Scherzo: La reine Mab, ou la fée des songes

(from Roméo et Juliette)

Berlioz’s “thunderbolt” discovery of Shakespeare, by way of an English theatre company’s productions at the Odéon in Paris in 1827, and his passion for Harriet Smithson, the actress whose Juliet he found so over-whelmingly enchanting, inspired one of the most extraordinary works in the orchestral repertoire. Any ordinary composer under the spell of Romeo and Juliet would have written an opera on the subject. Berlioz, whose reverence for Beethoven was no less intense than his adoration of Shakespeare, made a choral symphony of it. It took him twelve years and a generous subvention from Paganini to get to work on it but once he had started, in January 1839, he completed it in less than eight months.

One of the peculiarities of Berlioz’s Roméo et Juliette is its long introduction which, as well as setting the scene in a choral recitative, anticipates some of the events that are to follow, including the ball scene, the balcony scene and, in a brief Scherzetto for solo tenor and chorus, the “Queen Mab” speech. It is an awkward device but it does mean that in the purely instrumental sections of what Berlioz called his “dramatic symphony” - first movement, slow movement and scherzo - there is no need to offer any verbal explanation of what they are about.

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 actually 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 La Reine Mab, a magical Prestissimo “as thin of substance as the air,” obviously owes much to Mendelssohn but it also looks forwards – as far at least as the last act of Verdi’s Falstaff: Windsor Forest at midnight echoes all over with memories of Berlioz’s exquisitely scored scherzo, the poetic Allegretto nocturne in the middle no less then the hyperactive and slightly sinister material of the outer sections.