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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 1982
Béatrice et Bénédict is the last work of a great romantic. Yet, like Verdi's Falstaff with which it is tempting to make comparisons, it is a neo-classical comic opera. With both composers surprise at this last turn in their careers-is tempered by knowledge of admirable comedy in earlier operas (such as Un ballo in maschera and Benvenuto Cellini); and Berlioz's overt nec-classicism is perhaps, after Les troyens, hardly surprising at all. What is remarkable is that Béatrice et Bénédict is Berlioz's only Shakespearean opera, and one of only two full-length works based on the poet he idolized for more than forty years. It is not the first time, however, that Berlioz had dealt with Shakespeare's comedies. Although his first introduction to Shakespeare, and his profoundest experience of him in the theatre, concerned Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet, he was also inspired by plays he had only read, and his first Shakespearean composition was the fantasy-overture The Tempest (1830), followed by the overture King Lear (1831). Lines from The Merchant of Venice appear in Les troyens (no. 37). Berlioz almost certainly never saw Much Ado About Nothing, but as early as 1833 he asked a friend to lend him a copy, as he planned ‘a very merry Italian opera’ on the subject. The idea resurfaced in 1852. A full scenario survives from that period, but it bears no relation to the opera which reached the stage at Baden in 1862 beyond the two principal characters. The opera reached its final form in 1863, just thirty years after its conception; after the first performances Berlioz added two new numbers, of which the first, the Trio no. 11, is his last substantial composition, his swan-song.
1 ‘Je vais faire un opera italien fort gai’; Berlioz hoped for production at the Théâtre italien. Nothing further is heard of the project after two letters of January 1833. See Berlioz, Hector, Correspondance générale, ii (Paris, 1975), 68–9.Google Scholar
2 The scenario is reproduced in Berlioz, Béatria et Bénédics, ed. Hugh Macdonald, New Berliox Edition, 3 (Kassel, 1980), 299–300. In further references this edition appears as NBE 3.Google Scholar
3 The autograph (F-Pc MS 1513) is the sole complete musical source; it is unproblematical by Berlioz's standards. There are also a vocal score published under Berlioz's direction, and manuscript libretti with autograph revisions. See NBE 3, 285.Google Scholar
4 In response to criticism Berlioz claimed that the dialogue is taken ‘almost word for word from Shakespeare’. This is somewhat disingenuous; even where Shakespeare's characters are concerned some dialogue is new, and the scenes closest to the play arc severely pruned. Mémoires de Hector Berlioz (Paris, 1870), Postface; The Memoirs of Hector Berlioz, trans, and ed. David Cairns (London, 1969), 494.Google Scholar
5 Correspondance inédite de Hector Berlioz. (Paris, 1879), 270; a fuller citation, NBE 3, viii.Google Scholar
6 ‘Le programme zuivant doit done être considéré comme le texte parlé d'un Opera, servant à amener des morceaux de musique, dont il motive le caractère et l'expiession’. See Berlioz: Fantastic Symphony, ed. Edward T. Cone, Norton Critical Scores (London, 1971), 20–21.Google Scholar
7 Revue et gazette musicale, 16 September 1851, reprinted in Hector Berlioz, Les soirées de l'orchestre (Paris, 1852), second epilogue (life of Méhul).Google Scholar
8 Shakespeare's 2, i (masked ball); 4, i (interrupted marriage); 5, iii (act of penance in the church, clearly meant for musical setting within the play). There is a long history to the overshadowing of the Hero-Don John affair by Beatrice and Benedick; some very early references are to the play of ‘Benedicke and Betteris’, and it is they who drew the audience. In the eighteenth century Garrick took the part of Benedick rather than Claudio or Pedro. The rehabilitation of the main plot is a twentieth-century critical phenomenon. See the introductions to modern editions of the play; those consulted include Much Ado About Nothing, ed. R. A. Foakes, The New Penguin Shakespeare (Harmondsworth, 1968); Ibid., ed. A. R. Humphrey, The Arden Shakespeare (London, 1981).Google Scholar
9 The scenario is in Berlioz's hand but was intended to be made into a libretto by Legouvé, an exception to Berlioz's practice in later life of writing his own texts. See NBE 3, viii. One residue of Shakespeare is the overhearing by Benedick of a serenade to Beatrice, a trick to arouse him to action through jealousy.Google Scholar
10 Ariosto, Orlando furioso, Canto 5. Various versions were available in English in the 1590s; the play can be dated to 1599 or 1600. See Charles T. Prouty, The Sources of ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ (Yale University Press, New Haven, 1950).Google Scholar
11 ‘Le sujet de cet opera [Ariodant] est à peu près le même que celui de Montano et Stéphanie de Berton. … Ils sont l'un et l'autre empruntés à une tragi-comédie de ce poëte anglais, Shakespeare, … qui a pour titre: Much ado about nothing.’ Cited from Berlioz, Les soirées de l'orchestre (3rd edition (Paris, 1871), 397).Google Scholar
12 All Shakespeare's comic characters — the title roles, Dogberry, Verges, Margaret — are involved with the near-tragic main plot. For recent critical assessments of the integrity of the play see Paul and Miriam Mueschke, ‘Illusion and Metamorphosis’, in Shakespeare: ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ and ‘As You Like It’: a Casebook, ed. John Russell Brown (London, 1979), 130–148; Prouty, op. cit.; the prefaces to recent editions (see note 7).Google Scholar
13 Oeuvres computes de Shakespeare, traduction nouvelle par Benjamin Laroche (Paris, 1839); the edition consulted is the third (Paris, 1866).Google Scholar
14 Le dépit de la bergère was possibly published as early as 1819. See Macdonald, Hugh, ‘Berlioz's Self-Borrowings’, Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association, xcii (1965–6), 28.Google Scholar
15 Briefe von Hector Berlioz, an die Fürsten Carolyne Sayn-Wittgenstein, ed. La Mara (Leipzig, 1903), 123 (letter of 22 July 1862, cited more fully in NBE 3, be).Google Scholar
16 The rhythm of the opening of the Overture U analysed in Philip Friedheim, ‘Berlioz and Rhythm’, The Music Review, xxxvii (1976); see also Julian Rushton, The Musical Language of Berlioz (Cambridge, 1983), 136–7.Google Scholar
17 See NBE 3, xi, 289, and 308–12.Google Scholar
18 Conspicuous 9/8 bars breaking the duple pattern are formed by bars 17–19, 24–26, and 29–31 of the Trio; bars 81–3 of the Trio; and bars 47–9 and 61–3 of the Rondo. See Rushton, loc.cit.Google Scholar
19 Operas well known to Berlioz in which recitative appear! at an analogous point — a critical moment in the heroine's role — include Die Entführung and Fidelio. The practice goes back in the French tradition nearly a century before Béatrice et Bénédict to Philidor's Tom Jones (1765).Google Scholar
20 A veiled quotation is in Aeneas's Air, no. 41 (bars 119–21); an overt quotation is in Dido's Air, no. 48 (bars 27–30).Google Scholar
21 ‘His loveliest ideas are almost always stated only once, as if in passing’. Robert Schumann, ‘A Symphony by Berlioz’, in Berlioz: Fantastic Symphony, ed. Edward T. Cone, Norton Critical Scores (London, 1971), 236.Google Scholar