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Shakespeare & Beyond

Charles Gounod: The tragedy of Romeo and Juliet in four beautiful duets

Romeo and Juliet at San Francisco Opera
Romeo and Juliet at San Francisco Opera
Romeo and Juliet at San Francisco Opera

The tomb scene from Charles Gounod’s Romeo and Juliet at San Francisco Opera, 2019, with Pene Pati as Romeo and Nadine Sierra as Juliet. Photo: Cory Weaver/San Francisco Opera

Opera is fundamentally a genre of emotional storytelling. It speaks to the core of the human condition and our shared experiences as emotive beings.  The intersection of voice, music, and drama makes opera so perfect at telling humanity’s most universal stories through an intimately emotional lens.  Soaringly passionate and exquisitely heartbreaking, Romeo and Juliet is a perfect operatic subject, leading French composer Charles Gounod (1818-1893) to appropriate it in Paris nearly 300 years after its Shakespearean origins.

So much about Gounod’s Romeo and Juliet (Roméo et Juliette) is bound up in the emotional intimacy of its star-crossed protagonists. Gounod, with his librettists Jules Barbier and Michel Carré (the same pair behind the operatic telling of Hamlet by Ambroise Thomas), eschewed much of the political, courtly intrigue in Shakespeare’s play, focusing more on the lyrical arc of the love story. They used the world of Renaissance Verona to frame a love story of heartbreaking tragedy, punctuated by four masterful duets—a concentration of amour unprecedented even by romantic French opera standards.