Roméo et Juliette Synopsis

ACT I

A masked ball in the Capulets' palace

A ball is under way for Capulet’s daughter, Juliette, whom he has promised in marriage to Count Pâris. Roméo, Mercutio and their companions, members of the rival Montague clan, have joined the party uninvited. Roméo, apprehensive, wants to leave; but Mercutio wittily mocks him. When Roméo observes Juliette from afar, he falls under her spell. Alone, Juliette tells her nurse that she has no interest in marriage. As they are leaving for dinner, Roméo addresses Juliette and both are immediately infatuated. Just as they learn each other’s identity, Tybalt, Juliette’s cousin, arrives and recognizes his enemy Roméo. Capulet quells impending violence by calling for the festivities to continue.

ACT II

The Capulets' garden

The Capulets’ garden Shortly thereafter, Roméo stands beneath Juliette’s window and compares his beloved to the sun, entreating her to appear. Their ensuing conversation is interrupted by a group of men in pursuit of Roméo’s page. Juliette obeys her nurse Gertrude’s call to go to bed but then reappears on the balcony. Roméo and Juliette swear their love for one another; and they reluctantly separate.

ACT III

Scene 1 - Friar Laurent's cell

At daybreak, Roméo visits Friar Laurent, soon joined by Juliette and Gertrude. The monk marries the lovers, hoping his act may reconcile the warring families.

ACT III

Scene 2 - A street near Capulets' palace

Later that morning, Roméo’s page, Stéphano, searching for his missing master, sings a metaphorical song about a white turtledove’s flight from a nest of vultures. Angered by the impudent song, Grégorio challenges the page to a duel. Mercutio arrives to defend Stéphano, but Tybalt challenges him to a duel. Roméo rushes in to stop them. Ignoring Tybalt’s insults, he tries to make peace, but the distraction allows Tybalt to kill Mercutio. Mad with rage, Roméo then kills Tybalt. The Duke of Verona arrives and castigates Montagues and Capulets alike. He banishes Roméo from the city.

ACT IV

Juliet's room at dawn

Defying his sentence, Roméo has spent the night with his new bride in her room. As they sing of their night of love, Roméo hears the song of the lark heralding the day; he must depart. Capulet, accompanied by Gertrude and Friar Laurent, tells Juliette she is to marry Pâris that very day. After Capulet and Gertrude leave, the friar gives her a drug which will make her appear dead. He tells her that Roméo will be informed and that he, with her husband, will attend her awakening the next day in the burial vault. Left alone, Juliette drinks the potion and falls unconscious.

ACT V

An underground crypt

Roméo, not informed of the friar’s plan, enters the Capulet vault to embrace his beloved. Believing her dead, he drinks poison. At this moment, Juliette awakens. They embrace and are preparing to flee, when Roméo falters. Juliette, finding no poison in Roméo’s flask, plunges a dagger into her heart. They await death in each other’s arms, asking God’s forgiveness.

Roméo et Juliette Background

Charles Gounod exhibited refined literary taste in his selection of operatic subjects: Molière for Le Médecin malgré lui (1858), Goethe for Faust (1859), Jean de La Fontaine for Philémon et Baucis (1861), Gérard de Nerval for La Reine de Saba (1862). And, of course, William Shakespeare for Roméo et Juliette. The story of the Veronese lovers had been brought to the opera stage often before the 1867 premiere of Gounod’s work, but with un-Shakespearean literary antecedents that ranged from recent Italian theatrical hits to Renaissance sources. Vincenzo Bellini’s I Capuleti e i Montecchi (1830), for example, was based on a nineteenth-century play by Luigi Scevola. It was perhaps the most popular of the operatic settings that preceded Roméo et Juliette, but by the 1860s it had been largely forgotten, not to mention that the trouser-role Romeos populating Italian stages at the beginning of the century had long fallen out of fashion. So Gounod could explore new operatic territory with this familiar material: Shakespeare as a source and Roméo as a tenor.

The consensus among critics has always been that the play was ideally suited to Gounod’s operatic temperament. Shakespeare’s world is philosophically much less weighty than Goethe’s, thereby forestalling the oft-heard criticism about Faust that Gounod did not understand or project the depth of his literary models. The great French historian and statesman François Guizot described the love in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet as “so young, so ardent, so unreflecting...without restraint, and yet without coarseness.” He viewed the lovers as noble, gallant, brave and even witty. Gounod’s style suited such interpretations of Romeo and Juliet well.

The final duet is the most diffuse and loosely organized musical number that Gounod ever wrote for the stage. Comparisons across the entire opera are suggestive: the first duet for the lovers—their initial encounter at the Capulet ball in Act 1—is as formally restricted and cautious as the last duet is free. Gounod calls their meeting a “madrigal” in the score, a reflection of the literary artifice inherent in Shakespeare’s chain of metaphors at this moment. The meter and tempo are redolent of a minuet. The very difference in the formal properties between the first and last duet signifies the change in the condition of the lovers.

Gounod greatly reduced the public dimension of Shakespeare’s plot. In practical terms this means that Roméo et Juliette gives over a large amount of time to the lovers’ dialogues, no fewer than four extended duets, all of remarkably different character. This includes the final encounter in the tomb, where Gounod followed the famous custom introduced by David Garrick in the eighteenth century of having the two address each other once Juliet revives from the philtre. (In Shakespeare she awakens to discover Romeo’s body.) Gounod fashioned this final encounter into something of a structural imperative by allowing the lovers to recall themes from earlier in order to relive their amorous past at the brink of death.

In between the two outer duets lie two duets where the passion of the lovers blossoms. Gounod frames the balcony scene in Act 2 with an orchestral passage whose sweet and veiled sonorities suggest the unreality of a dream, the selfcontained bubble inhabited by all lovers. The duet in the fourth act begins with an orchestral passage of tender divisi cellos, an understated description of their night of love. Here Roméo and Juliette attempt to deny the day with a melody deployed as a rising sequence at various points in the duet. “Ce n’est pas le jour! Ce n’est pas l’alouette!” sounds at a higher pitch level each time, rendering the falseness of the hope all the more poignant.

The duets in Roméo et Juliette rank among Gounod’s finest achievements, and the score is effectively balanced by contrasting numbers that set them in relief. The success of the opera following its Parisian premiere was immediate, indeed much more rapid than that of Faust a few years earlier. Roméo has always held a strong place in the repertory since then and attracted many of the outstanding performers of the day. “They are in love, but not love-sick” wrote Anne Brownell about Shakespeare’s characters—Gounod’s Gallic sensibility draws the distinction well, and goes a long way to explain the opera’s continued longevity.

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Steven Huebner is author of the book The Operas of Charles Gounod.
He serves as a James McGill Professor of Music History/Musicology at McGill University in Montreal, Canada.