village Romeo and Juliet which (after a Novelle by Gottfried Keller) sets the same story in a Swiss village, West Side Story suggests that the composer of a Romeo and Juliet opera or musical is more likely to make a success of it the further he takes it from Verona and the less he has of Shakespeare’s poetry in it.

In ballet, which can draw on Shakespeare’s situation and characters without competing with his musical language, there should be no such problem. In fact, there have been few Romeo and Juliet ballets and only one major success. The most intriguing of the failures is the Rome and Juliet Constant Lambert wrote for the Diaghilev company in 1926. With designs by Joan Mirò and Max Ernst, choreography largely by Nijinska, and with Karsavina and Lifar in the title roles, how could it have failed? Perhaps the answer is in the scenario, which concerns an actor and an actress who are themselves thwarted lovers, rehearsing Shakespeare’s play, escaping from the rehearsal and eloping in an airoplane.

So the last of the Romeo and Juliet masterpieces is Prokofiev’s four-act ballet. Written in 1935, given its first performance in Brno in 1938 and first performed in the USSR (after much argument and distress) in 1940, it has proved to be the most sustained as well as one of the most inspired of all efforts to match Shakespeare’s genius in orchestral music.

Opera-lovers, frustrated by the thought of what Verdi might have done with the story if he had not decided against it, can console themselves with the reflection that Beethoven and Saint-Saëns were both faced by the Romeo and Juliet temptation and that both were wise enough to resist it.