Hector Berlioz on Music Theory Print

Béatrice et Bénédict

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Performance history#

Berlioz described the premiere of Béatrice et Bénédict as a “great success” in a letter to his son Louis; he was particularly taken with the performance of Charton-Demeur (who would create the role of Didon in Les Troyens in Paris a year later) and noted that the duo which closes the first half elicited an “astonishing impact”. Although it continued to be staged occasionally in German cities in the years after the premiere, the first performance in France only took place on 5 June 1890 at the Théâtre de l’Odéon, 21 years after its composer’s death, promoted by Élisabeth Greffulhe’s Société des Grandes auditions musicales de France, conducted by Charles Lamoureux, and with Juliette Bilbaut-Vauchelet and Émile Engel in the lead roles. Paul Bastide conducted a notable production of Béatrice et Bénédict in Strasbourg in the late 1940s. It was produced at the Paris Opéra-Comique in 1966 conducted by Pierre Dervaux but with recitatives by Tony Aubin, and in February 2010 under Emmanuel Krivine. The UK premiere was on 24 March 1936 in Glasgow under Erik Chisholm. The English National Opera opened a production on 25 January 1990, with wife and husband Ann Murray and Philip Langridge in the title roles. The work was first performed in New York in 1977 as a concert performance at Carnegie Hall, Seiji Ozawa conducting the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Although rather infrequently performed and not part of the standard operatic repertoire, recent productions have included Amsterdam and Welsh National Opera tour in 2001, Prague State Opera (Státní opera Praha) in 2003, Santa Fe Opera in 1998 and 2004, Opéra du Rhin in Strasbourg in 2005, Chicago Opera Theater in 2007, Houston Grand Opera in 2008 (in English), Opera Boston in 2011, Theater an der Wien in 2013, and Glyndebourne in 2016. The first Swedish production of the opera was at Läckö Castle in 2015, and the first in staging in Italy in late 2022 at the Teatro Carlo Felice in Genoa.

Benvenuto Cellini (opera)

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Composition history#

Berlioz wrote this in his Mémoires about the background to the opera: I had been greatly struck by certain episodes in the life of Benvenuto Cellini. I had the misfortune to believe they would make an interesting and dramatic subject for an opera, and I asked Léon de Wailly and Auguste Barbier … to write a libretto around them. The only plot element drawn directly from Cellini’s memoirs concerns the casting of his famous statue of Perseus with the Head of Medusa for Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici, although this was done in Florence, where it still stands in the Loggia dei Lanzi, not in Rome, as the opera has it. All the opera’s characters besides Cellini and Pope Clement VII, who is made commissioner of the statue in place of Cosimo, and all other episodes, are invented. The original libretto, which is lost, seems to have been in the format of an opéra comique; it was rejected by the Paris Opéra-Comique company. The story was then reworked as an opéra semiseria, without spoken dialogue, and offered to the Paris Opéra where it was accepted in 1835 by that company’s new director, Henri Duponchel. Actual composition started in 1836. Its completion date is unknown. Several Berlioz scholars say it was completed that same year before the composer turned his attention to his massive Grande messe des morts in 1837. In any event, its premiere was scheduled for June 1838, postponed, and finally given at the Opéra on 10 September 1838, conducted by François Habeneck and with Gilbert Duprez in the title role. It is likely the composer continued work on the score, or at least made revisions to it, during 1838 after the Grande messe was completed.

Grande Symphonie funèbre et triomphale

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Introduction#

The French government commissioned the symphony for the celebrations marking the tenth anniversary of the July Revolution which had brought Louis-Philippe I to power, for which it was erecting the July Column in the Place de la Bastille. Berlioz had little sympathy for the régime, but welcomed the opportunity to write the work because the government had offered him 10,000 francs for it. The Symphonie militaire (later renamed Symphonie funèbre et triomphale), rather than following the model Berlioz had established in Romeo and Juliet, represents a reversion to an earlier pre-Beethovenian style in the tradition of monumental French public ceremonial music. Berlioz claimed to have completed the entire score in just 40 hours, harvesting much of the musical material for this Grande symphonie funèbre et triomphale from unfinished works. The first movement, the “Marche funèbre”, was constructed from the Fête musicale funèbre à la mémoire des hommes illustres de la France, a massive, seven-movement ceremonial piece begun in 1835 in the hopes of selling it to the French government. According to Julian Rushton, “Berlioz worked best on large projects; when he could see no future for them he preferred not to compose.” He apparently abandoned the Fête musicale funèbre because he couldn’t find a sponsor to commission it. The Funereal and Triumphal Symphony was originally scored for a military band of 200 players marching in the procession accompanying the remains of those who had died fighting in the 1830 revolution on their way to reinterment beneath a memorial column erected on the site of the Bastille. On the day of the parade, little of the 3rd movement could be heard over the cheering crowds on the column when the ceremony was about to end as it was about to be reprised while the 1st and 3rd movements were heard during the procession and the 2nd during the dedication proper; but the work was such a success at the dress rehearsal that it was performed twice more in August and became one of the composer’s most popular works during his lifetime. Berlioz revised the score in January 1842, adding an optional part for strings and a final chorus to a text by Antony Deschamps. Richard Wagner attended a performance of this new version at the Salle Vivienne on 1 February 1842. On 5 February, he told Robert Schumann that he found passages in the last movement of Berlioz’s symphony so “magnificent and sublime that they can be surpassed.”

Harold en Italie

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Creation#

The Italian composer Niccolò Paganini encouraged Hector Berlioz to write . The two first met after a concert of Berlioz’s works conducted by Narcisse Girard on 22 December 1833, three years after the premiere of Berlioz’s . According to Berlioz’ , Paganini had acquired a “superb viola”, a Stradivarius (the so-called “Paganini-Mendelssohn” ) — “But I have no suitable music. Would you like to write a solo for viola? You are the only one I can trust for this task.” ("") Berlioz began “by writing a solo for viola, but one which involved the orchestra in such a way as not to reduce the effectiveness of the orchestral contribution”. When Paganini saw the sketch of the allegro movement, with all the rests in the viola part, he told Berlioz it would not do, and that he expected to be playing continuously. They then parted, with Paganini disappointed. A few years later, Paganini was in Paris again and attended a concert including the Symphonie Fantastique and Harold en Italie conducted by Berlioz. After the concert Paganini went to see Berlioz and told him he had never been as touched as by Harold, then kneeled and kissed Berlioz’s hand. Lord Byron’s poem “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage” inspired the mood of Harold, Berlioz wrote. That he had recycled some of the material from his discarded concert overture Rob Roy went unmentioned. Despite Berlioz’ mention of Byron, music critics, including Donald Tovey, have pointed out that Harold in Italy owes nearly nothing to the poem: “no definite elements of Byron’s poem have penetrated the impregnable fortress of Berlioz’s encyclopaedic inattention,…there is no trace in Berlioz’s music of any of the famous passages of Childe Harold.”

L'Enfance du Christ

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Background#

The idea for L’enfance went back to 1850 when Berlioz composed an organ piece for his friend Joseph-Louis Duc, called L’adieu des bergers (The Shepherds’ Farewell). He soon turned it into a choral movement for the shepherds saying goodbye to the baby Jesus as he leaves Bethlehem for Egypt. Berlioz had the chorus performed as a hoax on 12 November 1850, passing it off as the work of an imaginary 17th-century composer “Ducré”. He was gratified to discover many people who hated his music were taken in and praised it, one lady even going so far as to say, “Berlioz would never be able to write a tune as simple and charming as this little piece by old Ducré”. He then added a piece for tenor, Le repos de la sainte famille (The Repose of the Holy Family) and preceded both movements with an overture to form a work he called La fuite en Egypte. It was published in 1852 and first performed in Leipzig in December, 1853. The premiere was so successful, Berlioz’s friends urged him to expand the piece and he added a new section, L’arrivée à Sais (The Arrival at Sais), which included parts for Mary and Joseph. Berlioz, perhaps feeling the result was still unbalanced, then composed a third section to precede the other two, Le songe d’Hérode (Herod’s Dream).

La Damnation de Faust

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Background and composition history#

Berlioz read Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust, Part One in 1828, in Gérard de Nerval’s translation. “This marvelous book fascinated me from the first”, he recalled in his Memoirs. “I could not put it down. I read it incessantly, at meals, in the theatre, in the street.” The work so impressed Berlioz that he composed a suite entitled Eight Scenes from Faust, which became his Opus 1 (1829), though he later recalled all the copies of it he could find. He returned to the material in 1845, to make a larger work, with some additional text by Almire Gandonnière to Berlioz’s specifications, that he first called a “concert opera”, and as it expanded, finally a “légende dramatique” (“dramatic legend”). Berlioz worked on the score during his concert tour of 1845, adding his own text for “Nature immense, impénétrable et fière”—Faust’s climactic invocation of all nature—and incorporating the Rákóczi March, which had been a thunderous success at a concert in Pest, Hungary, on 15 February 1846.

La damnation de Faust (Georg Solti recording)

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Recording#

The album was digitally recorded in May 1981 in the Medinah Temple, Chicago.

Packaging#

The cover art shared by the LP, cassette and CD editions of the album when it was first released is Faust and Méphistophélès by Ferdinand Victor Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863), a painting in the Wallace Collection, London.

Reviews#

Alan Blyth reviewed the album on LP in Gramophone in May 1982, comparing it with earlier recordings of La damnation de Faust conducted by Colin Davis and Daniel Barenboim. Frederica von Stade’s Marguerite, he wrote, was sensibly phrased and sounded plausibly youthful, and her “Roi de Thule” was done “simply and sweetly”. In her “D’amour l’ardente flamme”, though, there was “a want of vocal warmth and a tendency to sound a shade mannered”. Von Stade was better than Barenboim’s Yvonne Minton, who sang with an erratic tone and a lack of emotional engagement. But she was far outclassed by Davis’s Josephine Veasey, who had a surer grasp of Berliozian style and was “almost unbearably moving”. John Rockwell reviewed the album on LP in The New York Times on 27 June 1982. Frederica von Stade, he wrote, was a “heart-rending” Marguerite. Kenneth Riegel’s voice sometimes sounded uncomfortable, and his name would not attract collectors in the way that Nicolai Gedda’s or Plácido Domingo’s would. But his Faust had to be “the performance of his lifetime thus far - direct, ardent, intelligent”. José van Dam was a “chilling, godlike Méphistophélès”. Both the chorus and the orchestra were superb. Georg Solti’s conducting had often been accused of several misdemeanours - a neglect of minutiae, an inadequate grasp of the architecture of the most challenging works and a degree of anonymity. But in this instance, he had nothing to fear from comparisons with Colin Davis or Daniel Barenboim. His handling of Berlioz’s “delicate, elfin” sections was “remarkable”, and he invested the album’s most thrilling passages with a Teutonic seriousness that was fitting for music inspired by Goethe. Decca’s audio quality was sumptuous. J. B. Steane reviewed the album on LP in Gramophone in July 1982. “I’m afraid that once again”, he wrote, “I was deaf to the faults of Frederica von Stade: the private, haunted tone of the Ballade and the tragic maturity of the Romance seemed to me things of very great beauty”. Kenneth Riegel was a “vividly anxious” Faust with a voice that was undaunted by the challenges of the role’s elevated tessitura even if its tone lacked the inherent loveliness of Plácido Domingo’s. José van Dam’s Méphistophélès was excellent too, and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra played with “sheer brilliance”. Georg Solti’s conducting was equally triumphant in every episode of Berlioz’s narrative. Emotional passages were invested with a “sustained depth of feeling”, solemn moments with a profundity that had rarely been rivalled and exciting scenes with a “sharpness of rhythm” and a “marvellously taut vitality”. The album as a whole was a “tremendous energizer”. Eric Salzman reviewed the album on LP in Stereo Review in December 1982. Frederica von Stade, he wrote, was “very subdued” in “Le roi de Thulé”, but livened up in her subsequent duet and Romance. Kenneth Riegel’s vocal limitations became impossible to overlook at one or two especially testing moments, but his portrait of Faust was “musical and passionate and achieved real heroic-tragic stature”. José van Dam was the best of the soloists, delivering a straightforward Méphistophélès who was, however incongruously, sympathetic. All three singers were poor in their diction, presenting a “mealy-mouthed mumble” instead of accurate French. But the album as a whole was nevertheless at least as good as even the best of its predecessors. “It crackles! It insinuates! … It flashes with colour and emotion. … It has chills. Thrills. You’ll laugh. You’ll cry. What a story! … What beauty! … What music!! And it rejoiced in “dazzling, full-colour digital recording, which captured every thrill and chill to perfection”. Geoffrey Horn, an expert in high fidelity audio, reviewed the album in Gramophone in April 1984. Record collectors had come to expect exceptionally sound quality from albums that had been taped in Chicago’s Medinah Temple, he wrote, and Georg Solti’s La damnation de Faust would not disappoint them. The Chicago Symphony Chorus in particular had been recorded with a fidelity that was something to marvel at. Listening to the album was very like experiencing the work in a concert hall. The album’s version of the Hungarian March would no doubt be used as a demonstration track by retailers wanting to show their customers what digital recording technology was now capable of. The Berlioz specialist John Warrack reviewed the album on CD in Gramophone in March 1990, comparing it to other versions conducted by Colin Davis and Sir John Eliot Gardiner. Frederica von Stade’s Marguerite he thought “a touch on the operatic side” compared with Davis’s Josephine Veasey’s. Kenneth Riegel was not even within hailing distance of Davis’s Nicolai Gedda as Faust. Georg Solti’s José van Dam, though, was a better Méphistophélès than Davis’s Jules Bastin. Solti’s conducting was stimulating - he made the Hungarian March “a compulsively exhilarating experience” - but the price of his many thrills was that the score’s “wonderful variety of mood and pace and colour” was not served as well as it should have been.

Le Chant des chemins de fer

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Circumstances of the composition#

The work was commissioned by the city of Lille. According to his correspondence, Berlioz composed it in a hurry in three nights, interrupting the writing of La Damnation de Faust. Berlioz, who travelled on the inaugural train, spent eight days in Lille and conducted Le Chant des chemins de fer and at the same time the finale of his Grande symphonie funèbre et triomphale leading a military orchestra of 150 wind instrumentalists and singers from the Conservatoire de Lille. Berlioz had asked that the final chord be punctuated by a cannonade that could not take place.

Lélio

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The music#

The six pieces of music are: Instrumentation: 2 flutes (2nd also piccolo), 2 oboes (2nd also English horn), 2 clarinets, 4 bassoons 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 2 cornets, 3 trombones, ophicleide, timpani, bass drum, tam-tam, harp, piano (2 and 4 hand), strings

Recordings#

Lambert Wilson (narrator), Montreal Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Charles Dutoit (Decca)
Orchestre National de l’ORTF, conducted by Jean Martinon (EMI)
Pierre Boulez Conducts Berlioz: Symphonie fantastique and Lélio
Zdenek Macal, Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, Glenn Siebert (tenor), William Diana (baritone), Werner Klemperer (narrator, in English)
London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Pierre Boulez; recording in public domain
Depardieu, Zeffiri, Ketelsen, CSO, Muti; recorded in 2010, released in 2015
Jean-Philippe Lafont (narrator), Cyrille Dubois (tenor), Florian Sempey (baritone), Vienna Symphony, conducted by Philippe Jordan; recorded in 2018, released in 2019 (Sony)

Sources#

David Cairns: Berlioz: The Making of an Artist (the first volume of his biography of the composer) (André Deutsch, 1989)
Hugh Macdonald: Berlioz (“The Master Musicians”, J.M.Dent, 1982)
Berlioz: Memoirs (Dover, 1960)
Booklet notes to the Dutoit recording

External links#

Complete text of Lélio *

Les Francs-juges

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Opera#

Ferrand was a law student with a love of poetry who became a lifelong friend of Berlioz. He had already written the words to a cantata for the composer, La Révolution grecque in 1825. Now Ferrand gratified Berlioz’s eagerness to write his first opera by providing him with a three-act libretto, Les Francs-juges. The work is set in Mediaeval Germany and the title literally means “The Free Judges”, referring to the secret Vehmic trials held in the region during the late Middle Ages. The plot, with its stormy passions and theme of rescue from oppression, offered Berlioz the opportunity to compose a work in the style of the French Revolutionary operas of Méhul and Cherubini. Berlioz intended Les Francs-juges for performance at the Odéon theatre and the management accepted it on the basis of Ferrand’s libretto. Berlioz threw himself into writing the score in the summer of 1826: the first two acts were finished by June, and he composed the third act in July and August and added the final touches in September. Unfortunately for Berlioz, the Odéon could not obtain government licensing to stage new French operas and Les Francs-juges was shelved. The composer made later attempts to have it performed at the Opéra, the Nouveautés, the German Theatre and in Karlsruhe. He revised it in 1829 and again in 1833, but to no avail. Les Francs-juges was never staged and only five numbers from the original score of 1826 survive complete. Some of the music was reused in the “Marche au supplice” of the Symphonie fantastique.

Les Nuits d'été

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Background#

Berlioz and the poet Théophile Gautier were neighbours and friends. Gautier wrote, “Berlioz represents the romantic musical idea … unexpected effects in sound, tumultuous and Shakespearean depth of passion.” It is possible that Berlioz read Gautier’s collection La comédie de la mort (The Comedy of Death) before its publication in 1838. Gautier had no objection to his friend’s setting six poems from that volume, and Berlioz began in March 1840. The title Nuits d’été was Berlioz’s invention, and it is not clear why he chose it: the first song is specifically set in spring rather than summer. The writer Annagret Fauser suggests that Berlioz may have been influenced by the preface to a collection of short stories by his friend Joseph Méry, Les Nuits de Londres, in which the author writes of summer nights in which he and his friends sat outside until dawn telling stories. In a 1989 study of Berlioz, D. Kern Holoman suggests that the title is an allusion to Shakespeare, whose works Berlioz loved. The cycle was complete in its original version for voice (mezzo-soprano or tenor) and piano by 1841. Berlioz later made arrangements for baritone, contralto, or soprano, and piano. The piano version is not as often performed in concert or on record as the orchestrated score, which Berlioz arranged between 1843 and 1856. David Cairns wrote in 1988 that the success of the piano version was impeded by the inferior quality of the piano part in the published score: it is not Berlioz’s own, and Cairns described it as “a clumsy, inauthentic piece of work”. In 1843 Berlioz orchestrated the fourth song, “Absence” for his lover, Marie Recio, who premiered it in Leipzig on 23 February 1843; it was not until 1856, that he returned to Les Nuits d’été, making an orchestral arrangement of “Le Spectre de la rose” for the mezzo-soprano Anna Bockholtz-Falconi. The publisher was in the audience for the premiere, and, much impressed, prevailed on Berlioz to orchestrate the rest of the cycle. The orchestration left the existing melodic and harmonic writing generally unchanged, but for “Le Spectre de la rose” the composer added an introduction for muted solo cello, flute and clarinet; the orchestration of this song, unlike the other five, includes a harp. The original piano version had a single dedicatee – Louise Bertin, whose father, Louis-François Bertin, was editor of the Journal des débats, for which Berlioz wrote musical criticism and other articles. Each of the six songs of the orchestral cycle was dedicated individually, to singers well known in Germany, some of whom had performed Berlioz’s music there: Louise Wolf (“Villanelle”), Anna Bockholtz-Falconi (“Le Spectre de la rose”), Hans von Milde (“Sur les lagunes”), Madeleine Nottès (“Absence”), Friedrich Caspari (“Au cimetière”) and Rosa von Milde (“L’Île inconnue”). For the orchestral version, Berlioz transposed the second and third songs to lower keys. When this version was published, Berlioz specified different voices for the various songs: mezzo-soprano or tenor for “Villanelle”, contralto for “Le Spectre de la rose”, baritone (or optionally contralto or mezzo) for “Sur les lagunes”, mezzo or tenor for “Absence”, tenor for “Au cimetière”, and mezzo or tenor for “L’Île inconnue”. The cycle is nevertheless usually sung by a single soloist, most often a soprano or mezzo-soprano. When the cycle is sung by sopranos the second and third songs are usually transposed back to their original pitches; when lower voices sing the cycle some other songs are often transposed downwards; in the view of the Berlioz scholar Julian Rushton this has a particularly deleterious effect in the first song, the lighthearted “Villanelle”. Although Berlioz wrote more than fifty songs, twenty of them with orchestral accompaniment, those in Les Nuits d’été are the only ones published as a set. They are not a cycle on the German model of Schubert’s Winterreise or Schumann’s Dichterliebe, with narrative and thematic continuity, but form a unified whole by virtue of the single authorship of the words and the composer’s use throughout of delicate, atmospheric musical shading. The structure of the cycle has four sombre songs framed by exuberant opening and closing ones. The critic A. E. F. Dickinson wrote in a 1969 study, “Their common theme is nominally love unrequited or lost, symbolizing, arguably, an ache for vanished or unattainable beauty. But their musical order is apparently fortuitous, and forms an acceptable, rather than a compulsive, association.” Berlioz’s innovative creation of an orchestral song cycle had few successors until Mahler took the genre up in the late 19th century. As far as is known, the orchestral cycle was not performed in its entirety during the composer’s lifetime. The work was neglected for many years, but during the twentieth century it was rediscovered and has become one of Berlioz’s best-loved works.

Les Troyens

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Composition history#

Berlioz began the libretto on 5 May 1856 and completed it toward the end of June 1856. He finished the full score on 12 April 1858. Berlioz had a keen affection for literature, and he had admired Virgil since his childhood. The Princess Carolyne zu Sayn-Wittgenstein was a prime motivator to Berlioz to compose this opera. On 3 May 1861, Berlioz wrote in a letter: “I am sure that I have written a great work, greater and nobler than anything done hitherto.” Elsewhere he wrote: “The principal merit of the work is, in my view, the truthfulness of the expression.” For Berlioz, truthful representation of passion was the highest goal of a dramatic composer, and in this respect he felt he had equalled the achievements of Gluck and Mozart.

Messe solennelle (Berlioz)

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Forces and structure#

Scored for soprano, tenor, (prominent) bass, mixed chorus, and large orchestra, including Piccolo (opt.), 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets (C) 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 4 trumpets, 3 trombones (ATB), serpent, buccin (or ophicleide), timpani, cymbals Tamtam, Harps (opt.), and strings Its movements are: * Kyrie * Gloria * Gratias * Quoniam * Credo * Incarnatus * Crucifixus * Resurrexit * Motet pour l’Offertoire * Sanctus * O salutaris hostia * Agnus Dei * Domine salvum fac

Nuits d'été & La damoiselle élue

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Background#

The album was a sequel to Shéhérazade, a 1981 recording on which von Stade, Doriot Anthony Dwyer, Jules Eskind, Martin Katz, the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Ozawa performed songs by Maurice Ravel: Deux mélodies hébraïques, Chansons madécasses and two of the Cinq mélodies populaires grecques in addition to Shéhérazade itself.

Recording#

The album was recorded digitally in the Symphony Hall, Boston. Berlioz’s Les nuits d’été was recorded on 17 October 1983, following a live performance of the work in Symphony Hall on 15 October 1983. Debussy’s La damoiselle élue was recorded on 10 October 1983, following live performances of the work in Symphony Hall on 7 and 8 October 1983. The engineers used a Soundstream system and a Sony PCM 1610 system. The album was mastered using CBS’s DisComputer system at the CBS Studios, New York City.

Overtures by Hector Berlioz

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Les francs-juges#

Les francs-juges, Op. 3. Composed 1826. The overture to Berlioz’s first attempt at opera, which was never staged. The overture was first performed in the concert hall of the Paris Conservatoire as part of an all Berlioz concert on 26 May 1828. In his study on the composer, Jacques Barzun describes the work as “a genuine tour de force for a young dramatic musician working without knowledge of Beethoven.” The instrumentation is two flutes doubling piccolo, two oboes, two clarinets in C, two bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns (in E and D), three trumpets (two in E and one in E), three trombones, two ophicleides, percussion (timpani, bass drum and cymbals) and strings.

Prix de Rome cantatas (Berlioz)

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Berlioz and the Prix de Rome#

The Prix de Rome was an award for composers allowing the winner to spend a year studying at the Villa Medici in Rome. It also entitled him to a five-year pension. The prize was adjudicated by the Paris Conservatoire. Entrants had to submit a fugue as proof of their compositional skills and the four successful candidates were then required to write a dramatic cantata to a text chosen by the judges.

Requiem (Berlioz)

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History#

In 1837, Adrien de Gasparin, the Minister of the Interior of France, asked Berlioz to compose a Requiem Mass to remember soldiers who died in the Revolution of July 1830, to be performed on the anniversary of Marshal Édouard Mortier’s death in Fieschi’s assassination attempt on Louis Phillippe in 1835. Berlioz accepted the request, having already wanted to compose a large orchestral work. Meanwhile, the orchestra was growing in size and quality, and the use of woodwinds and brass was expanding due to the increasing ease of intonation afforded by modern instruments. Berlioz later wrote, “if I were threatened with the destruction of the whole of my works save one, I should crave mercy for the Messe des morts.” After the originally planned performance was cancelled, a ceremony commemorating the death of General Damrémont and the soldiers killed at the Siege of Constantine provided the occasion for the premiere at Les Invalides, conducted by François Habeneck on 5 December 1837. In his Mémoires, Berlioz claimed that at the premiere of the work, conductor François Habeneck put down his baton during the dramatic “Tuba mirum” (part of the “Dies irae” movement) while he took a pinch of snuff, prompting the composer to rush to the podium to conduct the rest of the work himself, thereby saving the performance from disaster. The premiere was a complete success. Berlioz revised the work twice in his life, first in 1852, making the final revisions in 1867, only two years before his death.

Roméo et Juliette (Berlioz)

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Genesis#

Initial inspiration came from a performance he witnessed in 1827 of the play Romeo and Juliet (in David Garrick’s edited version) at the Odéon Theatre in Paris. The cast included his future wife Harriet Smithson, who also inspired Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique. In his Memoirs, Berlioz describes the electrifying effect of the drama: … to steep myself in the fiery sun and balmy nights of Italy, to witness the drama of that passion swift as thought, burning as lava, radiantly pure as an angel’s glance, imperious, irresistible, the raging vendettas, the desperate kisses, the frantic strife of love and death, was more than I could bear. By the third act, scarcely able to breathe—it was as though an iron hand had gripped me by the heart—I knew that I was lost. I may add that at the time I did not know a word of English; I could only glimpse Shakespeare darkly through the mists of Letourneur’s translation; the splendour of the poetry which gives a whole new glowing dimension to his glorious works was lost on me. … But the power of the acting, especially that of Juliet herself, the rapid flow of the scenes, the play of expression and voice and gesture, told me more and gave me a far richer awareness of the ideas and passions of the original than the words of my pale and garbled translation could do. The range of feeling and mood as well as poetic and formal invention which Berlioz found in Shakespeare had a strong influence on his music overall. To create a direct musical setting of Shakespeare’s work was natural. He had been planning a musical realisation of Romeo and Juliet for a long time before 1838, but other projects ìntervened.

Symphonie fantastique

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Inspiration#

Attending a performance of Shakespeare’s Hamlet on 11 September 1827, Berlioz fell in love with the Irish actress Harriet Smithson, who played the role of Ophelia. His biographer Hugh Macdonald writes of Berlioz’s “emotional derangement” in obsessively pursuing her, without success, for several years. She refused even to meet him. He sent her numerous love letters, all of which were unanswered. The Symphonie fantastique reflects his obsession with Smithson. She did not attend the premiere, given at the Paris Conservatoire on 5 December 1830, but she heard Berlioz’s revised version of the work in 1832 at a concert that also included its sequel, Lélio, which incorporates the same idée fixe and some spoken commentary. She finally appreciated the strength of his feelings for her. The two met shortly afterwards and began a romance that led to their marriage the following year.

Te Deum (Berlioz)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Background and premiere#

The Te Deum was originally conceived as the climax of a grand symphony celebrating Napoleon Bonaparte III., Some of the material used by Berlioz in the piece was originally written for his Messe Solennelle of 1824, thought to have been destroyed by the composer but rediscovered in 1991. The first performance of the work was on 30 April 1855, at the Church of Saint-Eustache, Paris; Berlioz conducted an ensemble of 900 or 950 performers.

Tragic Lovers

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Composition#

Tragic Lovers, released by the record label Delos in 2008, contains three works inspired by tragic love stories in literature: Richard Wagner’s Prelude and “Liebestod” from Tristan and Isolde, Hector Berlioz’s “Love Scene” from Roméo et Juliette, Op. 17, and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet. The album contains three tracks, each one comprising a single composition and running more than fifteen minutes in length. Amelia Haygood and Carol Rosenberger served as executive producers; the recording producers were Michael Fine for the Wagner and Berlioz works and Adam Stern for the Tchaikovsky composition. The album was engineered by John Eargle, with Andrés Villalta serving as associate engineer for the Wagner and Berlioz recordings. Editing was completed by Fine (Wagner, Berlioz) and Stern (Tchaikovsky).

Tristia (Berlioz)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Details of the work#

The three movements are:

References#

David Cairns: Berlioz: Servitude and Greatness (the second volume of his biography of the composer) (Viking, 1999)
Hugh Macdonald: Berlioz (“The Master Musicians”, J.M.Dent, 1982)
Berlioz: Memoirs (Dover, 1960)

External links#

Information on the Funeral March
Legouvé’s French text for La mort d’Ophélie.