by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
After the Beethoven we watched a 2012 film clip of the
Colorado Symphony under conductor Andrés Cárdenes performing Berlioz’ La
Mort de Cléopâtre (“The Death of
Cleopatra”) with singer Michelle DeYoung, who isn’t exactly the most gorgeous
or glamorous woman of all time but who gets the job done vocally. La
Mort de Cléopâtre was the third of Berlioz’
four contest entries for the final of the Prix de Rome, a contest sponsored by
the French government every year from 1663 (when it was established by the Sun
King, Louis XIV, the one who famously said, “L’état c’est moi,” which means, “I
am the state”) to 1968 (when de Gaulle’s minister of culture, André Malraux,
abolished it as part of the political ferment of that year that finally brought
down de Gaulle’s regime). It was initially a contest for painters and
sculptors, which as Berlioz mentioned in his autobiography actually made sense
because aspiring artists in those media could learn a great deal from living in
Italy for three years and getting to see the masterpieces of the Renaissance in
their original habitat. In 1720 a Prix de Rome for architecture was
established, and music was added in 1803 and engraving in 1804. As Berlioz noted,
it made no sense to send aspiring musicians to Italy as an award — not when the
center of classical music (as opposed to opera) was Germany and composers could
conceivably learn more from the homeland of Bach and Beethoven than from that
of Leonardo and Michaelangelo — but he entered the contest anyway four times,
every year from 1827 to 1830.
The rule in Berlioz’ time was that there was a
separate but related contest for poets, and as soon as the poetry judges
decided on the winner, the finalists would be given the award-winning poem and
locked in a room, where they would set it for voice and orchestra. (Later the
texts given the aspiring composers would include parts for two or three people,
and the result would be more like a short opera than the cantata for single
voice and orchestra the entrants were expected to come up with in Berlioz’
time.) One of Berlioz’ complaints was that, though the composers were supposed
to write for orchestra, the judges would see only a voice-and-piano reduction
of the orchestral score — which, Berlioz felt, handicapped him because he was
proud of all the cool orchestral effects he’d thought up and which no one would
ever hear unless he won, in which
case as part of the prize the winning piece would be performed publicly. For
his first year the text Berlioz got was La Mort d’Orphée (based on the Greek legend of the musician Orpheus,
subject of some of the earliest operas ever composed), and the next year he got
a piece called Herminie from
which he later recycled a theme as the famous “idée fixe” (recurring theme) in
his breakthrough work, the Symphonie Fantastique. Orphée
failed but Herminie won second
prize. His third entry, in 1829, was La Mort de Cléopâtre, which he ended unconventionally by adding a fairly
long (though not particularly bombastic) orchestral coda after Cleopatra
actually croaks, and that apparently put off the judges. So did his invocation
of Shakespeare — at one point in the margin of his score he wrote in a quote
from Romeo and Juliet, suggesting
to one modern critic that as long as he was writing a piece about the death of
Cleopatra he would much rather have taken his text from Shakespeare’s Antony
and Cleopatra rather than the poem by Pierre-Ange Vieillard he
was stuck with according to the contest rules. That may have put off the Prix
de Rome judges, too; after Berlioz submitted his entry, it was rejected and no
prize at all was awarded that year, one of the judges came up to Berlioz and
said, “Why did you do it? We wanted
to give you the prize!”
Berlioz’ own comment on the incident was a remark to
his friend Adolphe Adam, composer of the ballet Giselle and the well-known Christmas song “O Holy Night,”
“If they wanted us to write music for pastry cooks and dressmakers, why did
they give us a text about the Queen of Egypt and her solemn meditation on
death?” One Fanfare critic,
reviewing a CD on which all of Berlioz’ Prix de Rome entries (or at least as
much of them as survives) were included, wondered about the morbid
sensibilities of the judges of the poetry contest, since three of the four
winning poems the years Berlioz competed for the price had titles beginning
with “La Mort de … ” — an indication of the Romantic sensibility, in which one
of the things they romanticized big-time was death. Berlioz finally won the
damned thing in 1830 with what music historian Carter Harman called “a craftily
conventional cantata” called La Mort de Sardanapale (about the successful siege of the city of Sardanapolis
in ancient times), and when he got his public performance of the winning work
he followed it with the world premiere of the Symphonie Fantastique, as if telling the Paris concert audience, “That was
the work I wrote for the Prix de Rome judges — and this is the piece I wrote for me.” La Mort de Cléopâtre is a work that hints at the mature Berlioz — in the
August 2015 Opera News reviewer
David Shengold said, “Judges to the contrary, it’s a truly remarkable piece —
showing his debt to Gluck for classical grandeur and unorthodox orchestration —
and an important way station to creating his Cassandre and Didon three decades
later” — though it was a bit difficult to follow in this performance because,
even though it was an American orchestra and soloist, there weren’t any English
subtitles to give us the text. But DeYoung’s performance was quite appealing
and the orchestra’s performance supported her well, even though my favorite
version remains the one Jennie Tourel recorded with the New York Philharmonic
under Leonard Bernstein (most sources say in 1961, though the Wikipedia
discography of the piece says 1950 — he might have done it with her twice, a
mono original and a stereo remake).
