Berlioz: Les nuits d'été (Summer Nights), Op. 7

Introduction

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.

Background

Berlioz and the poet Théophile Gautier were neighbours and friends. Gautier wrote, "Berlioz represents the romantic musical idea … unexpected effects in sound, tumultuous and Shakespearean depth of passion." It is possible that Berlioz read Gautier's collection La comédie de la mort (The Comedy of Death) before its publication in 1838. Gautier had no objection to his friend's setting six poems from that volume, and Berlioz began in March 1840.^[3] The title Nuits d'été was Berlioz's invention, and it is not clear why he chose it: the first song is specifically set in spring rather than summer. The writer Annagret Fauser suggests that Berlioz may have been influenced by the preface to a collection of short stories by his friend Joseph Méry, Les nuits de Londres, in which the author writes of summer nights in which he and his friends sat outside until dawn telling stories. In a 1989 study of Berlioz, D Kern Holoman suggests that the title is an allusion to Shakespeare, whose works Berlioz loved.

The cycle was complete in its original version for voice (mezzo-soprano or tenor) and piano by 1841. Berlioz later made arrangements for baritone, contralto, or soprano, and piano. The piano version is not as often performed in concert or on record as the orchestrated score, which Berlioz arranged between 1843 and 1856.^[8] David Cairns wrote in 1988 that the success of the piano version was impeded by the inferior quality of the piano part in the published score: it is not Berlioz's own, and Cairns described it as "a clumsy, inauthentic piece of work".

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.

The original piano version had a single dedicatee – Louise Bertin, whose father, Louis Bertin, was editor of the Journal des débats, for which Berlioz wrote musical criticism and other articles. Each of the six songs of the orchestral cycle was dedicated individually, to singers well known in Germany, some of whom had performed Berlioz's music there: Louise Wolf ("Villanelle"), Anna Bockholtz-Falconi ("Le spectre de la rose"), Hans von Milde ("Sur les lagunes"), Madeleine Nottès ("Absence"), Friedrich Caspari ("Au cimetière") and Rosa von Milde ("L'île inconnue").

For the orchestral version, Berlioz transposed the second and third songs to lower keys. When this version was published, Berlioz specified different voices for the various songs: mezzo-soprano or tenor for "Villanelle", contralto for "Le spectre de la rose", baritone (or optionally contralto or mezzo) for "Sur les lagunes", mezzo or tenor for "Absence", tenor for "Au cimetière", and mezzo or tenor for "L'île inconnue". The cycle is nevertheless usually sung by a single soloist, most often a soprano or mezzo-soprano. When the cycle is sung by sopranos the second and third songs are usually transposed back to their original pitches; when lower voices sing the cycle some other songs are often transposed downwards; in the view of the Berlioz scholar Julian Rushton this has a particularly deleterious effect in the first song, the lighthearted "Villanelle".

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.

As far as is known, the orchestral cycle was not performed in its entirety during the composer's lifetime. The work was neglected for many years, but during the twentieth century it was rediscovered and has become one of Berlioz's best-loved works.