Chapter Twelve: Berlioz, Béatrice, and Much Ado About Nothing

Harriet Smithson, at the time twenty-seven years old, took the roles of Ophelia, Juliet, and Desdemona. She would later play Cordelia in King Lear, Portia in The Merchant of Venice, Queen Elizabeth in Richard III, and Lady Macbeth in Macbeth. Charles Kemble, at the time fifty-two, played Hamlet, Romeo, and Othello. Berlioz tells us explicitly that he saw Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet, the two plays that, for the next forty years, would most mark his career as a writer. In his books and articles, quotations from Shakespeare abound, as I have said earlier in this book. But Romeo and Juliet led to one of his most avant-garde compositions, the “dramatic symphony” Roméo et Juliette; and Hamlet, as I noted in the previous chapter, marks Le Retour à la vie, the Marche funèbre pour la dernière scène d’Hamlet, and La Mort d’Ophélie. Othello, too, had a profound impact on his life and work, not so much by jealousy as by a fascination with revenge. He does not speak of Othello in this context, but it is probable that, in 1827, he saw Othello as well.2 Kolb, “Berlioz’s Othello,” 249. In a letter dated January 25, 1829, François-Guillaume Andrieux—who had just become Secrétaire Perpétuel of the Académie Française and whose literature course at the Collège de France Berlioz was enthusiastically auditing at the time—spoke to Rouget de Lisle of an opera libretto based on Othello that Rouget, perhaps on Andrieux’s recommendation, hoped would be set by Berlioz.3 Mémoires, 165, 286.

The Shakespearean tragedies themselves, with their antitheses of gravitas and jest, provoked a new war in Paris between the classicists and romanticists, something first treated in detail in the still vital Le Théâtre anglais à Paris by Joseph-Léopold Borgerhoff. At the time, the French public, including the crème de la crème of the writers and poets, was especially impressed by the natural, life-like performances of the English actors, and by their pantomimic gestures, which seemed exaggerated in comparison to those of the French tradition. Harriet Smithson’s comportment was even compared favorably with that of the newly celebrated diva, Marie Malibran, who was making her début at the same time: both women played Desdemona (in Shakespeare and Rossini, respectively), one played Juliet and one played Romeo (in the opera by Zingarelli). The “spontaneity,” “inspiration,” “excesses,” and even the “convulsions” of both, as Céline Frigau Manning has written, were remarked upon at the time by various observers.4 Manning, “Shakespeariennes,” 25. For Smithson, the review of the opening performance of Hamlet in the Journal des débats of September 13, 1827, is representative of many:

On the other hand, Lady Granville—the wife of the British ambassador in Paris and a well-bred society matron whose ancient and aristocratic family later produced such celebrities as Winston Churchill and Diana, Princess of Wales—found Smithson’s accent and habits of speech rather vulgar. This matter is taken up by today’s authority on the subject, Peter Raby, who affirms that the actress’s articulation was surely not that of the British upper classes in the early decades of the new century.6 Raby, “Shakespeare in Paris,” 216–217; and Raby, Fair Ophelia. Is this something that was available to Duvicquet, or to Berlioz, at the time? In the touching obituary for Smithson that he wrote in the Journal des débats on March 20, 1854, Jules Janin recalled explicitly her “voix d’or” —her “golden voice”—evidence that for the Frenchman, Harriet’s expression was just fine.

Along with the exceptional comedy of The Merchant of Venice, played six times in 1828 by Smithson and her English partners, the plays that Berlioz knew best, and that encapsulated for him the double idée fixe of Smithson and Shakespeare, were the tragedies. If Much Ado About Nothing was played in France during Berlioz’s lifetime, the performance has left no trace. The character of Beatrice was the object of a brilliant analysis of the play by the fanatically royalist writer Jean-Joseph-François Poujoulat, in La Quotidienne of August 29, 1838, in his series on “Les Femmes de Shakespeare,” and Berlioz might well have seen it. Poujoulat’s description of the banter of the two principals, minimizing the nefarious role of Don John, could easily serve as a résumé of Berlioz’s opera. Otherwise, on the literally hundreds of occasions that the title of the play is found in the newspapers from the eighteen-twenties through the eighteen-sixties, “beaucoup de bruit pour rien” serves invariably to signify precisely what you might think: a lot of hubbub, usually political, of the useless and unnecessary kind!

As for the separate publication of the play, as early as February 4, 1823, Le Miroir des spectacles announced that “a six-person committee of translators has for some time been attempting to enrich the French language with the Shakespearean tragedy [sic] of Much Ado About Nothing [the title is given first in English, then in French].” The committee’s efforts seem to have been in vain; no separate edition appeared, not even in the series (mentioned in the previous chapter) published in English or French or bilingually by Madame Vergne, in the Place de l’Odéon, between September 1827 and February 1828: this included Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, and Richard III, all of the texts conforming to those recited by the English players led by Smithson and Kemble. In the eighteen-twenties, then, the only French version of Much Ado that would have been available was the one included in volume 7 of the Œuvres complètes de Shakespeare, traduites de l’anglais par Letourneur (1776–1783) in the edition newly revised by François Guizot and Amédée Pichot and published in thirteen volumes printed in Paris, by Ladvocat, in 1821.

In order to consult the original English text, something I believe he wished to do, Berlioz would presumably have taken up volume 2 of the best-known edition of the era, The Dramatic Works of Shakespeare edited by George Stevens and published in London, in nine volumes, by Josiah Boydell and George Nicol. The preface to this edition by Alexander Pope and Samuel Johnson is dated 1803. After 1835—because we know that, in May of that year, one of the composer’s admirer’s offered him a one-volume English edition of the plays,7 CG 2:240. no doubt The Dramatic Works of W. Shakspeare [sic] that I mentioned in the previous chapter, published in Paris by Baudry in 1829, 1830, and again in 1835—Berlioz would have been able to read Much Ado, not in a library or reading room, but at home. Years later, after July 1855— when John Ella gave to Berlioz another one-volume English edition of the plays,8 CG 5:126. no doubt The Works of William Shakspere [sic] that I also mentioned earlier, published in London by George Cox in 1849, 1852, and again in 1854—Berlioz would have had an embarras du choix. The Knight version, with textual explanations at the bottom of each page, was the most popular mid-century edition.

It is in his letter to his friend Joseph d’Ortigue of January 19, 1833, that, out of the blue, and with ironic alacrity, Berlioz mentions Much Ado for the first time: “À propos”—he has just said that he is roasting in the fires of hell because of his infernal obsession with Miss Smithson—“I intend to compose a charming and delightful Italian opera based on Shakespeare’s comedy Much Ado About Nothing. This time, I should like to ask you to lend me the volume that contains this play.”9 CG 2:68 (my emphasis). In question is volume 7 of the Ladvocat edition of 1821. D’Ortigue had just published the first authorized biography of Berlioz in the Revue de Paris of December 23, 1832, based upon the detailed notes that the composer had supplied. That biography mentioned nothing at all about a forthcoming Italian opera.

Four days later, in a letter to his sister Adèle of January 23, 1833, Berlioz again mentions his new project: “I intend to make my début at the Théâtre-Italien, with whose administration I am on very good terms. […] I have just now gone over there with the outline of a libretto that I have drafted myself. Those fellows will read it and, if it suits them, they will immediately put me in touch with an Italian poet who will write the verses under my close supervision.”10 CG 2:69.

From these messages we learn that between the 19th and 23rd of January, Berlioz sketched a libretto based on Much Ado About Nothing, a play with which he was already familiar, and that, on the 23rd, he gave the sketch to “ces monsieurs,” that is, to the directors of the Théâtre-Italien, Édouard Robert and Carlo Severini, whom we met in chapter 4. Berlioz does indeed seem to have been on friendly terms with these gentlemen. During the summer of 1833, he was hoping for an Italian translation of his earlier opera, Les Francs-Juges, “if Severini decides to take the risk.”11 Berlioz to Humbert Ferrand, August 1, 1833 (CG 2:109). Two years later, in a review of L’Éclair for Le Rénovateur of December 23, 1835, Berlioz would indulge in some rather lengthy wordplay on the surname Robert—the Joseph-Alexandre Robert who had lately invented a breech-loading rifle—the so-called “fusil Robert,” which figures in Halévy’s comic opera—and the Édouard Robert who was in charge of the Théâtre-Italien:

Be this as it may, the project of an Italian opera on Much Ado did not come to fruition in 1833. Nor did it see the light of day in 1852, when Berlioz, in London, sketched out a new libretto distantly based on the play,15 NBE 3:299–300. perhaps encouraged by the impresario John Mitchell, the then director of St. James’s Theatre, to whom Berlioz entrusted an English translation of his new book, Les Soirées de l’orchestre.16 CG 4:173. Six years later, in May 1858, Berlioz spoke to Édouard Bénazet, the director of the casino in Baden-Baden, about “a small opera designed for the opening of a theater, which he is in the process of building, and which will be inaugurated in August 1860.”17 Berlioz to his sister Adèle, May 28, 1858 (CG 5:575). Berlioz had met Bénazet many years earlier, in 1844, when the impresario, in Paris at the time in order to bid on the newspaper Le Constitutionnel (which was soon sold to Louis Véron),18 Le Commerce (March 16, 1844). had asked him to prepare a “festivalesque” concert in Baden-Baden in the latter part of August 1844.19 Berlioz to Louis Schlösser, April 20, 1844 (CG 8:235). Berlioz accepted the invitation, but had to renege when preparations for his own festival concert—for the great Paris industrial exhibition, on August 1, 1844—took precedence. It would not be until August 1853, by which time Édouard Bénazet had been the King of the Baden “Conversation House” for some seven years (his father, Jacques, having died in 1848) that Berlioz would there give a concert.

In 1858, Bénazet, whom Berlioz would now regard with sincere admiration, asked that the composer make a setting of a libretto by Offenbach’s regular collaborator, the poet and dramatist Édouard Plouvier, whom Berlioz had known since the eighteen-forties.20 Edouard Plouvier to Berlioz, probably 1844 (CG 8:609). The subject was to be a Légende du diable qui pleure based on an episode from the Thirty Years’ War. At first attracted to the tale, Berlioz gradually became disenchanted, as he told a friend on October 2, 1858.21 CG 5:600. He decided firmly against it at the end of 1859: “No, I shall not set Plouvier’s Légende,” he told Princess Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgenstein, on December 2, “I have just written to him to release me from my obligation to do so.”22 CG 6:75. The libretto was eventually set by Henri Litolff, as Nahel, and premiered in Baden-Baden on August 10, 1863. On September 3, in the Débats, Berlioz praised the work of the poet and the composer as “vast and profound.”

At what moment, very precisely, did Berlioz turn back to Much Ado About Nothing? In March 1858, in a review of Halévy’s La Magicienne that appeared in the Débats on the 24th, Berlioz describes the action of act 3, in which the protagonist, René, is persuaded to believe in the infidelity of his fiancée, Blanche, by a mystification involving an impersonator who wears Blanche’s clothing. Berlioz observes that the bit is based on act 3, scene 3 of Much Ado, where Borachio, a follower of the evil Don John, impersonates the principal character, Claudio, and announces his love, not to Claudio’s fiancée, Hero, but to Margaret, Hero’s lady-in-waiting. Borachio knows, of course, as the real Claudio does not, that Margaret is dressed in Hero’s clothing.23 Journal des débats (March 24, 1858); CM 9:356. That Berlioz mentions “la scène du troisième acte” suggests that he has recently had the play in hand. Still, not until October 23, 1860, in a letter to his son, does Berlioz speak decisively of the new work: “Yesterday, I worked for some seven hours on the little one-act opera I have undertaken; I cannot recall if I have mentioned this to you.” “I cannot recall” suggests that he had been at work for some time, perhaps eight months, perhaps more. He goes on about the new composition: “It is very pretty, but very difficult to get right. I still have a good deal of work to do on the libretto; I rarely have the time to concentrate on it. The music will come along in due time.”24 CG 6:169 (my emphasis).

It is possible that Berlioz had begun work in March 1860, when he accepted the Dutch composer Edouard Silas’ offer of the dedication of his new oratorio, Joash. Silas had also asked Berlioz to serve as godfather to his son, whom he wished to name Hector.25 “A Friend of Berlioz,” The Musical Herald (December 1, 1903), 372.

If, as I have suggested, it was Harriet Smithson who called Berlioz’s attention to Much Ado in 1833, then perhaps it was another artist who pointed him back to the play in 1860. In addition to Pauline Viardot, whom he saw frequently in that year, and who later attended the rehearsals of Béatrice et Bénédict in Baden-Baden at the time of the première, Richard Wagner, too, was swimming in Berlioz’s ken at the time. Reading Wagner’s letter to Berlioz of May 22, 1860, in which the German composer thanks Berlioz for his articles on Fidelio, which had appeared in the Débats of May 19 and May 22, one has the distinct impression that his admiration for the Frenchman’s artistry is profound and sincere, something verified in Wagner’s letter to Liszt of the same day.28 CG 6:154. Berlioz’s reply, too—in which, with the frankness of a friend, he told the German master not to address him as “cher maître”: “cela m’agace” (“that drives me nuts!”)29 CG 6:156.—suggests genuine, if not lasting, amity. Only a few weeks later, when Wagner and Viardot sang excerpts from Tristan, with Karl Klindworth at the piano, the sole persons in attendance were Wagner’s future patron, Maria Kalergis (it is to her that he dedicated the second edition of his infamous Das Judentum in der Musik), and Berlioz. Is it conceivable that the two men discussed Much Ado About Nothing at the time? Wagner’s Das Liebesverbot is founded on another comedy, Measure for Measure, whose free and easy manner, Wagner had mentioned to Meyerbeer in 1837, ought to appeal more readily to French sensibilities than it does to German Geschamck,30 Wagner to Meyerbeer, February 4, 1837, in Wagner, Selected Letters, 43. and whose substance, he admitted, he had “robbed,” as did Berlioz Much Ado, “of its “prevailing earnestness.”31 Wagner, “Autobiographical Sketch,” 10. This is what renders it conceivable that the author of Tannhäuser, who admired Beethoven and Shakespeare no less than the French composer, and who had earlier not hesitated to suggest to Berlioz the subject of an opera,32 Wagner to Liszt, September 8, 1852, in Wagner, Selected Letters, 268–269. might have encouraged Berlioz to adapt Much Ado About Nothing: we know, from Cosima Wagner’s diaries, that the play is one that Richard Wagner knew well and much admired.33 See Wagner (Cosima), Cosima Wagner’s Diaries, 1:864; 2:807.

From Berlioz’s correspondence, beginning in the autumn of 1860, we can follow his day-by-day work on Béatrice et Bénédict. I have mentioned the letter to his son of October 23, in which he speaks of how much writing remained to be done. Less than three weeks later, on November 10, he reported that he had made great headway: “I have now completed the little opera I told you about based on Shakespeare’s play Much Ado About Nothing. It’s called Bénédict et Béatrice [sic]. It’s very lighthearted and very pretty, as you shall see. The music is now coming to me so rapidly that I cannot decide which bit to do first. I’ve just completed two numbers in only a couple of days. But please say nothing about this to anyone, because it is very easy for someone to steal your ideas.”34 CG 8:494. What thief could Berlioz have been thinking about? Gounod, whose Faust came along thirteen years after his own, and whose Roméo et Juliette was seven years down the line?

On November 12, Berlioz made another progress report to his son:

Then, in 1861. January 2: “[Bénazet] has engaged me for Baden-Baden.” January 28: “My little opera Béatrice et Bénédict is moving along.” February 14: “I went to read the libretto to Monsieur Bénazet.” June 2: “I have not yet completed the score of Béatrice.” June 8: “I have added a new scene.” July 6: “Little by little I am finishing a one-act opera for the new theater in Baden-Baden, whose construction is just now coming to an end. I have based this one act on Shakespeare’s tragi-comedy entitled Beaucoup de bruit pour rien. Prudently, however, my opera is entitled Béatrice et Bénédict.” November 4: “While waiting [for news of Les Troyens], I work on the opera that Bénazet commissioned.” December 7: “I have just completed a two-act opera designed for the new theater at Baden-Baden. I have only the overture to finish.”36 CG 6:190, 194, 200, 218, 225; CG 8:507; CG 6:238, 250, 255–256, 262.

Then, again, in 1862. February 4: “[The opera] will be played next August, on the 5th or 6th.” February 6: “Béatrice et Bénédict will appear in Baden-Baden on August 6.” March 16: “Every Tuesday, we rehearse Béatrice.” April 9: “The day before yesterday, during a soirée with many people in attendance, we performed two numbers, a duet and an aria.” June 12: “[The opera] will be played in Baden-Baden on August 9.” June 20: “We rehearse on Monday [June 23] at half-past noon.” June 30: “It’s impossible for me to leave Paris because of the rehearsals.” July 12: “Yesterday, we rehearsed at the Opéra-Comique.” July 22: “It took me quite a while to train the singers. Now, I must face the difficult task of training the orchestra, car c’est un caprice écrit avec la pointe d’une aiguille et qui exige un excessive délicatesse d’exécution.”37 CG 6:270, 272, 276, 281, 287, 290, 298, 204, 311, 313, 317, 320 (my emphasis). The French phrase is perhaps familiar: it is cited at every hearing of the opera, live and recorded. What Berlioz means is that the work, “written with a crystalline pen, is a whimsical entertainment whose performance requires exceptional delicacy.” He speaks as one who knows his musicians, and who knows the difficulty of convincing them to play vivo, leggiero, and pianissimo.

The new opera was given in Baden-Baden on August 9 and 11. Despite his anxiety and his continuing poor health, Berlioz was entirely satisfied by the result. None other than Charles Gounod wrote of the work that is “absolutely perfect and lovely.”38 CG 6:326. At the end of August, Berlioz added to what had become a second act (in November 1861) a trio for the women, Héro, Béatrice, and Ursula (Berlioz’s transformation of Shakespeare’s Margaret). Here, in “Je vais d’un cœur d’amant,” Berlioz, always ready with a quotation, amused himself by adding to Ursula’s part a line from act 3, scene 3 of Othello, “la jalousie, ce monster aux yeux verts”—a phrase deriving from Iago’s warning: “O beware, my lord, of jealousy, it is the green-eyed monster which doth mock the meet it feeds on.” Berlioz also added a chorus, “Viens! Viens, de l’hymnée,” which serves to put Béatrice into the amorous mood that will soon lead to her acceptance of Bénédict’s offer of marriage, “despite herself,” and only in order “to save his life”! The score, naturally dedicated to Bénazet, was published in Paris, by Brandus et Dufour, in January 1863.

The central Duo-Nocturne itself, seen from afar and setting aside the incidental numbers, is surrounded by two duets sung by the principals and two trios sung respectively by the three men and the three women. Such large-scale symmetries, as Hervé Lacombe has pointed out, are characteristic of the classic superstructure of the opéra-comique.2 Lacombe, “Béatrice et Bénédict.”

What do we know of the translation of the play that Berlioz had before him as he constructed his drama? “I own three editions of Shakespeare,” he wrote in October 1856, “two in English,” which we have identified above, “and one in French: a translation,”3 Berlioz to his sister Adèle, October 26, 1856 (CG 5:379). which word, as I noted in chapter 11, he sets down in sarcastic capital letters. This was the work of Benjamin Laroche (1797–1852), a poet, journalist, abolitionist, professor of French and English, editor of the periodical Le Bon Sens, and translator of several major English writers, most prominently Lord Byron. The Laroche edition of the Œuvres dramatiques de Shakespeare, despite the appearance in the eighteen-sixties of a new printing of the Letourneur translation as revised by Guizot, despite the appearance of a new translation by François-Victor Hugo, and despite the feelings of some critics that prose translations cannot possibly bring poetry to life,4 “E.T.,” in the Gazette de France (October 24, 1840). saw at least ten subsequent printings before the century came to an end. Berlioz’s indebtedness to the Laroche translation, which, despite its shortcomings, he favored over the others, is noteworthy indeed.

It is at the outset of the play that we first savor the mockery of Beatrice and Benedict. “I pray you, is Signor Mountanto returned from the wars or no?” (1.1.23). How, I wonder, did Berlioz read this question? One must suppose that he was satisfied with the Laroche because he adopts it: “Veuillez me dire, je vous prie, si le seigneur Matamore est de retour, ou non, de la guerre?” A matamore in French would be a warrior proud of his exploits carried out against the Moors. But a mountanto, in English, or a montanto, as we find the word in the Stevens edition of 1802, is a fencing term for an upright thrust, a term that carried phallic implications and that was even spoken as “mount onto,” as a stallion would mount a mere. In his translation, François Guizot retained the word montanto and added an explanatory footnote: “an ancient fencing term applied to a ‘fier-à-bras’ [a ‘braggart’], to a ‘bravache’ [a ‘swaggerer’ or ‘wise-guy’].” In the more modern translation by François-Victor Hugo, we find the appellation “Tranche-Montagne,” a synonym for matamore and fanfaron, both meaning “show-off” or “egotist.” Only Guizot seems to have understood the sexual allusion: in his introduction to the play, Guizot admits to being struck by the sometimes “excessive liberty” of Beatrice’s speech. In the opening salvo of the play, I am not certain that Berlioz, who in these matters, I have always felt, was usually more straight-laced than lubricious, caught Beatrice’s clearly sexual drift.

Berlioz’s attitude toward the translators is well known. “I’ve corrected in my copy I don’t know how many silly errors of Monsieur Benjamin Laroche,” he wrote to his friend Humbert Ferrand, in a letter I quoted in chapter 2, “and yet it is he who is the most faithful and least ignorant of the lot.”5 CG 7:139. It is more than a shame that we do not possess Berlioz’s copy of the Laroche Shakespeare, because it would give us an object lesson in Berlioz’s understanding of Shakespeare’s English. With only a few exceptions, the books that were on his shelves at the end of his life disappeared with the rest of his mostly dilapidated possessions. But in this letter to Ferrand, from October 28, 1864, what is in question is not Much Ado, although Berlioz does mention a potential performance, in Stuttgart, of Béatrice et Bénédict, but rather Othello. Indeed, unlike his practice with Hamlet and Othello, among others, Berlioz seems never to quote from Much Ado in English.

To weigh Berlioz’s dependence on the Laroche translation, let us look closely at several excerpts from the composer’s libretto. First, the dialogue found in act 1, scene 3 of the opera, where Berlioz’s text is nearly but not absolutely identical to Laroche’s. This dialogue marks the opening of the play. In the opera, it is “scene 3” because scene 1 comprises the opening chorus, “Le More est en fuite,” and scene 2, a brief discussion among Héro, Béatrice, and Léonato (the governor of Messina, the scene of the play), whose text, of Berlioz’s invention, announces the arrival of the illustrious general don Pedro. Laroche spells the name with an accent; Berlioz does not.

The remaining lines of the scene, until the arrival of Don Pédro, are identical in Berlioz and Laroche. Berlioz avoids “Voici don Pédro” (“Don Pedro is approached”) because, desirous of musical symmetry, he rather introduces the return of the opening chorus, and thus has the messenger say: “Je vais au-devant du general” (“I shall go meet the general”). Here, Berlioz has reduced the text, altered a few words, but changed nothing of substance.

Now let us look elsewhere, at the text of a part of the trio found in act 1, scene 9 of the opera, which is based on lines from act 1, scene 1 of the play.

For his musical setting, Berlioz turns the lines into poetry, well rhythmicized, well rhymed, but hardly conventional. In the bit we have quoted (the central section of the trio), he distributes three alexandrines (lines 1, 4, and 7) among lines of 10, 10, 8, 5, 8, 8, 5, and 8 syllables. The rhyme scheme, too (aaabbcddcbb), is original. The vocabulary, however, fully depends on Laroche, from whom Berlioz borrows the words remercie, éleva, soucie, pardonneront, defiance, conclusion, and garçon. For Shakespeare’s notion of freedom, “I will live a bachelor” (“je veux vivre garçon”), Berlioz substitutes an intensifier: “je veux mourir garcon” (“I will die a bachelor”). But the composer’s nicest invention is the replacement of the ill-mannered expression porter des cornes, that is, “wear horns,” or “be victimized by infidelity,” with porter des hauts bois—literally “wear high woods,” but figuratively “wear oboes”! A lesser composer would have had the oboes quack at this moment of the proceedings.

Let us look, finally, at scenes 11, 12, and 13 of act 1, in which Berlioz introduces the asinine character of Somarone, loosely based upon Shakespeare’s Dogberry, who will introduce diagetic music into the action, and who will assert later in the play (act 4, scene 1): “remember that I am an ass”! Somarone’s name, derived by Berlioz from the Italian word somaro (“ass”), is also based on Shakespeare’s Balthasar, a singer in Don Pedro’s entourage. While Dogberry exaggerates his own talents as an officer and wise man, Balthasar rather modestly claims, in act 2, scene 3 (as we have seen), that “there’s not a note of mine that’s worth the noting.” Shakespeare’s Balthasar would thus not say, of his new composition, as Berlioz’s Somarone does: “Ladies and Gentlemen, the work you are about to have the honor to perform is a masterpiece!” In fact, this self-aggrandizing spoof is yet another Berliozian quotation: in his letter to Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgenstein of March 10, 1859, Berlioz repeats what he had been told that Spontini said at the final rehearsal of his opera of 1819: “Messieurs, Olympie est un chef’d’œuvre! Commençons!”—“Gentleman, Olympie is a masterpiece! Let us begin!”6 CG 5:668.

The true model for Somarone, however, as Joël-Marie Fauquet has discovered,7 Fauquet, “Somarone ou l’ivresse de soi,” 60–63. is the chapel master found in an obscure opéra-comique by Ferdinando Paër, Le Maître de chapelle, first performed in 1821, seen by Berlioz in a shortened version on July 23, 1834, and reviewed by him in Le Rénovateur: “In our opinion, the role of the chapel master is, like others of its kind, extremely silly. A musician who comes on stage in order to share with us the intimate secrets of his compositional talent—saying, for example, ‘here I desire the sound of the fluuuute’ (and the flute in the orchestra will toot a tune), ‘then I desire a solo for the bassoon’ (and the bassoon will groan in its turn), ‘and a canon’ (ra-ta-tat-tat), as in [Stanislas Champein’s] La Mélomanie [1781]—such a person may amuse the folks in the rue Charlot, relatives of those in [Alexis Wafflard and Fulgence de Bury’s] Le Voyageur à Dieppe [1821], but for everyone else he is nothing but a ridiculous Pasquin [a zany and ridiculous servant], dramatically untrue, and irritatingly inane to the point of giving you a headache.”8 Le Rénovateur, July 27, 1834; CM 1:309.

“Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more,” the poem sung by Balthasar, in act 2, scene 3, when Shakespeare uses music to press upon women the inevitability of male matrimonial deception, has, in the setting by R. J. S. Stevens, become something of a hit tune. Not so the two couplets of Somarone’s nuptial serenade, the Épithalame grotesque, in scene 11 of the opera, which encourage the youthful fiancés to forget the drudgery of daily existence and to indulge in the “infinite ecstasy” of love. “Mourez, tendres époux” (“Die, young lovers”) makes obvious use of the erotic cliché. More subtle is Berlioz’s reuse of the phrase “extase infinie,” extracted from the sublime love duet in act 4 of Les Troyens, “Nuit d’ivresse et d’extase infinie,” a borrowing not unlike Wagner’s, of the Tristan motif, in act 3, scene 3 of Die Meistersinger, but unlikely to be noticed by Berlioz’s listeners of 1862 in as much as Les Troyens, completed for some time, would not be performed until the following year.

Between the couplets of the Épithalame, as Somarone makes changes to his score, Bénédict and Claudio engage in a lively conversation, whose text is yet again beholden to Laroche. Somarone’s interjections, however, are Berlioz’s own:

These several examples suggest that while sketching the libretto of Béatrice et Bénédict, Berlioz had on his desk, not only the volume prepared by Benjamin Laroche, but also a version of the English text. Offering advice to the Berlin publishers Bote & Bock, who would bring out a German edition of the piano-vocal score, Berlioz wrote: “I shall send to you the French dialogues so that, in Berlin, you can personally supervise the translation into German. With the assistance of the Schlegel translation of the Shakespeare play, Much Ado About Nothing, the translator will in many places be able simply to copy out the words; that should take no more than three days.”9 CG 7:129.

Julian Rushton, in an earlier more comprehensive study of the work, has taken account of the differences between the texts of Laroche and Berlioz and has in one instance praised the latter for having avoided the former’s “translationese”:10 Rushton, “Berlioz’s Swan-Song,” 112. “Is it possible disdain should die while she hath such meet food to feed it as Signor Benedick?” asks Beatrice in act 1, scene 1. Writes Laroche: “Comment le dédain pourrait-il mourir, lorsqu’il trouve un aliment aussi inépuisable que le seigneur Bénédict?” In Shakespeare, disdain is feminine—the word is the literal personification of Beatrice—and food and feed are amusingly alliterative. But Laroche’s aliment aussi inépuisable, with three successive vowels, is not without its charm. That particular formulation—is it “translationese”?—is found in the original Le Tourneur version of the seventeen-eighties and in François Guizot’s reedition of Le Tourneur of the eighteen-twenties, both of which rather spoil the matter of personification: “Et comment la Dédiagneuse mourrait-elle, lorsqu’elle trouve à ses dédains un aliment aussi inépuisable que le seigneur Bénédick.” In his later, widely admired translation, François-Victor Hugo employed a capital letter to underline the personification—but kept the original alimentary articulation: “Est-il possible que Dédain meure, ayant pour se nourrir un aliment aussi inépuisable que le signor Bénédict?”

Berlioz had felt free to cut the play in half, to take over the sentences and the structures provided by Laroche, and to modify the words as he saw fit, because he knew, it is perhaps too obvious to say, that the essence of his reincarnation of the Shakespearean comedy was in the music—which had come to him, as he told his son, in an outpouring of inspiration. The quality of the jolly war between Béatrice et Bénédict, and here I conclude with only a single example, is manifest most charmingly in the number that gave rise to the overture and that best exemplifies the “pointe d’une aiguille,” the sparkling clarity with which he set down the score. I speak of the Scherzo-Duettino that closes the opera, whose character, as Berlioz himself wrote to the Princess Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgenstein, “encapsulates that of the two principals, and whose effect is quite special.”11 CG 6:319. Berlioz then quotes the full text, of which we give the first four lines:

The first phrase of the Scherzo-Duettino consists of four bars of which the fourth is “empty” (it is “nothing”!). That is to say, the fourth bar is present because of the traditional expectation, as it were, that phrases be constructed in bar-groupings of two and four. These four bars, functioning as “antecedent,” lead us to expect a subsequent phrase of four bars, functioning as “consequent.” Berlioz does indeed give us a second four-bar phrase of which the fourth, again, is “empty.” However, this phrase confounds our rhythmic expectations by the imitation in the winds of the principal melody (in the strings)—an imitation that removes the strong accent of the three-beat melody from the first beat, where it generally lies in ternary meter, to the second. The confusion results, to belabor the point, from the uncertain meaning of the first beat of the tune: is it in fact a downbeat, or is it perhaps an upbeat? Think of the word harassment—appropriate to the play in question!—which is sometimes accented on the first syllable (making “ha-” a downbeat), sometimes accented on the second (making “ha-” an upbeat). Berlioz continues the fun over the next eighteen bars, delightfully suggesting that the downbeat is now the first beat of the bar, now the second, now (on one occasion) the third. When Bénédict first sings “l’amour est,” the downbeat falls on the -mour of l’a-mour. When Béatrice first sings “l’amour est,” the downbeat falls on est. The musical bantering between the lines—ambiguous, changing, barbed—is what a literary scholar might call the “objective correlative” of the verbal bantering between the principals. From the music, and from the text, we feel something of the fabric of the characters’ emotions.

In the post-scriptum of the Mémoires, Berlioz enumerates the four preeminent qualities of his music: “passionate expression, inner fire, rhythmic momentum, unexpectedness.” Passionate expression and inner fire are of course among the preeminent qualities of the Shakespearean canon. But Shakespeare’s language, like ours, is attached to its time and place of origin. That it does not fully and faithfully carry over in translation—French or other—is self-evident. But the rhythmic momentum and unexpectedness of Berlioz’s score, in particular the score of the Scherzo-Duettino, seems to me to be convincing evidence of his expert understanding of the discernment, deception, and distrust manifested by Shakespeare’s principals, Beatrice and Benedick, the most extraordinary characters in the play: “More than any characters in high comedy, they rise above verbal wit and pit mind against mind in dialogue that surprises in sense, image, and cadence.”13 Wilson, Shakespearean and Other Studies, 86 (my emphasis).