Baltimore Opera Company

Study Guide

Roméo et Juliette

Reflections on Roméo et Juliette From the Conductor's Podium

Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette is but one of literally hundreds of operas that draw inspiration from Shakespeare plays. But only a small handful of these works have been critically esteemed as equals or near equals to their source material. It would seem that basing an opera on a famous masterpiece can be very much like playing with a double-edged sword. The seemingly impossible task for the composer is to live up to the original, not least in the expectations of an audience that already knows “how it’s supposed to go.” The challenge for the audience is to show discipline in keeping an open mind.

Some years ago I had the privilege to observe at close hand the final weeks of rehearsal for the world premier of André Previn’s A Streetcar Named Desire. It chagrins me terribly to confess that entering into this experience, I had never read the Tennessee Williams play, nor had I ever seen the movie! Please don’t ask how I could have reached adulthood with such a gap in my education—that’s another story. I admit this profound shortcoming only to make a point. A greater knowledge of the source material would have required effort on my part not to draw inapt or unfair comparisons. Blissfully ignorant, I came to this experience without preconceived expectations—certainly none that involved Marlon Brando or Vivien Leigh—and was free to absorb the framework and content of this new work of art in a comparative vacuum. For me, Previn’s opera WAS A Streetcar Named Desire.

I would imagine that it would be almost impossible to replicate that same circumstance with nearly anyone when it comes to Roméo et Juliette. Who doesn’t already know “how it’s supposed to go?” When asked to consider Gounod’s opera, all of us will have a natural inclination to make comparisons with the Shakespeare masterpiece we know and love. But operas aren’t plays, and our evaluations and judgments should be informed by an honest consideration and appreciation of the differences.

Operatic treatment of any play necessarily involves structural adaptation that almost always includes alteration of the plot. When you consider the practical fact that text sung to a musical line requires significantly more time to deliver, the need for plot modification becomes apparent. But there is much more to the issue than just that. When composers and librettists assume the process of consolidation, matters of readjusted balance and emphasis emerge. Certain minor characters may have to disappear—new characters sometimes get created.

So it is not surprising that Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette has its share of abridgements and amplifications. The pants-role of Stéphano is a newly created character, whose raison d’être has as much to do with the composer’s desire to satisfy Parisian custom and expectation as it does with any need for dramatic balance. Perhaps the most recognizable excerpt from the entire opera is itself a last-minute addition and has no correlation to the play. Juliette’s famous first-act waltz was inserted just before the premiere in 1867, to provide a showpiece for the popular soprano Marie Carvalho, wife of the theater’s director.

These exigent modifications not withstanding, the story of Gounod’s opera conforms admirably to that of Shakespeare’s play, with the essentials of the familiar story unfolding in sequential fidelity to the original. Librettists Jules Barbier and Michel Carré carefully and artfully embraced the poetic spirit of the play, often customizing Shakespeare’s actual phraseology with minimal alteration. And in Shakespeare’s two main characters, the artistic team of composer and librettists found inspiration sufficient to carry nearly the entire aesthetic thrust of the opera. The four duets for Roméo and Juliette contain the essential soul of the opera.

Having already produced a radiant gem in the love duet of Faust, Gounod was rightly confident that his new project would afford an ideal opportunity to substantiate his reputation as “the composer of love.” In the first-act duet the composer shows restraint by setting the characters’ first encounter in the form of what he calls a madrigal. The music is suitably elegant, perfectly supporting the cultured flirtatiousness of the soon-to-be lovers’ conversation. In the fabled balcony scene, Gounod embraces the tender moment by having both lovers—not just Juliette—express that “parting is such sweet sorrow.” The soprano Adelina Patti was so moved once while performing this duet that she extended the scene by giving her Roméo twenty-nine kisses before removing herself to her chamber.

The bedroom scene provides the setting for what is perhaps the most accomplished of the opera’s duets. The music beautifully represents the rapturous desperation and gravity of this moment in the characters’ lives. Gounod’s orchestral writing is profoundly more than merely ambient. The divided cellos that introduce the scene anticipate the same technique employed years later by Verdi to similar effect in Otello. The composer provides telling instrumental specificity by giving voice to the lark that announces the dread sunrise. As the moment of separation draws near, palpable anxiety rises up from the rhythmic accompanimental figure in the orchestra. The entire duet lives and breathes with a spontaneity that is supported by a formal but unassuming structure that focuses attention on the poignancy of the expressive content.

The final duet comes at the point of greatest departure from the plot of Shakespeare’s original. Given the emphasis of Gounod’s heightened attention to the two principal characters, it is understandable that the opera would end with the extravagantly romantic and unbearably heartbreaking spectacle of the lovers dying alone together, without Friar Laurence and the Prince joining Capulet and Montague to draw their moral conclusions. For Gounod the implications of the tragedy are obvious enough. Roméo and Juliette had lived and loved more deeply and privately than any of their family or acquaintances could possibly understand. Now they are dead—nothing else matters. The deeply religious composer reveals his sympathies for his young idealist lovers by making their final words a joint petition to God for forgiveness of their suicide.

Other players in the opera are supported by a musical inventiveness that makes their personalities clear and their interactions fluid. Mercutio’s wit and whimsy are aptly defined by the scherzo-like buoyancy of his Queen Mab aria. The writing for Capulet identifies him as a sincere and loving father, though clearly without the capacity to understand his young teenage daughter’s mind and heart. The nurse Gertrude’s music is appropriately comedic, that of Tybalt sufficiently impetuous and sinister. The chorus is given a dynamic role in shaping and intensifying the sympathies and conflicts of the drama.

Consider the singular confluence of language and culture that is gathered up in the homogenizing sweep of Gounod’s opera, a work of art that is based on an English play about Italian people and culture, sung in French. The dramatic theme of pure love imperiled by the clashing vicissitudes of family, clan and circumstance is hardly unique. It shows up everywhere in opera—Lucia di Lammermoor, I Puritani, Tristan und Isolde, La Traviata, Madama Butterfly, Pélleas et Mélisande—the list is endless. But Gounod has gone to Shakespeare’s archetype, creating a monument to love and beauty that enlivens the truths and treasures of the original masterpiece itself. It is a tale that will forever hold sway over the soul and psyche of the world.

Steven White

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