Berlioz: Le Corsaire, Op. 21
Hector Berlioz
B. Dec. 11, 1803 in La Côte-Saint-André, France
D. March 8, 1869 in Paris, France
Something of the complex psychological background of the Corsaire Overture can be read in the changes of title it went through: from La tour de Nice to Le corsaire rouge, to simply Le Corsaire (which literally translates as “pirate” in French). The overture dates, not from 1831, as is often stated, but from 1844, when Berlioz made his second trip to Nice. Exhausted from a series of concerts at the Festival of Industry in Paris, Berlioz went south, on his doctor’s orders.
“It was a moving experience for me to see again all the places I had seen 13 years before, at the outset of my Italian travels, on the occasion of another convalescence,” he wrote in his Memoirs. “I swam a great deal in the sea and made many expeditions to places near Nice…I resumed my explorations of the rocks, where I came across some ancient cannon, old friends of mine, still slumbering in the sun. I revisited the exquisite little bays and inlets where I had bathed in former times, and where the rocks are a carpet of emerald seaweed. The room in which in 1831 I had written the King Lear overture, was occupied by an English family, so I settled higher up, in a tower perched on a ledge of the Ponchettes rock, and feasted myself on the glorious view over the Mediterranean and tasted a peace such as I had come to value more than ever.”
That “tower of Nice” gave Berlioz’ overture its first prosaic title. But whatever powerful associations that city held for the composer, it could hardly be expected to rouse them in the listener. Titles and literary programs, as he more than once made plain, were of little consequence in the genesis of his music. Audiences expected something more suggestive, and he complied, first borrowing the title of the French translation of James Fennimore Cooper’s Red Rover (Le corsaire rouge), then settling for the even briefer Le Corsaire, with its Byronic resonance. Byron may have been far from Berlioz’ mind when he composed the overture, but something of the poet’s indomitable spirit burns in the music, and so, by a process of ex post facto tinkering, Byron and Berlioz are inextricably linked.
“Byronic,” in fact, is not a bad adjective for the overture, which is by turns sentimental and boisterous. Powerful as the sentiment is, introspection is only a temporary diversion, almost a willful indulgence. The real spirit of Le Corsaire is heard in the very first bars, with its thundercrack chords, then a rush of strings impulsively answered by woodwinds. One hardly knows which way to look, and when the real first theme enters, after the Adagio, one picks it out only gradually from the background. Berlioz never tires of it and he is ingenious in presenting it in new guises: in breathless canon; in party clothing, with a ballroom accompaniment; then in a roar of brasses that would rouse the dead. Finally, when its power seems almost spent, Berlioz notches the tension one level higher, pulling momentarily into D major. A few more thunderclaps, and it is all over, a lone chord of A-flat just before the end serving as a poignant reminder of the Adagio, and by inference, of the gentle aspect of Berlioz’ (or Byron’s) corsair.
The DSO last performed Le Corsaire in July 2003.
DSO Shop @ the Max Recomm ends: Berlioz, Overture to “Le Corsaire”: Paul Paray conducting the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, Mercury Living Presence B0005304.
Tags: Berlioz
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