![]() 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. In his memoirs, Berlioz describes the impact of the performance: The Irish actress Harriet Smithson (who inspired Berlioz’ infatuation as well as Symphonie Fantastique) played the role of Juliet. Although voices are frequently employed, it is neither a concert opera nor a cantata but a choral symphony.īerlioz was 23 when he attended a performance of Shakespeare’s play in 1827. ![]() There will doubtless be no mistake as to the genre of this work. Amid all of this formal ambiguity, Berlioz included these ironic lines in the score’s preface: We hear the seeds of Wagner, whose operas develop symphonically with long orchestral interludes. Language and literal meaning fade into the nocturnal shadows of the Capulet garden and the distant sounds of the ball. But it’s the orchestra, alone, that depicts the two title characters in the dramatic interior of the work. Only in the final movement are they heard together, overcoming their ancient feud. I say, “genre-defying” because Roméo et Juliette seems to fall somewhere between opera and symphony. Its adventurous libretto by Émile Deschamps re-shapes the story and includes a surreal line in which Shakespeare is mentioned by name. Dueling choruses represent the Montagues and Capulets. This is how Hector Berlioz described the dramatic potential of a bold new kind of symphonic music- a free-spirited Romanticism born out of the earth-shattering monumentality of Beethoven’s Ninth, which left behind classical balance and order to enter dark, new psychological territory. It’s an aesthetic realized in Berlioz’ Roméo et Juliette, a sprawling, seven-movement-long, genre-defying hybrid which attempts to encapsulate “the sum of passion” of one of Shakespeare’s most powerful plays. …Here a new world is opened up to view, one is raised into a higher ideal region, one senses that the sublime life dreamed of by poets is becoming a reality.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |