Berlioz at the end of the 1850s was in the midst of protracted negotiations for the production of the opera Les Troyens—his summa, testament, and grandest work—and miserably in the grip of a variously diagnosed intestinal complaint that could keep him in bed for days. Wagner arrived in Paris in the autumn of 1859 to present concerts of his music which Berlioz, as critic of the Journal des débats, was obliged to review. With the Prelude to Tristan und Isolde, Romanticism confronted its post-Romantic successor—and was perplexed. "I have read and reread this curious work several times," Berlioz wrote in his otherwise generally laudatory notice. "I have listened to it with the most careful attention and a keen desire to understand, but I must confess that I still have no idea what the composer was trying to do." To his young friend, the Belgian composer Adolphe Samuel, he wrote frankly that "...I found it a painful experience, even while admiring the vehemence of his musical feeling in particular instances. But the diminished sevenths, the dissonances, the brutal modulations, threw me into a fever, and I have to say I hate that style of music—it revolts me."

Rumors that Wagner's Tannhäuser was to be mounted at the Opéra, in preference to Les Troyens, understandably embittered him. In March 1860 his favorite sister and confidante, Adèle, died suddenly. Amazingly, he found respite in the composition of an opéra comique, Béatrice et Bénédict, based upon Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing. Early in 1859, illness had forced him to abandon a commission for an operetta for the annual festival at Baden-Baden, but during Berlioz's visit in August of the following year, Edouard Bénazet, director of the Baden festival, agreed to stage the new work-in-progress. Berlioz's second wife, Marie, died on June 13, 1862, and Béatrice et Bénédict received a rapturous Baden premiere the following August 9. The work's zesty richness and wealth of invention are well represented in its overture, which has become a popular concert piece. Its fleet verve and mercurial brilliance reflect the spirited banter of the antagonistic main characters, who are destined to become lovers and spouses. Their interplay is set off by candid sentiment and a luminous Mediterranean serenity soaring hand in hand. It is appropriate, too, to note that Berlioz's winsome, brimming melody and brisk, Mozartian linearity stand in the sharpest possible contrast to the harmonically based, chromatically laced eroticism of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde. Berlioz here casts a last, lingering, light, and lovingly sardonic look at Romantic love—close in spirit to his mélodie L'île inconnue, from Les nuits d'été—before casting his magic wand, Prospero-like, away, for Béatrice et Bénédict was to be his last major work. Berlioz's own description of its overall effect, epitomized in the Béatrice et Bénédict overture, is still the most apt: "a caprice written with the point of a needle." The score is dedicated to Bénazet.

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Berlioz had considered writing an opera based on Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing as early as 1833, but nearly three decades passed before he got down to serious work on it. Berlioz himself conducted the premiere at the new Baden-Baden Theater on August 9, 1862. The opera was commissioned by and dedicated to Edouard Benazet, who owned the Baden-Baden casino where Berlioz directed a series of concerts every August for ten years. The overture introduces two melodies that will turn out to be among the opera's most important. The scampering opening theme clearly announces a light comedy. The strings do little pirouettes, each time pausing for an imitative comment from the woodwinds. This happens softly at first, but before long the whole orchestra erupts in a loud, festive version of the material. Unexpectedly, this music is drawn from the love duet at the end of the opera. These 38 quick bars give way to the second theme, an Andante passage taken from Béatrice's Act II aria "Il m'en souvient," in which Béatrice realizes that Bénédict loves her. It's a broad melody introduced by horns and woodwinds before being taken up by the strings. The fast theme returns, now in quadruple rather than triple time, with the Béatrice motif weaving merrily around it until the coda appears with some rather uncouth commentary from the trombones.

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