The Program
HECTOR BERLIOZ
Overture to Benvenuto Cellini
In the years 1836–1838, Berlioz poured heart and soul into composing his first
produced opera, Benvenuto Cellini. He
had brought the subject back with him from Italy, where he had gone as a winner
of the Prix de Rome, and he persuaded Léon de Wailly and Auguste Barbier to
write a libretto for him. At first the work was intended as an opéra-comique, which meant that it would
have spoken dialogue and a somewhat light tone; but the first libretto was
refused, and the authors recast it in more elevated form so that Berlioz could
submit it to the Paris Opéra.
Rehearsals proved a sore trial to the composer. Conductor François Antoine
Habeneck was openly unsympathetic, and many singers and members of the
orchestra made fun of the work, or at least held their opinions in reserve in
order not to contradict the conductor. Though some members of the orchestra
became openly enthusiastic about the music by the time of the premiere, this
only led Henri Duponchel, director of the Opéra, to refer to them as “our
ridiculous orchestra” for praising Berlioz. Some of the other orchestral
players, though, chose to play other music entirely during the performance in hopes of ingratiating
themselves with the management. The singers did not take the rehearsals
seriously either, and when Berlioz attempted to complain to Duponchel, he found
that the director did not deign to attend rehearsals.
Benvenuto Cellini was not a success
with the public. Berlioz wrote, “The overture was extravagantly applauded; the
rest was hissed with exemplary precision and energy.” The opera has never been
a standard repertory favorite, though
revivals in recent years have shown
that it is full of wonderfully varied and colorful music. Berlioz himself
reworked parts of the score into his RomanCarnival Overture five years
after the opera’s original failure, and that is what most of us know of Benvenuto Cellini. But the opera’s own
overture, too, is a splendid work, and rightly pleased the Parisian audience in
1838. The variety of music in the score might well have embarrassed Berlioz in
his choice of materials for an overture. As it is, the main Allegro theme is
newly invented. We hear a bit of it by way of rousing introduction before
moving to an extended Larghetto that presents the theme associated with the
Cardinal (pizzicato cellos and basses) followed by the theme of Harlequin’s
arietta. This is restated before the main section, Allegro deciso con impeto,
which is not only decisive and impetuous (as the tempo marking indicates) but
also full of clever cross-rhythms, wonderful details of orchestration, and
surprise entrances.
—Steven Ledbetter
© Boston Symphony Orchestra, Inc. All rights reserved.
MAURICE
RAVEL
Piano Concerto in G Major
At about the same time that Paul Wittgenstein, a concert pianist who had lost
his right arm during World War I, asked Ravel if he would write a concerto for
him, Ravel’s longtime interpreter Marguerite Long asked for a concerto for
herself. Thus, although he had written no piano music for a dozen years, he
found himself in 1930 writing two concertos more or less simultaneously. The
Concerto for the Left Hand turned out to be one of his most serious
compositions, but the G-Major Concerto, dedicated to and first performed by
Madame Long, falls into the delightful category of high-quality diversion.
Ravel’s favorite term of praise was divertissement
de luxe, and he succeeded in producing just such a piece with this
concerto.
On the occasion of the first Boston Symphony Orchestra performances in April
1932 (the US premiere), the program book stated that “this concerto was
intended for the Jubilee of the Boston Symphony Orchestra; but though, it is
said, Ravel had worked continuously at it for more than two years, he was not
satisfied.” In fact, as reported in the BSO’s 1938 program book when the
orchestra next performed the concerto, again with Jesús María Sanromá and Serge
Koussevitzky, Ravel had been asked to write a piece for the BSO’s 50th
anniversary and did speak of a piano concerto, but “the score was not
forthcoming from the meticulous and painstaking composer.”
The motoric high jinks of the first movement are set off by the cracking of a
whip, though they occasionally yield to
lyric contemplation. The second movement is a total contrast, hushed and calm,
with a tune widely regarded as one of the best melodies Ravel ever wrote. The
effort cost him dearly, and it may have been here that he first realized that
his powers of composition were failing; they broke down completely in 1932,
when the shock of an automobile collision brought on a nervous breakdown, and
he found himself thereafter incapable of sustained work. For this concerto, he
found it necessary to write the Adagio assai one or two measures at a
time. The final Presto brings back the rushing motor rhythms of the opening,
and both movements now and then bear witness that Ravel had traveled in America
and become acquainted with jazz and recent popular music. He also met George
Gershwin and told him that he thought highly of his Rhapsody in Blue; perhaps it is a reminiscence of that score that
can be heard in some of the “blue” passages here and there.
—Steven Ledbetter
© Boston Symphony Orchestra, Inc. All rights reserved.
HECTOR BERLIOZ
Symphonie fantastique, Episode from
the life of an artist, Op. 14
On
December 9, 1832—two years after its first performance, and as vividly
recounted in his own Memoirs—Hector
Berlioz won the heart of his beloved Harriet Smithson, whom he had never met,
with a concert that included the Symphonie
fantastique, for which she had unknowingly served as inspiration when the
composer fell hopelessly in love with her some years before. The two met the
next day and were married on the following October 4. (The unfortunate but true
conclusion to this seemingly happy tale is that the two were formally separated
in 1844.)
Berlioz saw the Irish actress for the first time on September 11, 1827, when
she played Ophelia in Hamlet with a troupe of English actors visiting Paris. By the time of
her departure from Paris in 1829, Berlioz had made himself known to her through
letters, but they did not meet. By February 6, 1830, he had hoped to begin his
“Episode from the life of an artist,” a symphony reflecting the ardor of his
“infernal passion,” but his creative capabilities remained paralyzed until that
April, when gossip (later discredited) linking Harriet with her manager
provided the impetus for him to conceive a program that ended with the transformation of her previously unsullied image
into a participant in the infernal witches’ sabbath whose depiction makes up
the last movement of the Symphonie
fantastique.
Though Berlioz ultimately came to feel that the titles of the five
individual movements—Reveries, passions; A ball; Scene in the country; March to
the scaffold; Dream of a witches’ sabbath—spoke well enough for themselves, he
originally specified that his own detailed program be distributed to the
audience at the first performance. For present purposes, it is worth quoting
from that program’s opening paragraph, with its reference to the symphony’s
principal musical theme:
A young musician of morbidly sensitive temperament and fiery imagination
poisons himself with opium in a fit of lovesick despair. The dose of the
narcotic, too weak to kill him, plunges him into a deep slumber accompanied by
the strangest visions, during which his sensations, his emotions, his memories
are transformed in his sick mind into musical thoughts and images. The loved
one herself has become a melody to him, an idée
fixe as it were, that he encounters and hears everywhere.
The idée
fixe, as much a psychological fixation as a musical one, is introduced in
the violins and flute at the start of the first movement’s Allegro section. Its
appearance “everywhere” in the course of the symphony includes a ball in the
midst of a brilliant party; during a quiet summer evening in the country (where
it appears against a background texture of agitated strings, leading to a
dramatic outburst before the restoration of calm); in the artist’s last
thoughts before he is executed, in a dream, for the murder of his beloved (at
the end of the March to the scaffold); and during his posthumous participation
in a wild witches’ sabbath, following his execution, at which the melody
representing his beloved appears, grotesquely transformed, to join a “devilish
orgy” whose diabolically frenzied climax combines the Dies irae from the Mass for the Dead with the witches’ round dance.
Today, more than 180 years after its first performance, it is easy to
forget that when the Symphonie
fantastique was new, Beethoven’s symphonies had just recently reached
France, Beethoven himself having died only in 1827. With its much more specific
programmatic intent, Berlioz’s work is already a far cry even from Beethoven’s
own “Pastoral” Symphony of 1808. David Cairns has written that “Berlioz in the ‘Fantastic’ symphony was speaking a new language:
not only a new language of orchestral sound ... but also a new language
of feeling.”
Countless aspects of this score reflect Berlioz’s individual musical style,
among them his rhythmically flexible, characteristically long-spun melodies, of which the idée fixe is a prime example; the quick juxtaposition of
contrasting harmonies, as in the rapid-fire chords at the end of the March; the
telling and often novel use of particular instruments, whether the harps
at the Ball, the unaccompanied English horn in dialogue with the offstage oboe
at the start of the Scene in the country, or the quick tapping of bows on
strings to suggest the dancing skeletons of the witches’ sabbath; and his
precise concern with dynamic markings. And all of this becomes even more
striking when one considers that the Symphonie
fantastique is the composer’s earliest big orchestral work, composed when
he was not yet 30, and that the great, mature works—Roméo et Juliette, The
Damnation of Faust, the operas Les
Troyens and Béatrice et Bénédict
among them—would follow only years and decades later.
—Marc Mandel
© Boston Symphony Orchestra, Inc. All rights reserved.