Teacher's Guide Cambridge Pre-U MUSIC Available for teaching ...

20
Cambridge Pre-U Teacher Guide
Berlioz’s sense of musical drama was largely channelled into a succession of symphonic or hybrid
works: the quasi-autobiographical Symphonie fantastique (1830), Harold en Italie (1834), Roméo et
Juliette (1839), La Damnation de Faust (1846) and L’Enfance du Christ (1854). In the last three of these,
especially, Berlioz incorporated overtly theatrical gestures into works designed for the concert hall,
with solo voices representing individual protagonists in the drama.
In spite of his difficulties with the Parisian operatic establishment, Berlioz completed five true operas.
The first, Estelle et Némorin (1823), does not survive. The second, Les Francs-juges (1826, revised
1829 and 1833), was never performed and Berlioz abandoned it; the overture is sometimes played as
a concert piece, and some other extracts were later included in other works. Benvenuto Cellini was
first conceived as an opéra-comique with spoken dialogue; a second version with recitatives was
accepted for performance at the Opéra in 1838, but proved a failure. Berlioz revised it again in 1852
for performances given by Liszt in Weimar, and this version remained current for more than a century.
The original version with spoken dialogue was revived at Covent Garden in 1966, and this is the
version most often performed since then.
Berlioz abandoned opera for some years after the failure of Benvenuto Cellini in 1838. It was not
until 1856 that he began work on a large-scale opera in five acts based on Virgil’s Aeneid. After two
years’ concentrated work, he completed both the libretto and the music of Les Troyens, revising
and adding to it over the next five years or so. It was first refused by the Opéra, then rather hastily
accepted after the failure of Wagner’s Tannhäuser in 1861. The Opéra, however, went back on this
agreement in 1863, so Berlioz turned instead to the Théâtre Lyrique, an independent theatre with more
restricted resources than the Opéra. At the insistence of the management of the Théâtre Lyrique,
Berlioz split the opera into two parts, La Prise de Troie (Acts I and II of the original) and Les Troyens à
Carthage (Acts III, IV and V). In the end, only the second part was performed, with extensive cuts. The
entire work in its original form, albeit with a few cuts, was not heard until it was performed at Covent
Garden in 1957. The range and intensity of Les Troyens is little short of astonishing, encompassing
moments of intimate lyricism and scenes of grand spectacle. It owes something to sources as diverse
as Gluck’s classical restraint, Spontini’s elevated seriousness and Meyerbeer’s sense of theatre,
combined with a human warmth and a sympathy for individual characters that mark it out as Berlioz’s
most impressive achievement and as one of the high points of all Romantic opera.
Berlioz’s last opera was also his last major work – the brief, delicate opéra-comique, Béatrice et
Bénédict (1862). It was composed for the opening of a new opera house in the German spa town of
Baden-Baden, and is loosely based on Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing. This is as different
from Les Troyens as it is possible to imagine: short and witty, generally light in mood and full of an
exuberant joie-de-vivre.
Early in his career, Charles Gounod (1818–1893) became quite successful as a composer of opera. His
Sapho (1851) was produced at the Opéra and led to a second commission from the same company,
La Nonne sanglante (1854), with a libretto by Scribe. His next two operas proved more enduring,
however, and both were composed for the Théâtre Lyrique. They were Le Médecin malgré lui (1858),
an adaptation of Molière’s play, and especially Faust (1859), which proved so popular that it was
taken up by the Opéra in 1869, when Gounod duly added the ballet music. Other commissions from
both the Théâtre Lyrique and the Opéra followed, the most significant of which was Roméo et Juliette
(1867). Gounod moved to England after the Franco-Prussian war of 1870; when he returned to France
he completed four more operas, but none of them achieved the success of his earlier works.
www.cie.org.uk/cambridgepreu