Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Note to the Reader
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction: Berlioz in the Aftermath of the Bicentenary
- Part One Aesthetic Issues
- Part Two In Fiction and Fact
- Part Three Criticizing and Criticized
- Part Four The “Dramatic Symphony”
- Part Five In Foreign Lands
- Part Six An Artist’s Life
- Contributors
- Index
- Eastman Studies in Music
- Miscellaneous Endmatter
Chapter Seven - Berlioz’s Lost Roméo et Juliette
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 March 2023
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Note to the Reader
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction: Berlioz in the Aftermath of the Bicentenary
- Part One Aesthetic Issues
- Part Two In Fiction and Fact
- Part Three Criticizing and Criticized
- Part Four The “Dramatic Symphony”
- Part Five In Foreign Lands
- Part Six An Artist’s Life
- Contributors
- Index
- Eastman Studies in Music
- Miscellaneous Endmatter
Summary
If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.
—Francis BaconBerlioz’s third symphony Roméo et Juliette was composed in 1839 in response to a gift of twenty thousand francs from Paganini, to whom the work was dedicated. It has always been classed among the handful of his finest works, along with La Damnation de Faust and Les Troyens, and Berlioz himself retained a special affection for it to the end of his life. As part of the accepted history of the work it is well known that when he sat down to compose in the early months of 1839 this was not the first time he had contemplated music for Shakespeare’s play; in any case it was his usual practice to allow projects to mature slowly in his mind before taking their eventual form. This is certainly true of the Requiem, which grew out of several large-scale plans that he had been talking about for some years, and of La Damnation de Faust, which is a masterly expansion of the Huit Scènes de Faust composed seventeen years earlier. Most of his larger works have a prehistory threading back through his life.
In the case of Roméo et Juliette the prehistory can be traced in the reports of two of Berlioz’s collaborators with whom he shared confidences about earlier plans and in one memory from his own pen. The first is by Émile Deschamps, who wrote the verses for the 1839 Roméo et Juliette. Writing of his early friendship with the composer Deschamps recalled:
It was at that moment that Monsieur Hector Berlioz told me about his plan for a dramatic symphony on Roméo et Juliette. Shakespeare fever was all the rage and I went along with it. I was delighted by this new homage to my divine poet and to collaborate with a great artist. We worked out the plan of this musical and poetic work; melodies and verses came to us in profusion, and the symphony appeared … ten years later.
This reminiscence appeared in 1844, accompanying a publication of Deschamps’s translations of Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet. The time-lapse, ten years, sounds a little approximate, so it would be rash to give any date to their earlier conversations.
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- BerliozScenes from the Life and Work, pp. 125 - 137Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2008
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