When a theatrical adventurer, William Abbott, brought a troupe of English actors to Paris in the fall of 1827 their arrangements changed from day to day, though their promise was to offer Shakespeare. At the last moment, the Théâtre de l'Odéon was booked, and on September 6 they opened with Sheridan's The Rivals, in which an attractively competent but otherwise undistinguished Irish actress, Harriet Smithson (1800 - 1854), took the role of Lydia Languish. The legendary Charles Kemble, arriving to take the leads in Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet, opted to present the latter first, fearing that he hadn't an actress of sufficient star power on hand to mount the former. The part of Ophelia, regarded as negligible, fell casually to Miss Smithson. Seizing the opportunity, she closeted herself for two days with the script. At the performance on September 11, the earlier scenes seem to have gone off unremarkably, but in the mad scene she came into her own with a combination of supple mime and a clear, melodious diction in which Ophelia's ecstasy of grief gripped, harrowed, and transported a brilliant audience, including Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas pére, Théophile Gautier, Alfred de Vigny, Eugène Delacroix, and Berlioz—already, or soon to be, the leading makers of Romanticism. On that evening, she became a star and appeared opposite Kemble in Romeo and Juliet a few nights later. The twin impact upon Berlioz of Shakespeare revealed by Harriet Smithson can hardly be overestimated—as he absorbed the former he pursued the latter. Unresponsive—even afraid of him—at first, she loomed as the femme inspiratrice of the Symphonie fantastique (1830) and, after many vicissitudes, became his wife on October 3, 1833. The following year, a son was born to them. Their ménage seems to have resisted reality for several years, though as the decade wore on—and Berlioz gave his fullest expression to the ideal of romantic love in his dramatic symphony, Roméo et Juliette (1839)—Harriet became isolated (her fractured French was never more than functional), portly, frequently ill, a closet alcoholic, and, by 1840, chronically and paranoiacally abusive. There is perhaps no more quietly telling autobiographical work in Berlioz's catalog than La Mort d'Ophélie, composed in May 1842, to words paraphrased by Berlioz's friend, Ernest Legouvé (1807 - 1903), from Queen Gertrude's description in Hamlet (IV.7) of the drowning Ophelia—"There is a willow grows aslant a brook"—with its allusion in the vocal part to the idée fixe of the Symphonie fantastique, Harriet's melody. An engagingly persistent figure in the accompaniment, shifting restlessly from register to register, suggests the rippling current, hauntingly echoed by vocal melismas—"Which time she chanted snatches of old tunes,/As one in capable of her own distress"—at the conclusion of the first and fourth stanzas. Suggestively, it is dedicated to the Countess d'Agoult, Liszt's mistress and the mother of his children—a relationship already severely stressed. Berlioz arranged La Mort d'Ophélie for chorus and orchestra in 1848, and included the solo version in the 1849 collection, Tristia.

© All Music Guide

Portions of Content Provided by All Music Guide.
© 2008 All Media Guide, LLC. All Music Guide is a registered trademark of All Media Guide, LLC.