Hector Berlioz: Opera Opinions

ALTHOUGH only four works of Berlioz fall under the category of opera (three, if one excludes his Faustian légende dramatique, which nevertheless gets staged or semi-staged almost as often as not), the lyric theater played a major force throughout his career as composer, conductor, and critic. Not long after he arrived in Paris as a young student in the 1820s he began to frequent the opera house, witnessing productions of the works of Spontini and Gluck, to name but two of the biggest influences on his mature operatic style ("I could conceive of nothing more grand, sublime, or true than the works of those great composers," he writes in chapter 14 of his Memoirs). Some of his earliest compositional efforts were operatic in nature and scope: the overture to Les francs-juges, the only surviving remnant of a completed but unperformed first opera whose score ended up discarded or recycled, was in fact his first published orchestral work. When the Prix de Rome took him to Italy in 1831, exposure to the Italian bel canto world of Rossini, Bellini, and Donizetti would have both a positive and a negative impact on the formation of his operatic taste. After he returned to Paris, his primary goal of writing for the capital's principal lyric stage became a long struggle, culminating in the 1838 premiere of his Benvenuto Cellini, the only one of his stage works to be mounted by the Opéra during his lifetime; unfortunately the score's musical and dramatic challenges proved detrimental to the work, which was shelved after only four unsuccessful performances, remaining unheard in Paris until after the turn of the century. The unconventional nature of his other major vocal/dramatic works (the "dramatic legend" La damnation de Faust, the grand-scale Les Troyens, and the opéra comique Béatrice et Bénédict) prevented Berlioz from being accepted into the ranks of the standard French repertory composers of the day, such as Meyerbeer, Halévy, Auber, and Gounod. During his lifetime his operatic reputation was founded mainly on his activity as a conductor and interpreter/arranger of classic scores, such as Weber's Der Freischütz or Gluck's Orphée et Eurydice and Iphigénie en Tauride. Certainly a major portion of his artistic life—as composer, conductor, musicologist, and critic—was devoted to opera, and his frequent exposure to the genre is reflected in his voluminous literary output. What follows is but a random sampling of the many opinions on opera and opera composers that one finds in the published writings of Berlioz. For more detailed source data concerning the works cited herein, see Joe Law's "Selected Bibliography of English-Language Works about Berlioz" elsewhere in this issue of The Opera Quarterly.—Ed.

On Bellini's I Capuleti e i Montecchi

Bitter disappointment! The opera contained no Capulets' ball, no 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 wasted opportunity. Yet this wretched libretto carved out of Shakespeare's great play is the work of a distinguished poet, Felice Romani; such is the dominance of mediocre ideas and shoddy traditions on the Italian operatic stage.

The composer has, however, contrived at one important point to extract something memorable. It comes at the conclusion of an act, when the lovers, dragged apart by their infuriated parents, tear themselves free for an instant and rush into each other's arms with the cry, "We shall meet again in heaven." Bellini has set this passage to a phrase of wonderful élan and intensity, delivered by the two characters in unison. The two voices singing as one, as though in perfect union, give the melody an extraordinary force and bold impetus; and whether it was the context in which...