Les nuits d'été is a collection of songs by Hector Berlioz with texts by Théophile Gautier. It is a rare jewel of the art song repertoire because of its genre: it is one of the first of few orchestral song cycles ever to be composed, and the only one from nineteenth century France that is well known today. Another fascinating aspect of the work is its unconventional origin: it was initially composed for voice and piano in 1840-1841, and not fully orchestrated until 1856. Without question, the orchestral version has been the work to withstand the test of time; though the piano-voice version represents Berlioz's original vision for the songs, it is rarely performed and far less admired today. It is Berlioz's masterful orchestration that sent the initially admired piano version into obscurity and propelled the orchestral version into the limelight in the decades following his death. My thesis explores Berlioz's reasons for composing and orchestrating Les nuits d'été. I will compare the text settings of the orchestral version to those of the original with piano accompaniment in order to understand exactly how Berlioz used the orchestra to express the text. For the performance portion of my thesis, I will perform Les nuits d'été in the context of my Senior Voice Recital. I use the orchestral piano-reduction in preparation for a future performance of the work with orchestra. The detailed analysis of Berlioz's songs- from historical and critical perspectives as presented here- shape my performance.
They have been recorded umpteen times and Ralph Moore has done an exhaustive comparison of most of these recordings, which I recommend to anyone who loves the songs. You can view it at -international.com/classrev/2019/Aug/Berlioz_nuits_survey.pdf.
Les Nuits d'
For somebody who wrote so much about his own and others' music, Berlioz had surprisingly little to say about Les nuits d'été. There is no mention of it, for example, in his Memoirs, nor does his correspondence refer to the songs. Only one of the songs is dated - "Villanelle," March 23, 1840. Two of them, "Absence" and "Le spectre de la rose," were part of a concert program advertised for November 1840, but the performance never took place. The six songs were published in their original version, for high voice and piano, during the summer of 1841. Berlioz orchestrated "Absence" in 1843, planning to include it on his concert programs in Germany, and did the same with "Le spectre de la rose" for a concert in Gotha in February 1856. A Swiss music publisher who happened to be at that concert asked Berlioz, through an intermediary (Peter Cornelius, the composer of the opera The Barber of Baghdad and one of Berlioz' most ardent champions in Germany), to orchestrate the remaining songs; the composer agreed and the songs were published, in a version for soloists and orchestra, before the end of the year.
So that's what we know about Les nuits d'été. The fact that the songs emerged from their composer at a moment when so many conflicting trajectories in both his personal and professional life collided makes his silence about them all the more frustrating. By 1840, it had become apparent to both Berlioz and his wife, the actress Harriet Smithson, that their marriage had come, in David Cairns' words, to a "symbolic end." Smithson's physical and emotional state had been sinking ever-downward since her marriage to Berlioz in 1833 - she was often ill, hardly ever went out, had few friends, and could not speak French well enough to fully participate in her husband's social world of composers, writers, and artists. The assuredness and self-reliance of the woman who had conquered Paris with her Shakespeare performances more than a decade earlier had been replaced by the depression and isolation of a wife frustrated by the sacrifices that she had made for her marriage. Berlioz continued to love her, but not with the love of a man inflamed with passion for his muse. As his letters, especially those to his sisters, make clear, he had come to feel sorry for her more than anything else.
This explains, to some extent, why Berlioz might have been enthusiastic about preparing an orchestral version of Les nuits d'été. With their gentle, intimate musical language, the songs lend themselves to the nuanced sort of large-scale chamber music Berlioz produced in the orchestral version, itself the perfect rejoinder to detractors such as Scudo. In addition, Berlioz had little knowledge of the piano (he played the guitar), and the piano part for the songs in their original version is not among the most natural ever composed.
In Les nuits d'été, Berlioz selected six poems from the volume La comédie de la mort (The comedy of death) by his close friend Théophile Gautier (1811-72). The poems consider love from different angles, but loss of love permeates them all. When performed as a cycle, the songs convey this loss all the more strongly, not just as individual compositions touched by melancholy, but as a coherent conception, one where the longed-for "always" of the first song, "Villanelle," becomes unattainable in the last one, "L'île inconnue." Berlioz' rapturous, idealistic love for Harriet had faded - the breeze had blown his ship on a course far from one leading to the "always" of his youthful dreams.
Les nuits d'été (Summer Nights), Op. 7, is a song cycle by the French composer Hector Berlioz. It is a setting of six poems by Théophile Gautier. The cycle, completed in 1841, was originally for soloist and piano accompaniment. Berlioz orchestrated one of the songs in 1843, and did the same for the other five in 1856. The cycle was neglected for many years, but during the 20th century it became, and has remained, one of the composer's most popular works. The full orchestral version is more frequently performed in concert and on record than the piano original. The theme of the work is the progress of love, from youthful innocence to loss and finally renewal.
In 1843 Berlioz orchestrated the fourth song, "Absence" for his lover, Marie Recio, who premiered it in Leipzig on 23 February 1843; it was not until 1856, that he returned to Les nuits d'été, making an orchestral arrangement of "Le spectre de la rose" for the mezzo-soprano Anna Bockholtz-Falconi. The publisher Jakob Rieter-Biedermann was in the audience for the premiere, and, much impressed, prevailed on Berlioz to orchestrate the rest of the cycle. The orchestration left the existing melodic and harmonic writing generally unchanged, but for "Le spectre de la rose" the composer added an introduction for muted solo cello, flute and clarinet; the orchestration of this song, unlike the other five, includes a harp.
Although Berlioz wrote more than fifty songs, twenty of them with orchestral accompaniment, those in Les nuits d'été are the only ones published as a set. They are not a cycle on the German model of Schubert's Winterreise or Schumann's Dichterliebe, with narrative and thematic continuity, but form a unified whole by virtue of the single authorship of the words and the composer's use throughout of delicate, atmospheric musical shading. The structure of the cycle has four sombre songs framed by exuberant opening and closing ones. The critic A. E. F. Dickinson wrote in a 1969 study, "Their common theme is nominally love unrequited or lost, symbolizing, arguably, an ache for vanished or unattainable beauty. But their musical order is apparently fortuitous, and forms an acceptable, rather than a compulsive, association." Berlioz's innovative creation of an orchestral song cycle had few successors until Mahler took the genre up in the late 19th century.
Marie Recio führte die Absence als erstes Lied in orchestrierter Fassung 1843 bei einem Konzert in Leipzig auf. Nach der Orchestrierung und Uraufführung in Deutschland geriet das Werk auf den Konzertbühnen in Vergessenheit und wurde erst im 20. Jahrhundert wiederentdeckt. Les nuits d'été gehört heute zu den bekanntesten Werken des klassischen Liedgesangs.
Les nuits d'eté (Las noches de verano), op. 7, es un ciclo de canciones con acompañamiento de piano de 1841 (y orquesta, 1856) del compositor francés Hector Berlioz (1803-69). 2ff7e9595c
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