BERLIOZ

HECTOR BERLIOZ

(1803–1869)

London Philharmonic Orchestra – Roman Carnival Overture

Congress Theatre, Eastbourne, 1997

Hector Berlioz is often considered one of the most eccentric and flamboyant composers of the French Romantic period. His music is generally perceived to be noisy and over-strident – his Requiem, for instance, requires no fewer than four brass bands – and in his lifetime his work was more popular abroad than at home. But in fact his unorthodoxy is based on a thorough grounding in classicism, and derives from a lifelong effort to break the restricting bonds of convention.

He was unusual in that unlike most composers, he was no keyboard player (though he had studied the guitar and the flageolet), so his writing was not restricted to music that he could physically play. Although he attended the Paris Conservatoire, his conception of harmony and structure was largely self-taught. He was also the first major composer to embrace literature as an important source – he wrote several pieces based on the plays of Shakespeare, and his song cycle Nuits d’Été, settings of poems by Gautier, was the first such work for voice and orchestra (as opposed to voice and piano) which paved the way for Mahler.

But since his work refused to compromise, it received little recognition in his lifetime. A commission from Paganini in 1838 looked hopeful until the maestro declared the viola part too tame and refused to perform it. Nevertheless, it provided Berlioz with the raw material for Harold in Italy, which in time became one of his most popular pieces, while Paganini’s payment of twenty thousand francs financed the writing of the Roméo et Juliette symphony. This and the enormous Damnation of Faust are generally considered to be among the best musical interpretations of a literary masterpiece ever written.

The Roman Carnival Overture uses themes from the 1838 opera Benvenuto Cellini, a study of the Renaissance artist and goldsmith whose life and character were as turbulent and volcanic as the composer’s own. The cor anglais solo is similarly lifted from a previous work, the scena or concert piece for solo voice and orchestra, Cléopâtre.

The first performance took place at the Salle Herz, Paris on 3 February 1844, and for Berlioz it was a fraught affair. Although he was conducting an orchestra he knew well, they had only had time for one rehearsal, and at the last minute one of the other two items on the programme, ‘Marguerite’s Romance’ from the Eight Scenes from Faust, had to be withdrawn when the proposed soloist was taken ill.

But in the event, all went well and Berlioz was able to call the evening a wild success. Not only was he able to draw on the lost ‘Romance’ material the following year to complete the full score of The Damnation of Faust, the programme had also marked the first ever appearance by a saxophone in the concert hall, in the ‘Chant Sacré’. At the time this was a huge brass instrument similar to the ophicleide or keyed serpent, a large member of the bugle family.