HECTOR BERLIOZ (1803-1869)
Berlioz originally conceived his Nuits d'été - Summer Nights - as a song-cycle for
mezzo-soprano or tenor, with a piano accompaniment: he finished the work in 1841.
The words were by the great romantic poet Théophile Gautier (1811-72), critic, essayist,
dramatist and apostle of L'art pour l'art, Art for art's sake - the doctrine that
a work of art needs no social, religious or philosophical purpose: its aesthetic
value is all that matters. However that may be, Nuits d'été represents an ideal marriage
between composer and lyrist, founded on mutual admiration for each other's work.
Gautier wrote of Berlioz as the perfect type of romantic artist, personifying the
spirit of an era in Paris when the constraints of the ancien régime had been finally
thrown off. Berlioz, he declared, possessed 'a tumultuous and Shakespearean depth
of passion,' with the power to express 'infinite and mysterious continents not to
be rendered in words - that indefinable "something" for which language is inadequate
but which can be heard in music.'
Love and its transience are the theme of these songs, and Gautier's words brought
forth one of Berlioz's most luminous scores. The period of their composition was
a turning point in his life. His marriage to the English actress Harriet Smithson
- the Ophelia to Kemble's Hamlet whom Berlioz had seen in 1827 at the Odéon theatre
and fallen hopelessly in love with - was falling apart (she was to die in 1854, still
supported by Berlioz): it is not too fanciful to imagine his feelings for her colouring
the composition of these songs. But his disillusionment with the musical scene in
Paris was growing. Abroad, his music was performed to delighted audiences. At home,
he was largely ignored, or regarded as a crackpot modernist whose music was too outlandish
for serious attention. In Paris, he wrote when he returned after his first tour in
Germany, 'music too often speaks to morons, barbarians and the deaf...In Paris music
is a god - so long as only the most meagre sacrifices are called for to feed its
altars.' In 1841 the only work of his to be performed was a set of recitatives for
Weber's Der Freischütz, required to beat the Opéra's ban on spoken dialogue.
So for the next twenty years, Berlioz spent most of his time away from France. On
his German tour in 1843 he was accompanied by Marie Recio, a singer of mixed French
and Spanish birth, who sang in most of his concerts and for whom he orchestrated
the song Absence. More than once he tried to break off the relationship that grew
between them, but a few months after the death of Harriet, by now severely paralysed,
Berlioz and Marie Recioo were married, and it was Marie's mother who cared for him
in his last illness fifteen years later.
In 1856 the Nuits d'été, fully orchestrated, were published - in Germany. In their
orchestrated form, Berlioz himself only ever heard Absence and Le spectre de la rose
.
Programme Notes by Paul Vaughan ©
The Wimbledon Symphony Orchestra is a registered charity (No. 259860)
