Opéra Fantastique > Opera News > The Met Opera Guild

Copyright © OPERA NEWS 2009

If you didn't know Hector Berlioz's operas but did know his leading non-operatic works — the Symphonie Fantastique, of course, or the gigantic Roméo et Juliette symphony, or the even more gigantic Requiem, or La Damnation de Faust, the oratorio that just cries out to be staged — you'd expect the operas to be stupendous. I know I would. I know I'd expect it just from knowing La Damnation, which — with one scene sweeping by, and then another, all of them gripping — could hardly be more dramatic. Very few operas can equal it.

And in fact Berlioz is stupendously dramatic, stupendously theatrical, in nearly everything he wrote. Just look at the Symphonie Fantastique, his most performed and most recorded piece. It's laid out as a more or less standard orchestral symphony, but it also unfolds as the drug-addled dream of a Romantic artist. (Yes, literally drug-addled: Berlioz said so himself, specifying that the artist had been smoking opium, the drug of choice of nineteenth-century Romantics.) This artist — who easily might be Berlioz himself — loves a woman who's less than reliable. He thinks he kills her, and in his dream he's guillotined for his crime. He thinks he sees her dancing at a demonic orgy. None of this unfurls in story fashion, one detail at a time. Instead it's presented as a series of tableaux. But that doesn't make the work any less theatrical or any less vivid. There's even a famous moment of what we might call shock theater, when, at the guillotine, we hear the hero's head fall off.

The Requiem is overwhelming drama, with the last trumpet rendered by four separate brass ensembles, exploding from the four corners of the concert stage — and spurred on, as if that weren't enough, by no fewer than ten convulsive timpanists. As I listen to the piece again, after not hearing it for decades, what strikes me even more than that last trumpet is the uneasiness before the catastrophe, the sense of fear that creeps into the music, as if the world had fallen into doubt and shadow just before the end. And then there's every moment of the love scene in Roméo et Juliette, where, purely by means of the orchestra, Berlioz depicts an intimate encounter as searing and detailed as anything in opera. He seems to render every sigh and every kiss, every doubt and every hesitation, every shudder in the nighttime air.

Robert Lloyd (Narbal), Elena Zaremba (Anna), Lorraine Hunt Lieberson (Didon) and Matthew Polenzani (Iopas) in Francesca Zambello's 2003 Metropolitan Opera production of Les Troyens
© Beatriz Schiller 2008

How, then, can his operas be so dicey? He wrote three of them, and two — Béatrice et Bénédict and Benvenuto Cellini — mostly don't work. While the third, Les Troyens, is one of the masterworks of the repertoire (even if it's too long and demanding to be produced very often), it succeeds because of traits that really aren't operatic. So what's the problem? Why aren't Berlioz's operas more successful?

We can start to find an answer by looking hard at Roméo et Juliette, which on one hand is a symphony — the love scene is its slow movement — and on the other is a drama, telling Shakespeare's story (though not without some nineteenth-century adaptations, inconceivable in our time but standard then). So there's a chorus and three vocal soloists — a tenor and contralto to introduce the story and a bass to sing Friar Laurence during a long finale, in which he makes peace between the Capulets and Montagues.

What's astounding here is the way the drama is constructed. It's just about the opposite of opera. The vocal music largely deals with plot details and other outside circumstances, while the emotional moments — such as the love scene, or the deaths of Roméo and Juliette — happen only in the orchestra. From an operatic point of view, that's backwards, which is not to say it doesn't work. The orchestra, we might decide, says everything that might be too powerful for words.

But still there's opera in the piece. Roméo's meditation at Juliette's tomb, just before he kills himself, is a bel canto aria — complete with arpeggio accompaniment — that happens to use an English horn as soloist, rather than a voice. And the first purely instrumental movement in the symphony, called "Roméo Seul" (Romeo Alone), is an entire bel canto scena, crowned by a cabaletta. Cabalettas were the simple, surging pieces that brought nearly every scene in every bel canto opera to a rousing end, and which were constructed with a built-in repeat, to make them easier to grasp and remember. They weren't highbrow music, so it might seem odd — though very sweet — to find Berlioz, so famous as a radical and innovator, writing one without a hint of irony. It's true he complicates the form (weaving a melody from an earlier part of the scene into the cabaletta's climax), yet even so, a cabaletta is a cabaletta. And he wrote them in his operas, too — not in every scene (and not much in Les Troyens), but often. So that's an unexpected weakness in his operatic writing: he becomes oddly conventional, even though his strongest works, in other genres, were radically new.

But what's problematic in Roméo et Juliette is the finale, which might have crowned the piece, as the vocal finale does in Beethoven's Ninth. Instead, it's an anticlimax. We hear far too much from poor Friar Laurence, and the peace between the Capulets and Montagues just isn't gripping, or certainly it isn't compared to the doomed love of Roméo and Juliette. So Berlioz ends what's otherwise a masterwork with fifteen minutes of, quite frankly, boredom, and that shows us something else that causes problems in his operas: Berlioz doesn't always know which parts of the drama he should emphasize.

Sandra Piques Eddy (Béatrice) and Joseph Kaiser (Bénédict) in Nicola Raab's 2007 staging of Béatrice et Bénédict at Chicago Opera Theater
© Liz Lauren 2008

Which brings us to the operas. We might start with Béatrice et Bénédict, another Shakespeare adaptation, and one that should be very promising, since it's taken from a brainy comedy, Much Ado About Nothing, a play that's full of zest and verbal zingers — just the text, one might conclude, for a brainy, unconventional composer. But Berlioz blows it. The big failures in the work are the title characters, Beatrice and Benedick (to give them the names they have in Shakespeare), who plainly are in love (everybody else can see it) but won't admit it and instead spend every moment savaging each other verbally. In the opera, they simply aren't funny — and, worse, they're dull. Benedick sings three big pieces in Act I — a duet with Beatrice, a trio with two friends, and an aria — and none of them is memorable. The dominant music in the act goes to the ingenue soprano, Hero, who's in love with Benedick's friend Claudio and sings a lengthy aria (complete with cabaletta) and later on a long duet with her lady in waiting. The duet — whatever other problems Béatrice et Bénédict may have — is one of the most wistful, tender, beautiful-in-twilight pieces that you'll hear in any opera, but it skews the emphasis away from Beatrice and Benedick, so even its strength becomes a weakness. It undermines the drama. (This might not be a problem if Berlioz had adapted Shakespeare faithfully. In Much Ado, Hero is accused falsely of infidelity, and this propels the plot, neatly forcing Beatrice and Benedick to help restore her reputation, thus bringing them together at the end. Berlioz cuts this out, but if he hadn't, his initial emphasis on Hero might make sense. And he'd also give more substance to Beatrice and Benedick, who — as the opera stands — come together only in a feeble piece of spoken dialogue, thus further weakening the drama.)



Achim Freyer’s 2003 production of La Damnation de Faust at Los Angeles Opera, with Samuel Ramey (Méphistophélès), Paul Groves (Faust) and Denyce Graves (Marguerite) © Robert Millard 2008

Benvenuto Cellini is a stronger piece. It starts with comedy that's truly operatic, as an aged father scrambles to get ready for an important meeting while also trying to keep his daughter more or less locked up. When Cellini, the tenor lead, appears, we hear a love duet that's both theatrical and ravishing, music that just about screams, "Put me on the stage!"

Then everything unravels. Cellini and Teresa, his beloved — who of course is the locked-up daughter from the first scene — are going to elope, and Cellini makes some plans. He explains them in a cabaletta, which — with Teresa echoing his plans and a hidden rival muttering — becomes a trio, very long and wildly intricate. It's just too much, and when the repeat comes, as mandated by standard operatic form — and especially when Cellini introduces it by asking, "Should I repeat the time and place we're going to meet?" — I always want to cry out, "No, we've heard enough!"

Act II ends wonderfully, with the best operatic music Berlioz ever wrote — a finale that depicts a carnival in Rome (it's the source of Berlioz's much more famous Roman Carnival Overture) and does this with such realism, with such a sense of crowds swirling out of anyone's control, that it sweeps me away. But then Act III falls apart. The historical Cellini was the leading goldsmith of the Renaissance, and Berlioz wants to show his triumph as an artist — which, since Berlioz was an artist himself, you'd think he could identify with. Yet somehow he doesn't rise to the occasion. He has the Pope challenge Cellini to finish a major artwork, and while the Pope's music is unforgettable — rich, dark and strangely sensitive — Cellini's music (when he creates the work the Pope demands from him) isn't notable at all. So Cellini never really comes to life as an artist, and the premise of the opera dies.

And now for Les Troyens — a masterpiece that works, as I've said, in non-operatic ways. It tells two stories. First there's the story of the fall of Troy, conquered by the Greeks in the Trojan War. Then comes the story of Énée (Aeneas), the surviving Trojan hero, who sails to Carthage and falls in love with Didon (Dido), the Carthaginian queen, then leaves her to die while he fulfills his destiny, which is to sail to Italy and found what will become the Roman empire. Heady stuff, and not just because Berlioz loved Greek and Roman literature. It hits him, I might guess, with three symbols for the kind of romantic artist that he felt he was: Cassandre (Cassandra), the Trojan prophetess whom nobody believes, might represent the artist who's rejected by society; Didon, the abandoned queen, becomes the artist whom a fickle audience abandons; Énée, the hero with a destiny, becomes an artist with a mission.

What drives Les Troyens is the same thing that drives the drama in Berlioz's symphonies and oratorios — tableaux arranged in an order that illustrates a story, without quite telling it in any detail. That's how the best parts of Les Troyens proceed. When Dido and Aeneas fall in love, we don't see (or hear) them find each other in a love duet. Instead, they move with stylized steps.

First we see them sheltering together from lightning, rain and hail, without singing a single note, during an orchestral piece, the famous "Royal Hunt and Storm." Then we hear others say that they're in love. Then we see them watching a Carthaginian ceremony (long, with lots of dancing). Then Dido asks Aeneas to finish a story he's evidently started telling earlier, about the fall of Troy. This makes them interact for one short moment, but then they vanish in a glorious septet about the falling veils of night, which evaporates into an even more glorious (but not at all theatrical) duet about infinite ecstasy, which they sing while disappearing from the stage. They're lovers now, of course — the music tells us that — but we don't really see them get there. The setup, apart from Aeneas's unhappy story, unfolds like an oratorio, and not like opera.

Finally we get to La Damnation de Faust, which is an oratorio but of course has developed a second life onstage. It's a triumph, musically and dramatically. When it starts, with a simple melody played by unaccompanied violins, it's as if the piece had no beginning, as if the melody had been playing before the music started. This is radical but feels authoritative, as if the piece couldn't start any other way. Faust very soon starts singing, and the drama has been launched, but not the way it would be in opera, at least in Berlioz's time. Any proper opera in the nineteenth century would have to have an introduction, something to set the scene — perhaps an overture, as Benvenuto Cellini has, or an overture plus opening chorus, as in Béatrice et Bénédict. To be fair, Beatrice makes fun of the opening chorus, but it's not much of a joke, and the chorus still registers as the kind of standard operatic procedure that Berlioz doesn't bother with in Faust. He moves immediately to higher ground.

As in Troyens, there's very little music in conventional operatic forms. Faust and the Devil have two recitatives, though in a way these are anti-operatic, since they take the place of what might otherwise be long duets. Faust and Marguerite, his doomed and helpless lover, have a love scene, complete (once more) with cabaletta, but any search for opera in this work pretty much ends there. Marguerite has an aria, a famous one, "D'amour, l'ardente flamme," which she sings when — as we eventually learn — Faust has abandoned her. But although it sounds like opera — offering even some of the coloratura that Hero sings in Béatrice and Teresa sings in Benvenuto Cellini — it doesn't function like an operatic aria. We only gradually catch on that Marguerite has been abandoned, which means that there's no story leading up to this, and that the aria stands somehow out of time. It's really a tableau, placed just before tableaux that show us Faust and the Devil galloping to save Marguerite, then devils roaring, then Marguerite being welcomed into heaven.

Nothing connects these scenes. They simply happen, which is also how the start of the work unfolds. Faust is in a field at sunrise. Then peasants sing. Then, as the scene quickly shifts to another place, an army marches. All these moments show different sides of life to Faust. He then sits despairing in his study. "Je souffre!" (I'm suffering!), he cries, but this operatic outburst is the exception that proves the rule. It's not convincing, in the context of this piece, because it's too simple and too conventional; the true despair is in the orchestra. And when distant voices renew Faust's faith by singing of the Resurrection, it's the voices that convince me, not anything that Faust sings in response.

To put this differently, it's the tableaux that come alive. Faust, operatic tenor though he is, only reacts to them. This sounds entirely undramatic but in fact contains the seeds of La Damnation's reinvention as a stage piece. The tableaux, energized by music, have dramatic force and can be visualized. Put Faust and the Devil on their horses, let the demons scream, show us the glory of the heavens opening for Marguerite — and we'll never stop to ask how the drama happens. We'll just surrender to it.

GREG SANDOW is an opera composer and consultant who's also well known for his writings on the future of classical music.

Send feedback to OPERA NEWS.