BERLIOZ Roméo Et Juliette
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SAN FRANCISCO SYMPHONY MICHAEL TILSON THOMAS BERLIOZ Roméo et Juliette Sasha Cooke Nicholas Phan Luca Pisaroni SFS Chorus © San Francisco Symphony, 2018 SAN FRANCISCO SYMPHONY MICHAEL TILSON THOMAS music director and conductor Sasha Cooke mezzo-soprano San Francisco Symphony Chorus Nicholas Phan tenor Ragnar Bohlin chorus director Luca Pisaroni bass-baritone HECTOR BERLIOZ (1803-1869) Roméo et Juliette Opus 17 (1839/1846) Part 1 I. Introduction and Prologue 19:44 Part 2 II. Romeo Alone—Festivity at the Capulets’ 13:20 III. The Capulets’ Garden—Love Scene 18:23 IV. Scherzo: Queen Mab 08:40 Part 3 I. Second Prologue—Juliet’s Funeral Cortege 10:31 II. Romeo in the Tomb of the Capulets 07:47 III. Finale: Brawl between the Capulets and the Montagues— 01:24 IV. —Friar Laurence’s Recitative and Aria— 11:54 V. —Oath of Reconciliation 05:13 Producer: Jack Vad Engineering Support: Greg Moore, Gus Pollek, Dann Thompson, Denise Woodward Post-Production: Mark Willsher I Mastering: Gus Skinas Cover Photo: Onfokus / Getty Images I Booklet Photos: Cory Weaver, Kristen Loken, Stefan Cohen All editorial materials ©2018 San Francisco Symphony. All rights reserved. San Francisco Symphony, Davies Symphony Hall, San Francisco, CA 94102 [email protected] 2 BERLIOZ © San Francisco Symphony, 2018 BERLIOZ Roméo et Juliette Dramatic Symphony, Opus 17 THE BACKSTORY That Hector Berlioz (1803- on his taste. Depictions of Italian history, art, were interfused, each intensifying the other,” 1869) was a genius there can be no doubt, and landscape would surface often in his music wrote the composer in his Memoirs. (Despite the though genius does not always ensure a calm during ensuing decades, as witness such works fact that he spoke no English and she no French, passage through life. His father was a physician as the “dramatic symphony” Roméo et Juliette they would finally marry in 1833. It would be an in a town not far from Grenoble; and since the (1839/1846) heard here, as well as his symphony unhappy union, and after they separated in the father assumed that his son would follow in the Harold in Italy and the operas Benvenuto Cellini early 1840s, Smithson declined into alcoholism. same profession, the son’s musical inclinations (inspired by the autobiography of the sixteenth- She died in 1854.) were largely ignored. He was sent to Paris to century Italian sculptor, goldsmith, and One of Berlioz’s admirers was the attend medical school, strongly disliked the musician), Les Troyens (1856-58, renowned violinist Niccolò Paganini. Impressed experience, and took advantage of being in the after Virgil’s Aeneid, chronicling events leading by Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique, he approached big city by enrolling in private musical studies to the founding of Rome), and Béatrice et the composer in 1834 to commission a concerto and, beginning in 1826, the composition Bénédict (1860-62, after Shakespeare’s Much Ado with which he could show off his newly acquired curriculum at the Paris Conservatory. The seal About Nothing, which is set in Italy). Stradivarius viola. The resulting work, Harold of approval for all Conservatory composition Berlioz idolized the works of Shakespeare, en Italie, was not quite what Paganini had in students was the Prix de Rome, and in 1830, which the Romantics viewed as reflecting their mind, and he declined to perform it; but when in his fourth consecutive attempt, Berlioz was own esthetics of highly personalized expression. he finally heard the piece, in 1838, he was so finally honored with that prize. Apart from Berlioz first encounteredRomeo and Juliet in the moved that he presented Berlioz a gift of 20,000 providing a measure of recognition for his skills theater in an eighteenth-century adaptation by francs. Suddenly Berlioz enjoyed a degree of and a welcome source of income, the award David Garrick. That was in September 1827, financial security, and he spent most of the year included a residency in Italy, a nation whose at the Paris Odéon. The troupe performed in 1839 reinterpreting Shakespeare’s Romeo and ancient cultural lineage was considered to wield English, but attendees could purchase a French Juliet as a symphony, “something splendid on an indispensable influence over the formation of translation by Pierre Letourneur at the door, a a grand and original plan, full of passion and the creative intellect. version Berlioz had already studied. Playing the imagination” (as he put it). Original it surely The fifteen months he spent there provided part of Juliet Capulet (on nights when she was was. Berlioz’s dramatic symphony incorporated both inspiration and disappointment, and not appearing as Ophelia or Desdemona) was the distinct genres that did not normally intermarry Berlioz ended up returning to France before his Irish actress Harriet Smithson, with whom the any more than Capulets and Montagues did: residency concluded. But what he liked about twenty-three-year-old Berlioz was immediately oratorio, melodrama, operatic movements, Italy would become a permanent passion; both and irredeemably smitten. “My heart and whole song, and ballet, in addition to what might be the remnants of antiquity and the vivacity of being were possessed by a fierce, desperate considered “standard” symphonic writing. In modern Italian life left an indelible imprint passion in which love of the artist and of the art the end this unprecedented project unrolled 3 BERLIOZ © San Francisco Symphony, 2018 over eight movements (organized into three [The] last scene of the reconciliation parts), stretching across an hour and fourty- between the two families is the only one that five minutes. These movements depict or refer falls into the domain of opera or oratorio. It to selected scenes from Shakespeare’s tale of has never been performed on any stage since fair Verona—or, better put, they express the Shakespeare’s time, but it is too beautiful, composer’s representation of the emotions too musical, and it concludes a work of this involved. nature too well for the composer to dream of treating it differently. THE MUSIC It would have been more obvious If, in the famous garden and cemetery for Berlioz to act on his Romeo and Juliet scenes, the dialogue of the two lovers, Juliet’s fascination by turning the play into an opera, asides, and Romeo’s passionate outbursts are as Charles Gounod would in 1867. But his not sung, if the duets of love and despair opera Benvenuto Cellini had recently nosedived are given to the orchestra, the reasons are at its premiere, and it was doubtless the wrong numerous and easy to comprehend. First, moment to bank on another stage work. There and this alone would be sufficient, it is a is nonetheless a good deal that is operatic in symphony and not an opera. Second, since this score, particularly in the sections that duets of this nature have been handled vocally spotlight the solo singers. Berlioz roughed out a thousand times by the greatest masters, it the libretto by writing a prose text, adapting was wise as well as unusual to attempt another Shakespeare’s action considerably, after which means of expression. It is also because the very his friend Émile Deschamps crafted the lyrics sublimity of this love made its depiction so in French verse. And yet, Berlioz insisted that dangerous for the musician that he had to give this was a symphony, even if it far surpassed the his imagination a latitude that the positive assumptions that term might imply to music sense of the sung words would not have lovers. “There can be no mistaking the genre of given him, resorting instead to instrumental this work,” he wrote in a foreword to the score: language, which is richer, more varied, less precise, and by its very indefiniteness Even though voices are often used, it is incomparably more powerful in such a case. neither a concert opera nor a cantata, but a choral symphony. —James M. Keller If there is singing, almost from the James M. Keller is the longtime Program Annotator beginning, it is to prepare the listener’s mind of the San Francisco Symphony and the New York for the dramatic scenes whose feelings and Philharmonic. © San Francisco Symphony, 2018 passions are to be expressed by the orchestra. 4 BERLIOZ © San Francisco Symphony, 2018 The SAN FRANCISCO SYMPHONY gave its first concerts in December 1911. Its music directors have included Henry Hadley, Alfred Hertz, Basil Cameron, lssay Dobrowen, Pierre Monteux, Enrique Jordá, Josef Krips, Seiji Ozawa, Edo de Waart, Herbert Blomstedt, and, since 1995, Michael Tilson Thomas. The SFS has won such recording awards as France’s Grand Prix du Disque, Britain’s Gramophone Award, Germany’s ECHO Klassik, and the United States’s Grammy. Releases on the Symphony’s own label, SFS Media, include a cycle of Mahler symphonies that has received seven Grammys, several volumes devoted to the works of Beethoven, and John Adams’s Harmonielehre and Short Ride in a Fast Machine, which won a 2013 Grammy for Best Orchestral Performance, and the 2013 ECHO Klassik. Other recent recordings on SFS Media include Grammy-nominated albums of Debussy’s Images pour orchestre and Mason Bates’s orchestral works. For RCA Red Seal, Michael Tilson Thomas and the SFS have recorded scenes from Prokofiev’sRomeo and Juliet, a collection of Stravinsky ballets, and Charles Ives: An American Journey, among others. Some of the most important conductors of the past and recent years have been guests on the SFS podium, among them Bruno Walter, Leopold Stokowski, Leonard Bernstein, and Sir Georg Solti, and the list of composers who have led the Orchestra includes Stravinsky, Ravel, Copland, and John Adams. The SFS Youth Orchestra, founded in 1980, has become known around the world, as has the SFS Chorus, heard on recordings and on the soundtracks of such films asAmadeus and Godfather III.