Music chronicle

Hudson Review, The, Summer 2003 by Clark, Robert S

UNABASHED LOVERS OF THE MUSIC OF HECTOR BERLIOZ have had reason to rejoice in the months just past, as the musical community has marked the bicentennial of his birth in 1803. In addition to performances of the more familiar scores-Symphonie fantastique, Nuits d'Ete, Harold in Italy, and a few others, none of which have been out of the repertory since the Berlioz revival of the fifties and sixties-the peripatetic devotee could catch up with many of this idiosyncratic composer's works that are less often heard. In New York in the fall-winter season of 2002-2003, one could hear La Damnation de Faust, Romeo et Juliette, L'Enfance du Christ, and La Mort de Cleopatre, along with a flock of orchestral overtures. The Metropolitan Opera presented a fresh staging of the composer's inimitable Virgilian opera Les Troyens, and its orchestra played two all-Berlioz programs in Carnegie Hall (and will stage Benvenuto Cellini, a true Berlioz rarity, in the coming season). But for the really besotted, perhaps the most savored opportunity was the chance for not one but two different hearings of Berlioz's delectable two-act Shakespearean opera comique, Beatrice and Benedict, the first in concert in the New York Philharmonic's subscription series, led by the eminent Berliozian Sir Colin Davis, and the second fully staged by the students and faculty of the Manhattan School of Music.

Beatrice and Benedict was Berlioz's last completed work. He had struggled with Les Troyens's grand dimensions throughout the late 1850s, only to encounter almost total indifference to staging it on the part of the French operatic establishment. He was to die without ever hearing it performed complete. Fortunately for posterity, in 1858 he received another commission for an opera from a friendly source, and it made him change his mind about forsaking composition for good. Edouard Benizet, head of the casino in Baden-Baden in southern Germany, for whom Berlioz had regularly conducted during summer seasons, sent Berlioz a libretto set during the Thirty Years War; but after temporizing for several years, the composer rejected it, turning instead to his beloved Shakespeare for inspiration. The resulting opera comique, Beatrice and Benedict, had its debut in Baden-Baden in August 1862 to great acclaim, and it was again staged early the following year in Weimar, where Liszt, as music master of the ducal household, had steadily championed Berlioz's music. Berlioz again led the work in Baden-Baden in the summer of 1863, and for this performance he added a trio and a wedding song to the second act. In its final form, the opera comique combines the fleet-footed and ingenious sparkle of Berlioz's light touch (think the "Queen Mab" Scherzo from Romeo et Juliette) with the exquisite melodic invention that characterizes his finest works.

Berlioz described Beatrice and Benedict, loosely based on Shakespeare's Much Ado about Nothing, as a "caprice written with the point of a needle." The composer prepared his own libretto, subordinating the play's principal characters, Hero and Claudio, to the two characters of the opera's title, who engage in "a kind of merry war" until they recognize that love lies behind the insults. Berlioz balances the work's structure by devoting the first act to Benedict's conversion and the second to Beatrice's. The composer scrapped the playwright's scenes dealing with Hero's wooing by Claudio, Don John's plot to defame her, and her reported death. And Berlioz added an arrogant and incompetent music master, Somarone (Big Donkey), who leads the townspeople in his own hapless compositions, a turgid fugal chorus (Epithalamium grotesque) and a drinking song, satirizing the pedantry and sterility of the music of his time. But elsewhere the composer hewed closely to Shakespeare's structure and language.

The two performances dealt with the vexing opera comique combination of arias and ensembles alongside spoken passages in disparate ways. The Manhattan School student singers spoke the dialogue (translated into English) as well as sang the musical numbers; the Philharmonic's singers had alter egos on stage to supply the intervening spoken passages. Both approaches were basically satisfactory, but both had drawbacks. The Manhattan musicians handled the dialogue skilfully, but stretches of it were inaudible, and poorly lit and barely legible supertitles did not provide much help. At the Philharmonic, the presence on stage of two performers for each singing role created confusion from time to time, though the actors, who were amplified, were never less than professional and effective. (Their dialogue, also in English, was abbreviated and prepared by the versatile Sir Colin.)

In both cases the musical contributions were admirable, even if it was no surprise that the student musicians could not supply the polish and fervor of the professional musicians. Still, they offered zest and aplomb, and Laurent Pillot conducted ably, with a lot of spirit, particularly in the fast-moving music. Ensemble, both of the soloists and the secondary players, was for the most part excellent. All of the soloists performed with grace and style: the challenging coloratura of Hero's first-act aria was done smartly by Elaine Alvarez, and Jeniece Golbourne was a strong Beatrice. Christopher Clayton got the right notes of vanity and bumbling for Somarone without hamming it up, and the remaining players were capable or better. The delightful staging of Chris Mattaliano, the colorful and apt sets of Erhard Rohm (the first-act garden set artfully suggested Watteau), and the period costumes of Fabio Toblino all played their part in the evening's success.