Hey everyone! Welcome to Day 40, the half-way point of the project!
Today was devoted to Berlioz's gigantic Romeo and Juliet, a work that is part symphony, part oratorio, and part...well, something else.
Berlioz: Romeo and Juliet - February 9th and 16th, 1947
Every now and then I poke some good-natured fun at the more low-brow works that Toscanini recorded, by saying that they are not among "the titanic masterpieces of Western Civilization," or something similar. Romeo and Juliet is a different matter: this monumental score by Hector Berlioz is one of the titanic masterpieces of Western Civilization. Arturo Toscanini once called the Love Scene from this work "the most beautiful music in the world," and it is hard to argue with him. This music is so intoxicating that once under its spell it is deeply jarring to return to the real world.
This indescribably sublime creation was not always given the respect it deserves. For many years it was inexplicably given the same smirking reaction from critics that I have given to works like Paganini's Moto Perpetuo or Kabalevsky's Colas Breugnon Overture (I'm not proud of this). As recently as 1987, music critic Joseph Horowitz grouped Berlioz's Romeo and Juliet together with works like Kurt Atterberg's Symphony No. 6 and Kodály's Dances of Marosszék as being among the "novelties" that Toscanini performed. If this score was a novelty in 1987, it had been virtually forgotten forty years earlier. In 1947 Toscanini led the first complete performance of this masterpiece that had ever been given in the United States.
Toscanini had been programming excerpts from Romeo and Juliet for some time. He had attempted to perform the second part of the work at a concert in Turin as early as 1898 (the orchestra's board refused to pay for the music for such an obscure piece, convincing Toscanini to instead program Arturo Buzzi-Peccia's symphonic poem Re Harfagar), and played the Love Scene and Queen Mab Scherzo with some regularity throughout his career. He recorded the latter movement with the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1942, in one of his most outstanding documents with that ensemble.
I don't know exactly why Toscanini waited so long to program the entire piece, but I can't imagine it would have been an easy sell in the early part of his career. Between the work's ninety-minute performing time, its large personnel requirements (including a chorus, three vocal soloists, and an orchestra which was to ideally include eighteen harps) and lack of an accessible narrative structure, it should not be so surprising that Toscanini had to wait until he was nearly eighty years old to finally conduct the complete score. Perhaps it is simply that even someone like Toscanini had to reach a certain stature before he could convince a performing organization to foot the bill for this behemoth.
Once this work had finally been performed in its entirety, there was no going back. By 1953 Charles Munch would record his own complete Romeo and Juliet, and Pierre Monteux followed suit nine years later. There are now at least twenty complete recorded versions of this piece, and uncut concert presentations occur with some (but not enough) regularity. Hopefully some day Romeo and Juliet will take its rightful place alongside works like Carmina Burana or Mozart's Requiem in the world of standard choral works with orchestra.
Now we must get to the Toscanini performance itself. Rather like the broadcasts of Fidelio and Shostakovich's Leningrad Symphony, the true meaning of this performance cannot be measured strictly on its interpretive merits. The concert was an occasion of tremendous historical importance (and the applause of the audience that has been preserved on the recording suggests that this was not lost on them), and that is what really matters. As a musical interpretation, however, I find Toscanini's conception of this piece to be a bit…well, rather imperfect, and even a bit out of character.
Toscanini's performance is marked by an intense lyricism from start to finish that is extremely beautiful, but also deflects some of the static stillness that makes some of the most remarkable moments in the score so original. Toscanini also makes a number of bizarre emendations to the score. Most egregious in this regard is the ending of the Festivities at the Capulets movement, in which the woodwinds are supposed to hold out the final chord after the rest of the orchestra has cut off. Toscanini changes this by having the entire orchestra cut off together, a very ordinary effect that defeats the extraordinary originality of the passage. The Love Scene is also marked by a breathlessness that stands at odds with the wondrous and unusual harmonies that must be fully indulged in for the "most beautiful music in the world" to achieve its exquisite sensuality.
Although this performance does have some excellent passages (particularly the opening fight scene between the Montagues and Capulets, which really benefits from Toscanini's intensity), it must be judged more by the influence it exerted on future generations of musicians than on its own interpretive merits. There's nothing wrong with that.
Berlioz: Festivities at the Capulets and Love Scene from Romeo and Juliet - February 17th, 1947
These excerpts were recorded the day after the last of the two NBC broadcasts of the complete Romeo and Juliet score. Though Toscanini apparently did approve the RCA recording of the complete score as derived from the two 1947 broadcasts (minus the Queen Mab Scherzo, which ended up coming from a 1951 broadcast that evidently had cleaner ensemble), it was considered more commercially viable at the time to release studio recordings of only the three orchestral excerpts from the middle of the score. The Festivities at the Capulets, Love Scene, and Queen Mab Scherzo were all recorded at this session, but the last of these excerpts was rejected for release by Toscanini. The two approved movements were released during Toscanini's lifetime; the broadcast performances of the complete score were not released until 1965.
Though still not interpretively definitive, the two approved movements from the studio session serve as a revealing gloss on the broadcast recording from the previous week. In some respects the studio performances are more relaxed than their live counterparts, and the ensemble is generally more precise. The quality of the recorded sound from the studio session is also a significant improvement. I have the same qualms about these excerpts from a purely musical point of view as I do from the broadcasts, but once again the importance of Toscanini's attention to this music as a matter of historicity makes any concerns seem quite mundane. Thanks in large part to Toscanini, this monumental Berlioz masterpiece is now recognized for what it is, and no longer considered a "novelty."
..................................................................................................................................................
That's it for Day 40!
Check back tomorrow for a "great" symphony, and an octet that has been performed by many more than eight people.
Happy Monday!
No comments:
Post a Comment