Lelio
ou Le Retour à la vie

Monodrame lyrique
Edition in three languages
English translation by H. Macdonald
German translation by St. Troßbach
Vocal Score by E. Wernhard
BA 5447A

Foreword

Lelio was composed during Berlioz's stay in Italy in 1831. In April of that year he set out from Rome, where he held a scholarship as winner of the Prix de Rome, and travelled as far as Nice on hearing that his fiancee Camille Moke had rejected him in favour of another suitor. He had intended to return to Paris to exact revenge, but then he abandoned his plan and instead spent three weeks in Nice, returning in stages to Rome. On this return journey he conceived the ideaof a semi-theatrical work that combined music and monologues to express the idea of returning to life after a profound traumatic experience. The rejection by Camille was perhaps the experience that prompted the composition, but it was framed as a sequel to the 1830 Symphonie fantastique, which had dramatized the agony of the art ist's ill-fated love (in that case for the actress Harriet Smithson). Originally entitled Le Retour a la Vie, it consists of six separate compositions interspersed with dramatic monologues. The idee fixe, the recurrent theme from the Symphonie fantastique, appears at the beginning and the end. All six pieces had already been written with a different purpose in mind:
1       Le Pecheur, a setting of Goethe's ballad he composed 'five years before'.
2       The Chœur d'ombres is a new version of Cleopatra's invocation to the Pharaohs from the cantata Cleopatre (1829).
3       The Chanson de brigands is probably a version of the lost Chanson de pirates, a setting of
         a Hugo poem from 1829 or perhaps of a poem by Berlioz's friend Ferrand, the Chant du brigand.
4       The Chant de bonheur is an adaptation from La mort d'Orphee, the Prix de Rome cantata of 1827.
5       La harpe eolienne is also derived from La mort d'Orphee.
6       The Fantaisie sur la Tempete de Shakespeare was composed as an overture in the autumn
         of 1830 and was first performed on 7 November 1830.
The monologues are to be recited by an actor in front of a curtain which conceals the orchestra, and they reflect Berlioz's most passionate concerns in 1831, especially friendship, love, Shakespeare, and the healing power of music.
His stay in Italy had also inspired a delight in brigands and the free outdoor life (no. 3) and is also reflected in the Italian text for the Tempest fantasy (no. 6). The introduction to the Tempest, when the curtain is raised and the chorus and orchestra are revealed, features his lifelong preoccupation with concert-giving and the proper performance of orchestral and choral music. At the very end the idee fixe reminds us that his obsession haunts him still.
The composition was finished in Rome in June 1831. In the spring of 1832, while staying with his parents in Dauphine, Berlioz copied the orchestral and vocal parts, and the work was first performed in conjunction with the Symphonie fantastique at the Paris Conservatoire on 9 December 1832. It was heard again three weeks later and again on 3 May 1835. Liszt, who was present at that concert, revived it for a performance in Weimar in 1855, when Berlioz undertook a revision which particularly affected the monologues. When the score was published a year later, it had acquired its definitive title Lelio, a name of Italian origin that Berlioz now gave to the artist whose thoughts and fantasies are at the centre of the dramatic concept.While designated as the second part of the 'Episode in the Life of an Artist', Lelio can nevertheless be performed on its own, without the Symphonie fantastique to precede it.

Hugh Macdonald