Berlioz's Semi-Operas

A full-length study of two of Berlioz's most unique works, which combine the highest goals of both symphony and opera and incorporate two of the greatest classics of Western literature into a total fusion of the arts.This work studies two works that are among the most challenging of the entire Romantic Movement, not least because they assault the notion of genre: they take place in a sort of limbo between symphony and opera, and try to fulfillthe highest goals of each simultaneously. Berlioz was a composer who strenuously resisted any impediments that stood in the way of complete compositional freedom. Most of his large-scale works nevertheless obey the strictures of some preexistent form, whether opera or symphony or mass or cantata; it is chiefly in these two experiments that Berlioz allowed himself to be Berlioz. One of the central characteristics of Romanticism is the belief that all arts are one, that literature, painting, and music have a common origin and a common goal; and this book tries to show that Berlioz achieved a Gesamtkunstwerk, a fusion of arts, in a manner even more impressive (in certain respects) than that of Wagner, in that Berlioz implicated into his total-art-work texts by two of the greatest poets of Western literature, Shakespeare and Goethe. The method of this book is unusual in that it pays equally close attention to the original text [Romeo and Juliet and Faust] as well as to the musical adaptation; furthermore, it suggests many analogues in the operatic world which Berlioz knew -- the world of Gluck, Mozart, Mehul, Spontini, Cherubini -- in order to show exactly how Berlioz followed or flouted the dramatic conventions of his age. This book aims to contribute to Berlioz studies, to studies of the Romantic Movement, and to the rapidly growing field of comparative arts. Daniel Albright is Richard L. Turner Professor in the Humanities at the University of Rochester.