World Premiere: December 22, 1833
Last HSO Performance: HSO Premiere 
Instrumentation: 2 flutes with 2nd doubling piccolo, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani and strings
Duration: 16 minutes

Hector Berlioz

After three unsuccessful attempts, Berlioz finally won the Prix de Rome at the end of 1830, but he then pried himself away from Paris only with great reluctance. His reputation as a leader of the city’s musical avant-garde was just beginning to blossom (the Symphonie Fantastique was premiered on December 5th), and a recent passion conceived for the pianist Camille Moke had resulted in their betrothal. Upon his arrival in Rome, Berlioz installed himself in the French Academy at the Villa Medici, and proceeded to worry more about the lack of correspondence from Camille than about his creative work. He passed his time poking about the ancient ruins, touching up the score of the Symphonie Fantastique, and immersing himself in Byron’s poem The Corsair, reading much of it in, of all places, St. Peter’s Basilica. By April, waiting for word from Paris had proven intolerable to him, and he broke the terms of his Prix appointment by bolting north from Rome.

Berlioz’s journey was halted for several days in Florence by fever and a sore throat, and he speeded his recovery by reading Shakespeare’s King Lear on the banks of the Arno. He was overwhelmed by the drama: “I uttered a cry of admiration in the face of this work of genius; I thought I would burst from enthusiasm, I rolled around (in the grass, honestly), I rolled convulsively to appease my utter rapture.” Immediately upon the heels of this literary revelation, however, came a letter from Camille’s mother, who reported to Berlioz that her daughter had married the noted piano maker Ignaz Pleyel. Revenge, the jilted composer vowed, must be done upon his faithless fiancée. He purchased two revolvers and a measure of laudanum and strychnine, as well as some serving maid’s clothes (!) that he planned to use as a disguise to sneak into the Pleyel–Moke abode. He got as far as Nice, where his reason apparently snapped, and threw himself into the ocean in an attempted suicide. After being “yanked out like a fish,” as he put it in his memoirs, his rage completely drowned, and he spent the next three weeks recovering (“the happiest twenty days of my existence”). He sketched out some ideas later used in his Corsaire Overture, but worked mainly on a concert overture inspired by King Lear. He returned to Rome, made amends with Horace Vernet, the French historical painter then heading the Academy, and finished King Lear by May 10th. The work had to await its premiere until December 22, 1833, when Narcisse Girard led it (Berlioz did not debut as a conductor until 1835) on a program that also featured the Symphonie Fantastique and the composer’s friend Franz Liszt playing Weber’s Konzertstück. 

Berlioz left no specific program for King Lear relating the score’s progress to the characters and events of the drama, and the eminent English musicologist Sir Donald Tovey claimed that the piece was not programmatic at all, but simply “a magnificent piece of orchestral rhetoric in tragic style.” Lear himself seems to be evoked by the commanding unison string figure that begins the extended slow introduction. Cordelia enters with the plaintive melody in the oboe above pizzicato strings. The return of Lear’s theme at the end of the introduction is heightened by thundering rolls on the timpani. The main body of the work, in fast tempo, largely follows traditional sonata form, with a violent main theme placated by two gentle strains unfolded by oboe and bassoon. There is much contention between the contrasting emotional states of the principal thematic material in the development and recapitulation sections until Lear’s motto from the introduction reappears as a menacing recitative for basses that leads to the stormy closing pages.