Opera no 130
Berlioz; Les Francs juges
Soloists
New Philharmonia Orchestra
Colin Davis
I start this phase of the project devoted to 19th and early 20th century French operas with a piece which only exists in fragments. Les Francs-Juges was Berlioz’ first attempt at an opera. He started it in 1826 when he was in his early 20s and tinkered with it several times over the next few years. There is conflicting information about whether it was actually completed, but it was never performed and only fragments of the score remain. The overture is of course famous but the rest of what remains of the score appears never to have been commercially recorded. But the BBC did record these fragments many years ago and they have been posted on line so that it is possible to hear them.
Altogether, excluding the overture, there is about 25 mins of music here in about half a dozen separate numbers which were scattered about the entire score - this is not a case of the composer starting an opera and then giving up. I thought that the music was well worth saving as it gives a really good sense of the composer’s early development in the years before the Symphonie Fantastique..The choral writing owes something to the French Revolution generation of composers and there are also strong indications of the huge importance that Gluck played in Berlioz’s musical thinking. Altogether I thought that this music was well worth preserving - to me anything by Berlioz is likely to be of real interest. Had the opera been completed and performed who knows how Berlioz’s operatic career might have developed -as it was he was always something of an outsider in the French operatic establishment.
