by MARK GABRISH CONLAN
Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights
reserved
Two nights ago
my husband Charles and I watched something special on TV: a tribute concert to
Hector Berlioz broadcast from the Paris Philharmonie last January 11 with the
following program:
Benvenuto Cellini (Ouverture)
Beatrice et Bénédict (Ouverture)
Le Carnaval romain (Ouverture)
Roméo et Juliette: Roméo seul -
Grande fête chez les Capulets
Harold en Italie
Encore: La Damnation de Faust –
Hungarian March
Tabea Zimmermann, Alto
Les Siècles
Dir.: François-Xavier Roth
I had seen this
performance available on a download but found I couldn’t open the video file on
my computer, nor could I burn it to a DVD — but I could copy it onto a flash
drive and play it on the TV from that. Berlioz is one of my favorite composers,
partly due to his sheer Romanticism and also due to his quirkiness. He’s the
one French composer of the 19th century whose music stacks up at the
same level of quality of the Germans who then dominated classical symphonic
music, and when the band Art of Noise did their tribute album to Claude Debussy
in the late 1990’s and their narrator proclaimed Debussy France’s greatest composer,
I thought, “A good case could be made for him, but a good case could also be
made for Berlioz.” I’ve read Berlioz’ autobiography, in which among other
things he laments that he was cursed by being born in such an unmusical nation
as France and suggested that the Prix de Rome — an annual competition for French artists in various fields, started
under Louis XIV and continued until it ended as part of the overall
near-revolutionary ferment of 1968, in which the winner got a three-year trip
to Italy and a stipend to live on while there in return for sending back at
least one work per year (called an Énvoi) to prove that the French government wasn’t wasting its money sending
them there — was a good prize for visual artists who could benefit by seeing
the Renaissance masterpieces in their homeland, but for musicians the French
government would have been better off sending them to Germany. (Berlioz himself
won the Prix de Rome on his
fourth try when he realized he needed to “write down” to the level of the judges
and give them what they wanted.)
The Psychedelic Pioneer
Berlioz made his
reputation in 1830 with the Symphonie Fantastique, which I’ve called the first piece of psychedelic music because it had
two major things in common with the psychedelic rock of the 1960’s: it used
elaborate sonic effects (including now-obsolete instruments like the ophicleide
and the serpent — the latter, pronounced “ser-PENT,” was a big brass instrument
that sounded like a tuba but with a peculiarly buzzing quality that made me wonder,
when I heard Roger Norrington’s early-1990’s recording of the Symphonie
Fantastique, whether my stereo was grounded
correctly) and it was intended as a musical depiction of the act of taking
drugs. Berlioz himself wrote a program for the work indicating that it was a
“program symphony” — i.e., a piece that, though entirely instrumental, was
intended to tell a story — and the story was about a young artist who, under
the influence of opium, takes his girlfriend to a ball, then takes her to the
country, kills her, is hanged for the crime and ends up in hell. (The last
movement, “Dream of a Witches’ Sabbath,” was used in the 1991 film Sleeping
with the Enemy as the theme for the
physically abusive husband of Julia Roberts’ character.)
Shakespeare and Paganini
The program for
the January 11 concert included three Berlioz overtures — the ones to his first
and third (and last) operas, Benvenuto Cellini and Béatrice et Bénédict
(based on Shakespeare’s play Much Ado About Nothing), as well as a separate piece, Roman
Carnival — along with one of the six
movements of Berlioz’ symphony based on Romeo and Juliet (if you get the impression Berlioz was a big-time fan
of Shakespeare, you’re right: he wrote shorter pieces based on scenes from Hamlet and The Tempest and his first wife, Henrietta Smithson, was an actress from Scotland
he’d seen in a production of Hamlet
and fallen in love with on the spot even though he didn’t know a word of
English) and, as the post-intermission feature, Berlioz’ second symphony, Harold
in Italy.
This one came
about as the result of a commission from the best-known violinist of the 19th
century, Niccoló Paganini, whom I’ve described elsewhere as the Jimi Hendrix of
his time: he was a flamboyant showman (one of his tricks was to partially saw
through the strings before a performance so that, under the lash of his
ferocious playing, they’d break one by one until he’d be left fiddling on just
one string), he extended the technique of the violin far beyond anything any
previous player had imagined (much the way Hendrix did with the electric
guitar), he wrote a lot of his own music to showcase his technical and
showmanship skills, and like Hendrix he set the seal on his legend by dying
young.
Paganini had
just acquired a Stradivarius viola and wanted to get Berlioz to write him a
piece for viola and orchestra to showcase him playing it — why Paganini didn’t
write the piece himself is a mystery, since he composed quite a lot of music,
including six violin concerti and 24 caprices for unaccompanied violin, but
maybe he didn’t feel as assured writing for viola as he did for violin.
Berlioz’ first thought was to do a three-movement work on the life of Mary,
Queen of Scots, with the viola playing Mary, but as the work germinated in his
head the three movements became four and the story shifted from Mary, Queen of
Scots to Lord Byron’s star-making epic poem Childe Harold.
When Paganini
finally saw the work in score he rejected it because, instead of the viola
concerto he’d been expecting, it was a symphony that used the viola as an
obbligato instrument and incorporated it into the ensemble. Berlioz had to get
another violist to play it for the premiere, though Paganini liked it well
enough when he finally heard it that he paid Berlioz for it anyway — a large
chunk of money the chronically cash-poor Berlioz desperately needed. (Don’t be
fooled by the above credit to Tabea Zimmermann for “alto” into thinking it’s a
vocal work and she’s a low-voiced woman singer; “alto” is simply the French
word for “viola.”)
The concert on
January 11 was given by an orchestra called “Les Siècles,” which means “The
Centuries,” and that means they’re interested in using the instruments of the
period in which the pieces they play were composed — something that was most apparent
visually in the strangely shaped trumpets, the unvalved “natural” French horns,
the wooden flutes, and the convex bow used by one of the two featured bass
players (though the other bassist we saw — there were six in the orchestra, but
only two were visible in the telecast — was using the concave bow that is the
modern-day standard).
Fortunately, the
antique instruments didn’t alter the sound too much from what we’re used to in
these pieces, and the musicians were adept enough that they could play them
well — which was not always the case in the early days of “historically
informed performances” (I remember a Musical Heritage Society LP of Handel’s Music
for the Royal Fireworks which sounded
excruciatingly out of tune, though as I listened to that record more and more I
actually got to like it; not only were the players doing the best they could
with these oddball and difficult instruments, it probably was closer to what
Handel and his original audience heard than the slick big-orchestra versions
I’d heard before) — and I was able to enjoy the music as such and not think,
“Oh, they’re doing the best they can with these obsolete instruments.”
The two opera
overtures came first in the program, and then followed the Roman Carnival — which particularly impressed Charles because he
said he’d never seen a classical-music telecast in which the performers seemed
to be having that much fun. The
musicians were grinning from ear to ear as they played this joyous music, and
so was the conductor, François-Xavier Roth. (I hadn’t noticed it as much
because I’d been too busy grinning my way through it myself.)
Berlioz and Wagner
After that the
orchestra played one movement of one of Berlioz’ greatest works, his symphony
based on Romeo and Juliet, an oddly
structured piece in that it sandwiches a four-movement symphony in between a
prologue and epilogue with vocal soloists and chorus. The prologue gives a
basic outline of the story and pays homage to Shakespeare by name; then we get
four movements in classical symphonic form — a fast movement with a slow
opening representing “Romeo alone” and then his decision to crash the Capulets’
big ball, where he meets Juliet; a slow movement depicting their love scene; a
scherzo based on the Queen Mab speech in the play; and a long last movement
depicting the deaths of the lovers.
Then there’s an
epilogue which dramatizes in near-operatic style the final scene of the play,
in which Friar Laurence brings the Montagues and Capulets together at long last
following the tragic deaths of their kids. It’s an absolutely glorious work for
what it is, but it’s also frustrating in that one wishes if Berlioz were so
interested in the story of Romeo and Juliet,
why didn’t he just set it as an opera? (There’s one report that he was considering writing an opera on Romeo and
Juliet at the end of his life and he just
ran out of time to do so.)
I vividly
remember the first time I heard the Romeo and Juliet symphony — in the 1970’s, in the first flush of my
enthusiasm for all things Wagnerian — and was astonished when I heard the
opening of the “Romeo Alone” movement, the one Les Siècles and François-Xavier
Roth programmed in the January 11 concert, and noticed its amazing resemblance
to the famous opening of the Act I Prelude to Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, composed 20 years later. Both Berlioz and Wagner
pulled the same musical trick — stacking dissonances on top of each other
without resolving them to more consonant harmonies — to depict the same
dramatic situation: the beginning of a doomed, tragic love affair. Since the
so-called “Tristan chord” had
been considered one of Wagner’s greatest musical innovations, I was startled to
hear that a French composer had been there 20 years before him.
Later I got the
book Wagner Writes from Paris, edited
and translated by Hubert Jacobs and Geoffrey Skelton from articles Wagner wrote
as a musical correspondent to the Dresdener Abendzeitung (the name simply means “Dresden Evening Paper”)
while he was living in Paris. It includes a remarkable piece called “Berlioz
and Liszt,” published May 4, 1841, in which he calls Berlioz a “man of genius”
and adds, “His great virtue is that he does not write for money … Berlioz is a
sworn enemy of anything vulgar, beggarly or catchpennyish.” (Wagner in other
essays used the term “banker-composers” to indicate his contempt of the French
composers he believed did write
for money, and given Wagner’s anti-Semitism and the fact that his principal
target for that epithet was the German expat Jewish composer Giacomo Meyerbeer
it’s not hard to read “banker-composers” as dog-whistle racism for “Jewish
composers.”)
Wagner also
wrote of Berlioz, “If you want to hear Berlioz’s music you will have to go
where he is, for you will encounter him nowhere else … You will hear Berlioz’s
compositions only at the concerts which he himself gives once or twice a year.
These are his own exclusive territory, and here he has his works performed by
an orchestra of his own making, before a public captured by him in the course
of a ten-year campaign.” The moment I first read those words I thought, “Role
model,” for what Berlioz had successfully (more or less — the poor man was always in financial trouble and at the thin edge of
bankruptcy) accomplished in Paris in the late 1830’s was what Wagner ultimately
did at Bayreuth in 1876: open a theatre devoted exclusively to his own
compositions with an orchestra he had personally trained and an audience he had
attracted by sheer persistence.
There have been
arguments back and forth about what Berlioz and Wagner really thought of each
other — in Berlioz’ autobiography his one mention of Wagner is a sense of envy
that Wagner was able to write his own opera libretti instead of having to go
hat-in-hand for writers willing to work with him — though later Berlioz’ references
to Wagner, both in his public articles (Berlioz subsidized himself as a
composer by writing as a music critic for the French press) and his letters,
became kvetchier and more hostile.
In 1859 Berlioz
reviewed a concert of excerpts from Wagner’s operas, conducted by Wagner
himself, and wrote, “It must be concluded, I believe,
that he possesses that rare intensity of feeling, inner fire, will-power, and
conviction which overwhelm, move and sweep the listener along. But those
qualities would have far greater impact if they were combined with more
inventiveness, less calculation and a juster appreciation of some of the
fundamental elements of the art of music.”
Two years later, reviewing a concert of symphonies by the
French composer Henri Reber, Berlioz made a veiled allusion to Wagner and
saying that Reber’s music avoided a trap German composers of the day were
falling into: “His [Reber’s] harmonic writing is bolder than that of Haydn and
Mozart, though without betraying the slightest taste for the savage dissonances
and the chaotic style (style charivarique)
that has been systematically adopted these last four or five years by some
German musicians of unsound mind, and which is nowadays a source of alarm and
horror to the civilised musical world.”
Of course, being Wagner, his praise of Berlioz in 1841 had
its own left-handed aspects, and many of them got filtered through Wagner’s
nationalism: “[H]is French characteristics prevent him from ever making direct
contact with the genius of Beethoven. The tendency of the French is directed
outwards in a search for common points of contact in extremes. A German prefers
to withdraw from social life in order to seek the sources of his inspiration
inside himself, whereas the Frenchman looks for inspiration in the remotest
reaches of society. …
“What inner conflicts must therefore arise in an artist’s
soul such as Berlioz’s, when on the one hand his lively imagination urges him
to explore the profoundest and most mysterious depths of his inner being, while
on the other hand the demands and peculiarities of the people to whom he
belongs, and whose sympathies he shares, oblige him to express his thoughts
only on the immediate surface — when indeed his own creative impulses compel
him in this direction?” This is what led Wagner to say that Berlioz probably
wished he had been born in Germany — something I discounted until I read
Berlioz himself cursing his French ancestry.
Wagner also wrote about the Romeo and Juliet symphony — which he was reviewing in his article — that “in
this work there are so many examples of tastelessness and so many artistic
blemishes, ranged side by side with passages of pure genius, that I could not
help wishing that Berlioz had shown it before the performance to a man like
Cherubini, who would certainly have known how to remove a large number of its
ugly distortions without in any way harming the original as a whole.”
While the idea of Richard Wagner, of all people, criticizing another composer’s work for
being too long stretches the imagination like a taffy-pull (and Wagner either
didn’t know about the bitter enmity Berlioz felt towards Cherubini or was
insensitively rubbing Berlioz’ nose in it), Berlioz himself shortened the work
considerably between the 1839 version Wagner was reviewing and his first
publication of it in 1847, including eliminating another vocal interlude
between the love scene and the Queen Mab scherzo which added further
information about the plot. And yet Wagner had enough of a long-standing
admiration for Berlioz in general and Romeo and Juliet in particular that when he finished Tristan und Isolde he gave Berlioz a copy of the score of Tristan and inscribed it, “To the dear and great author of Romeo
and Juliet [from] the grateful author of Tristan
und Isolde.”
Indeed, the movement of Romeo and Juliet played by Les Siècles at the January 11, 2019 concert
shows the duality of Berlioz’ character, the deep “German” introspection he was
capable of in writing about the lonely torments of Romeo before he meets Juliet
and the superficial “French” gaiety of the ball he goes to more out of sheer
boredom — and a cheekiness in sneaking into the home of his family’s bitterest
enemies — than anything else, where he meets the love who will exalt his life
and (in just two days!) destroy it. As with the other pieces in the first half
of his concert, Roth conducted brilliantly, capturing the sheer joi de vivre of the Capulets’ ball as well as he had done with the
generic “Roman carnival” of the preceding concert overture, and also reveling
in the Tristanisms of the opening of “Romeo alone.”
Harold: Home
from Italy
The three overtures and the Romeo and Juliet excerpt made up the first half of this quite interesting
Les Siècles Berlioz concert. The second half was taken up by Harold in Italy, which I was looking forward to hearing even though I
think it’s the least interesting of Berlioz’ four major quasi-symphonic scores
(the Fantastique, Romeo and Juliet and The
Damnation of Faust — in the last of those
Berlioz still called the work a “dramatic symphony” but it’s a full-fledged
operatic work in which each of the characters is played by a singer and, though
Berlioz didn’t intend it as one, it’s actually been staged as an opera). I’m
not sure why; perhaps Berlioz felt constrained by the commission (even though
he didn’t deliver Paganini the virtuoso concerto he wanted), or maybe the
material didn’t turn him on as much.
Still, I was grateful for the chance to see Harold in
Italy performed. I’d recently re-heard the
late-1950’s recording made by the Philharmonia Orchestra under the young Colin
Davis (one of his few recordings for EMI before he switched to the Philips
label and recorded virtually all of Berlioz’ major works for them). The soloist
on Davis’s recording was Yehudi Menuhin, who like Paganini was primarily a
violinist who took up viola for this work. Recordings of Harold have sometimes used violinists for the viola part,
sometimes viola soloists (not that there are that many of them, though the
first studio recording of Harold in
1944 featured one, William Primrose), and sometimes conductors have simply
pressed into service the first violist of their orchestras (as Arturo Toscanini
did when he recorded Harold with his
regular lead violist, Carleton Cooley).
One problem just listening to Harold is it’s
not always that easy to tell when the viola soloist is playing, since sometimes
Berlioz brings him or her front and center and sometimes lets the solo part
sink into the overall string texture. (That was probably the main reason
Paganini rejected the piece.) Seeing
the work performed clarified things a lot. The soloist for Les Siècles, Tabea
Zimmermann, seemed quite accomplished; she’s a hard-core violist rather than a
violin “switcher.” She was born in Lahr, Germany in 1966 and started studying
viola at 3 and piano at 5. She plays a viola of modern manufacture, hand-made
by Étienne Vatelot in 1980, which she won at the Maurice Vieux International
Viola Competition in 1983 and has used ever since.
Zimmermann is a
heavy-set but reasonably attractive woman who played Harold about as well as anyone could. I’d like to hear her
in other music sometime — she’s recorded chamber music with violinist Gidon
Kremer and has made an album of solo viola works. She’s also featured in a
recording of Harold that may be
from this very same performance, since it was released just eight days later,
also features Les Siècles with François Xavier-Roth as conductor, and is
coupled with a performance of Berlioz’ song cycle Les Nuits d’Été — which I wish they’d performed in the concert since it’s a glorious composition and
one of the first song cycles with full orchestra instead of piano. It would
have been nice to have a representation of Berlioz as vocal composer, and also
interesting since Roth recorded it in an alternate version Berlioz wrote for
baritone (here Stèphane Dugout) whereas every recording I’ve heard has used the
original for soprano.
Though the notes
for this concert designated Harold as
for viola and orchestra (in that order), according to the Wikipedia page on the
piece the official title Berlioz gave it is “Symphonie en quatre parties avec
un alto principal” — “Symphony in four parts with viola obbligato.”
The four parts,
taken from sections in Lord Byron’s poem Childe Harold, are “Harold in the Mountains,” “March of the
Pilgrims” (in which the pilgrims Harold passes as he’s out and about in Italy
are singing an evening hymn — just as they did in Wagner’s Tannhäuser, composed 11 years later), “Serenade of a
Mountaineer of the Abruzzi to His Sweetheart” (the Abruzzi is a region in
central Italy known for its mountains, the Apennines), and “Orgy of the
Brigands” — though the Wikipedia page on Harold contains a quote from Jacques Barzun’s book Berlioz
and the Romantic Century that says
“brigands” doesn’t mean “bandits,” as we might assume: “The brigand of
Berlioz’s time is the avenger of social injustice, the rebel against the City,
who resorts to nature for healing the wounds of social man.”
Harold in
Italy is an impressive work, though it just
doesn’t seem to me to be at the level of Berlioz’s other big program
symphonies, and Zimmermann, Roth and Les Siècles did it as much justice as they
could. Following that they did an unannounced encore: the “Rakozcy March” from La
Damnation de Faust. Berlioz originally wrote
this 4 ½-minute orchestral piece as a one-off, made to create a show-stopping
impression at a concert he was giving in Hungary — it was based on a Hungarian
military march and he knew his audience would get a bang from hearing their
familiar melody, first played softly and then rising in a mighty crescendo. He
then incorporated it into his Faust symphony even though that meant having to
do a quick rewrite of his text to take Faust to Hungary.
In the
“Hungarian March” (which also exists in a piano version by Franz Liszt, though
I’ve never been able to figure out whether Liszt worked from Berlioz’ score or
based his version on the original tune that was, after all, from his native
land) Roth was back on form, clearly having fun with the work as it got louder
and bringing his concert to a close on a viscerally exciting note.
Europe’s
Rich Heritage of Classical Music on TV
This show was
one of a number of televised concerts I’ve been able to obtain lately from
European online sources. Among the others are one Charles and I screened
earlier — a performance of French composer César Franck’s violin sonata from
Utrecht, The Netherlands, with violinist Noa Wildschut and pianist Elisabeth
Brauss giving a tight-knit, exciting, unified performance of a piece that’s been
known to ramble; and the one we watched last night, a really surprising and
beautiful performance of the violin concerto by Aram Khachaturian.
Though the
Khachaturian concerto was filmed and recorded in the famous Concertgebouw hall
in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, the orchestra involved was the Borusan Istanbul
Philharmonic Orchestra, a Turkish group under the leadership of Sascha Goetzel,
a native of Vienna, Austria who’s been conductor of the Borusan since 2008 (and
seemed to have sneaked in a lot of European musicians, judging from the
decidedly non-Turkish looking personnel with whom the orchestra abounded). The
soloist was Nemanja Radulović, who’s listed on his Web page as part French and
part Serbian.
Like the British
violinist Nigel Kennedy, who emerged on the classical scene in the early 1980’s
looking like a punk rocker, Radulović defies the stereotype of what a classical
concert soloist should look like. His hair looks like someone tried to
cross-breed Jimi Hendrix, Bob Marley and Toshiro Mifune in one of his samurai roles (the pics on his Wikipedia page show him with
Marley-style dreadlocks and he’s added the topknot since), and he’s a quite
active musician physically, bobbing and weaving in time to the music instead of
just standing there, stock still, in front of the orchestra the way Serious Musicians are expected to.
The last time I
heard the Khachaturian violin concerto was in a record from EMI that should
have been unsurpassable — the great Russian virtuoso David Oistrakh as the
soloist and an orchestra conducted by Khachaturian himself — but it was a
frustrating experience. Not only was the recording an LP in poor shape, but the
music seemed to be incredibly banal — it sounded like the score for a bad
Hollywood movie about the Middle East. This time around it seemed considerably
better: Radulović and Goetzel tore into the piece and gave it meat and sinew.
It’s still got those big fat tunes from Khachaturian’s native Armenia, but the
performance came together beautifully and made this concerto seem like a real
piece of music and not just a pleasant travelogue.
These two short
films are examples of the kind of programming classical music fans in Europe
get regularly from their TV networks, which are either publicly owned or
privately owned by people who take seriously their obligation to “serve the
people” — all the people, not just the
lowest-common-denominator audience. By comparison, even the U.S.’s Public
Broadcasting Service (PBS) offers precious little cultural programming (and
sometimes stations like San Diego’s KPBS outlet ghettoize even that little to
absurd time slots like Sundays at noon), and the major commercial networks once
broadcast classical music but now seem all too relieved to have dumped that
responsibility onto PBS.
