{"id":1093,"date":"2023-03-11T09:43:53","date_gmt":"2023-03-11T09:43:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.justsheetmusic.com\/blog\/?p=1093"},"modified":"2023-03-11T09:43:53","modified_gmt":"2023-03-11T09:43:53","slug":"hector-berlioz-bearer-of-romanticisms-torch-part-i","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.justsheetmusic.com\/blog\/opera-2\/hector-berlioz-bearer-of-romanticisms-torch-part-i\/","title":{"rendered":"Hector Berlioz: Bearer of Romanticism’s Torch: Part I"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Bearer of Romanticism\u2019s Torch: Part I<\/p><\/div>\n

I’ve said a bit about Hector Berlioz now and then since I’ve been writing here<\/a>. But in this and the next entry I hope to put my Berliozian thoughts together, to offer you the Big Picture<\/a> as well as the details. Berlioz might actually be the high-point of romanticism. He believed, and his admirers echo him here, that he had taken up music at the point to which Beethoven had carried it, and continued its progress. Brian Primmer<\/a> has written, \u201cHis harmonic progressions showed how the grammar of music could be refashioned.\u201d<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll write today specifically about the five operas attributed to this great Romantic. I\u2019ll take them up in chronological order.<\/p>\n

1. Les francs-juges<\/em><\/a> (1826).<\/h3>\n

This opera, \u201cThe free judges,\u201d is for the most part lost to us. Berlioz, still in his early twenties, composed to a libretto by his friend Humbert Ferrand. But the intended theatre, the Od\u00e9on, couldn\u2019t get government permission for a staging.<\/p>\n

Berlioz\u2019 admirers have often blamed Ferrand\u2019s libretto for this. One musicologist sums it up by saying that the cloudy and convoluted language \u201crepeatedly befogs the purpose of the words.\u201d<\/p>\n

The opera went on a shelf, and at some later point Berlioz, blaming himself rather than his friend, destroyed most of the score. Some fragments remain, among them the overture, to which you can listen here.<\/a> With due respect, it does sound a bit in parts like Berlioz may have been a young man too determined to seem mature and sententious.<\/p>\n

Nonetheless, Franz Liszt, no less, was impressed, and in time created a piano transcription of this overture.<\/p>\n

Berlioz\u2019 second opera, or the first that survives in full, is<\/p>\n

2. Benvenuto Cellini<\/em><\/a> (1838).<\/h3>\n

\"\"This one, which takes its name from a Florentine sculptor of the 16th century, famously set off a riot in the streets of Paris, so different \u2013 so odd \u2013 seemed the style.<\/p>\n

Cellini himself must have seemed a promising subject. His works include \u201cPerseus with the Head of Medusa,\u201d a remarkable statute (photo on the left) that you may find in the Loggia del Lonzi.<\/p>\n

Yet Cellini is perhaps better remembered for his colorful life and his boastful autobiography than for the body of his work.<\/p>\n

Berlioz\u2019 opera is a comic reworking of Cellini\u2019s own account of how he came to create the Perseus<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The problem wasn\u2019t with the story, though. It was Berlioz\u2019 still-developing musical style. Not only did it provoke much of the audience into violent reactions, it annoyed some of the performers, too. Gilbert Duprez, the tenor with the title role, found the music too demanding of stamina, too idiosyncratic in tessitura. In his own memoir, written many years later, Duprez would say that Berlioz\u2019 talent \u201cn\u2019\u00e9tait pas pr\u00e9cis\u00e9ment m\u00e9lodique\u201d (was not precisely melodic.)<\/p>\n

Here posterity takes Berlioz\u2019 side: Duprez\u2019 precision was another man\u2019s prison!<\/p>\n

A fascinating sidebar has come down to us: Cellini <\/em>opened at a time when Duprez\u2019s wife was heavy with child. She went into labor as he was leaving their home for the third performance. During the final act, Duprez saw a doctor \u2013 the<\/strong> doctor \u2013 standing in the wings, presumably with news. He was rattled and never for the remainder of that performance quite regained his stride.<\/p>\n

[The newborn was a healthy boy.]<\/p>\n

One consequence of Benvenuto<\/em>, and all the attendant drama, for Berlioz\u2019 career was that he received his first sustained notice on the other side of the Channel. London\u2019s Musical World<\/em> ran a long article on it.<\/p>\n

3. La damnation de Faust<\/em><\/a> (1846)<\/h3>\n

But in the way of all rebels, Berlioz aged, and his audience aged with him. Both became respectable with time. By the time he took on the topic of a deal-for-damnation, Berlioz was famous as a conductor and as the author of a very influential treatise on instrumentation.<\/p>\n

As for this next work, Berlioz\u2019 take on Faust, you\u2019ll find it generally listed as a \u201cconcert drama\u201d rather than an opera. But I\u2019m including it with his operas, and I\u2019m in good company there. Well-known filmmaker Terry Gilliam (famed for Brazil<\/em><\/a> and Time Bandits<\/em> as well as for his years in the Monty Python troupe), directed a performance of Berlioz\u2019s Damnation<\/em> at the English National Opera, in London, in 2011, treating it very much as an opera<\/em>. Reviewer Rupert Christiansen, writing in The Telegraph,<\/em> gave it his highest rating, five stars.<\/p>\n

Christiansen praised \u201cEdward Gardner\u2019s magnificent conducting, Peter Hoare\u2019s charismatic performance in the title role, Christopher Purves\u2019 gloriously sardonic Mephistopheles [and] Christine Rice\u2019s heartrending singing of Marguerite\u2019s two gorgeous arias.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s a lot to like.<\/p>\n

But since this is www.justsheetmusic.com<\/a> and our focus here is as ever on the music, we\u2019ll offer you a link to one of those gorgeous arias, Marguerite\u2019s D\u2019Amour L\u2019Ardente Flamme<\/em><\/a>. <\/em>It is sung in that clip by Vesselina Kasarova, a Bulgarian mezzo soprano better known for work in the Mozartian canon. I\u2019ve put a photo of Kasarova at the top of this blog entry. <\/em><\/p>\n

That aria shows how Berlioz pioneered the use of vocal timbre as a deliberate element in the structuring of a work.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>It also shows the determined way in which the music expresses character, as does, to take another example, the starting-and-stopping fugue of Faust\u2019s monologue at the start of Part II, where Faust has been driven to the brink of suicide by his own world-weariness.<\/p>\n

4. Les Troyens<\/em><\/a> (1858)<\/h3>\n

Les Troyens<\/em> was, also, a distinctive take on a very traditional operatic theme. The theme is the aftermath of the fall of Troy, and most especially the arrival of Aeneas and his band of Trojans on the shores of North Africa, where Aeneas had his notorious fling with Queen Dido.<\/p>\n

Between Acts III and IV there is a symphonic interlude known as \u201cRoyal Hunt and Storm.\u201d<\/p>\n

You must listen! <\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"

Hector Berlioz<\/p><\/div>\n

Much of this is unabashed nature painting<\/a>. Berlioz wants us to see the hunt, and then catch the scent and the windy force of the oncoming storm.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

5. B\u00e9atrice et B\u00e9n\u00e9dict<\/em> (1862)<\/h3>\n

Berlioz\u2019 final opera. B\u00e9atrice et B\u00e9n\u00e9dict<\/em> came about because Berlioz was fascinated by Shakespeare \u2013 a common enough fascination amongst the romantics. He has re-worked Shakespeare\u2019s comedy Much Ado About Nothing<\/em>, (a story with two central couples), so that one of those couples, Claudio and Hero, nearly disappears, and the whole \u201cado\u201d turns out to be about Berlioz\u2019 title characters.<\/p>\n

In this case, as in Les Troyens<\/em>, Berlioz wrote the libretto as well as composing its musical setting.<\/p>\n

Throughout all of this, throughout what Berlioz himself called his long war \u201cagainst the professors, the routineers, and the deaf,\u201d there was a growth of confidence (he no longer thought he had to rely on someone else for the words) as well as constant invention, a constant pressing against expectation, and thus an expansion of what music could do and mean.<\/p>\n

Let us conclude \u2013 until we meet again \u2013 with a concert hall recording of the Overture.<\/p>\n