For most commentators, the Scène d’amour that constitutes the instrumental Adagio at the heart of Berlioz’s Roméo et Juliette is a faithful illustration and a scrupulous rendering of the dramatic narrative of the balcony scene in Act II, scene ii of Shakespeare’s play. Jacques Chailley, in the nineteen-seventies, was one of the first to present a strictly programmatic exegesis of this movement.

Berlioz according to Shakespeare

Chailley began on the basis of the information presented by the chorus in the Prologue, whose text forms an authentic literary “program” that is not presented apart from, but is rather integrated into, the musical fabric itself. As he has it:

On the basis of information provided by Berlioz, Chailley proposes a semantic interpretation of the movement that has the music describe in chronological order the actions of Shakespeare’s scene. The result is far from unpersuasive. More recently, Ian Kemp has undertaken to follow with even greater rigor and exactitude the path of Berlioz’s literary and dramatic sources—namely, the Garrick version of the text and the version played at the Odéon in 1827. Kemp systematically applies to all the instrumental movements of the symphony the kind of analysis earlier undertaken by Chailley. For the Scène d’amour, he connects Berlioz’s musical continuity, measure by measure, to the poetic dialogue. He synthesizes his findings in a highly-detailed comparative table. These two exegetical narratives lead in some quarters to enthusiastic acceptance and in others to categorical rejection. The latter results from a refusal to acknowledge that one of Berlioz’s most admirable symphonic works should be exclusively based upon an underlying verbal scenario, from a refusal, that is, to believe that a successful symphonic movement could have an architectural framework resting on an entirely extramusical foundation.