We are currently rehearsing *Roméo et Juliette * by Berlioz. In one scene, the male Capulet chorus is returning home from an evening ball. On their way they sing to each other about what a night they have had, what a great ball it was, the crazy gossip and chatter etc:
This passage led to us to wonder why the noun *Paroles * is capitalised. It’s done repeatedly throughout the chorus in all four parts, so it doesn’t seem to be an error.
French scholars - any ideas?
To me it looks like a typographical error. If you google the phrase, you don’t see paroles capitalized. Here’s an example from Google Books.
Beyond that, I can’t think of any reason to capitalize it. It’s not like La Sainte Ecriture or anything like that – paroles is used here as a common noun.
I’m not a scholar of the French language, but I am a native speaker.
It’s fairly common for poets to capitalize some words like Amour, but I think the same holds true for English. Parole, here, indeed, doesn’t seem to fit that sort of usage.
To answer the question, I took a look at Gallica, a site run by the French National Library that has facsimiles of a great many books in their collection, many of which are first editions. Luckily, they have a 1839 version of the libretto, which means it’s a first edition. Here is the relevant page:
The answer is obvious: Parole is, by itself, a single verse, hence it’s capitalized. The rhyming pattern is AA-BB, and it’s meant to rhyme with folles.
Thank you for that link jovan. That makes a lot of sense. I’m sending the link on to the choir’s manager so that the information can be included in the next choir bulletin.