Concerts & Tickets

Programme note

Hector Berlioz (1803-1869)
Love Scene, Romeo and Juliet (1839)

Berlioz, having won the Prix de Rome and now en route to his year at the Villa Medici, paused in Florence in 1831 to see Bellini’s new opera on the subject of Romeo and Juliet at the historic Teatro Pergola. He disliked it intensely. As he remarked caustically in his memoirs: “...in the libretto, no ball at the Capulets, no trace of Mercutio, no garrulous nurse, no grave and tranquil hermit, no balcony scene, 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 botched piece of work, mangled, disfigured, arranged. And in the music, where was the double chorus of Montagues and Capulets, where the passion of the two lovers, the great orchestral outbursts, the vivid instrumental patterns, the new and searching melodies, the bold progressions lending colour to the scene, the unexpected modulations? Where was the musical drama, the dramatic music, that such poetry should give birth to?”

Eight years later, back in France, Berlioz rectified Bellini’s worst omissions by completing his own Romeo and Juliet, which was not an opera, nor even an opera in disguise, but a “dramatic symphony,” the third of four such works he composed, all of them fascinating, none of them conventional. The first was the Symphonie Fantastique, with which Robin Ticciati and the SCO launched their current Scottish season. Paganini commissioned the second (Harold in Italy) with a major part for solo viola which the celebrated virtuoso deemed too slight to be worth performing. But he later regretted his hasty decision, and his subsidy of 20,000 francs gave Berlioz the freedom to embark on his third symphony, Romeo and Juliet, the longest and structurally most complex of the four works, the last of which was the Grande Symphonie Funebre et Triomphale for military band with strings and chorus, dating from 1840.

In a full performance, Berlioz’s Romeo and Juliet requires not only an orchestra but three solo singers (none of them, however, portraying Romeo or Juliet) plus a double chorus and semi-chorus - an array of forces that must have been one of the reasons why, at least to begin with, the work as an entity was heard less often than it deserved. Orchestral fragments (the portrait of Romeo alone, the grand feast of the Capulets, the filigree Queen Mab scherzo) were considered quite sufficient, though even the exquisite love scene, lasting about eighteen minutes, was feared to be too long for frequent performance. As recently as the nineteen-fifties the complete score was still a great rarity and an outdoor account of it in the Cour Carre of the Louvre, heard by the writer of this programme-note as a schoolboy, served (despite the performance’s memorable ineptitude) as an indelible introduction to a masterpiece which, as the years pass, has come to seem greater and greater.

Berlioz himself regarded it, he said, as the equivalent of his beloved Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony - and not merely because it ended with a choral finale. But only one of the two works has an actual story to tell, and the way Berlioz tells it is what makes his Romeo and Juliet the masterpiece it is. Even in excerpt form, thanks to the composer’s use of the orchestra as an expressive commentator on the drama, the music rivets attention.

The love scene, third of the work’s seven movements, forms the heart of the matter, a rapt, haunting, extended adagio in which the orchestra conveys all the warmth, perfume, and hush of the Verona night. The music, more a meditation than a dialogue, is Berlioz’s masterly response to Shakespeare’s balcony scene, a profound confirmation of his belief that instrumental language was “richer, more varied, less restricted” - and certainly more potent - than any operatic love duet. Indeed, in the complete score, Berlioz relies on the voices, like the orchestra, to provide a commentary on the action.

The music starts atmospherically with an evocation of the distant voices of the Capulets leaving the ball. Thereafter the focus is entirely on the young lovers, Romeo via the sound of horn and cellos, Juliet via the strains of flute and cor anglais. The strands of theme sway softly in A major, growing sometimes more palpitating, returning at other times to a state of loving tranquillity. The music gleams and shimmers as magically as only Berlioz’s music can. Wagner, to his credit, adored Berlioz’s Romeo and Juliet, calling it the revelation of a new world of music, to which he replied quarter of a century later with Tristan and Isolde.

© Conrad Wilson