Focus on a Masterpiece
The Roman Carnival: Berlioz (click here for MIDI)
Each issue we look
at a Masterpiece of good music. This time it is a classical
overture from the romantic period by Hector Berlioz.
Hector Berlioz established programme music1 as the Romantic musical form and started the beginnings of the symphonic poem. His music is representative of his own wild emotional swings and he often broke traditional orchestral rules!
Roman Carnival is a fast and exciting piece which captures the imagination and drives the listener forward through a carnival in the streets of Rome, giving us colour, fun, excitement, people enjoying themselves, dancing, singing, laughing, playing — all having a ball!
This is what classical music is all about: real life.
Berlioz
He was born in France in 1803, the son of an atheist doctor and catholic mother, and brought up a catholic but later became agnostic.
He had various successes in Germany, Russia and London; but he became very sick in 1869 and died in March. Today he has his own square in Paris with an overlooking statue.
Roman Carnival
Although not his most famous work, this overture is still a masterpiece in its own right. He dedicated it to Prince Friedrich von Hohenzollern-Hechingen, an enlightened patron of Berlioz’s music with whom the composer had stayed during a German tour in 1842.
The first performance of Roman Carnival was conducted by Berlioz himself at the Salle Herz in Paris in 1844. Let us quote from his own Memoirs:2
Indeed, when I arrived in the orchestra, all the wind players crowded round me, appalled at the thought of giving a public performance of an overture that was completely unknown to them.
“Don’t worry,” I said, “The parts are correct, and you are all excellent players. Watch my stick as often as you can, count your rests carefully, and everything will be all right.”
Not a single mistake occurred. I started the allegro at the right tempo, the whirlwind tempo of the Roman dancers. The audience encored it; we played it again; it went even better the second time.
Roman Carnival was enthusiastically received in many places. It was based on a poorly received work written 5 years earlier, the opera Benvenuto Cellini. This overture is based on two themes from the opera.
After a preliminary Carnival flourish in the key of A major, the first theme heard is Cellini’s aria to Teresa, “O Teresa, vous que j’aime”, from the Duo and Trio in Act 1 set in the house of her father. This is a love story!
To this sad declaration of love she replies, with equal sadness and to the same melody, that they must part. The music modulates to C major and then E major, with the statements of the melody being accompanied with music similar to that in the original opera. This is followed by an elaborate A major statement on full orchestra in the form of a canon, hinting at the coming Carnival, during which Cellini and Teresa plan to elope!
Now prepared for the dance the listener should not be surprised by the slightly animated wind notes that precipitate the music into the very fast music of the Carnival scene.
Berlioz repeatedly emphasised the importance of speed in the Carnival scene, once even interrupting a performance in Vienna which was not being done fast enough, played that time on a piano and an early harmonium, by shouting “This is the carnival, not Lent. You make it sound like Good Friday in Rome.”
Berlioz himself did experience the real Roman Carnival during his stay in the city as a Prix de Rome winner in 1831.
By long tradition, deriving from the ancient pagan Saturnalia (the forerunner to christmas), it was the most hectic, licentious and violent of all Italy’s pre-Lenten carnivals, and one which several Popes had unsuccessfully tried to restrain.
Like Goethe, who witnessed it twice on his famous Italian journey, in 1787 and 1788, and found in it noise but no real merriment — “One has to see the Roman Carnival to lose all wish to ever see it again!” — Berlioz describes it brilliantly, but as his Memoirs show was in fact disgusted by what he too found an almost totally degrading spectacle.
The full score and parts of Le Carnaval Romain were published by Schlesinger in June 1844. The autograph seems to be lost apart from a single sheet in the Paris Conservatoire de Musique.
Personal Reaction
After listening to this rather exciting and enjoyable piece one cannot help but be sucked into the merriment and enjoy the party. Although one does not need to participate in the degrading activities of the original Roman Carnival to enjoy the music! Overall a piece you can enjoy when you need something to lift your spirits or to just relax and imagine a carnival.
1: programme music: music that tells a story; for definitions of this and other musical terms, see our series on music jargon.
2: The Memoirs of Hector Berlioz, translated and edited by David Cairns. Published by Gollancz, London, 1969.
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Updated 12 March, 2003 © David King 2000-2003