(Editor’s note: The performance shown above was taped back in 1977. Go here for a contemporary performance— Béatrice strips down to her slip for this one—but with French subtitles only. My review is based on a 2016 Glyndebourne production available via subscription from “Marquee TV” on Amazon Video. I particularly liked Stéphanie d’Oustrac in the role of Béatrice.)
Anyone, I suspect, who “loves” Shakespeare—and those who love Shakespearean wordplay in particular—is gonna luv Much Ado About Nothing, which features three of Bill’s most famous talkers—both Captain Benedick1 and Beatrice, My Lady Tongue—two sleek wits whose clashing humors glisten like exuberant seals frolicking in a sunlit sea, along with master stumbler good constable Dogberry, for whom all comparisons are indeed odorous. And anyone who loves Much Ado About Nothing—well, they might love Hector Berlioz’s 1858 opera Béatrice et Bénédict, despite Hector’s radical reworking of the story, removing ninety percent of the kinks and curveballs from Bill’s typically extravagant, fanciful and indeed “theatrical” plot—because, in an opera, only the music can be “complex”. Everything else must be streamlined.
As his title implies, Berlioz drops almost everything from “Much Ado” except the unconscious erotic agon between the leads, both tricked by their friends, in an eminently comic manner, into not only “discovering” their long-suppressed desire but also each deciding that he/she must take the lead in declaring their love because their previous verbal malice had so intimidated the other as to leave them petrified at the prospect of speaking first.
Thus, there is no Claudio and Hero except as confidantes of the leads,2 serving only to discover and fan the hidden sparks of their passion. Don Pedro, Shakespeare’s ever-active matchmaker, has a similarly reduced role, as does Hero’s father Leonato, and there is no “evil” Don John at all. And also no Dogberry!
And, really, that’s about all there is to it, except for lots and lots of excellent (to my unwashed ears) mid-19th century music from Berlioz, sounding much more “French”—even “Gallic”—and much less “Romantic”, than I would have expected. However (again, to my unwashed ears), Berlioz makes one significant change—lessening (slightly) Benedick’s importance while significantly increasing that of Beatrice. (Perhaps that’s why he put her name first.)
In Much Ado, it is the bluff Captain Benedick’s transformation into “Benedict, the Married Man” that marks the greater change. Shakespeare gives Benedick two of his simplest, most touching lines: “The world must be peopled!” and “For man is a giddy thing.” Beatrice, on the other hand, abandons her former truculence with less fuss—though she will resist the blackening of Hero’s name with much greater fuss (which I will discuss later). In Berlioz’s opera, the opposite is the case, simplifying Bénédict while making deepening Béatrice.
In her remarkable aria that occurs shortly after the beginning of Act II (“Dieu! Que viens-je d'entendre?”), Béatrice acknowledges that her previous raillery always concealed a secret longing for Bénédict, but now that the longing is out in the open she also realizes that, once she achieves the consummation of her love for Bénédict, she will lose the uncommitted freedom she once had—a shallow, narrow freedom perhaps, but complete in itself—a freedom she must lose if she “loses control”—surrenders to her sexual passion and becomes complete not through solitude but through her marriage with Bénédict—a greater completeness but one necessarily dependent upon him. As Berlioz puts it in the text he wrote for Béatrice (as translated by Berlioz scholar Hugh MacDonald)
Heavens! What is this comes to my ears?
I feel a secret fire spreading through my breast.
Bénédict! Can it be that Bénédict could love me?
I remember, I remember the day the army marched away
I could not explain the strange feeling of anxious sorrow
Which lay upon my heart. He is leaving, said I, whilst I stay behind.
Is it glory, is it death that fate holds for this scoffer whom I detest?
She recalls dreaming that Bénédict has been killed and then waking up, laughing at her fears but weeping as well. Then she continues
I love him then? Yes, Bénédict, I love thee.
I am no longer my own master I am no more myself.
Come, my vanquisher, Tame my heart!
Come, already this wild heart lies to meet its bondage.
Farewell, gay frivolity, farewell, freedom,
Farewell, disdain, farewell, folly, farewell, biting mockery,
Béatrice in her turn
Falls a victim to love.
After so many deletions, Berlioz makes one major insertion: “Somarone” (Italian for “big donkey”, MacDonald informs me), who has no interaction with the other characters of the opera, but only appears on two occasions to make a fool of himself and allow Berlioz to make fun of composers he doesn’t like. Somarone insists on rehearsing an “epithalamium” he has written in honor of Claudius and Hero’s upcoming wedding, to wit:
Swoon and die, gentle consorts
In the drunkenness of bliss!
Why outlive
Such moments of tenderness?
Let blessed oblivion
Fall upon you soft
As calm dreaming night.
Not exactly upbeat, is it? The very opposite of what one might expect for an epithalamium, and sung in the most mournful and brooding manner possible. In liner notes to a 1977 recording of the opera, the learned Dr. MacDonald explains to us that Somarone is “a caricatured amalgam of all that was academic, pedantic, and exhibitionist in nineteenth-century Kapellmeister”. Therefore, “We have to picture Spontini, Cherubini, Habeneck, Jullien and their like very clearly in our minds before we can appreciate the gentle force of Berlioz’s humour,” which I perhaps could do if I had any formal capacity to appreciate music and had any knowledge of these composers.3 However, what I find “interesting” is something more than a little different, for I see (and hear) the piece as a sendup avant la lettre of Richard Wagner’s legendary “Liebestod” (“Love Death”)4 from his equally legendary opera Tristan und Isolde, which premiered in 1865, three years after Béatrice et Bénédict. Who knew the Romantics could be so witty?
Afterwords—Much ado about Much Ado
A classic line of advice to any writer is “write what you know”. What did Shakespeare know? The theatre. It is a rare Shakespeare play that doesn’t have a “play within a play”, at least informally, and Much Ado has half a dozen. The play has scarcely started before we get a masquerade—and what could be more theatrical than that!—in which the ever active Don Pedro promises to woo Hero in disguise on behalf of Claudio as Claudio (not quite sure how that would work), which ultimately comes off without a hitch even though Claudio briefly fears that Don Pedro is really planning to woo Hero for himself.
Having gotten one marriage out of the way, Don Pedro immediately starts planning the next—deceiving—but really undeceiving—Beatrice and Benedick into realizing that they are in love with one another, by arranging for each to overhear supposedly idle gossip about the other’s “hopeless” love—charades leading to “truth”, the two leads tricked into accepting the passions they had previously labored to conceal.
It is these maneuvers that constitute the substance of Berlioz’s opera. But Shakespeare can never be so simple. He complicates matters by one of his favorite devices, an “evil brother”—Don John, Don Pedro’s bastard brother, determined to derail and ruin the match Don Pedro has just created, arranging for his accomplice Borachio to put on a performance on Hero’s balcony with her maid Margaret (somehow “disguised” as Hero) to convince an audience assembled by Don John consisting of Claudio, Don Pedro, Lorenzo, and Benedick that Hero was “unchaste”—a maneuver that “works” perfectly, as one might expect, given the obsessive mistrust and fear of female sexuality that Shakespeare so often displays, particularly in his great tragedies like Hamlet and Othello.5
We then get another masquerade as Claudio, Don Pedro, Lorenzo, and Benedick all show up for the wedding of Claudio and Hero the next day, pretending that nothing is wrong until after the actual ceremony begins, at which point Claudio horrifies “everyone” by denouncing Hero on the very slimmest of evidence, though it’s immediately corroborated by the rest of the men, Benedick excepted. After Claudio, Don Pedro, and Don John leave, however, the friar presiding at the wedding takes a hand, suggesting that word be given out that Hero did not merely faint out of shame but has actually died, as a way of deceiving Claudio into realizing that he actually loves Hero yet:
For it so falls out
That what we have we prize not to the worth
Whiles we enjoy it, but being lacked and lost,
Why then we rack the value, then we find
The virtue that possession would not show us
Whiles it was ours. So will it fare with Claudio.
Beatrice, on the other hand, has a different suggestion (for Benedick alone): “Kill Claudio!”
Very surprisingly (for Shakespeare), the notion that a woman merely accused of “unchastity” might not be unchaste carries the day, and the friar’s suggestion is accepted. On top of that, Benedick agrees to Beatrice’s demand as well, so that, if Claudio fails to recognize Hero’s true virtue—well, so much the worse for him. And then later yet a final plot is laid, as Claudio, who has discovered, to his shame, that Hero was innocent (though he still thinks her dead), agrees (a bit surprisingly) to marry Beatrice in her place, and arrives at the “wedding” to, of course, discover the real Hero still alive! And so the double wedding can finally take place!6
There is a excellent version of Much Ado About Nothing from 1973 available via YouTube, with Sam “Law & Order” Waterston more than excellent as Benedick and Kathleen Widdoes the same as Beatrice. The performance was produced by legendary Broadway impresario Joseph Papp (who created “Shakespeare in the Park” back in 1954), with TV journeyman Nick Havinga directing. I don’t know who to credit for the decision to, in effect, underline the intriguing sidetwist that Shakespeare gives to the play (entirely absent from the opera, of course), but I find it fascinating.
At one point (Act II, Scene 1, to be precise), after Hero and Claudio exeunt, Beatrice addresses Don Pedro (aka “the Prince”) as follows:
Beatrice: Good Lord for alliance! Thus goes everyone to the world but I, and I am sunburnt. I may sit in a corner and cry “Heigh-ho for a husband!”
Prince: Lady Beatrice, I will get you one.
Beatrice: I would rather have one of your father’s getting. Hath your Grace ne’er a brother like you? Your father got excellent husbands, if a maid could come by them.
Prince: Will you have me, lady?
Beatrice: No, my lord, unless I might have another for working days. Your Grace is too costly to wear every day. But I beseech your Grace pardon me. I was born to speak all mirth and no matter.
Prince: Your silence most offends me, and to be merry best becomes you, for out o’ question you were born in a merry hour.
Beatrice: No, sure, my lord, my mother cried, but then there was a star danced, and under that was I born.
As the scene is played in the 1973 production, Don Pedro (Douglass Watson) senses that Beatrice is effectively declaring herself destined to become an old maid, that her temperament condemns her to solitude, a temperament and a solitude that he shares, and, out of sympathy rather than desire, pushes himself forward against his own nature as her champion. She too recognizes their kindred spirits and also recognizes that a marriage of such too kindred spirits would be a disaster. Gently, she pushes him away—“I was born to speak all mirth and no matter”—though clearly she often uses mirth to disguise her matter—her loneliness.
Nothing more is made of this until the very end of the play when Benedick demands a dance before the exchange of vows. After the dance begins, he calls out to Don Pedro “Prince, thou art sad, get thee a wife, get thee a wife!” But Shakespeare gives Don Pedro no lines. In the 1973 production, Beatrice and Benedick are shot in the foreground, framing Don Pedro, who shifts uneasily at Benedick’s words. Of course he’s sad! Our play is done, and one must go back to “reality”. As we have already seen, Don Pedro is one of those who are only happy when wearing a mask. He delights in the innocent happiness of others—never was a pandar more virtuous—but cannot be happy himself.
I have seen other productions where this subtext, which I find unmistakable on Shakespeare’s part, is utterly ignored. Is Don Pedro’s sadness autobiographical? Hard to say. The theatre world is a natural refuge for souls seeking escape from the everyday. I guess we’ll never know. The rest is silence.
1. In the first act of Berlioz’s opera, Béatrice dubs Bénédict “Signior Matamore” (“Moor Killer”), but in Shakespeare’s play she calls him “Signior Mountanto”—“Mountanto” being a minor misspelling of the Italian “montanto”, a technical term from the world of fencing meaning “an upward thrust”, as Beatrice acknowledges Bénédict as her invariable opponent in their endless verbal duels. If you “got” that one (Berlioz perhaps did not), well, you’re at least one up on me, and probably two. In the good old pre-sixties days of litcrit, we would have said that Shakespeare was already suggesting the real source of Béatrice’s non-stop raillery: her own unconscious desire for a “upward thrust” in the bedroom rather than the salon.
2. In addition, Hero shares a much admired duet with her maid in praise of love to conclude the first act.
3. MacDonald knows infinitely more about this, or any other, period of music than I do, but I have to find this grouping a bit dubious. Wikipedia tells me that Spontini and Cherubini were both highly respected composers, bridging the classical and romantic eras. Beethoven regarded Cherubini as the greatest composer of his time, though Berlioz disliked him personally, finding him a tedious old bore and Cherubini was in fact famed for his ill temper. The music critic Adolphe Adam said of him, in a line that has subsequently been applied to others, “some maintain his temper was very even, because he was always angry.” Habeneck and Jullien were much less renowned, but Habeneck is famous in music history for having conducted Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony “correctly” and thus awakening Richard Wagner to its greatness.
4. Isolde sings the following lines at the conclusion of Wagner’s “masterpiece” (which I found ineffably tedious) over Tristan’s dead (of course) body: “to drown,/ to founder –/ unconscious –/ utmost bliss!” If you say so!
5. I have discussed Shakespeare’s “conflicted” attitude towards women—constantly treating them with compulsive suspicion in the tragedies but then making them the moral centers of his comedies—in my “comparison” piece, Shakespeare versus Molière: Who’s better?. Don John’s “motiveless malignity” prefigures both Iago in Othello and his fellow bastard Edmund in King Lear, but without any of the latter two’s depth. Iago’s malignity is not really motiveless—he is “wildly” in love with Othello but can find no way of expressing it other than to destroy Othello’s life—and while we can “assume” that Don John’s bastardy is the cause of his ill temper, he makes no real mention of it, in contrast to Edmund, who is on a virtual par with Iago for villainy.
6. I’m even leaving out an extended sequence in which Leonato pours out his grief to his brother over Hero’s death even though he knows she’s still alive, and why his brother “has” to be deceived in this manner is very unclear. One can wonder if Shakespeare originally wrote the play so that Leonato didn’t know that Hero was still alive and liked the speeches he gave Leonato so much—on a favorite topic, the inability of “philosophy” to overcome immediate emotional pain—“For there was never yet philosopher/ that could endure the toothache patiently,/ However they have writ the style of gods/ And made a push at chance and sufferance”—that he decided to leave it all in, even though it didn’t make much sense.
