 |
 |
 |
| Hector
Berlioz Lélio or The Return to Life |
|
| Lélio
has a prequel, the Symphonie fantastique: The desperation of unrequited
love causes a young musician to try and poison himself with opium. He
falls into a long sleep in which he experiences the most peculiar visions.
Finally he dreams he has killed his beloved and is being dragged to the
scaffold. After his death he witnesses a wild Walpurgis Night orgy...
The Monodrame lyrique begins as Lélio, the musician from
the Symphonie fantastique, awakes from his intoxication. The terror
of the execution and the witches' sabbath lingers in his bones, but his
dread is combined with despair that destiny has chosen to keep him alive.
He recalls the time he wrote The Fisherman (No. 1), a piano piece
for his friend Horatio. The siren which accompanied the fisherman on his
journey to the depth now appears to have anticipated the suffering he
endured at the hands of his own unfaithful beloved. Lélio becomes
engrossed in a monologue where he searches for his own artistic identity
and bemoans the state of the world. His mind turns to the reflections
of Hamlet, and his imagination conjures up the Chorus of the Shades
from the invocation scene in its full orchestral magnificence (No. 2).
Hardly has the chorus reached its conclusion than Lélio starts
to settle accounts with the critics and other enemies of the arts, with
the »pitiful habitants of the temple of habit, the fanatic priests
who would sacrifice the most elevated new ideas to their dim-witted goddess
were they privy to the same«. He yearns to break with a »society
worse than hell« and dreams of a life as a brigand in the Abruzzi
(no. 3). The image of his beloved stirs once again in Lèlio, and
he sings of the bliss he will savour with her in his arms (No. 4). He
can conceive of no greater fulfilment than dying of love together with
her. To the sounds of the Aeolian harp (no. 5) Lélio ponders that
death has declined him its solace and he is condemned to live: »I
shall compose it as if it were for me alone - a piece which banishes all
dismal shades of doom and despair.« He conjures up the ghosts from
Shakespeare's Tempest, and suddenly the empty stage is bristling with
life. The choir and orchestra come into view and perform Lélio's/Berlioz's
Fantasia on Shakespeare's »Tempest« (No. 6). The curtain falls.
Lélio is determined henceforth to take his life in both hands,
but the past casts its shadow even now. The idée fixe from the
Symphonie fantastique sounds softly in the back-ground to Lélio's
groans: »Once more!... Once more - and for ever!...«
Hector Berlioz came upon the idea of writing a sequel for the Symphonie fantastique when he was staying in Rome in the summer of 1831. Shortly before his departure he had fallen in love with a young lady by the name of Camille Moke, but hardly had he reached his destination than he discovered Mademoiselle Moke had entered into a liaison with another and was betrothed to Monsieur Pleyel jr. Harbouring plans for revenge (he intended to shoot mother, daughter and fiancé), Berlioz set off for Paris. But in Nice he came to his senses and decided that from now on he would devote his passions to art. His arrival back in Rome, his renewed artistic preoccupation, was his own »return to life«. Berlioz drafted the words for Lélio in the space of a few days. He wrote to his friend Thomas Counet, the writer: »As for my verse, I have chosen to refrain from the pursuit of consistent rhyme; I have written prose replete with cadences, measured verse which rhymes here and there; and that will suffice for music. [...] The music is ready too; all that remains is to copy it out.« Berlioz spared himself considerable effort in writing the music for Lélio, preferring simply to draw on earlier works. The Song of Bliss (No. 4) and Aeolian Harp. Recollections are taken from the cantata La Mort d'Orphée which Berlioz had entered for the Prix de Rome in 1827, while the Chorus of the Shades (No. 2) was originally included in La Mort de Cléopâtre (1829) and Berlioz had performed the Fantasia on Shakespeare's »Tempest« in Paris in November 1830. The combination of such disparate elements, the switch from song with piano accompaniment to choral writing and orchestral interludes, may seem rather peculiar to our ears, but was quite typical of the »colourful« programmes that were the fashion in the first half of the 19h century. Although Berlioz himself valued Lélio more than the Symphonie fantastique (since symphonic element was more consistently subordinated to the poetic principal in the monodrama), the work has never managed to establish itself in the concert repertoire. It was premiered in November 1832 but not performed again until 1855 in Weimar - together with the Symphonie fantastique under the direction of Franz Liszt. Wolfgang Lempfrid |
|
|
|
|