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S
hakespeare’s play
Romeo and Juliet
has led a large number of
composers to base an opera on its tantalizing love story, but how
many of these operas are performed in opera houses today? You
may have heard Bellini’s
I Capuleti e i Montecchi
(
The Capulets and
the Montagues
) but who has even heard of the 1776
Romeo and Juliet
composed by Georg Benda, or the 1862 Leopold Damrosch opera of the
same name, or
Giulietta e Romeo
composed by Nicola Vaccai in 1832?
Even though
Romeo and Juliet,
the quintessential love story,
is endearing and memorable, those
qualities haven’t guaranteed that
an opera based on it will do well,
but Charles Gounod’s
Roméo et
Juliette
succeeded from the start.
Its triumphant 1867 premiere at
Paris’s Théâtre-Lyrique, and the
run of performances that followed,
was aided by a happy coincidence:
the Exposition Universelle opened
in Paris in April 1867, attracting
9.2 million visitors to the French
capital. Many visitors were looking
for entertainment; as a result,
Roméo
et Juliette
played to sold-out houses
night after night. It then traveled
to all the major opera centers in
Europe and returned to Paris as a
staple at the Opéra Comique in
1873, before finally moving to the
mighty Paris Opéra in 1888. Its
early, resounding success ensured
that it would become a part of the
international repertory — but why
did it endure when others failed?
When Gounod (1818-1893)
turned his attention to
Roméo et
Juliette
in 1867, he’d already earned
renown with an opera based on
another legendary world-famous
drama, Goethe’s
Faust
. He’d long considered setting Shakespeare’s play to
music, and was returning to a story that had captivated his attention many
years before. As a student in Rome in his mid-twenties, he began a
Romeo
e Giulietta
(probably based on the same libretto Bellini had used in 1830
for his
Capuleti
). He may have been inspired at an even earlier time, when
he was still a teenager and first heard another
Roméo et Juliette
, Berlioz’s
glorious “dramatic symphony.”
For his new opera Gounod collaborated with the same librettists,
Jules Barbier and Michel Carré, who worked with him on
Faust
. These
two tried to stay close to the language and meter of Shakespeare, using
Victor Hugo’s recently completed French translation. Barbier and Carré
selected scenes from Shakespeare’s play, but they did away with many of
the secondary characters while expanding others. They also condensed the
original play where they deemed it necessary. Although Gounod intended
to remain as faithful to Shakespeare as possible, he allowed his two
librettists to make changes to create
a text of workable length for the
opera, and to remove many scenes
that didn’t focus directly on the two
lovers. To that end, the librettists
made a bold decision in changing
the final scene; in Shakespeare, when
Juliet awakens and finds herself in
the tomb, Romeo is already dead. In
Gounod’s opera, however, Romeo
is still alive, and the lovers sing
a duet before Juliet fatally stabs
herself. The two then die together,
begging God’s forgiveness for their
unchristian suicide.
The librettists’ choice of scenes
and their rewriting can bring us
closer to understanding Gounod’s
success. It can be found in the more
concentrated way the opera tells this
iconic story. The composer was able
to create a Romantic masterpiece
of captivating melodic music,
gradually intensifying the love of
the two teenagers with exceptionally
beautiful duets in four of the five
acts. The duets highlight the lovers
while creating a magnificent and
unusual progression, linking the plot
and the music.
It’s important to remember that Gounod, a former church organist
and choirmaster, studied theology for two years before entering the
Saint-Sulpice seminary in 1846. It was only a year later that he decided
against taking holy orders and began composing operas. He wasn’t
simply a French romantic; at times he was described as very religious,
overly sensitive, hyperemotional, sensuous, and passionate. All these
characteristics he transferred to
Roméo et Juliette
. Because – like the
O P E R A N O T E S | L Y R I C O P E R A O F C H I C A G O
February 22 - March 19, 2016
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Gounod’s
Roméo et Juliette
: Love Triumphs Even in Death
By Susan Halpern
“The Last Kiss of Romeo and Juliet”
by Italian painter Francesco Hayez (1791-1882)