Harold in italy program notes

Characteristically, having won, he dallied and resisted actually moving to Rome for the required residency there—he loathed Rome and Italian art and music. He did love the Italian countryside, the sunshine, and the evocative legends and characters. Hence, some of his most inspired music stemmed from his time there—including Harold in Italy. Paganini in the early s had acquired a fine Stradivarius viola, and commissioned Berlioz to write a concerto for him that would serve as a springboard for his prodigious talents.

Berlioz, never to waste ideas, recast the work to suit himself, and something quite different emerged. It is not a concerto, nor is it a symphony or a tone poem—the three most important genres for symphony orchestra. Thus, Harold in Italy is sui generis , and typical Berlioz. The first movement alludes to tramping around in the Abruzzi mountains that Berlioz, himself, loved, and in the second, Harold joins a procession of holy pilgrims. The third movement is simply a serenade to a beloved, and in the last the hero Harold—represented, as in all the movements, by the solo viola—joins in the riotous revelry of the local brigands.

Paganini did not hear the piece that his abortive composition morphed into until a few years later. Skip to main content. Indeed, while surely aware of his reputation, Berlioz never heard Paganini play. And why for a solo display piece?

Berlioz was known for his restless orchestration, shifting textures and formal experimentation. Perhaps, to his lasting credit, Paganini recognized a fellow visionary who could lift his artistry to new heights. In any event, they announced to the press a mammoth work for orchestra, chorus and solo viola to be entitled Les dernier instants de Mary Stuart "The Last Moments of Mary Stuart" , the "Queen of Scots" who had been executed in after two decades of imprisonment and political intrigue.

According to Berlioz, he tried to combine the solo lines with the orchestra, feeling sure that Paganini's incomparable execution would enable him to give the solo instrument all its due prominence. Yet, when presented with the first movement, Paganini rejected it as having too many rests, insisting that he wanted to be playing all the time.

Berlioz then recast the work as a series of orchestral scenes "in which the viola finds itself mixed up [while] always preserving his individuality. But Paganini's connection with Harold did not end with his disavowal of the work.

After attending a December performance, sapped by the illness that already had taken his voice and before long would take his life, Paganini dragged the composer back on stage, knelt down and kissed his hand. The next day, Paganini's son delivered an ecstatically flattering letter in florid Italian that began: "Beethoven spento non c'era che Berlioz che potesse farlo rivivere. Many have speculated that the funds were from an anonymous admirer — possibly his publisher Armand Bertini — since Paganini was in financial straits after a disastrous investment in a Paris casino.

Ernest Newman, though, feels that Paganini hoped to benefit from the publicity surrounding the gesture to counter widespread criticism of his stinginess. Berlioz portrait by Signol When Berlioz went to give thanks, Paganini said that hearing Harold was the greatest pleasure of his life: "You will never know how your music affected me.

It is many years since I had felt anything like it. Harold's musical roots are equally intriguing. After three unsuccessful attempts, in Berlioz had finally won the prestigious Prix de Rome , a four year scholarship awarded by the French government for study in Italy, which required annual compositions.

Berlioz fulfilled his obligation for with his Rob Roy Overture , for which critical opinion has been sharply divided.

Francis Tovey calls it "quite an engaging work," while Hugh Macdonald dubs it "vacuous and repetitive," and suggests that Berlioz deliberately wrote it with the assumption that official taste of the conservative Academy preferred the commonplace to the inspired. Berlioz himself called it "long and diffuse," and claimed to have been so disappointed with its reception at its first and only performance that he burned the score although the copy he submitted to the French Academy survived.

Yet, Berlioz clearly retained some affection for it, as its two primary themes, as well as a lengthy development section, play prominent roles in Harold. Its full title — Intrada de Rob Roy MacGregor — explains much of the Scottish flavor that carries over into Harold — as does the initial concept of the Mary Stuart piece. Indeed, D. Kern Holomon notes a striking similarity of a key Harold theme to the Scotttish song "Scotts wha' hae wi' Wallace bled.

As for literary inspiration, Berlioz claimed that his new work was written in the style of Lord Byron's immensely popular epic poem Childe Harold's Pilgrimage.

Berlioz must have closely identified with Byron's title character, a melancholy dreamer who visits and comments upon sites of classical antiquity in search of meaning to counter his own world-weary disillusionment. Even so, beyond a subconscious autobiographical affinity there is no direct connection between any specific elements of the Byron poem and Harold ; Olin Downes quips that the work really should be called "Berlioz in Italy.

Berlioz may also have been attracted to the Byron poem as an extraordinary technical feat. Despite its extreme length, each stanza is written in a strict form consisting of eight lines of iambic pentameter and a final line of iambic hexameter in a rhyme scheme of ababbcbcc.

Berlioz's Harold , too, is an uneasy alliance of classical technique and free-thinking attitude. Indeed, despite its lesser status in the Berlioz symphonic canon, Harold displays all of his most important hallmarks. Paul Henry Lang notes: "Berlioz raised program music from a rather occasional indulgence to a constructive principle of composition. Elliott summed it up: "Berlioz's best is wonderful, his worst appalling — and the twain, with the degrees between them, are inextricably confused together.

In furtherance of the program, each movement of Harold begins with a descriptive title that tends to draw more attention than the formal structure.

Egon Kenton posits that the titles were grafted on as an afterthought, to ease the audience's shock of listening to novel music they might otherwise not be able to grasp. The first is entitled: "Harold aux Montagnes. Scenes of melancholy, happiness and joy". While often described as a modified sonata form, over half its length is a slow introduction launched with a sinuous fugue, as if to suggest the academic doldrums from which Berlioz sought escape in nature.

Only after the languor is dispelled by the Harold theme does the sonata form emerge and become apparent. While commentators may and often do debate the success of his formal merits, there can be no dispute as to two technical areas in which Berlioz transformed music.

The first is orchestration. In his authoritative History of Orchestration , Adam Carse dubs Berlioz "by far the most progressive, original, independent and daring orchestrator of his time. Yet, Carse notes with irony that Berlioz's music never became popular enough to significantly influence either his contemporaries or successors to adopt his innovations.

Julian Rushton suggests that Berlioz relished the conflict between audiences' generic expectations and his musical reality. More than any other factor, Berlioz's daring instrumentation arose from seeming deficits in his training — after Haydn, he was only the second great composer who had not risen from the ranks of virtuoso performers.

He also had little interest in most music of the past. Berlioz portrait by Courbet As a result, he was able to investigate the properties of each instrument without preconception so as to grasp their intrinsic properties, suggest fresh techniques woodwind mutes, string harmonics, bowing textures , imagine new combinations to realize his expressive purposes, and demand players with the expertise to realize the effects he envisioned. For Joel-Marie Fouquet, through this treatise Berlioz evolved the science of instrumentation into the art of orchestration.

The second movement of Harold is an extraordinary display of Berlioz's skill in that realm. The first section comprises 16 repetitions of a gentle pilgrim's march theme over a walking bass that sustains interest through subtle variation, both of the theme itself and the timbre as it wends its way through various instrumental combinations.

After a central section of a religious canto that builds in an urgent harmonic progression and an abbreviated repeat of the opening comes a remarkable coda of breathless tension in which sustained clashing notes of b horns and c harp, oboe and flute alternate 11 times before relaxing into a concluding E-major chord.

Ironically, although this movement was the most popular segment of Harold at the time often performed alone and thus was considered the most conservative, its slightly altered persistent repetitions now can be seen as a thoroughly modern harbinger of minimalism.

Berlioz's other undisputed realm of mastery is rhythm. Indeed, Harold has an, edgy, natural feel that defies bar lines and strict timing with syncopation, dropped beats and unexpected accents. Once we know the piece, following the score can be both frustrating and exhilarating, as we can feel a great tension as Berlioz forced his free-wheeling conception into the rigid conventions of notation. The third movement of Harold proudly displays Berlioz's rhythmic prowess.

The opening rhythm, forlorn melody and a lazily augmented version of the Harold theme return in an astounding coda where, remarkably, they are overlaid as three independent events occupying the same sonic space, a thoroughly baffling complexity in the context of its era yet a harbinger of the autonomous events of 20th century "chance" music. Even beyond their evocative titles, each of the first three movements are enriched by resonances of the composer's travels. Perfectly, utterly, illimitably free.

He also wrote of "returning gleaners from fields singing soft litanies to the accompaniment of the sad tinkling of the distant convent bell" — a clear description of the march and coda of the second movement — and, while generally condemning modern Italian music, he admired Palestrina and the reverie produced by calm harmonies without melody or rhythm during a Sistine Chapel service — the generator of the middle section.

In chapter 38, he described a leather-lunged serenader accompanied by mandolins and bagpipes, and in chapter 39 the "long series of gay and refreshing refrains repeated over and over" by wandering piffero fife players who descend from the mountains — all evident in the elements of the third movement. While much of Harold is grounded in the composer's cherished memories, the fourth movement culminates the work with a flight of pure fantasy that deliriously displays all the hallmarks of Berlioz's style.

Actually, the paradigm's scheme is reversed — Beethoven's orchestra offers prior themes which angry celli rebuff and then emerge with their own soothing "Ode to Joy," whereas Berlioz's ensemble sympathetically supports the viola's citation of earlier ideas and melds them into its own upbeat fervor. Then begins the true finale — "Orgy des brigands" "Brigands' orgy". Jacques Barzun notes that brigands were rebels who turned to nature to heal the wounds of society, and that Berlioz seized upon their revelry as a violent purging that symbolized an antidote to the repressions of conventional life.

Indeed, Berlioz prefaces the frenzied culmination with a brilliant contrasting touch — a soft off-stage string trio that wistfully recalls the peaceful pilgrim's march before the revelry overrides it. Rhythmic complexity abounds, bar lines virtually disappear, duple and triple meters are overlaid, and, in a novel touch, several emphatic held notes are prefaced with a tied sixteenth that disrupts the expected downbeat with a sense of great anticipatory urgency.

Perhaps the greatest challenge Berlioz set for himself in Harold was to develop the long-neglected viola into a featured voice. String historian Tully Potter considers the instrument inherently unstabile and treacherous to play at both ends of its range, which lies a fifth below the brilliance of the violin yet an octave above the richness of a cello, and notes that in order to obtain acoustical balance it would have to be too large to play as a shoulder instrument; thus, its compromised size imparts a nasal, throaty tone to its middle register.

While they routinely included violas in orchestra string sections, composers of the Romantic era displayed none of the interest in the viola as a solo instrument that had enriched music of the 18th century and would revive in the 20th. Whenever a violinist is mediocre, it is said, 'He would make a capital violist. Berlioz seized upon the viola's status as an outsider in the world of 19th century music with which he undoubtedly identified to fashion a fascinating, highly personalized role for it throughout Harold.

Like Berlioz himself, the solo viola finds itself increasingly isolated from the orchestral mainstream. In the first movement, it seems at one with the orchestral depiction of nature — it launches the Harold theme to break out of the rigidity of the opening orchestral fugue, and then in a series of fitful rising figures, struggles to rouse itself and find an appropriate melody for the sonata portion, in which the full orchestra heartily joins, producing a partnership where each stimulates the other in a unified concerted blend of rising excitement and driving momentum.

The relationship unravels in the second movement, though — at first an augmented Harold theme blends harmoniously with the pilgrim song, next becomes disruptive with triplet rhythm, and then turns downright annoying, as rapid arpeggiated chords emulating the guitar Berlioz liked to strum on his mountain walks are played sul ponticello [near the bridge] for a gratingly nasal, whiny tone that sours the peaceful meditation of the solemn prayer like a rowdy child in church.

The third movement finds the solo viola marginalized, emerging only to play its Harold theme as a distant observer to the intensely human amorous activity being depicted.

After the finale leaves reminiscences of the earlier movements behind, the viola is utterly silent, as if Berlioz, having conjured an onslaught of evil and rebellion, finds himself too timid to join in — or, as if, as Hugh Macdonald put it, Berlioz was temperamentally a stranger to his own wishful imaginings. Indeed, it is only heard once more — harmonizing with the off-stage trio's vain attempt to restore a brief breath of serene stability, after which the boiling orchestra leaves them all decisively behind to seal its mutiny.