Berlioz Concert: Les Siècles, François-Xavier Roth, conductor; January 11, 2019

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 19^th 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 19^th 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.