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PROGRAMME NOTES
Beaumont’s re-telling of the familiar tale, followed by the dénouement: ‘The Beast had disappeared, and now at her feet she saw a prince, more handsome than Love itself, who thanked her for releasing him from his spell.’ This story is told in slow waltz time, with the Beast’s theme introduced on contra-bassoon, but transformed at the end on a high solo violin.
Hector BERLIOZ
The slow, rapt finale, ‘The Enchanted Garden’, is mostly subdued in dynamics, but ends resplendently in a pure C major, on the white notes of childhood exploration of the piano. Here above all Ravel shows us, in the words of his biographer Roland-Manuel, ‘the secret of his profound nature and the soul of a child who has never left fairyland’.
LA MORT DE CLÉOPÂTRE ANNA CATERINA ANTONACCI soprano
1803-1869
As an impoverished and late-starting composition student in Paris, Berlioz made five attempts to win the coveted, and lucrative, Prix de Rome, a two-year scholarship to live and work in Italy. In 1826, he fell at the first hurdle, the preliminary test which involved writing a fugue. But in the following years he was admitted each time to the final round, which required the composition of a cantata for voice and orchestra on a set text, to be accomplished in a 25-day incarceration within the Institut de France. His 1827 cantata, La Mort d’Orphée, was deemed ‘unplayable’; but his 1828 effort, Herminie, won a second prize. This, coupled with the fact that his music was beginning to be performed, published and (so important in Paris) talked about, made him the favourite in the 1829 competition. But, all too aware of this, he made the mistake of treating the text, ‘The Death of Cleopatra’ by one Pierre-Ange Viellard de Boismartin, with a freedom and boldness that was guaranteed to set the more conservative jury members against him; and his ambitious orchestral writing proved unsuitable to the piano reduction which was all that was performed to the jury. No first prize was awarded that year, and the cantata remained unpublished and unperformed in the composer’s lifetime (allowing him to raid it for themes for other works). Finally, in 1830, the chastened Berlioz reined in
8 | London Philharmonic Orchestra
his more adventurous instincts and won the prize with La Mort de Sardanapale (only a fragment of which has survived). But his complicated love life, and the success of his Symphonie fantastique the same year, meant that he did not spend the full two years in Rome. The cantata is a soliloquy of the Egyptian queen Cleopatra, the consort of Mark Antony (and before him Julius Caesar), who following Antony’s defeat in battle by his Roman rival Octavius has resolved to commit suicide. The text is arranged in the form of recitatives alternating with arias. But Berlioz loosens this structure by the addition of an extended and dramatic orchestral introduction, and a very free approach to the closing stages. There is just one complete aria, ‘Ah! Qu’ils sont loin ces jours’, looking back to days of glory (and including a recurring phrase which found its way into the opera Benvenuto Cellini, and from there into the Roman Carnival Overture). A second aria, a ‘Méditation’ addressed by Cleopatra to her ancestors the Pharaohs, has a self-contained opening section over an insistent throbbing rhythm, followed by an agitated quick section. But it dissolves into increasingly disjointed recitative, before the closing orchestral representation of a heartbeat faltering and failing.