Der Freischütz: The Berlioz Connection Carl Maria von Weber's
operatic masterpiece Der Freischütz remains in the world's
repertory, a stunning precursor of German Romanticism. It
contains a fair quantity of spoken dialogue, always a problem
for non-German singers and already a dilemma for a 19th-century
production of Le Freyschutz in Paris. The pragmatic French
producers hired Hector Berlioz to write French-language
recitatives to replace the German spoken dialogue. For an April
production of Freischütz at the University of Houston's Moores
School of Music, Peter Jacoby grappled with the same problem.
Learning that Bärenreiter was about to issue the Berlioz
recitatives as part of its New Berlioz Edition, he thought, why
not use them? However, since the Houston production was being
sung in German, it meant that Berlioz's French recitatives
needed to be translated into German, an imaginative project
undertaken by music students in Texas.