Gounod's "Roméo et Juliette" at the Metropolitan Opera: "Live in HD" Telecast (Metropolitan Opera, aired March 23, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Right now I’m listening to a 1976 radio broadcast of Charles Gounod’s opera Roméo et Juliette, featuring a capable cast – Alain Vanzo as Roméo and Andrée Esposito as Juliette – with Antonio de Almeida conducting the orchestra and chorus of the Opéra de Nice. This was the opera my husband Charles and I went to see yesterday afternoon in the Met’s “Live in HD” satellite telecast at the AMC 20 theatre complex in Mission Valley. The theatre management let us in free because there had been some dropouts when they tested the image, courtesy of interference from some storms that had been racking New York City recently, but in the end there was only a brief bit of digital dithering in the image towards the end. In these pages before I’ve noted my frustration that the truly great composers who contemplated writing operas based on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet never did so while the lesser talents actually did. The first important opera based on the Romeo and Juliet story was composed by Nicola Vaccai (I wonder if he got teased as a kid because his last name derives from the Italian word for “cow”) in 1825 and was based not on Shakespeare’s play but on the original 1580 Italian story, the “Daysong” (so called because the good things that happen to the lovers all occur at night and the bad things happen during the day), by Luigi Da Porto that was also Shakespeare’s source. Vaccai’s librettist, Felice Romani, also worked from an intervening Italian play by Luigi Scevola called Giulietta è Romeo (note the reverse order of the names from the one we’re used to!) from the eighteen-teens. Later Romani recycled his libretto for Vaccai’s opera and gave it to Vincenzo Bellini for an opera called I Capuleti è I Montecchi, which was also based directly on the Italian sources rather than on Shakespeare. Both Vaccai and Bellini cast Romeo as a travesti or “trouser” role; that is, a male character played by a woman in drag. (I once mentioned this to my late roommate/home-care client John and he said, “Why did they do that?” Then I reminded him that in Shakespeare’s productions both Romeo and Juliet were played by males.)

In 1839 Hector Berlioz took up the Romeo and Juliet story but not, alas, for an opera. Instead, his Roméo et Juliette was a so-called “dramatic symphony,” which featured vocal soloists, chorus and orchestra in an opening movement that paid tribute to Shakespeare and the play, then four more or less conventional symphonic movements (though with choral interjections in the love and death scenes), and a final movement that dramatized the play’s epilogue, in which Friar Laurence presides over the joint funerals of Romeo and Juliet and at last gets the Montagues and the Capulets to settle their difference and stop the insane generations-long feud that has killed both their kids. The pattern of great composers falling through on their plans for a Romeo and Juliet opera while lesser talents did theirs continued; Tchaikovsky got as far as a “Fantasy-Overture” on the play (which I’ve never cared for, actually, being particularly annoyed by the cheaply gushing Big Tune for the lovers) and a duet on the balcony scene. Debussy contemplated a Roméo et Juliette opera for Mary Garden, the soprano who had created the role of Mélisande in Debussy’s one completed opera, Pelléas et Mélisande, but according to Garden this was one of many projects Debussy abandoned in the wake of the breakup of his first marriage and his remarriage to socialite Emma Bardac. Instead the composers who finished and premiered Romeo and Juliet operas in the 19th and 20th centuries were Charles Gounod and Riccardo Zandonaï.

Gounod is best known today for his opera Faust, based on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s dramatic poem, and his Roméo et Juliette was premiered in Paris in 1867 at the Théâtre-Lyrique Impérial du Châtelet, the lesser theatre for composers who couldn’t make it into the Paris Opéra. At least Gounod and his librettist, Jules Barbier and Michel Carré, cast Romeo and Juliet as the characters’ actual biological genders – the only “trouser role” in this opera is Romeo’s page Stéphano – and gave them both a series of powerful and moving duets that form the heart of the opera. However, just about the only parts of this opera well known to modern audiences are Juliet’s aria “Je veux vivre” (“I want to live”), sung before she and Romeo even meet; and Romeo’s aria “Ah! Lêve-toi soleil” (“Arise, fair sun”), sung after he sees Juliet for the first time at the Capulets’ party which he’s crashed but before they’ve had any interaction with each other. As Charles and I were leaving the theatre I ran into an older straight couple and the man told me, “Prokofieff’s Romeo and Juliet is a masterpiece; this is just music.” I know what he means, though I’d substitute Berlioz’s for Prokofieff’s; Prokofieff was originally commissioned to compose a ballet based on Romeo and Juliet in 1936 but was told by the choreographer to give it a happy ending because “people can’t dance lying down.” Fortunately that original production fell through, and in 1940 a new choreographer, Leonid Lavrovsky, took a look at the score and approached Prokofieff about staging it. Lavrovsky asked Prokofieff, “Why does it have a happy ending?” Prokofieff replied, “Because the first choreographer told me people can’t dance lying down.” Lavrovsky told Prokofieff, “Write me the most intense and moving death scene you can imagine, and let me worry about what the dancers will do.”

Anyway, getting back to Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette, it opens with a weird overture that reminded me of the one to Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman – especially the big string tremeloes that open it – and seemed more appropriate for a ship sailing through a storm than a tale of two star-crossed lovers. Then we get a chorus adapted from Shakespeare’s prologue about the generations-long feud between the Montagues and the Capulets, which segues into the Capulets’ party in which Romeo (Benjamin Bernheim, who despite his German-Jewish last name is actually French, and he gave an intermission interview in which he talked about how good it felt to sing in his native language instead of Italian, German or Russian) and his Montague friends crash the gate and worry about being found out. Romeo has been dating a woman named Rosaline (whom we never see) and Juliet (American soprano Nadine Sierra, who’s quite good) is being forced by her father (Nathan Berg) and mother to marry an obnoxious guy named Páris (Daniel Rich). (I noticed that the singers pronounced the “s” in Páris’s last name, presumably to distinguish him from the French capital, in which the “s” is silent.) But once the two lay eyes on each other at the party, they lose all interest in anyone else. The plot cycles through the familiar highlights from Shakespeare’s play: the balcony scene, the sequence in which Friar Laurence (Alfred Walker) secretly marries them, their one night of lovemaking, the catastrophic duel – incited, at least in this version, by Stéphano (Samantha Hankey) and the insulting song he sings about the Capulets – in which Capulet family member Tybalt kills Romeo’s friend Mercutio and Romeo kills Tybalt in revenge, the plot hatched by Friar Laurence to get Juliet out of having to marry Páris by giving her a drug that will make her look dead but in reality she will just sleep for a day, Romeo entering the Capulet family tomb and finding Juliet dead, Romeo drinking poison and then Juliet waking up from the drug, finding Romeo dead and then killing herself with Romeo’s dagger.

Like Berlioz and his librettist, Émile Deschamps, Gounod, Barbier and Carré worked not from Shakespeare’s original but from a rewrite by 18th century British actor/author David Garrick, who changed the ending so Juliet awakens after Romeo has already drunk the poison but before it’s killed him, so the two can sing a beautiful and heartrending final duet as they face the inevitability of their mutual demises and look forward to their reunion in death. (This whole business of being “reunited in death” is one of the sillier conceits of the entire Romantic era, though it’s one of the aspects of Romeo and Juliet that powered its rediscovery after having been largely forgotten in the intervening two centuries after Shakespeare’s death. At least Barbier and Carré didn’t have Romeo and Juliet survive at the end the way they did with Hamlet in their libretto for Ambroise Thomas’s opera on that play, based once again not on the original but a rewrite, this time by Alexandre Dumas père, best known today for The Three Musketeers.) Their last words are a prayer to God, “Forgive us!,” reflecting that in Roman Catholic theology suicide is a mortal sin and earns you eternal damnation. In one of the earlier duets for the lovers, they argue over whether a particular bird song they’ve heard is a nightingale heralding the evening or a lark heralding daybreak – a carry-over from the original “Daysong” origin of the story in which the good things that happen to Romeo and Juliet all occur at night and the bad things happen during daytime.

Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette is a competent, workmanlike opera with some quite stunning moments – a surprising bit of world-weariness for Juliet in which, even before she’s met Romeo, she complains that her life seems meaningless and she longs for death; a late duet for the lovers called “Va, je t'ai pardonne” (recorded by Plácido Domingo and Renata Scotto on a quite impressive duets album for Columbia in 1978); and Romeo’s final scene in the tomb (recorded by legendary Polish tenor Jean de Reszke in 1905 but never approved for release by him, and no copy of the master disc exists). It also ends rather abruptly, with the deaths of the lovers and without Shakespeare’s epilogue in which Friar Laurence officiates at the joint funeral of Romeo and Juliet and at least tries to use the families’ grief at the loss of their kids to end their feud at last. (Since this is the one part of the play Berlioz set in operatic style, it might be interesting to graft the last movement of Berlioz’s Roméo et Juliette onto a production of Gounod’s opera. At least they’re both from the mid-19th century and are both in French.) The Met’s production of Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette was basically well done and did justice to the story. Director Bartlett Sher and his production designers (Michael Yeargan for sets and Catherine Zuber for costumes) moved up the setting from the 16th to the 18th centuries, but it was still “antique” enough to fit the mood and not offer any of the outrageous anachronisms that infect modern-dress productions of Shakespeare. The Met’s current music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, conducted with loving attention to the score and didn’t glibly rush through it the way he’s done in some previous productions.

The cast was stunning, especially the singers in the leads; for some reason the Mercutio, Tybalt and Friar Laurence were all Black, but that was a battle fought and won long ago (though I was still taken aback when a preview for the Met’s next “Live in HD” production, Puccini’s La Rondine, featuring soprano Angel Blue, a heavy-set African-American, less because she’s Black than she was dressed in a costume that made her look like Bessie Smith). While not an opera at the level of the very best conceivable adaptations (and I still mourn that we don’t have Romeo and Juliet operas by Berlioz or Debussy!), Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette is still a quite capable piece of work and the Met’s current production (which debuted in 2017) does it justice. Oddly, though, it’s in just two acts; Gounod, Barbier and Carré wrote it in five short acts but the Met jammed it all together into two long ones, spotting the single intermission in between the two scenes of act three: a far cry from the Met’s 1930’s practice of either splitting long one-act operas like Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman and Das Rheingold to create intermissions or having Richard Strauss’s Salomé and Elektra preceded by curtain-raisers so there would be an intermission: a provision in the contract with their food-service provider required they have at least one intermission each time they performed!