9 - Afterword: Roméo et Juliette as covert opera

Summary

‘Roméo est une symphonie’: it lacks an ‘action suivie’, so although it may be dramatic in essence, it cannot be dramatic in form. Thus Jacques Chailley challenges us to defy Berlioz's own classification. Yet Roméo et Juliettecan only be understood as a symphony if we are prepared to distend that term beyond what is helpful. In 1839 Auguste Morel struggled to align it with a model: ‘with the ball scene, the garden scene, the Queen Mab scherzo, and the finale, one has a complete symphony, cut virtually according to the pattern of Beethoven's Choral’. Chailley's conflation of Nos. 1 and 2 into an introduction–allegro, and Nos. 5, 6 and 7 into a single composite finale, is no less specious; the last three movements interrelate music and drama in three different ways. Much as one may dislike the idea of a favourite work resulting from its creator being constrained by external events, Jeffrey Langford's statement that the dramatic symphony was a ‘temporary substitute for opera’ has the ring of truth. Enough has already been said to determine that the case for calling it ‘a symphony’ tout court is negligible; in this chapter I shall try to make the case that it is best understood as a dramatic form, albeit one without precedent and virtually, as it now appears, without posterity.

Symphonies, as the Fantastique demonstrates, deal best with a dramatic development which is largely internal, a fantasy, the love it portrays being unknown to its object and unrequited. In Roméo et Juliette Berlioz assumes the objectivity of a dramatist; he deals not only with the mutual love of the protagonists but, departing (as we have seen) from his immediate sources, with society at large.