Roméo et Juliette, Op. 17: Roméo seul

Program notes

About the Work

Hector Berlioz first saw Romeo and Juliet at the Odéon theatre in Paris in September 1827, given by a visiting English company. He knew almost no English, but the play overwhelmed him, and so did the Juliet, the actress Harriet Smithson, whom he later married. The idea of setting the story to music stayed with him for twelve years. The means to do it came at the end of 1838, when the violinist Nicolò Paganini, having heard Harold en Italie, sent him a gift of 20,000 francs. The money cleared his debts and bought him time to compose. Berlioz wrote Roméo et Juliette in 1839 and conducted the first performance at the Paris Conservatoire on 24 November that year. The score is dedicated to Paganini.

He called the work a symphonie dramatique. It lasts about an hour and a half and uses solo singers and chorus, but they only narrate and comment. The lovers themselves never sing: Berlioz gives their scenes to the orchestra alone, arguing in his preface that instrumental music could express such feeling more freely than words. These purely orchestral movements are the core of the work, and they are often played on their own, as they are here.

The first of them carries a long title that amounts to a programme: Roméo seul. Tristesse. Bruits lointains de concert et de bal. Grande fête chez Capulet (Romeo alone. Sadness. Distant sounds of music and dancing. Great festivities at the Capulets’).

What to Listen For

The movement begins with the violins entirely alone, playing a slow, wandering, chromatic line: Romeo by himself, restless and melancholy. Other instruments join gradually, and from far away come fragments of a quick dance. Then a solo oboe sings a long, tender melody over a quiet pulse from the percussion, which keeps the rhythm of the distant ball going underneath. Berlioz had written this tune years earlier for one of his Prix de Rome cantatas and saved it for a better use.

The dance music draws closer and the tempo changes to Allegro: we are inside the Capulets’ ballroom, with the full orchestra in brilliant colours. The high point comes when Berlioz brings back the oboe’s melody, now given out at full volume by the wind and brass, and sets it on top of the whirling dance tune. Combining two themes in this way was a favourite device of his. The movement drives on over a repeating figure in the bass, pauses for a last, brief memory of the solo oboe, and ends in a blaze.