Chapter Twelve
Berlioz, Béatrice, and Much Ado About Nothing
O Shakespeare! Shakespeare! … que tu es peu compris!
—Berlioz, Lélio ou Le Retour à la vie
Much Ado About Nothing, the play upon which Berlioz based his lone opéra-comique,
Béatrice et Bénédict, carries a title that is singularly ambiguous: the noun “nothing,” which, for most of us signifies “not anything,” or “no single thing,” or “zero,” to use the terms of the
Oxford English Dictionary, did not mean those things only in and around the year 1599, the probable date of the completion of Shakespeare’s play.
1 For this chapter, I have consulted Much Ado About Nothing as edited by Tucker Brooke (The Yale Shakespeare; New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1917); Josephine Waters Bennett (Baltimore: Penguin, 1971); A. R. Humphreys (The Arden Edition; London: Methuen, 1981); F. H. Mares (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), and John F. Cox (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). At the time, the word may well have been pronounced “noting,” with a long
o, which word we now use to describe the behavior of one taking, or setting down,
notes,
as would a spy—or a composer. In act 2, scene 3 of the play, at lines 54–56, Don Pedro and Balthasar meditate explicitly upon these various possibilities: “Note this before my notes: There’s not a note of mine that’s worth the noting.” The scholars have used use this line, and hundreds of others, to construct a discourse upon the significance of this conspicuously explosive word in the Shakespearean canon. And, as in many comedies of the Bard, music, above and beyond
noting, plays a fundamental role in
Much Ado About Nothing, something that becomes pointedly ironic when one insists upon the title in French,
Beaucoup de bruit pour rien, where “ado” simply becomes “noise.”
Among the possible meanings of “nothing,” in the Elizabethan era, as adolescents are sometimes delighted to discover, is the sex of the woman, the vagina, as we have seen in the previous chapter, in the quotation from act 3, scene 2 of Hamlet:
Hamlet: Lady, shall I lie in your lap?
Ophelia: No, my lord.
Hamlet: I mean, my head upon your lap.
Ophelia: Aye, my lord.
Hamlet: Do you think I meant country matters?
Ophelia: I think nothing, my lord.
Female sexuality is of course one of the principal themes of
Much Ado, in which the obviously most fascinating character is Beatrice. That Berlioz felt as much is clear from the grand second-act
scena he devised for her, the work’s most “musically adventurous” page, carefully tailored to the voice of the star of the show, Anne Charton-Demeur, and comprising, as a recent critic has well said, “a last desperate cry of a woman who holds the convention of marriage to be a meaningless sham, even as she prepares to yield to it.”
2 Harper-Scott, “Béatrice et Bénédict,” 22. And she does. The celebrated critic Harold Bloom, musing on the crucial word of the play’s title, suggests that “all of [Shakespeare’s] deceptions and machinations, though important in their moment, will ultimately amount to
nothing.”
3 Bloom (Harold), Much Ado About Nothing, 9 (my emphasis). But Berlioz’s opera does cause us to wonder anew about the relative merits of human freedom and social convention.
The first question that I asked myself in undertaking this study is
not how Berlioz reduced the action of Shakespeare’s play to the mischief and trickery of Beatrice and Benedict. One might think, considering his excoriation of
I Montecchi ed i Capuleti, even based as it was on the erroneous assumption that the Italian composer’s opera derived from Shakespeare, that such a reduction was unlikely. “What a terrible disappointment,” he wrote, on seeing Bellini’s opera in Florence in February 1832: “In the libretto there is no Capulets’ ball, no Mercutio, no gossipy nurse, no wise and solemn hermit, no balcony scene, no sublime monologue for Juliet as she accepts hermit’s potion, no duet in the cell between the banished Romeo and the dismayed hermit, no Shakespeare, no
anything,
merely a botched and mutilated endeavor, an
arrangement.”
4 Berlioz, Revue européenne (March 15, 1832); and Mémoires (shortened), 328. (Berlioz, who refers to Friar Lawrence as the “hermit,” even though the word is not found in Shakespeare, always used the French word “arrangement” as an expletive.) Despite this tirade, it seems obvious to me, in the case of
Much Ado, that the composer found little apt for
operatic setting in the plot directed by Don John against the love of Hero and Claudio. Indeed, of Richard III and Macbeth, if not Don John, he asserted explicitly that such individuals, sullied by ambition and intrigue, cannot find a place in an opera “without yielding the principal character traits that Shakespeare gave to them, or without hopelessly tormenting the art of music by requiring of it a kind of expression it does not possess.”
5 Journal des débats (September 10, 1837); CM 3:238.The question I rather asked myself, then, is how Berlioz actually understood the language of the play; how he felt and interpreted the subtleties of the English text—the precipitous repartee, the delicate rhymes and rhythms, the careful opposition of free and rhymed verse and of poetry and prose, the improprieties, the ambiguities, the doubles entendres, the overlapping literal and figurative senses of the words, the music of the speech; the question, in other words, of how he perceived and sensed the style. Before turning to that issue, however, I had to ask which versions of Much Ado Berlioz had before him in the early years and when he came back to the play at the time of Les Troyens, and how he made use of them when he determined to set down the libretto himself.