Shakespeare in Berlioz, Berlioz in Shakespeare

Abstract

Berlioz’s obsession—it was hardly less—with Shakespeare set in when he witnessed performances of Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet, in English (a language he scarcely knew), at the Odéon theatre, Paris, in 1827. His feelings were complicated by his falling in love with Ophelia/Juliet, in the person of Harriet Smithson, whom he later married. His habit of citing lines, in the original, was life-long; he used Shakespeare for epigraphs to his scenes from Goethe’s Faust (1829) and other works, and often quoted him in his journalism and other writings. He was perhaps more cautious about exposing his feelings in music; his first Shakespeare-inspired composition is not from the tragedies he had witnessed, but is a fantasy-overture inspired by The Tempest (1830). The next year he composed an overture King Lear; he had, however, only read, and not seen, both plays. In 1839, however, Berlioz composed a large-scale concert work (‘dramatic symphony’) Roméo et Juliette, and in the 1840s he composed music connected to Hamlet. Writing the libretto for his great opera Les Troyens, he called it ‘Virgil Shakespeareanized’, and his swan-song was an opéra comique, Béatrice et Bénédict (1862–1863), based on Much Ado About Nothing. It is sometimes argued that he ‘misunderstood’ Shakespeare; more constructively, it will be suggested that he read Shakespeare to serve his own creative objectives.