Berlioz: Les Nuits d’Été, Op.7 (1840-1/56)
Villanelle
Le Spectre de la rose
Sur les lagunes: Lamento
Absence
Au cimetière: clair de lune
L’île inconnue
Hector Berlioz must have been one of the most impressionable of men, acutely sensitive to so much he came into contact with, whether it be poetry, nature, women, or other composers’ music. So many of his works were conceived out of an intense creative response to such experiences, and many of them are on an enormous scale – it could be that the wildest and most extravagant moments of the Symphonie Fantastique or the Grande Messe des Morts had a not entirely beneficial effect on his reputation, both during his lifetime and afterwards. However, modern scholarship – allied to a more authoritative and informed level of performance – has led to a re-appraisal over the past half-century (significantly, since the centenary of his death in 1969), as well as a true recognition of his rightful place in the succession of great dramatic/symphonic composers from Gluck to Beethoven, and onwards to Schumann, Liszt, Wagner, Verdi, and Tchaikovsky.
However, attention must be drawn to the undeniable truth that, in amongst the trail blazing sonorities of his most famous (some would say notorious!) compositions, we will find sometimes brief, sometimes more extended moments of pure chamber music, moments of the most profound intimacy: no more so than at the very climax in Act IV of that grandest of grand operas – Les Troyens – when Didon and Énée share the sweetest and most ravishing love duet, delicately accompanied for the most part by gentle strings and the merest handful of wind instruments. That unforgettable scene could be said to be foreshadowed in the present collection of songs, all of which gradually appeared between November 1840 and September 1841. Published that same year, originally with piano accompaniment – as were virtually all of his songs – he eventually orchestrated them in 1856 (the very year in which he began Les Troyens), transposing the 2nd and 3rd of them to lower keys and specifically calling for four different voices to facilitate their combined range. Nowadays, practical constraints tend to have a bearing on how far the composer’s wishes can be adhered to here – and the practice of returning to Berlioz’s original keys for one high voice has become more customary. The four great literary influences on his life had always been Shakespeare, Virgil, Byron, and Goethe; but here he turns to Théophile Gautier’s La comédie de la mort (1838) for a selection of characteristic musings on romantic love, the passionate and sometimes tragic tone of Nos.2 to 5 being framed by no less sincere expressions of lighthearted and joyful abandon in the first and last.
Typically of Berlioz, this distilled essence of his musical language was immediately preceded by one of his most public creations, the Grande symphonie funèbre et triomphale – specifically commissioned for a great ceremonial, and originally scored for a gigantic military band of 200 players! An amazing and mightily impressive piece it is – especially its sombre opening funeral march; yet no more so than these deeply touching chansons, in their own way as near to perfection as anything he ever wrote.
Synopsis
“Villanelle” is a celebration of spring and love: it tells of the pleasures of wandering together in the woods in springtime to gather wild strawberries, returning home with hands entwined. Even in this happy song, however, shadows pass over the scene, belying its innocent surface.
“The Spectre of the Rose”, tells of a girl’s dreams of the ghost of the rose she had worn to a ball the previous day. Although the rose has died, it has ascended to paradise; it does not regret its death, but instead proclaims that “all kings will envy it.”
“On the Lagoons”, with its sombre harmonies and orchestration, is imbued with melancholy; the undulating accompaniment suggests the movement of the waves. The poem is the lament of a Venetian boatman at the loss of his beloved, and the pain of sailing out to sea unloved: “How bitter my fate is! Ah! Without love to set out on the sea!”. Subtitled “lament,” this mournful song fades away poetically on an unresolved half-cadence.
The rhetorical “Absence” pleads for the return of the beloved. A vast distance separates them: in context, the distance could metaphorically refer to that between this life and the hereafter.
The most chilling of the songs, “In the Cemetery – moonlight” is a further lament, depicting a gothic scene in which the bereaved lover, now more distant from the memory of his beloved, is perturbed by a vision of her ghost, calling from beyond the grave (the apparition is evoked by ghostly violin and viola harmonics). In this song the singer at last breaks free from grief, resolving never to return to the cemetery.
“The Unknown Island” hints at the unattainable – a place where love can be eternal. The singer steers a fanciful ship over the open ocean, asking a new beloved “Where would you like to go? Is it to the Baltic? To the Pacific Ocean? The isle of Java? Or perhaps to Norway, To pick the snow-flower, Or the flower of Angsoka?” She answers: “Take me to the faithful shore, where one loves forever.” “That shore is hardly known, my dear, in the land of love,” the singer responds.
© Alan George
See Ralph Moore’s survey of this work.
