Roman Carnival
Overture
Hector Berlioz
(born 1803, died 1869)
Berlioz – the
passionate, ardent, irrepressible genius of French Romanticism – left a rich
and original oeuvre, which exerted a profound influence on nineteenth- century
music. Berlioz developed a thoughtful affinity toward music and literature, as
a child. Sent to Paris at 17 to study medicine, Gluck's operas enchanted him and made him
firmly decide to become a composer. With his father's reluctant consent,
Berlioz entered the Paris Conservatoire in 1826. His originality was already
apparent and disconcerting – a competition cantata, Cléopâtre (1829), looms as his first sustained masterpiece – and he
won the Prix de Rome in 1830 amid the turmoil of the July Revolution.
Meanwhile, a performance of Hamlet in
September 1827, with Harriet Smithson as Ophelia,
provoked an overwhelming – but unrequited – passion, the aftermath of which is
discernable in the Symphonie fantastique
(1830).
Returning from Rome, Berlioz organized a concert in 1832 featuring his symphony. Harriet
Smithson was in the audience. Introduced days later, they married on October
3, 1833.
Berlioz settled into a career pattern, which he maintained for more than a
decade, writing reviews, organizing concerts, and composing a series of
visionary masterpieces: Harold en Italie
(1834), the monumental Requiem
(1837), and an opera, Benvenuto Cellini
(1838), a crushing fiasco. At year's end, the dying Paganini made Berlioz a
gift of 20,000 francs, enabling him to devote nearly a year to the composition
of his "dramatic symphony," Roméo
et Juliette (1839). And then, to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the
July Revolution, came the Symphonie
funèbre et triomphale (1840).
Iridescently scored, an exquisite collection of six Gautier settings, Les nuits d'été, opened the new decade.
This was a difficult time for Berlioz, as his marriage failed to bring him the
happiness he desired. Concert tours to Brussels, many German cities, Vienna, Pesth, Prague, and London occupied him, through most of the 1840s. He
composed La Damnation de Faust, en
route, offering the new work to a half-empty house in Paris, December 6, 1846. Expenses were catastrophic, and only a
successful concert tour to St. Petersburg saved him.
He sat out the revolutionary upheavals of 1848 in London, returning to Paris in July. He composed the massive Te Deum – a "little brother"
to the Requiem – largely over 1849, though it would not premiere until 1855. L'Enfance du Christ scored an immediate
and enduring success, from its first performance on December 10, 1854. Elected to the Institut de France in 1855,
he started receiving a members' stipend, and this provided him with a modicum
of financial security. Consequently, Berlioz was able to devote himself to the summa
of his career, his vast opera, Les
Troyens, based on Virgil's Aeneid,
the Roman poet's unfinished epic masterpiece. He completed the opera in 1858.
As he negotiated for its performance, he composed a comique adaptation
of Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing,
which met with a rapturous Baden
première, on August 9, 1862. Unfortunately, the Théatre-Lyrique mounted
only the third, fourth, and fifth acts of Les
Troyens, a successful premiere, on November 4, 1863 and a run of 21 performances
notwithstanding. This lopsided production stemmed from a compromise (bitterly
regretted by the composer) that Berlioz had made with the Théâtre-Lyrique.
Though frail and ailing, Berlioz conducted his works in Vienna and Cologne in 1866, traveling to St. Petersburg and Moscow in the winter of 1867-1868.
Despondent and tortured by self-doubt, the composer received a triumphant
welcome in Russia. Back in Paris in March 1868, he was but a
walking shadow as paralysis slowly overcame him.
Roman Carnival
Overture
Instrumentation: 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons,
4 French horns, 4 trumpets, 3 trombones, timpani, percussion, strings.
The DPO last performed this piece on Wednesday, March 21, 2001 with Christopher
Wilkins conducting.
Berlioz's most popular and most virtuosic overture is
actually an independent concert piece, but it has close ties to an opera.
After the premiere of his opera Benvenuto Cellini, based on the autobiography of the famous Italian
Renaissance sculptor, Berlioz never forgave the conductor for his lifeless
delivery of the second act's saltarello
finale. So, ten years later he used the saltarello
as the opening of his Roman Carnival
Overture and took the trouble to conduct the work himself in its first
performances.
However, even before the strings and winds can really launch
the revelry, the solo horn and clarinet introduce some harmonic ambiguity, and
the English horn slips in with the rapturous love-duet theme from the opera's
first act. Suddenly, three swirling woodwind passages suggest that fireworks
are going off on the Piazza Colonna, and the saltarello takes over, eventually incorporating the love theme into
the festivities.
Berlioz was so pleased with this overture and with its reception that he
advocated using it as the prelude to
the second act of Benvenuto Cellini.
This practice still exists to this day.
After the overture's publication in full score, Johann Peter
Pixis arranged it for two pianos, eight hands. This arrangement received a
performance by the pianistic luminaries Franz Liszt, Charles Hallé, Ferdinand
Hiller, and Pixis himself – full testimony to its status as one of the hits of
its day.
Biography by Adrian Corleonis
Composition Description by James Reel
Source: All Media Guide
