Berlioz Music Scores

Overture: Benvenuto Cellini (H 76B)

Contents of this page

Benvenuto Cellini: an outline history of the opera
The overture
Performance history

See also Texts and Documents; Berlioz Libretti; Pierre-René Serna, Les mesquineries de Benvenuto Cellini ? and Benvenuto Cellini: une ur-version trop ignorée (both in French); Christian Wasselin, "Benvenuto Cellini" (in English); Berlioz and his music: self-borrowings

Benvenuto Cellini: an outline history of the opera

In France in Berlioz’s time, the path to success for a composer went through the Paris Opéra, France’s most prestigious musical institution, which had the grand title of Théâtre de l’Académie Royale de Musique. Berlioz first tried his hand at writing opera in 1826 with Les Francs-Juges to a libretto by his friend Humbert Ferrand, but it was eventually rejected in June 1829 by the Opéra. On his return from Italy in 1832 his first task was to have his new and revised works performed (notably the revised Symphonie fantastique and its new sequel Le Retour à la vie, and the two overtures King Lear and Rob Roy), but his thoughts soon turned back to the Opéra. The first indication of this is in a letter to his sister Adèle dated 29 April 1834, from Montmartre (CG no. 394):

There is talk for me of a large work in five acts, at the Opéra, and we are involved in negociations for this great enterprise which will determine the whole of my artistic life. I hope this will work out, I have strong and powerful support.

Berlioz does not identify at this stage the subject of the projected opera, but a letter of mid May to Humbert Ferrand gives indications of his thinking at the time (CG no. 398):

My interests at the Opéra are in the hands of the Bertin family [the owners of the Journal des Débats] who have taken charge of the matter. The idea is to give me Shakespeare’s Hamlet arranged excellently as an opera. […] In the meantime I have chosen, for a two-act comic opera, Benvenuto Cellini, whose striking Memoirs you have probably read, and whose character provides me with an excellent text in several respects. Do not mention any of this until everything is organised.

The journey from these first tentative beginnings in 1834 to the actual performances of the completed Benvenuto Cellini in September 1838 at the Paris Opéra was to be long and tortuous, and can only be briefly summarised here. The projected Hamlet did not materialise, but Berlioz pursued his plan for Benvenuto Cellini, as a letter to Humbert Ferrand of 31 August 1834 indicates (CG no. 408):

I had suggested to Léon de Wailly, a young poet of great talent and a close friend [of Auguste Barbier], that he should do me a two-act opera based on the Memoirs of Benvenuto Cellini; he chose Auguste Barbier to assist him. Between the two of them they have written for me the most delicious comic opera that can be imagined. All three of us went like fools to meet M. Crosnier [the director of the Opéra-Comique]; the opera was read out before us and refused. Despite M. Crosnier’s protestations we think that I am the cause of the refusal. I am regarded at the Opéra-Comique as a subverter of the national genre, and they will have nothing to do with of me. As a result they refused the libretto so as not to have to accept the music of a lunatic.
I nevertheless wrote the first scene, the chorus of the goldsmiths of Florence, of which they are all exceedingly enamoured. It will be performed at my concerts.

Rejection by the Opéra-Comique meant that Berlioz turned his attention back to the Opéra, which from 23 August 1835 was now under a new director, Edmond Duponchel. Duponchel accepted in principle to stage a two-act Benvenuto Cellini, subject to extensive changes to the libretto. A letter of Berlioz to his mother dated 11 October 1835 puts a positive gloss on the agreement with the Opéra (CG no. 445):

On the subject of poets, I must tell you finally that I have just been accepted at the Opéra. The new director is far better disposed than his predecessor, so I have presented to him an opera in two acts which was done under my supervision by MM. Alfred de Vigny, Auguste Barbier and Léon de Wailly. He received it with the greatest eagerness. As a result I will soon start to write the score.

Berlioz was being optimistic: with multiple commitments to attend to, it was several months before he was able to begin composing the music. This took up the whole of 1836, but still left a great deal of orchestrating to do, and work on the score continued into the following year 1837. Then Berlioz had to join a queue: there were two other operas to be staged before his. Interestingly Berlioz left the writing of the overture to the very last, and it was only completed in the early months of 1838. Rehearsals started in April 1838, at first with the singers only, later with the orchestra as well. The opera received 3 performances with Duprez in the title role (10, 12 and 14 September 1838), after which Duprez abruptly gave up the title role, which was taken up by Alexis Dupont. This delayed the next performance of the complete opera till 11 January 1839, which turned out to be the last. After this only the first act was performed 3 times in February and March, and Berlioz then withdrew the work altogether (CG no. 638). This was a major setback in his career as a composer, as he relates in his Memoirs (chapter 48). Henceforward the Opéra was closed to him, and this permanently affected what music he could compose and expect to be performed in Paris.

Benvenuto Cellini was never again performed in France in Berlioz’s lifetime, and after its failure Berlioz seemed to have given up on the work. When in 1847 he was engaged to conduct the Drury Lane Theatre in London and was expected to provide an opera for it, he did not consider using Benvenuto Cellini for the purpose. But thanks to his friend Liszt, the work turned out to have a future after all. It was successfully revived by Liszt in Weimar in 1852 and again in 1856, in a shortened and modified form. The modifications that were made for these performances contained some improvements, but also sacrificed some fine music from the original version, and considerable changes were made to the sequence of scenes of the original second Act (which now became Act III, while Act I was subdivided into two Acts). Successful in Weimar in this revised version, the opera failed in London at Covent Garden in 1853, but the Weimar revival had long-term results. Hans von Bülow, who had played a major part in that revival, staged the work again in Hanover in 1879, and it remained popular in Germany subsequently. For example Felix Weingartner had a special fondness for the opera and staged it in Berlin in 1897 and in Vienna in 1911 (see his article on the opera). But in France Benvenuto Cellini had to wait till 1913 before it was revived, and that revival did not have any lasting impact.

The overture

As Berlioz mentions in his Memoirs (chapter 48), the overture to the opera was successful at the first and subsequent performances, when much of the rest of the opera was hissed by an organised cabal. Berlioz thought in fact that the success that greeted the overture was ‘exaggerated’. But he lost no time in publishing it: the full score appeared in 1839, together with a number of vocal excerpts from the opera (with piano accompaniment). The overture was dedicated to Berlioz’s friend Ernest Legouvé; as Berlioz relates in his Memoirs (chapter 48), Legouvé had provided Berlioz with a loan of 2,000 francs at a crucial moment in the composition of the work, which enabled him to complete the opera.

The overture was the most brilliant concert overture Berlioz had written so far; it is remarkable for its imaginative and varied orchestral writing, its rhythmic vitality and its abundant melodic inspiration. It was greatly admired by Felix Weingartner, who performed it frequently and wrote a short essay on it. The version known nowadays represents the result of rewriting by Berlioz before its publication – there survives a copy from the archives of the Paris Opéra of an earlier version, similar to the final version but with numerous differences in detail and orchestration, and longer by nearly fifty bars. As often, Berlioz’s second thoughts were more effective by being more concise.

The thematic material of the overture is partly original, and partly taken from the opera (this follows Weber’s practice). The main theme and its development (bars 1-16, 91-134 etc.), which clearly stand for Cellini himself, are not found in the opera. The two themes of the slow introduction are derived respectively from the Pope’s aria in Act II/III (À tous péchés pleine indulgence; bars 23-36, 64-78 then again in the allegro, bars 355-88) and Harlequin’s arietta on the cor anglais in the carnival scene in Act I/II (bars 34-54, 78-88) – a theme which recalls the opening of the Damnation of Faust and which had already been used by Berlioz in a melody he published in 1834 (Je crois en vous – H 70). The second subject in the allegro (bars 159-99, 228-66) is derived from a duet between Cellini and Teresa in Act I, but characteristically Berlioz changes its time signature from triple to duple time and gives it much fuller development in the overture than it receives in the opera.

Performance history

Strikingly, though one of Berlioz’s most brilliant concert pieces, the overture to Benvenuto Cellini received rather few performances in Berlioz’s lifetime, as compared with other overtures of his (such as the Francs-Juges overture, that to King Lear and the Carnaval romain). Berlioz conducted it 3 times in Paris in 1840, but not otherwise. He gave a number of performances of the work in his first tour of Germany in 1843 (Dresden, Brunswick, Berlin [twice]), and he conducted it in Dresden twice in 1854. After a long interval he conducted it for the last time in St Petersburg in November 1867 during his last trip to Russia. But the work received a number of performances elsewhere under other conductors: in London in 1841, in Berlin in 1858 under Hans von Bülow who also made a piano transcription of the overture, and in the United States in 1867 (Brooklyn) and 1868 (New York).

In order to achieve the correct note values on playback all triplets and sextuplets have been notated in full wherever they occur.

    Overture: Benvenuto Cellini (duration 9'52")
    — Score in large format
    (file created on 6.6.2001)
    — Score in pdf format

This page revised and enlarged on 1 January 2022.

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