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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
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February 22 - March 19, 2016
Juliet (Mirella Freni) and Romeo (Alfredo Kraus) are married by Friar Laurence (Sesto Bruscantini)
in Lyric’s 1981 production.
Leslie Howard and Norma Shearer were
Hollywood’s idea of Romeo and Juliet
in the 1930s.
great majority of his countrymen – Gounod
was a religious Catholic, it’s possible that
he included a subtle religious message in his
opera. It would have been understood in the
France of Gounod’s time that the deaths of the
lovers occurred because of their own actions,
decisions, and choices, and the lack of parental
guidance; thus many in the audience might
have interpreted this tragedy as a Christian or
Catholic cautionary tale. If we don’t interpret
the opera today as Gounod’s audience might
have done, it’s because we don’t share the
over-arching French Catholic viewpoint of
Gounod’s audiences.
In the prologue that begins
Roméo et
Juliette
, the chorus foreshadows the action to
come as it introduces the feud between the
two families, the Montagues and the Capulets.
We soon sense its edge of violence, as well as
the love between Romeo and Juliet. In the
mazurka opening Act One, Gounod’s music
highlights the stark contrast between inner
emotional feelings and the sounds of the
festivities. The dance music, which returns
after Juliet appears for the first time, and again
at the end of the act, provides the atmosphere
for the whole act and creates its unity, while
helping to establish the act’s pageantry.
Although both Shakespeare’s play and
Gounod’s opera are divided into five acts,
the Barbier-Carré libretto doesn’t follow
Shakespeare’s sequence of scenes. Instead, it
extracts and condenses the best-known and most
“operatic” scenes and then links them together:
the Capulets’ masked ball, the scene in Juliet’s
garden, the hot-blooded duels in the street, the
scene in Friar Laurence’s cell, Juliet’s soliloquy
before taking the potion, and the tomb scene.
Gounod was pleased with how he conceived
the work’s structure, and wrote expressing his
satisfaction while he was still working on it: “The
ending of the first act is brilliant, of the second
tender and dreamy, of the third animated and
grand with the duels and the exile of Romeo, of
the fourth dramatic and of the fifth tragic. It is a
beautiful progression.”
In his writing, however, Gounod had
to conform to the demands of Parisian opera
audience. They required not only that there
be five acts and a strong element of spectacle,
but also that each opera have a ballet as well as
voices of a predictable number and type -- two
prominent sopranos, as well as a tenor and a
baritone. To satisfy this requirement Gounod
created a second soprano: the “pants” role of
Stephano, Romeo’s page, who doesn’t appear
in the original Shakespeare play.
TONY ROMANO