Berlioz: Past, Present, Future (Eastman Studies in Music)

Berlioz Past, Present, Future

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Berlioz Past, Present, Future

Bicentenary Essays Edited by Peter Bloom

University of Rochester Press

Copyright © 2003 Contributors All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation, no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded, or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. First published 2003 by the University of Rochester Press The University of Rochester Press 668 Mt. Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620, USA Boydell & Brewer, Ltd. P.O. Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK www.urpress.com ISBN 1–58046–047–X ISSN 1071–9989 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Berlioz : past, present, future : bicentenary essays / edited by Peter Bloom. p. cm. — (Eastman studies in music; v. 20) Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index. ISBN 1-58046-047-X 1. Berlioz, Hector, 1803–1869. I. Bloom, Peter. II. Series. ML410.B5 B332 2002 780'.92–dc21

2002034773

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Contents Illustrations Music Examples Abbreviations

vii viii ix

Foreword Talking about Berlioz PETER BLOOM

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Berlioz on Berlioz

1

1 Berlioz’s Berlioz PETER GAY Berlioz and Before 2 Berlioz and Early Music CATHERINE MASSIP 3 Learning the Past DAVID CHARLTON Issues of Berlioz’s Day and Ours 4 Joseph d’Ortigue’s “Autopsy” of Benvenuto Cellini SYLVIA L’ÉCUYER 5 Plots and Politics: Berlioz’s Tales of Sound and Fury KATHERINE KOLB 6 Berlioz, Meyerbeer, and the Place of Jewishness in Criticism KERRY MURPHY 7 Berlioz, Liszt, and the Question of Virtuosity CÉCILE REYNAUD 8 Berlioz, Ophelia, and Feminist Hermeneutics HEATHER HADLOCK

3

17 19 34

57 59 76 90 105 123

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Berlioz Viewed Posthumously 9 Berlioz in 1900: Between Fervor and Fear JEAN-MICHEL NECTOUX 10 Berlioz in the Fin-de-siècle Press LESLEY WRIGHT 11 Berlioz Forgeries RICHARD MACNUTT Afterword Fourteen Points about Berlioz and the Public, or Why There Is Still a Berlioz Problem JACQUES BARZUN Contributors Index

135 137 158 173

193

202 205

Illustrations Hector Berlioz, circa 1863. Photograph by Pierre Petit. Figure 9.1 Henri Fantin-Latour, L’Anniversaire. Lithograph, 1875. Figure 9.2 Henri Fantin-Latour, L’Anniversaire. Sketch for Le Monde illustré, 16 October 1886. Figure 9.3 Henri Fantin-Latour, La Musique. Pastel version. Figure 9.4 Henri Fantin-Latour, Danses (Ballet des “Troyens”). Pastel. Figure 9.5 Henri Fantin-Latour, Italie! (Duo des “Troyens”). Pencil and charcoal, then lithographed in 1884. Figure 9.6 Henri Fantin-Latour, Duo des “Troyens.” Lithograph, 1894. Figure 11.1 Forged draft of La Captive. Figure 11.2 Berlioz, Autograph letter to Camille Pal, 24 September 1854. Figure 11.3 Forged receipt, 20 August 1854. Figure 11.4 Forged album-leaf, from Benvenuto Cellini. Figure 11.5 Berlioz, Autograph album-leaf, from Harold en Italie.

2 149 150 152 153 153 154 179 181 181 183 184

Music Examples Example 3.1 Anton Reicha, “Horsch!” from Reicha, Traité de haute composition musicale. 3.2 Anton Reicha, Marche funèbre. 3.3 Jean-François Lesueur, “Jour glorieux!” from Chant du 1er vendémiaire An IX.

41 44 52

Abbreviations CG CG

CM CM CM CM

Hector Berlioz, Correspondance générale Pierre Citron, general editor (Paris: Flammarion, 1972–) I 1803–1832, ed. Pierre Citron (1972) II 1832–1842, ed. Frédéric Robert (1975) III 1842–1850, ed. Pierre Citron (1978) IV 1851–1855, ed. Pierre Citron, Yves Gérard, and Hugh Macdonald (1983) V 1855–1859, ed. Hugh Macdonald and François Lesure (1988) VI 1859–1863, ed. Hugh Macdonald and François Lesure (1995) VII 1864–1869, ed. Hugh Macdonald (2001) VIII Supplément, ed. Hugh Macdonald (2003) Hector Berlioz, Critique musicale (Paris: Buchet/Chastel, 1996–) I 1823–1834, ed. H. Robert Cohen and Yves Gérard (1996) II 1835–1836, ed. Yves Gérard and Marie-Hélène Coudroy-Saghaï (1998) III 1837–1838, ed. Yves Gérard, Marie-Hélène Coudroy-Saghaï, and Anne Bongrain (2001)

Memoirs The Memoirs of Hector Berlioz, trans. and ed. David Cairns (London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1969; and all later editions) Mémoires Hector Berlioz, Mémoires, ed. Pierre Citron (Paris: Flammarion, 1991) Les Soirées de l’orchestre (1968) Les Grotesques de la musique (1969) À travers chants (1971) Hector Berlioz, Œuvres Littéraires, Édition du Centenaire ed. Léon Guichard (Paris: Gründ, 1968–71)

x

Abbreviations

NBE [New Berlioz Edition] Hector Berlioz, New Edition of the Complete Works, Hugh Macdonald, general editor (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1967–) NBE 1a–d Benvenuto Cellini, ed. Hugh Macdonald (1994–) 2a–c Les Troyens, ed. Hugh Macdonald (1969–70) 3 Béatrice et Bénédict, ed. Hugh Macdonald (1980) 4 Incomplete Operas, ed. Ric Graebner and Paul Banks (forthcoming) 5 Huit Scènes de Faust, ed. Julian Rushton (1970) 6 Prix de Rome Works, ed. David Gilbert (1998) 7 Lélio ou Le Retour à la vie, ed. Peter Bloom (1992) 8a–b La Damnation de Faust, ed. Julian Rushton (1979–86) 9 Grande Messe des morts, ed. Jürgen Kindermann (1978) 10 Te Deum, ed. Denis McCaldin (1973) 11 L’Enfance du Christ, ed. David Lloyd-Jones (1998) 12a Choral Works with Orchestra, I, ed. Julian Rushton (1991) 12b Choral Works with Orchestra, II, ed. David Charlton (1993) 13 Songs for Solo Voice and Orchestra, ed. Ian Kemp (1975) 14 Choral Works with Keyboard, ed. Ian Rumbold (1996) 15 Songs for One, Two, or Three Voices and Keyboard, ed. Ian Rumbold (forthcoming) 16 Symphonie fantastique, ed. Nicholas Temperley (1972) 17 Harold en Italie, ed. Paul Banks and Hugh Macdonald (2002) 18 Roméo et Juliette, ed. D. Kern Holoman (1990) 19 Symphonie funèbre et triomphale, ed. Hugh Macdonald (1967) 20 Overtures, ed. Diana Bickley (2000) 21 Miscellaneous Works, ed. Hugh Macdonald (forthcoming) 22a Arrangements of Works by Gluck, ed. Joël-Marie Fauquet (forthcoming) 22b Arrangements of Works by Other Composers, ed. Ian Rumbold (forthcoming) 23 Messe solennelle, ed. Hugh Macdonald (1994) 24 Grand Traité d’instrumentation et d’orchestration modernes, ed. Peter Bloom (2003) 25 D. Kern Holoman, Catalogue of the Works of Hector Berlioz (1987) 26 Portraits, ed. Gunther Braam (forthcoming)

Foreword Talking about Berlioz Peter Bloom C’est un génie. Il a trop de génie. Il fait des fautes. Qu’importe! —Richard Strauss, talking about Berlioz to Romain Rolland1

This book presents papers, as revised for publication, from a gathering at Smith College, in Northampton, Massachusetts, that was the first of five international conferences planned in the late 1990s by the Paris-based Comité International Hector Berlioz to usher in the bicentenary of the composer’s birth. As I write, a second conference, in Bayreuth, has already taken place; a third, in London, is imminent; a fourth and fifth, in La Côte-Saint-André and in Paris, are not far off. The approach to 2003 will also see a crescendo of concerts and exhibitions, including one of grand proportion at the très grande Bibliothèque Nationale de France, and a ceremonial tribute—Berlioz would dub it pyramidal or babylonien—that will remove the composer’s remains from the tranquility of the Cimetière Montmartre to the imposing dignity of the Panthéon: Aux grands hommes, la patrie reconnaissante.2 That panthéonisation—the word cannot be pronounced without an incredulous smile—was the subject of some formal discourse and rather more talk at the Smith College Colloquium (colloquium oblige!). Berlioz’s entombment in the Panthéon, alongside such figures as Voltaire and Rousseau, Victor Hugo and Émile Zola, Jean Jaurès and Jean Moulin, raises questions of enormous import for those engaged in the musical politics of this year and yesteryear: Are Berlioz’s political views—in particular his rejection of republicanism à la 1848 and his embrace of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte’s 1851 coup d’état—relevant to the honor one would bestow upon him now? Louis Napoléon associated his first election with the will of god: “Vox populi, vox dei” read the inscription on a banner that was unfurled when he entered the Opéra shortly after a plebiscite made him President of the Republic on 10 December 1848. Less than a year later Berlioz published two “popular” choruses, La Menace des Francs and Hymne à la France, under that same Latin expression, Vox populi.3 Was this a sign of his belief in universal suffrage? Or was it a cynical attempt to ingratiate himself with the man who would soon convert from four-year executive to emperor for life? Of the slogan “vox populi, vox dei,” Berlioz’s old friend Ferdinand Hiller reported hearing Beethoven say: “I never believed it!” Hiller may have reported this to Berlioz; Berlioz may never have believed it either.4

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What were Berlioz’s political views? How did they engage with his professional pursuits? And not did they—for it is folly to say that Berlioz was indifferent to the changing social functions of art—but how did they evolve? This is an area (touched upon in these papers) where further work, archival and critical, is needed if ever we are fully to unravel one of the central mysteries of Berlioz’s career, which is the modesty of his success despite friends in high places and high artistic gifts. Endpapers “Past, Present, Future” is hardly a restricted vista. The perspectives assembled between these endpapers are refined and often related. The whole is not required to be more than the sum of its parts, however, and I can make no synthetic statement that will encapsulate the work here put forth. As is nearly always the case with collections such as this one, it is left to observers to transcend the sundry and, should they wish to do so, trace larger pictures. Peter Gay, the celebrated biographer of Freud, is on to something in telling us about “Berlioz’s Berlioz”—how the man regarded himself—for the consequences of Berlioz’s critical awareness of his role as a rebel with a cause have rarely been explored with this sort of focused lucidity. Have others discerned so pointedly that Berlioz’s enthusiasm for music was “erotic in intensity” and that his appetite for composing came to him, when he was twelve, concurrently with an appetite for physical passion? The Berlioz that transpires through Gay’s lecture is impassioned and single-minded. Did his genius lie “at the mercy of a weak character,” as Romain Rolland put it in 1904, in what remains a quite remarkable essay?5 Or was that character remarkably strong, as Gay suggests, in its unswerving devotion to intelligence, reason, and inspiration? Gay was the keynote speaker at the Smith College celebration, and Jacques Barzun was the seniormost speaker of note. As dean of Berlioz studies for even longer than the half century during which he was professor and provost at Columbia, Barzun distilled the learning of a lifetime into fourteen points about Berlioz that relate to another famous fourteen in their hope for a better world—“hope” because, as Barzun’s own “endpaper” tells us (the expression is his, though in the book I have preferred “Afterword”), there is still a “Berlioz problem”: more urgent than the political question raised above, for this still enthusiastic listener, is the practical matter of bringing and keeping Berlioz’s music before the public. Born when the twentieth century was but seven years old, Barzun knows from experience of what he speaks. Berlioz and Before In September 1864, returned to Paris from a month-long sojourn that took him to some of the haunts of his youth, Berlioz wrote wistfully to his then

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confidante, the Princess Carolyne Sayn-Wittgenstein, that he did not believe in the future, that he was tormented by the past: “Je ne crois pas à l’avenir, mais le passé me torture.”6 He was not speaking of the musical past, of course, but in a different context he might have been, for in a sense one of the primary objections he had always met as a composer concerned his apparent rejection of the traditions—harmonic, melodic, contrapuntal—of the canonical repertory as it was perceived at the time. In point of fact Berlioz adored the past: his literary heroes were ancient, his musical heroes no longer alive. His work, if it shows anything at all, shows the influence of Virgil and Shakespeare, of Beethoven and Gluck. It is more because of what he put down with words than because of what he set down with notes that some have come to think of Berlioz as disdainful of all that went before. Catherine Massip offers a promenade through Berlioz’s views of “early” and “earlier” music, showing that his enthusiasm, indulgence, and understanding, though generally coherent, were specifically unpredictable: he was highly subject to irritation by such matters as this composer’s adherence to some large theory, on the one hand, or that composer’s admission of some small cross-relation, on the other. We must try to remember that Berlioz shared a fundamental belief in “progress” with most of his nineteenth-century contemporaries, who tended to impose present criteria upon prior artifacts and thereby find them wanting. Berlioz could liken Bachian polyphony to medieval psalmody and apply the adjectives “stupid” (sotte) and “ridiculous” (ridicule) to both. But let us proceed with caution: what most discomforts Berlioz is the cult of Bach, to whose growing numbers his animadversions give spirited witness.7 In the matter of the “ancients,” it was a different bunch of radicals in the nineteenth century (Berlioz was not of their number) who found aesthetic value in the music of yore. David Charlton considers Berlioz’s historical gaze in contradistinction to the ways visual artists might have regarded the past, and, in particular, how a youthful musician might have developed an aesthetics of large-scale ceremonial music—for which our composer has enjoyed especial renown— on the basis of models quite different from museum pieces upon which a youthful painter might take up the genre historique. Learning from Reicha and Lesueur, among others, of specific procedures regarding stately ritualistic music as well as of the contexts in which such music was performed, Berlioz, too, with his own monumental compositions, remembered past musical magnificence and so emulated “early music” as his teachers understood it. Issues of Berlioz’s Day and Ours Sylvia L’Écuyer takes us behind the scenes of Joseph d’Ortigue’s “autopsy” of the failure of Benvenuto Cellini. In similar cases of operatic infirmity,

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the administration of the Opéra was now and again prepared to offer emergency and even long-term care. Why not for Cellini? That is the question that clings to the story of this opera, which for Berlioz’s career was always a misunderstood might-have-been. Katherine Kolb treats the literary themes of Berlioz’s writings and the impact of politics upon his prose. She teases the Napoleonic theme from Les Soirées de l’orchestre and bares Berlioz’s taste for revenge. In this article we discover a paradox, which is that—while the path between life and art is always a two-way street chez Berlioz—the stories considered here can be more autobiographical than the composer’s Mémoires themselves. Kerry Murphy takes up the “Jewish question” as it pertains to music criticism in the 1830s. The origins of modern anti-Semitism have strong roots in the writings of Wagner, as is well known. But the distinction between talent and technique—used by Wagner and others to make “Others” of Jews—was sounded by French music critics of the July Monarchy, and one must wonder whether finding fault with the music of a Jewish composer was a merely a reflection of an attitude of the society at large, or, more ominously, whether that sort of carping, carried out in the feuilletons at the bottom of page one, was something that conduced this strain of antiSemitism into the mainstream of political and social thought.8 Berlioz, friend to Hiller at the beginning of his career and to Meyerbeer at the end, here stands out as a man of conspicuous integrity and principle. Cécile Reynaud considers the always fascinating interchange between Liszt and Berlioz. Kindred souls at the revolutionary juncture of 1830 and artistic collaborators for more than two decades as virtuosos of their respective crafts, these were actors with careers of distinctive trajectories and elder musical statesmen with contrasting views of the future of their art. It is arguably because of Liszt that Berlioz viewed conducting at its best as the brilliant playing of some mighty metaphorical keyboard. Heather Hadlock applies what she calls “feminist hermeneutics” to Berlioz’s La Mort d’Ophélie and suggests how a music such as Berlioz’s enchanting mélodie, perhaps motivated by the inconsolable decline of Harriet Smithson, can confer a kind of immortality upon the deceased subject of the song. Berlioz Viewed Posthumously Modern music took shape “not in the twentieth century but in the latter part of the nineteenth,” a prominent critic has lately written, in a world of art in which composers were now “making their own laws.”9 But Oscar Wilde’s aestheticist dictum of 1891, that “art develops purely on its own lines,” was strikingly anticipated by Berlioz, a quarter century earlier, then wearing his academic gown. Reviewing a treatise which claimed that all music could and should be theoretically explained by the numbers 1, 2, 3,

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and their powers, Berlioz wrote that “I no longer believe in any of these various theories by which one would like yet again to imprison the art of sound. Music is free, it does what it wants, and without permission!”10 Berlioz practiced what he preached, and so, too, did the French composers who rose to prominence in the decades following his death. Yet the virtues they celebrated, which we might wish to resume as refinement, radiance, and restraint, were notably distant from those of the feverish romanticism they perhaps too hastily associated with the composer of the Symphonie fantastique. Jean-Michel Nectoux explores what Fauré, Debussy, Ravel, and others made of Berlioz’s legacy. Nearly all belabor the charge, bandied about during his lifetime by critics spooked by the contrapuntal wizardry of such eloquent soothsayers as Cherubini and Fétis, that Berlioz had poor musical grammar. But conductors such as Lamoureux, Pasdeloup, and Colonne, unburdened (as composers cannot be) by notions of where the art of music is going and of where it ought to go, presided over what became a Berlioz renaissance in the post-Berlioz era. Lesley Wright investigates Berlioz in the musical press before and after that time of national pride and assessment, in 1900, when there was a magnificent world’s fair in Paris, and that time of particular reflection, in 1903, when there was a fitting celebration of our man at the centenary of his birth. Using Les Troyens and Faust as case studies, she shows that, despite a widespread desire to glorify the monuments of French music, Berlioz’s œuvre remained ever subject to controversy. To revive his work was for some a duty, for others a delight. Into the latter category falls the celebrated novelist Romain Rolland, who wrote in a memorable phrase— especially so considering that it comes from one whose literal and figurative hero was Beethoven—that Berlioz was not merely a musician, he was music itself: “il n’est pas un musicien, il est la musique même.” Richard Macnutt, having presented at the original conference a splendid exhibition of rare items from his unparalleled private collection, here examines a subject that few in the world are competent to treat. Berlioz forgeries supply the stuff of a cinematic thriller: a famous man, his trusting family, a clever thief, an inventive forger, and latter-day specialists with egg on their face. (One of the characters who makes a cameo appearance in the narrative is that wise old amateur collector, Sarah Fenderson, who, obstinate though she could be, is shown in one case to have been more expert than the experts.) Macnutt’s expert listings are now essential to all who would pay for a Berlioz document or probe Berlioz’s hand. Talking about Berlioz I earlier referred to one of the central mysteries of Berlioz’s career: especially viewed from afar, his trials and tribulations can seem somehow greater

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than they ought to have been, considering the standing of his family and the magnitude of his faculties. Sympathetic to his plight in an often uncomprehending world, we must not forget that our primary source for the story of his life is Berlioz himself, and that Berlioz was a man who knew how to tell a tale: he knew that struggle is entertaining, tranquility drab; that evil is exciting, goodness dull; that tension is exhilarating, resolution inevitably short-lived. If his adventures and anecdotes were saccharine sweet (composed of four-bar phrases) rather than unerringly bitter (with unexpected groupings and surprising tonal twists), we would not keep coming back for more. It was not for nothing that he perfumed the perimeters of his Mémoires with the bewitching gloom of Macbeth’s “Life’s but a walking shadow.” The central mystery of his musical mixed fortunes may be explained by his paradoxical use of so many mixed genres—paradoxical because the willful creation of symphonies with elements of the fantasy or the concerto or the play, and the willful creation of operas without the elements of traditional dramatic development or vocal display, simply had to lead to a degree of incomprehension.11 Berlioz’s music likewise refuses to follow the paradigm of the “forward march” that we perceive on so many levels in Beethoven both within the composition and from one composition to the next, and that we furthermore take to be representative of the relentless but inevitable progress of the history of music itself—which is why the career of one of Berlioz’s great admirers, Richard Strauss, is also something of an enigma. Even more than Berlioz, whom one may see as having moved towards a certain classicism after the modernism of Roméo et Juliette and La Damnation de Faust, Strauss has been seen as retreating to late romanticism after setting down those cutting-edge works that are Salome and Elektra. That theoretically astute observer of the musical scene who was Theodore Adorno, highly critical of Strauss’s later devotion to “consonance,”12 was “not really sure what to think about” Berlioz. He had “the worst musical manners in the world,” Adorno wrote (tiresomely) to Walter Benjamin, claiming that the “noise and spurious glitter of Wagnerism can be traced back” to Berlioz. But Berlioz introduced into music “the principle of the imprévu; of sudden surprise, of new effects or nouveauté”—which Adorno likened to the kaleidoscopic arcades of Paris as Benjamin famously saw them. The aperçu of the imprévu remains fresh, even if Adorno went on to accuse Berlioz of a “lack of real compositional elaboration,” admitting simultaneously to knowing none of Berlioz’s “later” works!13 Here we are reminded of several of Barzun’s “fourteen points,” which lament the lack of knowledge of Berlioz’s music because of its relative rarity on concert programs, and the frequently poor playing to which the music is subject when it is performed—precisely because it fails to conform to expected types. The commentariat has long been influenced by such notions of “real compositional elaboration” as proffered by Adorno and other musico-

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graphers mistaken about Berlioz’s allegedly imperfect musical etiquette. In mannerly France, his native country, despite the admirers discussed in pieces found in this volume, Berlioz has rarely found sustained support. Explicating the reasons for this, as I have argued here and elsewhere, inexorably carries us from the musical to the political. An anecdote, which allows us to conclude with another evocation of the Panthéon, makes plain the point. On 8 May 1836, in his regular column at the Revue et Gazette musicale, Berlioz published an account of the final concert of the season at the Conservatoire. Among the items on the program was an aria, sung by the great tenor Adolphe Nourrit, from an opera by his friend Ruolz—Vicomte Henri-Catherine-Camille de Ruolz-Montchal, that is, who became Berlioz’s associate in 1838, when our composer attempted valiantly but in vain to obtain the directorship of the Théâtre Italien, offering a plan that would end the government’s subsidy to that theater (which could have been privileged to put on French and German works as well) and operate it as an entirely private enterprise. (Here, surely, is evidence of Berlioz’s “politics.”) The aria sung in 1836 was from Ruolz’s 1835 opera, Lara (based on Byron’s poem of 1814), which had its première not in Paris, but in Naples, because the composer, unable to have his work performed at home, had had to “expatriate himself,” as Berlioz puts it, in order to appear on the stage. This is all perfectly normal, for the directors of the Théâtre Italien certainly do not receive an enormous subvention from the French Government in order to stage productions due to the talents of French composers! This subvention, which represents a net benefit above and beyond all their other profits, has absolutely no purpose other than to compensate the directors in a just and dignified manner for all the many sacrifices and all the constantly resourceful efforts that they make every single year in behalf of the glory and progressive development of the art of music.14 To which ironic diatribe Berlioz then adds, slightly misquoting the inscription on the edifice, “Aux grands hommes de la patrie reconnaissante!!” Berlioz failed to obtain the directorship of the Théâtre Italien—national politics assassinated the attempt15—and he failed to obtain a number of other posts that would have suited his talents as a composer, conductor, impresario, and writer with a broadly European grasp of the present state of music. Is it astonishing that he now and again entertained the idea that an autocrat could be an artistic liberator? But let us not exaggerate his suffering, as it is possible that he, himself, tended to do. His health was poor, he lived with much disappointment and much pain (probably from what is now called Crohn’s disease, though Berlioz had no name for it),16 but he did manage to make an honorable living and he did—not, of course, without a good dose of self-expatriation—achieve widespread celebrity. His demons and passions are not

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unblemished. But his place in the pantheon that counts, the pantheon of historic musical luminaries, is assured.

Notes 1. Richard Strauss and Romain Rolland, Correspondance, Cahiers Romain Rolland 3 (Paris: Michel, 1951), 155 (from an entry in Rolland’s Journal dated 15 May 1907: “He’s a genius. He has too much genius. He makes mistakes. It doesn’t matter!”). 2. In his Viewpoint (“Berlioz Lately”) for 19th-Century Music 25 (2001–2): 337–45, D. Kern Holoman considers the current state of Berlioz studies and solemnties. I do likewise, briefly, in a review of new books on Berlioz in Music & Letters 83 (2002): 300–305. 3. See Adolphe Boschot, Le Crépuscule d’un romantique (Paris: Plon-Nourrit, 1912), 278; and NBE 12b, pp. xii–xiv. 4. Hiller’s report is cited in Thayer’s Life of Beethoven, ed. Elliot Forbes (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1967), 1046. 5. “Berlioz,” in Romain Rolland’s Essays on Music, ed. David Ewen (New York: Dover, 1959), 288. The original appeared in the Revue de Paris in March 1904. 6. CG VII, 109. 7. See Joël-Marie Fauquet and Antoine Hennion, La Grandeur de Bach (Paris: Fayard, 2000), 70, 133–34. With far greater vehemence Berlioz resented the cult of Rossini, whose music he could not help but admire. 8. See Karen Painter, “Contested Counterpoint: ‘Jewish’ Appropriation and Polyphonic Liberation,” Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 58 (2001): 217. 9. Alex Ross, in The New Yorker (6 November 2000). 10. Archives de l’Académie des Sciences (pochette de la séance du 30 octobre 1865). 11. On these matters see Julian Rushton, “Genre in Berlioz,” in The Cambridge Companion to Berlioz, ed. Peter Bloom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 41–52. 12. See Leon Botstein, “The Enigmas of Richard Strauss: A Revisionist View,” in Richard Strauss and His World, ed. Bryan Gilliam (Princteon, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992), 8–9. 13. See Thodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin, The Complete Correspondence, 1928–1940, ed. Henri Lonitz, trans. Nicholas Walker (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1999), 190, 304; and Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. and trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 218. 14. Berlioz, in the Revue et Gazette musicale (8 May 1836); CM II, 463. 15. See Peter Bloom, “ Berlioz’s Directorship of the Théâtre Italien,” in Échos de France & d’Italie, Liber amicorum Yves Gérard, ed. Marie-Claire Mussat, Jean Mongrédien, and Jean-Michel Nectoux (Paris: Buchet/Chastel, Société française de musicologie, 1997), 137–52. 16. Crohn’s disease, “diagnosed” by Dr. Paul Mestitz on the basis of the vivid descriptions of Berlioz’s illness in David Cairns, Berlioz II: Servitude and Greatness (London: Allen Lane, 1999), is a gastrointestinal disorder named, only in the 1930s, after the American research physician Burrill B. Crohn.

Berlioz on Berlioz

Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

Hector Berlioz, circa 1863. Photograph by Pierre Petit. Macnutt Collection, Withyham. à Madame de Milde un admirateur de son talent un adorateur de sa grâce et de sa beauté Hector Berlioz

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Berlioz’s Berlioz Peter Gay I To fall in love with oneself, Oscar Wilde tells us, is the beginning of a lifelong love affair. Like many of his witty observations, this one, too, is partly profound and partly untrue. But it does apply to a certain degree to Hector Berlioz. It applies to him, moreover, without any of the invidious implications—of egotism, of narcissism, and the rest—that usually attached to Wilde’s bon mot. He was single-minded from his youth on, and he knew it. In a characteristic account of a concert of his own works that he offered at Weimar in 1843, he notes in his Mémoires that his compositions were exceedingly well received, “like an acquaintance,” he wrote, “one is glad to see again.” And he quickly adds: “Well, here I am again, verging on lack of modesty.”1 But why be modest when one has no need to be modest, he asked himself more than once. “Why should I not lack modesty?” he wondered, a little defiantly (327). In what follows, this is what I want to concentrate on—not much what others knew, and for that matter know, about him, but what he knew about himself. Berlioz’s Berlioz. We have ample material allowing us to visit Berlioz’s mind. More, in fact, than would be available for most other composers. We have the usual suspects: letters, diaries, reviews, reminiscences of friends and acquaintances. Furthermore, let me just mention that the quality of what I have called the usual suspects is, with Berlioz, unusually high. We need relatively few inferences, for Berlioz is always there. Not that he was superficial as a human being, let alone as a composer. But he allowed much of his inner life to rise to the surface. And I should not forget the most rewarding of all sources: Berlioz’s wonderful Mémoires, a perpetual pleasure no matter how often one opens the book, and always ready to offer new surprises. How much he has given of himself to the world emerges with particular clarity when we compare the testimonies Berlioz left for posterity with those of most other composers. Just think of Brahms, who hid behind a vast array of letters rather than using them to publish, or even hint at, his feelings. His copious correspondence was more an act of self-protection than one of self-revelation. Beethoven, for his part, wrote two memorable auto-

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biographical documents, his love letter, An die unsterbliche Geliebte, and that moving suicide note, the Heiligenstadt Testament. We can also consult his conversation books, which show Beethoven unbuttoned and largely unfettered. Still, I think whoever wants to understand Beethoven is bound to engage in far more interpretive ventures than would his counterpart for Berlioz. Indeed, what Beethoven delivered intermittently, Berlioz delivered all the time. Or consider Mozart. He left a respectable trove of letters, beautifully edited, to be supplemented by his father’s letters. It is perfectly proper for me to resort to a popular cliché, namely that Leopold Mozart’s correspondence tells us as much about him as about his son, about whom he reported in the tiniest detail and with whom he was deeply and emotionally engaged. And yet, these letters, too, require the most careful reading, for the battles and the alliance between father and son are not quite so obvious as they at first appear.2 Berlioz, then, stands at the other extreme of this spectrum. He could not help expressing himself, and this very accumulation of material—exceedingly usable material—is an element in his self-definition that is the topic of my talk. Whatever he wrote, whether letters or reviews, or whatever else, he took others into his confidence. His mind was intensely alive and immensely mobile, and so I will tell you today only what you have probably gleaned on your own by consulting the texts he composed.3 I have omitted music from the list of witnesses. This is not to say that Berlioz’s compositions have no value as a clue. I shall refer to his music as I go. But compositions (just like a painter’s or a sculptor’s work) must be handled delicately, with white gloves. For, to translate directly a certain composition, or the emotional trajectory of a composer, into biographical information is, we know, a most treacherous proceeding, if not, to be blunt, a vulgar one. The argument against such translations is familiar enough to spare me a detailed explanation; let me only comment that Berlioz fully recognized the hazards of overinterpreting an artist’s expressive product as a direct reflection of the composer’s mood or the composer’s mind. In reporting just how he became a music critic for the Journal des débats, he recalled that he wrote what he called “a sort of novel,” Rubini à Calais. “I was extremely sad when I wrote it, but none of that is in the story; it was full of a mad gaiety; this contrast,” he added, “we know to occur frequently” (279–80). To be sure, compositions, which presumably emerge from the very core of the composer’s being, are not always or wholly irrelevant to a diagnosis of his character, or at least to his disposition at the time of writing. It seems highly plausible to suppose that Tchaikovsky’s Symphonie pathétique supplies useful evidence about its composer’s frame of mind—namely, as considerably depressed. And surely, Berlioz’s vital, energetic, highly original compositions do tell us something about his sense of himself.

Berlioz’s Berlioz

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These, then, are the ground rules under which I want to discuss Berlioz’s Berlioz. We shall discover that the public and the private perceptions of this delightful composer pretty much coincide. II It is my contention that the most prominent ingredient in Berlioz’s selfappraisal was his awareness of himself as a rebel, a bringer of news, a violator, even, of taboos. The quality of discretion was foreign to him, and he gloried in that. And he was confident that this dominant quality was not something to be apologetic about. He felt no such need because he knew that he was not a rebel without a cause. He did not practice opposition for the sake of opposition. He believed in music, his own and that of his heroes, and stood ready to fend for his convictions at the drop of a hat, and even when no hat was being dropped. He felt buoyed up, almost literally supported, by his sense of vocation. I want to underscore the second part of this point. He was not a rebel without a cause, as I said: it is not that he did not get a good deal of pleasure from being in a minority, from being misunderstood. There are those, we know, who glory in having the solid majority against them—artists who are disappointed when they are well reviewed by bourgeois critics, who think that to sell is to sell out. As I shall show later, Berlioz does not belong into that club—not in the least. He enjoyed success, and did not live off failure. A series of fascinating Berlioz letters published for the first time some years ago by Peter Bloom make this point unmistakably. I am referring to letters that Berlioz sent to the duc d’Orléans, the eldest son of King LouisPhilippe, during the July Monarchy. A generous and intelligent patron of the arts, he was the ideal target for Berlioz’s solicitations. The longest and most interesting of these letters, from November 1834, asks the duke to attend a concert that Berlioz was offering. But the letter is notable not for such a request, the like of which the duke, known for his interests, received very often. It is notable for its wit and its self-respect, and, quite incidentally, for its confirming the thesis I am developing. Berlioz informs his exalted correspondent that he, Berlioz, is no doubt known to his royal highness as an eccentric and a lunatic, and that an “infinitessimally small segment of the public” is generally “referred to as my ‘fanatics.’” He adds that this is the fate of artists who “depart even ever so slightly from the beaten track.” And yet he will persist in his mission. “Obstinate as I am, and determined to work towards my goal with the most unswerving perseverance, even if I should have to claw the way for myself with teeth and nails through gates that refuse to open, I firmly believe that one day I shall succeed.” And then, in a characteristic touch, Berlioz comments on his own brave declaration, humorously subverting it

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and thus erasing any possible hint of servility: “Unfortunately, it is possible that the day will come only when I have no longer teeth or nails.”4 Berlioz was, then, a loyal servant to Music, with a capital M. And to the firm conviction that he was part of a great educational enterprise—that of educating the so-called educated public in understanding “real” music, by which he meant his own, to be sure, but not only his own. Inevitably, this stance brought ample troubles, as he candidly recognized and reported on in detail. And, to repeat, he did not enjoy that. But if he had been told to choose between a less anxiety-ridden existence that would have kept him from realizing his talents to the full on the one hand, and the kind of precarious life he actually led on the other, I believe that he would have chosen the latter, without hesitation. In 1848, in exile in London after the February Revolution in France, reflecting on his career so far, he recorded that as soon as he had reached Paris from his provincial home in La Côte-SaintAndré not far from Grenoble—he was then not yet eighteen—he began, he wrote in the Mémoires, “the bitter struggles against men, ideas, and things I waged almost from the moment I arrived, and have never ceased to carry on” (84). He almost seems to be boasting. But I insist on that “almost.” He believed, thinking of himself, that he “had been condemned never to act like everyone else, and to act in life and the Academy against the grain” (164). Facing fierce opposition from his parents to his plan, formed early and never modified, to become a musician and, even worse, a composer, he did not hesitate to steel himself against that opposition—he was, after all, a good and loving son—and not be swayed from his life’s goal. “I vowed,” he wrote, “that I would be a musician, in spite of father, mother, uncles, aunts, grandparents, and friends.” As soon as he was sure, he promptly wrote to his father and told him “how irresistibly strong my inclinations were, and pleaded with him not to oppose them needlessly” (59). It is perhaps useful to remember that the nineteenth-century bourgeois family, especially in France, made much of the children’s obligations to their parents, especially—as when the choice of a profession was under discussion—to their father. To disobey strong recommendations was an act almost of impiety. Berlioz’s father was a physician, a distinguished and far from uncultivated one, and his determined recommendation to his son was clear, and firmly expressed: he wanted Hector to be a physician like himself. To set himself up to disregard parental orders—they were little less—was to take a giant step toward disloyalty. But Berlioz, once having decided (he felt his vocation so strongly that it seemed to him it had been somehow decided for him), insisted that he must follow his star, and resistance made him all the more obstinate. And he knew precisely how far he was going; he had no reason to be surprised at his parents’ obstruction. Only, to say that he welcomed it would be to substitute melodrama for a more sober, more complex, biographical dilemma.

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It is worth noting that choosing a vocation in defiance of parental demands was not unknown in nineteenth-century Europe, and Berlioz was in good company. Let me remind you that Flaubert briefly studied law at his father’s behest, and that Baudelaire half-heartedly and briefly played at studying law because his family wanted him to make something of himself. And in Austria, Arthur Schnitzler, too, attended medical school because his father, a prominent laryngologist in Vienna, insisted that the son follow in the father’s footsteps. But in all these cases, and in others as well, the pressure to listen to one’s self as much as to one’s family could become irresistible. It is as though these great literary men had to undergo certain trials before they could enter their proper domain. It was not quite that way with composers. Many of them, we recall, hail from a musical background, though at times, as with Beethoven and Brahms, a rather disreputable one. Their passion for music came, as it were, from their early exposure to it at home. Mozart’s father, we cannot forget, was a respectable composer and virtuoso who at once fostered and oppressed his son. With Berlioz it was different. Still, his father, much as he wanted his son to be a doctor, was a civilized man who enjoyed his boy’s playing with music. But not as a professional! Once Berlioz reached Paris, presumably to study medicine, his determination was put to the test. How far would he push his rebelliousness? How soon would he make his sense of himself as an outsider a fixed part of his character? His father continually threatened to withdraw his monthly allowance, and without that, how would Berlioz live? The question was almost literally one of life and death. There would be days when Berlioz had nothing to eat. Yet he remained firm. “To return to my father,” he noted later, remembering these trying days and months, “to confess myself guilty and beaten, or to die of hunger? These were the alternatives that presented themselves to me. The indomitable rage that dominated me inspired me with new energy for the struggle” (83). His language is revealing: Berlioz is angry, not simply depressed. This energy awakened in him the most extravagant fantasies. Weighing his alternatives he pondered: “I would have gone to China. I would have become a sailor, a pirate, a buccaneer, or a savage, rather than surrender” (83). From our long distance some of this rhetoric sounds like bravado. It is not likely that he would have abandoned his beloved music just to become a pirate or a buccaneer. And it is true that sons often count on the parents finally weakening in their resolve. But his declarations leave no doubt that his parents’ willful obstruction—or so it seemed to their son—only stimulated him to further, even more strenuous efforts. His friends subscribed to his self-description as firm, as obstinate, as directed toward a goal he understood only too well and had no intention of compromising on. The composer Ferdinand Hiller, who knew Berlioz well, said flatly that his friend was “at war with all conventions.”5

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It is entirely in Berlioz’s character, then, that he persistently relied on military or combative metaphors to describe his activities—or at least his fantasies. Here he is in 1828 recalling his first assignments to write music criticism: “The idea of having such a weapon placed into my hands for the defense of beauty and for attacking what I considered the opposite of beautiful, I found immensely attractive” (126). When one of his early compositions proved a fiasco because the players were inadequate, or inadequately rehearsed, he determined to work even harder to encompass what he called his “revenge” (67). In an autobiographical fragment of 1855, he notes that when he first declared his passion for music at home, there was “war within the family, resistance on my part.” And then, after his father had forgiven him, “on my return from Italy I began my Thirty Years’ War against the routineers, the professors, and the deaf.”6 The need to get even was ever on his mind. When Felix Mendelssohn disparages Gluck, Berlioz looks for, and of course finds, an “opportunity to revenge myself for this little outburst” (342).7 To be sure, Berlioz rarely acted on these vengeful impulses, and if so only verbally. But the feelings were there, and the fantasies, endless varied, must have given him some pleasure. His distaste for Rossini and his noisy acolytes was so intense that he imagined, in lurid detail, “undermining the Théâtre Italien, so as to blow it up and its Rossini populace with it, during a performance” (93). It is reassuring to know that he never did anything of the kind, and in fact reassured his readers that he had no plans to realize his dreams. Yet he found, I repeat, some gratification in imagining the discomfiture of the fools and ignoramuses who were embittering his life. In his Mémoires, reliving years of being reviled as a madman by his critics and frustrated by bureaucrats who would not give him the resources that his massive compositions required, he exclaimed: “Oh, you vulgarians who treat me like this! If I spoke out, you would see that the bed of thorns on which you think I have stretched you out is a bed of roses compared with the grill on which I would roast you!” (281). III Berlioz’s exclusive and impassioned enthusiasm for music and his role in advancing it was erotic in its intensity and was related in his mind to amorous infatuation. It is interesting to observe that his appetite for composing came to him along with physical passion when he was twelve. In a touching and resigned paragraph he describes falling in love with a “tall, slight girl,” Estelle, who was eighteen. “The moment I saw her I felt an electric shock” (46). The two, love and music, were intimately intertwined, and though he never had the slightest chance of winning the older woman’s affection—he could not keep his puppy love from her and she laughed at him—he would find fulfillment in his other passion.

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The year he spent, an obedient son, in medical school was torment for him and, far from distracting him from his ambition to become a composer, only made music seem all the more desirable. “Become a doctor!” he exclaimed in retrospect. “Study anatomy! Dissect! Participate in horrible operations! Instead of delivering myself over heart and soul to music, that sublime art whose grandeur I had already glimpsed! Forsake the empyrean for dreary mundane realities! The immortal angels of poetry and love and their inspired songs for foul hospitals, for dreadful fellows of the amphitheater, hideous cadavers, screaming patients, the groans and death rattle of the dying!” (53). His writings show that he was not squeamish in the least, but he could not bear the thought of having to give up the one thing in life that mattered to him. Even starvation was better than this. And once he had a career, once he was able to compose and to see at least some of his compositions performed, Berlioz could transfer his aggressive impulses, his purposeful rebelliousness, to his chosen field. There was so much to criticize! He faced a solid phalanx of composers, conductors, performers, directors of conservatories, ministers (with some notable exceptions) whose tastes ran, as Berlioz saw it, to superficiality, ease of comprehension, voguishness—in a word, mindless entertainment. Cherubini and Grétry were the undisputed heroes of the French public and establishment, apparently secure in the pantheon. This was the kind of musical world in which the Director of Fine Arts could hardly recall Beethoven’s name and who, when Berlioz reminded him of it, commented condescendingly: “Ah, yes, Beethoven, he’s not without talent” (269). One of Berlioz’s favorites was Carl Maria von Weber, especially his Freischütz, an opera, he said, that did not make “the smallest concessions to the puerile demands of fashion” (104). Even more, he adored Beethoven, who, to Berlioz, was “the king of kings,” though he never abandoned his first love, Gluck. Gluck, indeed, remained his most persistent passion. One of his earliest surviving letters, an excited and touching missive to his sister Nanci from Paris (written on 13 December 1821), is a tribute to him and to his unconquerable passion for music. He tells Nanci that he cannot possibly convey the impression of hearing Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride, his “masterpiece.” Eighty musicians playing together so perfectly that one thinks a single instrument is playing. The drama on stage, the two protagonists—Orestes and Iphigenia—in action, is really indescribable, the horrifying action! the conflicts! “And the orchestra,” he exclaims, “All that’s in the orchestra!”8 This is a remarkably prescient letter, for it was to become of Berlioz’s most stunning gifts as a music critic to describe the indescribable. His first teacher in Paris, Lesueur, was, I think, though not a hopeless routineer, the kind of musician who could privately admit that a Beethoven symphony had deeply moved him yet even so insist that nobody should be allowed to write such music. Berlioz’s slashing and psychologically astute comment on such talk: “Poor human nature! . . . poor master! . . . There is

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in his words, which so many in similar circumstances have echoed, obstinacy, regret, envy, terror of the unknown, and an implicit admission of impotence” (124). Unlike such fellow avant-garde artists, he does not use the word “bourgeois” to denounce the enemy, but he has the middling orders in mind when he writes in audible contempt: “Sensible people don’t know what degree of intensity can be reached by sheer awareness” (207). No one would accuse Berlioz of being sensible—at least not in the sense he gives the word, though, as I will show later, he was immensely sensible when it came to his metier. Sensible? His obstinacy (as he called it), his principled refusal to compromise, cost him the Prix de Rome on the third try. It had escaped him twice, and on the second try he had violated his own cherished principles and suited the composition he submitted to his judges’ particular prejudices. This betrayal was only proof that he had been right all along: it is pointless to surrender to the establishment. Now, in the third contest, he determined that he would be himself as he usually was. “I resolved to let myself go, following my own heart, and write in a style that is natural to me.” But the jury, rather than reward a composer who “manifested such tendencies,” refused to give a first prize to anyone that year (145). Running into the highly esteemed, highly conventional composer Boieldieu shortly afterwards, Berlioz had a priceless conversation that he reproduces at length. Boieldieu gently reproached his young colleague. He had thrown away the prize that he had virtually held in his hand! But Berlioz was content: this defeat was a personal triumph for him. Boieldieu, he wrote, was “merely summing up French ideas about music during that epoch. What the Parisian public wanted was soothing music, even for the most terrifying situations, a little dramatic but not too much, clear, colorless, with no extraordinary harmonies, unusual rhythms, new forms, or unexpected effects” (146). As we all know only too well, the one effect Berlioz did not want to achieve was to have his listeners value his compositions as colorless or soothing. IV It is not extravagant to call Berlioz’s compositions impassioned. But his relation to passion was more complex than might at first appear, and on this issue, too, he was thoroughly self-aware. Whether it is the idée fixe that haunts the Symphonie fantastique, the brass choirs and the overpowering crescendos in the Requiem, Marguerite’s unforgettable aria in La Damnation de Faust, all are ardent, stirring pieces of music. Nor is there any question that Berlioz conducted his life impulsively, heedlessly.9 When his mother curses him for persisting in his impious choice of a career— apparently impulsiveness was a family trait—he is inclined to see this episode in the largest possible terms. “Is it credible,” he asks, “that religious

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opinions, supported by the most fanatical provincial prejudices against the cult of art, should have led to such a scene between so tender a mother and so grateful and respectful a son? A scene of exaggerated violence, improbable, horrible, which I shall never forget, a scene that has contributed not a little to my hatred for those stupid doctrines, relics of the middle ages and still so common in many French provinces even today” (78). The tortured syntax is in itself evidence for Berlioz’s passionate view of life. Here is another scene to the same purpose. When at a concert Berlioz attends he discovers that the conductor has introduced changes in the orchestration of a masterpiece, he lets the audience know that they are being treated to a blasphemous performance, as he shouts: “Who has dared to correct Gluck?!” (98). To his mind any “adaptation” of music was a serious crime, to be detected, denounced, and punished. There was no way that inferior interpreters—even consummate interpreters—could improve on masterpieces. A composition must be played the way the composer had written it. “No, no, ten million times no; musicians, poets, writers of prose, actors, pianists, conductors of the third, second, or even the first class have no right to touch Beethoven or Shakespeare, to bestow the charity of their science or their taste on them” (108). A brief interpolation here: Berlioz says “ten million times, no” (“dix millions de fois non”), but the early translators of the Mémoires have “a thousand times, no,” an “improvement” that tames Berlioz, who deserves better.10 After all, Berlioz’s natural mode of utterance was the exclamation: “Let’s go! Let’s go, wings! Let’s devour space! We must see, we must admire! We need love, enthusiasm, inflamed embraces! We need the great life!” (223). We all remember how he fell in love with Harriet Smithson— at first sight, the only way, according to seventeenth-century playwrights, of true love. It would be unjust to Berlioz, I think, to attribute the urgency, the unreflectedness, of his infatuation to his reading of Shakespeare, as though he wanted to turn literature into life. But Shakespeare would have understood Berlioz’s instantaneous conversion into a lover. No wonder that Rouget de Lisle, author of the Marseillaise, told Berlioz: “Your head seems to be a volcano steadily in eruption” (158). I only note that this was meant as a compliment. And yet, at the same time, Berlioz strongly objected to what he called the “incredible absurdity” of Rossini and his followers, who claimed to believe that “the only end of music, dramatic or any other kind, is to charm the ear and cannot claim to express sentiments and passions” (127). He criticized the Italians in his slashing manner for having no sense for the emotional depths that music can plumb. “To the Italians,” he writes, “music is only sensual pleasure, nothing else. They have scarcely more respect for this beautiful manifestation of thoughts than they have for the culinary arts. They want music they can assimilate at first hearing, without reflection, even without attention, as they would do with a plate of macaroni”

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(247–48). If we nowadays find such light-hearted generalizations about national character both inaccurate and offensive, it is worth remembering that in Berlioz’s day (and many years beyond him), such verdicts were standard fare, and that Berlioz was quite as willing to denounce French as he was Italian tastes. In his war against the philistine, Berlioz was not always consistent. On the one hand, he praises certain piano versions of orchestral compositions for being accurate and (in the best sense of the word) suggestive. On the other hand, he denounced the practice of translating the resounding sounds of the orchestra to the far thinner expressiveness of a piano reduction. It ruins music, he wrote. “Thus the idea, the thought, the inspiration are annihilated or warped” (132). Berlioz, then, did not share the ideal of “pure” music, the music that awakens no associations. It is interesting that it took him some years to learn to appreciate Mozart, though once he did, his admiration was wholehearted, and included Mozart’s most abstract compositions, including the quartets and quintets. But his heart, we must admit, lay elsewhere.11 We must walk a fine line, then, when we consider how Berlioz saw himself: as spontaneous and imaginative, but at the same time powerfully committed to form, to sanity, to precision. He proclaimed that the only remedies for his loneliness and sense of isolation were “immense, devouring, furious pleasure”(224), but that is not how he composed. He recognized the need for what he called “beauty and truth in expression” (215)—not just beauty, but truth no less. In an impressive analysis of the Symphony fantastique, David Cairns has cautioned against seeing this masterpiece as a sheer outpouring, a drunken, drugged dream translated into notes.12 It is true, as Cairns admits, Berlioz initially furnished a program for his first symphony, and a melodramatic program at that. But he was later willing to jettison the program, and let the music carry its own weight. What mattered to him supremely was the music—it was the logic of music he obeyed, the language of music he spoke. He said he was appalled at Wagner’s stress on his poetry in what Wagner liked to call not operas but music dramas.13 For Berlioz, music is precise; it can communicate, to those able to listen, feelings and states of mind. “To suppose, as certain people do,” he wrote, “that music is a language vague enough so that the natural inflections of fury are equally suitable to fear, joy, and love, only proves the lack of that sense which makes to others the varieties of expression in music as incontestable a reality as the existence of the sun” (249). And Cairns rightly insists that the Symphonie fantastique is not just chaos covered by a thin veneer of organization. On the contrary, close listening shows it to be an immensely competent specimen of orderly presentation. In short, intelligence and reason mattered to Berlioz the composer quite as much as inspiration.

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V Berlioz’s music criticism and his critique of musical institutions leave, I think, no doubt about this conclusion. He knew—who better than he?— that much music criticism of his time was incompetent and, worse, corrupt. He knew, too, that writers on music lived by a tacit agreement to remain silent about certain subjects as being too hot to handle. But Berlioz had no use for this timid kind of self-censorship. Wholly aware of what he was doing, he walked into the temple with his shoes on. One of these untouchable topics was the way the Prix de Rome was awarded. Having won both a second and a first prize at the Institut, he felt qualified to speak out. Envy could not possibly be a motive for his denunciation. “One must conclude” from reading his competitors, he wrote, “that there is no way of approaching this sacred subject. Yet I do approach it, and will moreover treat it as I would a profane subject” (130). It turned out to be profane in more ways than one. This declaration bears significant resemblances to the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, and even to the seventeenth century. Spinoza had anticipated the philosophes by proposing that the Bible should be read like any other book. And the Encyclopédie embodies Diderot’s assertion that facts, whether religious, historical, psychological or whatever, are all on one level. All must be subject to criticism. There were for Diderot, as later for Berlioz, no sanctuaries in which truths, especially inconvenient truths, could hide. This was the principle that Berlioz quite self-consciously followed as he listened to other composers and wrote about them. Personal likes and dislikes played only a limited role in Berlioz’s criticism, and he was not ungenerous. Thus, though he knew that Mendelssohn, whom he had encountered in Italy, understood nothing of his (Berlioz’s) music,14 this did not keep him from calling Mendelssohn’s score for A Midsummer Night’s Dream “ravishing” (345). What some readers might interpret as vendettas were in Berlioz’s eyes service to music. Even if he sometimes dwelled on the joys of revenge, that was not his primary moving force. It is only fair to add that, when aroused in the good cause, he could be pretty severe. In that collection of stories, essays, and reviews known as Les Soirées de l’orchestre, he issued a wholesale condemnation of the Paris Opéra: The quality of a performance naturally depends not only on the choice of performers, but on the spirit that pervades them. Now, this spirit might be just right if they had not long ago found out something which has discouraged them, made them indifferent and, in the end, bored and disgusted. They found out that one master passion controls all the purposes, fetters all the ambitions, and absorbs all the thoughts of the Opéra:

14

Berlioz on Berlioz the Opéra is madly in love with mediocrity. In order to possess mediocrity, do honor to it, give it a home, pet it and cherish it and glorify it, it will stop at nothing, shrink from no sacrifice, and accept any hard labor with enthusiasm. With the best of intentions, the utmost good will, it works itself up to ecstasy over platitude, shows a raging appetite for the insipid, and burns with the fever of love for what is lukewarm. It would turn poet in order to sing the praises of prose.15

And so on for pages more. But denunciation was not Berlioz’s central passion. If we look at the care with which he prepared his concerts we find the craftsman at work, the technician whom David Cairns, among others, has singled out for attention. In a series of Berlioz letters that Jacques Barzun published in 1954, we find ample evidence for this professionalism. He wants to study the range of a cornet in B-flat and a small trumpet or soprano Saxhorn, also in B-flat. He calls for adequate rehearsals. Preparing for a concert in Lyon, he sets down instrument by instrument how many he will need, from the first violins to the brass, the woodwinds, the percussion instruments. He worries about getting both orchestra and chorus placed on a relatively small stage.16 He was a man of order as well as a man of intuition. All true. But in concluding I want to tell an anecdote that shows the power of a passion for authenticity—or, less fancifully, for the real thing. Berlioz remembered that he had heard his good friend Liszt play Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata complete with embellishments—with tremolos and trills not in the original score. Berlioz’s response is not recorded, but we can imagine how appalled he must have been. But then, some time later, Liszt proposed to play the opening adagio of the same sonata for a small group of friends—including Berlioz. It was late afternoon, but Liszt, to Berlioz’s satisfaction, wanted no lights: no candles, no lamps. Even the fireplace was to be covered. Then, in total darkness, Liszt played, this time without fancy additions. “After a moment’s pause,” Berlioz remembered, “rose in its sublime simplicity the very same noble elegy he had once so perversely disfigured; not one note, not one accent was added to the notes and the accents of the composer. It was the shade of Beethoven, conjured up by the virtuoso, to whose grand voice we were listening. We all trembled in silence, and when the last chord had sounded we still remained mute . . . we were in tears.17

Notes 1. Hector Berlioz, Mémoires, ed. Pierre Citron (Paris: Flammarion, 1991), 340. All references here to Berlioz’s Mémoires are to this edition, whose page numbers are henceforth given in the text. Unless otherwise noted, the translations are my own.

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2. [Peter Gay considers Mozart’s relationship to his father in his Mozart (New York: Penguin, 1999), passim. —Ed.] 3. [This and other marks of Peter Gay’s spoken text have been retained here at the express wish of the author. —Ed.] 4. Peter Bloom, “Berlioz and Officialdom: Unpublished Correspondence,” 19thCentury Music 4 (1980–81): 134–46, here 139. 5. Hiller’s comment is cited in the Memoirs of Hector Berlioz from 1803 to 1865, trans. Rachel (Scott Russell) Holmes and Eleanor Holmes, annotated and revised by Ernest Newman (New York: Tudor, 1935), 103 n. 6. Quoted in New Letters of Berlioz, ed. and trans. Jacques Barzun (New York: Columbia University Press, 1954), 3. 7. In Berlioz’s delightful anecdote, Mendelssohn does not know that the work he disparages, in Italian, is by Gluck. 8. CG I, 37. 9. [For a rather different point of view, see the Afterword here by Jacquers Barzun. —Ed.] 10. The “early” translators are Rachel and Eleanor Holmes. The modern translation by David Cairns (The Memoirs of Hector Berlioz [London: Cardinal, 1990], 55) has “a million times no!” 11. See Hugh Macdonald, “Berlioz and Mozart,” in The Cambridge Companion to Berlioz, ed. Peter Bloom, 211–22 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 12. David Cairns, “Reflections on the Symphonie fantastique of 1830,” in Music in Paris in the Eighteen-Thirties, ed. Peter Bloom (Stuyvesant, N.Y.: Pendragon Press, 1987), 81–96. 13. See, for example, Berlioz’s letter to Carolyne Sayn-Wittgenstein of 12 August 1856 (CG V, 352). 14. CG I, 486. 15. Berlioz, Les Soirées de l’orchestre, 141. I quote from Evenings with the Orchestra, ed. and trans. Jacques Barzun (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), 106–7. 16. See New Letters, esp. 50–51, 52–53, 62–65, 74–75. 17. Berlioz, “Quelques mots sur les trios et les sonates de Beethoven,” in À travers chants, 84–85.

Berlioz and Before

2

Berlioz and Early Music Catherine Massip The subject the editor of this volume has asked me to treat requires narrowing and definition. “Early music” (la musique ancienne) and “Baroque music” (la musique baroque) are expressions that do not mean precisely the same thing for English and French speakers; nor would they have meant to Berlioz what they mean now to us. A reading of Berlioz’s correspondence and readily available criticism—the Mémoires, the three books, the selection published by Gérard Condé, and the first volumes of the Critique musicale—suggests that it would be too limiting to base this brief study primarily upon his reactions to the music of the period from Lully to Rameau, and to ignore the rest of Europe and the names of Palestrina, Bach, Handel, and a host of others as well. The real problem is to arrive at a terminus ad quem. Gluck and his contemporaries, for our composer, represented the music of the past, even though Gluck himself died only sixteen years before Berlioz’s birth. This may seem strange to us, but one may nonetheless suggest that the French Revolution marked an important point of demarcation for Berlioz, who would presumably have peered out at a vast sort of yesteryear that would extend from that grand political and social event back to the middle ages. In this measureless “past” we must reserve a special chronological division for what Berlioz called “les maîtres de l’ancienne école,” by which he meant the generation of the years 1760–85, marked principally by the mature works of Gluck, Monsigny, and Dalayrac. For this generation Berlioz had high praise, as we may see from the following quotation, from an article concerning some of the old masters of the opéra comique, that appeared in the Journal des débats: In general I have very little regard for children’s tales in music; but, in the works of the maîtres de l’ancienne école I like the very natural musical sentiments that one cannot fail to find in them, the almost constant respect for expression, the intimate bond between the music and the drama, the proper accentuation of the words, the almost always irreproachable musical prosody, the qualities of the play that are only subtly indicated by the authors yet that are so well understood and so clev-

20

Berlioz and Before erly developed by the composers. I adore so many dramatic nuances skillfully articulated by the orchestra and the distinctive methods of instrumentation such that Grétry’s orchestra sounds nothing at all like Méhul’s, just as Cherubini’s sounds nothing like Boieldieu’s, and Lesueur’s nothing like Gluck’s. [. . .] And I love the Ancients independently of their excellent qualities and despite their faults, because they in no way resemble the Moderns, because they are new.1

Here Berlioz qualifies as Ancients composers most of whose works are no longer in the repertory: Gluck, Grétry, Dalayrac, Monsigny, and others. It is of course well known that Gluck occupied a central place in Berlioz’s pantheon. But that entire generation benefited from the halo around the composer of Iphigénie en Tauride and thus from the critic’s extraordinary indulgence. These honorable “Ancients” must be distinguished from other figures whom Berlioz cites sporadically, such as those of the Italian school— Palestrina, Monteverdi, Benedetto Marcello (for his psalms), Pergolesi, and Paisiello; those of the German school—Bach, Handel, and Hasse; and those of the French school—in particular Lully and Rameau. For these composers, Berlioz’s tone is usually far less flattering. And it is this “past,” somewhat farther removed, that I propose to explore here with, as it were, Berlioz’s pen in hand. My purpose is not only to bring together a series of quotations, although it is difficult not to do so when reading Berlioz is so delightful; it is also to examine his remarks in order to comprehend his modus operandi, his critical methodology, and to underline some of his aesthetic prejudices—for Berlioz the critic always opens small windows that look out, or in, upon Berlioz the composer. Of Several Transitional Figures: Choron, Lesueur, Bottée de Toulmon In the 1830s, Berlioz’s notes on early music appear only occasionally, when circumstances permit him to treat the subject. Such a circumstance arose upon the death of the historically minded teacher Alexandre Choron (1771– 1834), for whom Berlioz wrote obituaries in both Le Rénovateur (11 August 1834) and the Gazette musicale de Paris (7 September 1834). Choron’s efforts and those of his school, the Institution royale de musique classique, led Berlioz to evoke this notable personality again, and on several occasions, in 1836. While underlining Choron’s disinterested idealism, Berlioz cannot refrain from recalling the oddities of his temperament and from transforming him into a character out of the tales of Hoffmann, all the while insisting that he was more a theorist than a practitioner: Choron was no speculator; he was an artist in the highest sense of the word. [. . .] The desire to bring to light the works which he admired was

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sufficient for him to publish a number of scores (very beautiful scores at that) by the masters of the ancient Italian school, without the slightest hope of being able to recover the considerable expenses that these publications entailed.2 Choron [was] the only true representative that choral music had ever had in France. [He] finally offered us protection from those perfectly just criticisms directed at us from England, Germany, and Italy, for having no understanding whatsoever of the monumental works of Handel, Bach, Durante, Leo, Hasse, and Palestrina. Choron [. . .] offered the most complete realization of the ravishing ideal that the genius of Hoffmann causes us to love so much in Le Violon de Crémone [. . .] . [H]e must have been born in Italy, at the time of Masaccio and Dominiquin.3 Because his earliest studies were almost exclusively concentrated upon the exact sciences, he was not able to become a very adroit performer when, later on, he developed a taste for music; but his knowledge was extremely broad, and the service that he rendered to French artists, in leading them to discover the masterpieces of early music, is all the more meritorious for his having had to overcome even more obstacles than most in order to reach his goal.4 We may we assume here that among those “French artists” Berlioz includes himself. Even more than for his work digging out and editing early music, Choron was known as the founder of a school for religious music, the Institution royale de musique classique et religieuse, which Berlioz always praised without reserve. Choron seems to have searched far and wide in France for promising young voices, one of which turned out to be that of Gilbert Duprez, the creator of the role of Benvenuto Cellini. Berlioz speaks of the happiness of those young singers under Choron’s tutelage: children, young boys and girls, all keen on Gluck, Lesueur, and Palestrina: In earlier times, when the summer sun spread its splendor so brilliant yet calm, placid, and serene upon the fields and the woods, Choron’s children—seated all together in the shade of some venerable tree and singing Palestrina’s famous madrigal Alla riva del Tebro—gave the impression of deliciously cooling themselves off in that harmonious lake of waves both pure and profound to which, today, we seem to be denied access.5 This text offers several clues to Berlioz’s larger ideas about early music: for him, early music is essentially choral music, usually sacred, only sometimes

22

Berlioz and Before

(as in the madrigal) secular. He makes no allusion to Italian instrumental music, which makes him a man of his time, because the rediscovery of that repertory had to wait until the twentieth century. After his death, Choron remained a point of reference for Berlioz, both as a choral conductor and as a lexicographer—as the author of a celebrated dictionary of musical biography edited with F.-J. Fayolle and published in 1810–11. Indeed, in 1836 Berlioz evoked in a letter to Liszt the notion of having wanted to add “a choral school along the lines of Choron’s” to the program of the Gymnase musical of which he had lately been named director. (The school was not permitted to allow singing to remain in the curriculum, and Berlioz was thus deprived of what would have been a lucrative position.)6 In the same year he wrote as follows to his friend Bottée de Toulmon, then librarian at the Conservatoire: You, who are the pearl of book-loving musicians, can you not help me out of a jam? I believe in your erudition as much as I do in your generosity and I come to ask for help from both categories. [. . .] I have promised to a journal some biographies of Italian musicians, but, with the exception of Marcello, I really do not know where to find information about this gallimaufry of characters [illustrations macaroniques]. Help me a little bit! Do you have some Italian articles that I could translate? What can be found in Choron? Or in Michaud’s biography?7 Berlioz makes an association between the Italian school and Handel in an article on his teacher, Jean-François Lesueur and, specifically, on one of his sacred motets entitled La Veillée de David, in which he suggests that “there is, in my opinion, nothing at all in Marcello, Durante, Palestrina, Jomelli, Scarlatti, or Handel that is superior or perhaps even equal to the sublimity of this inspired work.”8 The subsequent analysis extols the lucidity of Lesueur’s compositional procedures, which turn upon the inventive use of spare, sometimes unresolved, sometimes deceptive harmonies, and which Berlioz, quoting Paisiello, derives from Hasse: Lesueur’s music “is fundamentally expressive and original; one finds in it that antique simplicity, so little familiar to our contemporaries, whose beauty Adolphe Hasse, alone among all earlier composers, appears to have glimpsed.”9 It is obvious that Berlioz was aware primarily of Hasse’s sacred works and not of his works for the stage, which unambiguously follow the conventional model of the opera seria. The almost reverential vision of a calm and civilized beauty that radiates from these quotations quickly evaporates as one reads further through Berlioz’s feuilletons, as one observes his vocabulary changing, as one sees “old masters” become “old fogies,” and as one finds ever more often the words borné, ridicule, routine, and préjugé. Clearly following the example of almost all nineteenth-century thinkers, Berlioz’s conception of the his-

Berlioz and Early Music

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tory of music is an evolutionary one. The notions of technical progress and “emancipation” are embedded as filigrees in all of his aesthetic judgments. And yet Berlioz is always endlessly curious, provoked as he can be by a book, a concert, a reading of a score. His observations little by little outline the fundamental principles of his own compositional art. Of Several Figures from the Italian School: Palestrina, Monteverdi, Handel Before turning specifically to Palestrina, a word on Berlioz’s view of medieval music and of the polyphonic music of the sixteenth century seems necessary. In a laudatory review of Joseph d’Ortigue’s La Musique à l’église (1861), he writes as follows: M. d’Ortigue’s book proposes [. . .] to vaunt the musical system of plainchant at the expense of modern music, indeed at the expense of music, as alone capable of expressing religious sentiment in a dignified manner. Consequently, the author seeks on the one hand to remedy the innumerable abuses that have been introduced into church music, and one the other hand to unfetter plainchant itself from the corruption that has befallen it. These disgusting abuses, of which he gives examples, are not, it is true, products of our own day; everyone is aware of the extent of the foolishness and cynicism that led the ancient contrapuntists to use as the bases of their so-called religious compositions themes from popular tunes whose saucy and even obscene words were widely known, themes that served as the superstructures of their harmonic networks during the divine service; the Masses on L’Homme armé are well known. The glory of Palestrina is to have caused this sort of barbarousness to disappear.10 To d’Ortigue, an advocate of a return to the pure sources of plainchant, Berlioz replies: It is for us absolutely impossible to understand how plainchant, the successor to the music of the Greeks, to the music of the pagans, can seem to him worthy of singing those Christian hymns to God whose richness of expression plainchant does not possess and which it cannot aspire to possess.11 The name of Palestrina, that vanquisher of barbarousness, is associated with the Sistine Chapel in Rome, to which Berlioz devoted an article in 1834 that is a response to a study by Joseph Mainzer making the Chapel the ultimate sanctuary of religious music. While recognizing that this sanctuary is especially “a refuge against the artillery fire of the fabricators of

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Berlioz and Before

cavatinas” and while recognizing that “this pure and calm harmony” can lead to meditations that are not without charm, Berlioz denigrates all interest in the musical language of the sixteenth century and in composers of that era, whom he accuses of “spending their lives merely compiling major chords.” He goes on to make this rather categorical judgment: In these four-part psalmodies [Berlioz here refers to Palestrina’s falsobordone settings of Improperia], in which melody and rhythm are never deployed and whose harmony is itself limited to a single species of chord, one can admittedly say that the composer was guided by a certain amount of taste and science. But genius? Come on! That’s a joke! I do not deny that Palestrina was blessed to a very high degree with all the qualities that constitute musical genius; but I maintain that nothing attests to the presence of that genius in the choral works he has left us.12 Berlioz’s rare references to Monteverdi concern not his musical work but rather his celebrated quarrel with the Bolognese Canon Artusi over the proper treatment of dissonance. Like his contemporaries, Berlioz had a kind of “legendary” idea of the history of harmony in which Monteverdi occupied a symbolic place. Speaking of rhythm and orchestration at the time of Johann Strauss père’s visit to Paris, Berlioz elaborates an ingenious and surprisingly modern theory of rhythm (reminding one of Messiaen) which asserts that “There are rhythmic dissonances, there are rhythmic consonances, there are rhythmic modulations”; and which concludes that “to wish to limit rhythm to the miserable little role that it has played for so long a time is now as useless and foolish at it was, in Monteverdi’s time, to try to resist the invasion of dissonance into harmony: one will not be able to do it.”13 That Italian music of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is largely ignored by Berlioz is hardly surprising when one considers that this period was little explored before the publication of the dissertation of Romain Rolland.14 Rolland’s book centers upon the figure of Pergolesi, whose Stabat mater, performed at the concerts at the Conservatoire in 1842, was ridiculed by Berlioz: he could not consider as a masterpiece a work that consisted of what he calls an insipid sequence of arias and duets—a “nightmare,” or cauchemar, which word he brings out by means of a kind of acrostic with those nine letters set in bold type in the elegant typography of the Revue et Gazette musicale of 3 April 1842. The same reproach is cast upon Admetus of Handel, who contributed one of the many operas written on the theme of Alceste’s sacrifice to prolong the life of her husband. Analyzing this score, Berlioz focuses critically on Handel’s tedious structure of a series of arias followed by recitatives, on the poverty of his orchestral accompaniment, on the monotony of his tonal vocabulary, and on the excessive vocal ornamentation caused by Italian

Berlioz and Early Music

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virtuosos’ desires for useless bravura singing. The program he sketches of the typical Handelian aria is extremely harsh: As for the thirty arias, they are almost all cut according to the same pattern. The orchestra—whether employing four string parts or only two or three, and sometimes enriched with two oboes or two transverse flutes, or with two horns and two bassoons—first unfolds a ritornello, usually rather lengthy, after which the singer in turn presents the main theme. This, of a melodic contour that is hardly graceful, is often accompanied by the bass instruments alone, which clumsily beat out a design analogous to that of the vocal line. After a few measures of development, using a method in which all parts follow the same or nearly the same rhythm, the voice almost always snatches up some old syllable, whether or not suitable for vocalizing, thereby cutting one word in half, and rolls out on the first half a long passaggio. This passaggio is often interrupted by rests (not that the word is completed on that account); it is stuffed with trills and notes, syncopated and repeated, which would be far more suited to instrumental playing than to vocal display. The whole thing is as stiff and heavy as the rope around a capstan.15 Of the French School: Lully and Rameau Berlioz’s comments on Lully are rare and rather negative. To the extent that Lully exists for Berlioz, it is in relation to Molière and, especially, to Gluck: [I]f one wishes today to gain a reasonably good idea of Lully’s musical style, one may do so by listening at the Théatre Français to the selections he composed for the comedies of Molière; his music for Alceste has the color, the tone, and all the qualities of the music that he wrote for Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme.16 As one of the pioneers of comparative studies, Berlioz here takes Alceste for the subject of his analysis, treating it from the dramatic vision of Euripides through that of Quinault and on to that of Gluck. Along the way he considers the works by Handel (as we have seen), Anton Schweitzer, and Pietro Guglielmi. For Lully, Berlioz must have been working with score in hand, for he mentions having heard in concert only the scene in Act IV, when Charon sings of the inevitability of death. Although he does not object to the principles of the tragédie lyrique, he nonetheless finds Lully’s music boring and monotonous. Lully is relegated to the lowest rung of a hierarchical ladder designed on the evolutionary postulate that we have already mentioned: If I may conclude, taking carefully into account the state of the arts in France, in Germany, and in Italy at the various times in which these

26

Berlioz and Before works were written, Handel’s Alceste seems to me superior to Lully’s Alceste, Schweitzer’s superior to Handel’s, and Guglielmi’s superior to Schweitzer’s; in short, these four works, in my opinion, resemble Gluck’s Alceste the way some grotesque little figures carved with a penknife from a horse chestnut to amuse the kids resemble a head by Phidias!17

Berlioz further reproaches Lully for the ornamentation of his arias, as we see in a short article in Les Grotesques de la musique cleverly titled “The Song of Roosters—The Roosters of Song,” where we read that “in general, the vocal trill is by itself as ridiculous, as odious, as absurdly comical as the mordents and grace notes and other disgraceful embellishments with which Lully and his contemporaries inundated their deplorable melodies.”18 Such a remark directly contradicts the view of his vocal writing maintained by Lully’s contemporaries. Indeed, Lecerf de la Viéville specifically credits the Florentine composer with having maintained great rigor in the laying out of his arias and recitatives. For Rameau, to whom in 1842 he devoted a series of four articles in the Revue et Gazette musicale, Berlioz demonstrates rather greater indulgence and understanding.19 The first two articles examine Rameau’s theories of harmony relative to “natural” harmony. It would seem that Berlioz takes up d’Alembert’s criticisms of Rameau, contesting the accuracy of Rameau’s system, based as it is on the scientific or physical principle of the basse fondamentale, on the axiomatic notion of a sounding body: [I]t surely suffices to have set down the system, with its fundamental idea, the consequences of that idea, and the tangle of errors and contradictions that the author, having taken as his point of departure an extramusical principle, was unable to avoid [. . .].20 Berlioz’s criticism is based upon a narrow reading of Rameau’s texts, focusing upon the so-called obligatory movements of the basse fondamentale and the fact that dissonance must be properly prepared and resolved. What is in fact at issue is the reaction of our practicing composer, irritated by abstract and inapplicable principles—principles not consistently applied even by Rameau himself. The second two articles concern Castor et Pollux (1737), the analysis of which Berlioz justifies as follows: Our libraries are veritable catacombs in which lie tucked away many lovely works of forgotten beauty from bygone centuries, along with a multitude of works which widely accepted opinion insists upon counting among the great masterpieces even though they were never anything but mediocre or otherwise entirely appalling.21

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Berlioz then recounts the intrigue of Bernard’s libretto, concluding as follows: Such is this libretto, which is hardly geared to current sensibilities, but which is nonetheless eminently musical despite the naïveté of certain verses and the absurdity of certain scenes, such as that of the ballet of the stars, in which we see astral bodies dancing a chaconne!22 His account of the music opens with a severely ironic presentation of the French overture: The opera Castor et Pollux has an overture; and this is one of its least debatable demerits. Like nine hundred ninety-nine out of a thousand operas of that period, this one, too, one may say, has an overture, just as one may say of a man—a shapely man at that—that he has a sty on his eye or a cyst on his forehead or some other deformity. This overture consists of a Maestoso that would express heroic prowess and power, and a kind of fugal minuet that would express nothing at all—and which thus perfectly accomplishes the task assigned to it by the composer. All of this forms an ensemble of unimaginable awkwardness and triviality.23 To understand the cruelty of such a judgment, we must remember that Berlioz’s points of reference are the molds of the overture as cast by Gluck, which he magnificently refers to as those “splendid porticos of half-ruined peristyles.”24 Berlioz’s contempt for “powdered” minuets and useless chaconnes, and his total incomprehension of the instrumental music—and probably the entire civilization—of the eighteenth century and of the Ancien Régime, may well be the result of his having been influenced by his uncle, Félix Marmion, a symbolic figure of Balzacian Bonapartism. Marmion, an officer in Napoléon’s Grande Armée and an inveterate gambler, saw music as “an adornment of a man’s existence,” in David Cairns’s words, “and not its main business.”25 The carefully argued critique that follows gives both evidence of a number of Berlioz’ s obsessions and evidence of his method of work, for we see him perusing the score, pen in hand, searching for what is attractive and true. Comparisons with Gluck occur to him naturally, as do clear-cut opinions on the use of figuralisme or stereotypical embellishments. One’s overwhelming impression is that this is an evaluation of remarkable honesty and precision, which evokes the larger discourse and the richness of the harmony with decorum. Berlioz’s view of Castor et Pollux is constructed in the shadow of Rameau’s theories, with a careful balance of positive and negative elements. Two years before confronting Rameau “on paper,” Berlioz had faced him “live” at a performance not of Castor et Pollux but of excerpts from

28

Berlioz and Before

Les Indes galantes, given at a concert at the Conservatoire in January 1840, along with Beethoven’s Leonore Overture, a violin concerto by Bach, and excerpts (including the Aria and Chorus, No. 26, “Ich will bei meinem Jesu wachen”) from the Saint Matthew Passion, about which he has this to say: The aria with chorus from Bach’s Saint Matthew Passion had never before been performed in France, and is the only excerpt of this celebrated work that we have heard up to now. It is of an admirably antique tint, and of a quality of expression that is true, and profound. The recitatives of the Evangelist and Jesus, well sung by MM. Alexis Dupont and Alizard, seemed to me to present almost insurmountable problems of intonation. The lovely melody of the aria in C Minor, given out now by the solo oboe, now by the tenor in counterpoint with the oboe and bass, with interjections from the chorus, simply breathes those feelings of infinite sadness and mortal exhaustion that Christ must have felt when crying out: “Father, remove this bitter chalice from my lips!” But why must one endure those harsh dissonances and false relations that are all the more offensive to the ear in that they occur in passages of only two voices! The dissonance at the seventh measure [of the aria]— where the bass line arrives from a D-natural to an E-flat on which is built a dominant-seventh chord—is extremely painful, not to use an even harsher expression.26 What troubles Berlioz here is a false relation that is rather common in Bach’s music, but that would have struck him with particular force since the figured bass was in all probability not realized on this occasion by a keyboard instrument. One cannot easily refute Berlioz’s rather negative view of the celebrated scene from Rameau’s Les Indes galantes, since even today it is difficult to perform this somewhat atypical excerpt with just the right touch: Rameau’s Air des sauvages did not produce much of an impression, even though it includes several highly interesting harmonic niceties. The expressivity of the instrumental parts of this piece contrasts markedly with that of the voices. The words “Forêt paisible, jamais un vain désir ne trouble ici nos cœurs” seem in no way to call for the heavy rhythm and rather grotesque merriment of the orchestral accompaniment. Compare this to Gluck’s chorus “Jamais dans ces beaux lieux” and see where truth and grace are found! Perhaps, during this chorus of wild savages (savages just like you and me, by the way, who contemplate the “danger of the favors of fortune and of the slippery attraction of renown”), perhaps, I say, a different group of these philosophical Hurons was dancing at the performance. In which case the discourse of the orchestra would be entirely well motivated and my critique entirely off the mark.27

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The Theory of Imitation Referring to the writings of the critic Giuseppe Carpani, Berlioz developed a theory of musical “imitation,” that is, the “reproduction of certain noises,” or “the musical description or depiction of objects whose existence is revealed to us uniquely by our eyes,” in the Revue et Gazette musicale of 1837. Responding to the categories laid out by Carpani, Berlioz distinguishes physical imitation based directly on the sounds of nature from “sentimental” or “indirect” imitation—the latter qualifying as “expression.” As a negative example of the first kind of imitation, he cites a phrase from the duet in Act II of Fidelio, when, as Rocco and Leonora dig down towards the old well, the double basses execute “a short and bizarre line” by which, Berlioz suggests, “Beethoven must have intended to imitate the muffled noise of the rolling of the stone.” This imitation was necessary neither to the drama nor to the musical effect, so the composer’s purpose must have been to imitate for the sake of imitation—which leads him astray, because in such imitation there is no poetry, no music, no drama, and no truth.28 He continues by citing a puerile figure from Israel in Egypt: We would have to say the same thing of Handel if it is true, as we are told, that in his oratorio Israel in Egypt he wished to reproduce the hurried movements of grasshoppers in the rhythmic gestures of the vocal parts. This is surely a shabby imitation of something itself even shabbier, unworthy of music in general, and a hundred times more unworthy of the noble and elevated style of the oratorio.29 It is curious that the example chosen to illustrate the absurdity of imitation, at the opening of Berlioz’s second article on the subject, comes, via Carpani, from a much earlier work: the opera Il Potestà di Colognole, by Jacopo Melani, the seventeenth-century organist and composer who set animal sounds in the text of the vocal parts (“bè bè,” “kiou kiou,” etc.) and had the instruments attempt to imitate them as well. Fugue Despite his own imaginative use of fugal texture, Berlioz often expressed animosity towards fugue—an animosity that found expression in some of his earliest writings. All those antiquated productions from Italy and Germany are infected by the fugal style—a style at once barbaric, ridiculous, and absurd, and

30

Berlioz and Before yet acclaimed by the majority of artists and put forth by the masters for the veneration of their students. Here I see the fugue-fanatics staring at me in anger, but I am not writing for them; I address myself to those veritable friends of art whose minds are not filled with prejudice. “Is it therefore wrong,” they will ask, “for fugue to be taught in school?” No, certainly not, for fugue is a highly useful exercise that familiarizes students with a number of harmonic complications, and teaches them how to make the most of a melodic idea. It is also the case, I might add, that the fugal style, in modified form, can at times be successfully employed in a slow movement. But the use that has been made of it up to now, in Masses, represents in my view an inconceivable aberration of composers’ understanding. They ought at least to have sought to unite this sort of music with words whose meaning could accommodate it, as Jomelli did in the work entitled Movendi sunt cæli et terra.30

Berlioz always complained about the vocal fugues required as a preliminary exercise in the annual competition for the Prix de Rome (only his efforts of 1826 and 1829 have been preserved),31 for he found them inappropriate measures of the capacities of future laureates, who rather needed the ability to express drama in music. In the article of 1829 cited above, written by a young Berlioz recently inoculated with the teachings of Reicha and Lesueur, we find more about the negative effects of fugue and counterpoint on the development of religious music, which should express grandeur, gravitas, and seriousness. The scholastic workings of fugue, however, seem addressed only to the intellect; furthermore, since the extinction of the maîtrises associated with the church, they suffer from deplorable performance. Those who have never heard a fugue on the words Amen or Kyrie or Agnus Dei, he writes, should imagine the religious effect that results from fifty bleating voices fast and furiously repeating four or five hundred times the word Amen, or vocalizing on the syllable a in such a way as to imitate delirious bursts of laughter, in order to get a good idea of what a vocal fugue is like, which will surely not be a very positive idea. I defy anyone who is blessed with a truly musical imagination and who listens without prejudice to a fugue on Amen not to take the choir for a legion of devils incarnate, ridiculing the sacred sacrifice, rather than for a gathering of the faithful assembled to sing the praises of God.32 We find a similar excoriation of keyboard fugues in Berlioz’s article on the organ, first published in the Revue et Gazette musicale in April 1842 as a part of his series “De l’instrumentation” and then incorporated into the

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Traité d’instrumentation: for our composer, the organ fugue in rapid tempo was sound and fury that signified nothing at all.33 Conclusion These several citations lead us to the fundamental question of whether the past—which Berlioz has a tendency to collapse into two categories: Gluck and his generation, on the one hand, and some distant and all-encompassing yesterday, on the other—was seen by our composer as something from which he could profit as a composer. To Gluck he obviously turned a most open mind; but to earlier contrapuntal music and earlier practices of ornamentation, which he found dramatically unmotivated, he seems often to have turned a deaf ear. Berlioz was convinced that progress was possible in music, especially if innovators struggling to impose their new ideas would first dispose of the mediocre imitators of ancient schools. He was something of a Darwinian in music. For Berlioz, Gluck was an “ancient” but still a model, as were Gluck’s contemporary composers of opéra comique, who were also not without ideas and inspirations. But the more Berlioz looked back into the mist of music history, the more he manifested incomprehension. Did Berlioz’s thinking about early music evolve? Looking at his writings, one would probably have to answer in the negative, although one might wish to take L’Enfance du Christ—which began as a work that Berlioz ascribed to a fictional seventeenth-century maître de chapelle—as something of an homage to the music of the past. In the end, one can perhaps pardon Berlioz for some of his prejudices by recognizing objectively that his insatiable curiosity was in part nourished by the many scores he read in the library of the Conservatoire and by the many agreeable exchanges he had with his colleague, Bottée de Toulmon, who was himself an indefatigable investigator of the sources of earlier Italian and German music.

Notes 1. Journal des débats (25 September 1850); cited in Hector Berlioz, Cauchemars et passions, ed. Gérard Condé (Paris: J. D. Lattès, 1981), 220. 2. Revue et Gazette musicale (10 July 1836); CM II, 491. Berlioz seems to refer specifically to Choron’s Collection générale des ouvrages classiques de musique (Paris: Leduc, 1809–10) and his Principes de composition des écoles d’Italie, 6 vols. in 3 (Paris: Leduc, 1808–16). 3. Journal des débats (3 July 1836); CM II, 483–84. 4. Revue et Gazette musicale (10 July 1836); CM II, 492–93. 5. Journal des débats (3 July 1836); CM II, 484–85. Palestrina’s famous fourvoice madrigal dates from 1586.

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6. CG II, 281. 7. CG II, 313–14. Michaud’s Biographie universelle, parts of which Berlioz read as a child, was reissued from 1843. Berlioz writes about various Italian musicians in a number of his articles published in the Débats and the Revue et Gazette musicale in 1837, including one on Marcello, in the Débats of 4 August 1837, that he reused in 1840 and 1849. 8. Revue et Gazette musicale (10 June 1838); CM III, 475. The motet serves as the Offertoire in Lesueur’s Troisième Messe solennelle, published in Vienna by Frey in 1838. (See CM III, 471). See also Klaus Heinrich Kohrs, “La Veillée de David: Hector Berlioz über Jean-François Le Sueur,” in Biographische Konstellation und künstlerisches Handeln, ed. Giselher Schubert (Mainz: Schott, 1997), 61–80. 9. Revue et Gazette musicale (15 October 1837); CM III, 305. 10. Journal des débats (7 January 1862); À travers chants, 275. 11. Journal des débats (7 January 1862); À travers chants, 277. 12. Le Renovateur (20 April 1834); CM I, 217. In L’Italie pittoresque of July 1834, Berlioz reiterated many of the same themes. Here, the phrase “a single species of chord” becomes “major chords interspersed with a few suspensions.” (The passage on Mainzer’s study, published in four installments in the Gazette musicale in January and February 1834, appeared again in chapter 39 of the Mémoires.) For further views of Palestrina at the time, see Katharine Ellis, “Palestrina et la musique dite ‘palestrinienne’ en France au XIXe siècle,” in La Renaissance et sa musique au XIXe siècle, ed. Philippe Vendrix, 155–90 (Paris: Klincksieck, 2000). 13. Journal des débats (10 November 1837); CM III, 334. Berlioz opens his Grand Traité d’instrumentation et d’orchestration modernes with a page on Monteverdi’s harmonic innovations. 14. Romain Rolland, Les Origines du théâtre lyrique moderne (Paris: E. Thorin, 1895). 15. À travers chants, 220–21. 16. Ibid., 166. 17. Ibid., 222. 18. “Le chant des coqs.—Les coqs du chant,” in Les Grotesques de la musique, 197. 19. Revue et Gazette musicale (7, 14 August; 4 September; 13 November 1842). 20. Revue et Gazette musicale (14 August 1842). 21. Revue et Gazette musicale (7 August 1842). 22. Revue et Gazette musicale (4 September 1842). 23. Revue et Gazette musicale (13 November 1842). 24. À travers chants, 176. 25. David Cairns, Berlioz I: The Making of an Artist (London: Allen Lane, 1999), 85. 26. Revue et Gazette musicale (19 January 1840). That Berlioz specifies the “seventh measure” suggests that he was looking at the score of the work, which Maurice Schlesinger had put on sale in Paris as early as 1830. 27. Revue et Gazette musicale (19 January 1840). The chorus by Gluck, “Jamais dans ces beaux lieux,” from Armide (which Berlioz saw in Berlin, under Meyerbeer’s direction, in April 1843), is specifically praised by Berlioz in the Mémoires, in the Eighth Letter of the Deuxième Voyage en Allemagne. 28. Revue et Gazette musicale (1 January 1837); CM II, 4.

Berlioz and Early Music

33

29. Revue et Gazette musicale (1 January 1837); CM II, 4–5. Berlioz presumably refers to the chorus (No. 6) in Part I of the oratorio, “He spake the word, [. . .] and the locusts came without number.” 30. Le Correspondant (29 April 1829); CM I, 13–14. Presumably the work by Jomelli to which Berlioz refers is his Missa pro defunctis. 31. See NBE 6. 32. CM I, 14. 33. The articles that served as the basis of the Traité d’instrumentation are published in De l’instrumentation, ed. Joël-Marie Fauquet (Bègles, France: Le Castor Astral, 1994). Reading through them one finds notions articulated earlier: the “past”—immediate or distant—as a point of reference; a concern for the most minute detail, such as for the use of the lute in the Saint Matthew Passion; a disparagement of church music, to which a little article on the serpent gives rise.

3

Learning the Past David Charlton The Role of the State In the final pages of a recent monograph devoted to Berlioz, Julian Rushton includes the following words: No more than [Schumann or Wagner] did Berlioz depend on classical models and nor was he an imitator; more than most, he exemplifies Dahlhaus’s dictum that ‘In the language of eighteenth-century aesthetics, imitatio was replaced and superseded by æmulatio’. Berlioz is not often understood in that light because, unlike say Schumann, or Brahms, he emulated what is no longer common currency—French revolutionary music, Lesueur’s church music, Gluck’s, Méhul’s, Spontini’s and Weber’s operas.1 Whereas Rushton’s summing-up goes on to conclude that “Berlioz’s last works elevate nostalgia to the highest artistic level, and break out of nineteenth-century moulds by recovering the past,” the following essay concerns Berlioz’s earlier responses to past models. Dahlhaus’s “dictum” occurred in a discussion about that century’s changed ways of regarding the past; about the “profound change in the ways in which past music was received,” allied to a supposed “crisis” in the craft of composition teaching itself—a crisis which explains Schubert’s late course of counterpoint teaching in 1828 with Sechter, for instance. The following reflections will speculate upon Berlioz’s experience of being taught, but will not have occasion to conclude that this involved a “crisis.” Recent art historians like Michael Marrinan and Beth S. Wright have focused on the 1820s and 1830s in France precisely in order to delve into the substance of turbulent conflict in ways of regarding and representing the past.2 For painting, this process was closely bound up with official patronage, with genre, and with the politics of the day. Berlioz’s Paris during these decades was sundered by profound artistic rifts in assumptions about genre, historical perspective, and subject-matter; and these intense debates and their associated actions were avidly attended by public inter-

Learning the Past

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est—the State-sponsored Salons under Louis-Philippe were now held each year, for example, instead of biennially. And thanks in part to the genius of Walter Scott, a very rapid experiential assimilation (by the public) of a revolutionary approach to history became possible. Put simply, a new, politically liberal view of History was articulated through the role and depiction of le peuple, as well as through the concomitant breaking down of traditional generic disciplines. Art historians now, consequently, reformulate or add nuance to the term “history painting” by using “genre historique,” for example, or “assemblage composition,” or “representational canvases.”3 “The historical painter could depict moral meaning and emotion through material elements, addressing the spectator’s imagination through the concrete reconstruction of another age.”4 The purpose of the present essay cannot be to bring analogous issues up to date for music and musicology, a necessary task which will take much more time. Instead, its purpose is to focus on the aspect of ceremonial large-scale musical aesthetics and events, this being admittedly only one facet of Berlioz’s French inheritance, yet one which has wider currency than might be suspected. We know of Berlioz’s continuing engagement with larger-scale forces (especially the Requiem, the Te Deum, the Symphonie funèbre et triomphale, and L’Impériale) but deal somewhat less with these phenomena as elements within a historical continuity, represented for present purposes by Antonin Reicha, Sigismund Neukomm, Jean-François Lesueur, and by the incidence of stage bands. We shall also have to consider whether the composers to be investigated below can stand as objects or even exemplars of Berlioz’s attention, in the form of æmulatio, or emulation, which the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines as “The endeavour to equal or surpass others in actions or qualities; also, the desire to equal or excel.” An essay on Berlioz and his past must speculate occasionally on the cultural connections with History exemplified by large-scale aesthetics and events in music. This will surely not, by itself, be sufficient to explain away Berlioz’s complex relations with the past, but there are interesting tensions well worth exploring, even briefly, between grandiose musical designs and the search for legitimacy, both aesthetic and political. Although the larger-scale performance may appear superficially ipso facto new and anti-traditional, there may often be a thinly concealed appeal to a conservative, religious, and authoritarian past, as much as to any other: one summed up in the French term “légitimiste,” used during the July Monarchy and after to refer to the specific rights of the ousted Bourbon monarchy to carry on and to govern. For Berlioz this tension is easily seen if we consider his awed approach to the legend of Napoleon (characteristic of a widespread reaction in France), which was apparently articulated in large-scale musical schemes planned by him during the 1830s. They seem to have been partly completed, and then re-used:

36

Berlioz and Before [H]e was already at work on a ceremonial composition [. . .]. This was, in fact, his major enterprise of 1835, a Fête musicale funèbre “in memory of the illustrious men of France,” combining his inclinations toward a military symphony of some sort with his growing interest in staging a colossal fête musicale on the order of the German festivals of which he had read accounts. His recurrent urge to compose something monumental, something Napoleonic, was taking shape as a third symphony, in seven movements, intended for first performance in November.5

Already in 1833, for the actual government celebrations commemorating the July Revolution, he had arranged the “Prière” and finale of the early Scène héroïque for chorus and two hundred fifty wind instruments, which Habeneck rehearsed and would have conducted publicly had not the candles given out.6 In the same decade, in order to legitimate itself by legitimating both Napoleon and the events of 1789–94, the government created prestigious spaces to display monumental paintings either from or about these episodes. Louis-Philippe was adept at manipulating the way artists were obliged to respond to the Revolutionary or Imperial past. This was a world where an official commission was accepted, or competed for, on terms dictated by government officials. There was the Chamber of Deputies scheme, “especially costly and complex,”7 involving four painters reworking subjects from the 1789 Revolution. Then in 1833 the King began the renovation of Versailles as a museum with a gallery “dedicated to the Imperial epoch” (now called the Salle du Sacre), furnished by 1834 with the most powerful Napoleonic images which had been painted by J.-L. David and others.8 And of course the year 1840 was dominated by the return of Napoleon’s remains to French soil, when the political impressions given to the public became both intense and contradictory, deliberately, since “the inner circles of power had been expecting trouble during Napoleon’s return”: in Victor Hugo’s words, “This entire ceremony [in December] had the conspicuous quality of sleight-of-hand. The government seemed to be afraid of the phantom it was conjuring up.”9 There was in other words a fine line to tread between an institution emulating the past, on the one hand, while maintaining approval for itself (rather than provoking demonstrations), and on the other hand merely imitating the past, which risked producing a present sense of inferiority. As we know, the same government allowed too little time for Berlioz to consider contributing to the ceremony in December (when, on the 15th, Napoleon’s remains were installed at the Invalides), although Auber, Halévy, and Adam did write music for it. And Berlioz was well spared the general sense of embarrassment, even as he recalled the relative success of his Symphonie funèbre (played in July 1840)—a commission directly legitimating the July Monarchy through its honoring the fallen of 1830 in the

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revolution which brought it to power. “Relative” is applicable because “the minister regretted the conditions under which [it] had been heard, and encouraged Berlioz to offer the work again,” i.e., in an ordinary concert venue rather than for a State occasion.10 These events point up two root problems faced by composers like Berlioz, Reicha, Neukomm, and Lesueur: first, that the desire to commemorate a past object may not coincide with the desires of a patron willing to mount a performance; and second, that the regrettable transience of a musical event ill accords with the desire of an artist to contribute a permanent memorial to a past object. Inasmuch as we shall find that all three composers other than Berlioz experienced the latter’s pattern of desires and frustrations, we can begin to point to a romantic ideal of emulation where heroic commemorations are concerned: an idealistic or impossible desire, that is, to insert musical monuments within politics, whose romantic means (in form as well as instrumentarium) should infuse the models of the past with new meaning. The fact that such procedures were carried out regularly, and by commission, in painting and in a different way in literature, may have been no consolation to musicians. To investigate how composers approached similar tasks will help us put a more correct value upon exceptional successes in emulation such as Berlioz’s Requiem and Te Deum. In the following case studies we shall continue by comparing his attitudes towards the aesthetics and identity of large-scale ensembles with those of selected contemporaries. Learning with Reicha Antonin Reicha’s role in Berlioz’s education, and in his compositional psyche, still tends to be represented through a knowledge of his known influence as counterpoint teacher more than through his own compositions or works of scholarship and pedagogy. Reicha (1770–1836) was, however, the subject of newspaper articles by Berlioz (as was Lesueur) which cast further light on Reicha’s impact. Julian Rushton is surely on the right trail in The Musical Language of Berlioz in the following assessment, though was (happily) quite wrong in thinking we have no evidence for Berlioz’s acquaintance with Reicha’s treatises— There may be a more general influence, not from Reicha’s often eccentric but rather feeble compositions, but from other aspects of his teaching. His harmony treatise broke new ground by including a short manual of instrumentation, and in the counterpoint sections of the composition treatise he discusses imitation and fugue in all kinds of composition, including symphony and opera, and distinguishes between ‘rigorous’ and ‘free’ styles, the latter clearly regarded as modern, and expressive. This might have appealed to Berlioz [. . .] but there is no evidence [. . .] that he studied these interesting volumes.11

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—which comprise the Traité de mélodie (1814), the Cours de composition musicale (ca. 1817) and the Traité de haute composition musicale (1825). Even D. Kern Holoman’s capacious Berlioz limits itself on this subject to the issue of fugues, and draws a metaphorical line between Berlioz’s years of tutelage and his later years of creativity. But as we now see more clearly from the reviews reprinted in the Critique musicale, Berlioz did know and respect at least the last of these publications. Peter Eliot Stone’s article on Reicha in The New Grove is, by contrast, confidently based on the principle of “no smoke without fire,” and he lists seven properties of Berlioz’s music which, he asserts, “all reflect Reicha’s influence, regardless of Berlioz’s silence on that subject.” These properties are as follows: —frequent fugal passages; —reharmonisation of melodies on each occurrence; —use of assymmetric meters; —general rhythmic flexibility; —concept of the ideal orchestra; —use of the timpani; —emphasis upon wind instruments.12 Stone’s initial narrative paints a picture of a Paris Conservatoire momentarily split by theoretical factions, following the publication in 1825 of Reicha’s Traité de haute composition musicale: The most important of Reicha’s treatises, the Traité de haute composition musicale [. . .] provoked much controversy. [. . .] The controversy divided the students and faculty of the Conservatoire into adherents of Cherubini, Reicha or Fétis. Antoine Marmontel recalled the courtyard and corridor battles of looks between ‘Italy, Bohemia and the Netherlands’ [. . .]. Baini (sometimes labelled an ultra-conservative), Cherubini and Fétis represented the rearguard while Reicha, in this instance at least, represented the future. [. . .] In 1826 Berlioz and Liszt began studying with Reicha.13 Stone then brings in some evidence from Liszt, although without giving a source: “Liszt suggested that his own idiosyncratic use of fugue and his attitudes toward formal and rhythmic experiments might derive from Reicha.” On 7 June 1835, when Reicha was elected to the Institut, Berlioz addressed some words on his former teacher to the readers of Le Rénovateur, stressing Reicha’s forward-looking position with the phrases “une véritable révolutionnaire” and “carbonarisme.”

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Furthermore, we owe [Reicha] many extraordinary instrumental compositions, as well as works of pedagogy where theories of harmony, counterpoint, instrumentation, even of melody, are set out with as equal clarity and profundity. Much more, M. Reicha, albeit professor at the Conservatoire, enthusiastically pleads the cause of progress; his pupils know this even if his colleagues are unconvinced by it, but the fact remains that the Académie finds itself having unknowingly taken a true revolutionary to its bosom. I refer those who doubt this fact to the hymn for double choir (Horsch! Horsch!) that M. Reicha published at the end of his Traité de haute composition; there they will find all the evidence that its author was a Carbonarist.14 These words not only concord with the later estimations of Maurice Emmanuel and Peter Eliot Stone, they also evoke, via “Carbonarist” (as I have translated the original “carbonarisme de l’auteur”), a far-reaching cultural and political conflict during the 1820s. All this should probably alert us to Berlioz’s receptivity towards Reicha’s wider position, to be seen in a moment. Carbonarisme, deriving from the Italian secret societies of carbonari, denoted a liberal network with known adherents in literature, art, and criticism. “The pro-Romantic [Parisian newspaper] Globe was led by Carbonarists,” asserts Wright, and “Géricault’s friend and neighbour Horace Vernet was a Carbonarist and a Mason,”15 Vernet himself being a leading figure among those reconfiguring historical painting along liberal lines, with Ary Scheffer and others. On the political front Scheffer became an employee of the future Louis-Philippe, while his brother Arnold remained part of the underground opposition. They and others were not against the nation, but rather had an open vision of what constituted the nation. At the Conservatoire, Cherubini waged an equally underground opposition, but against modern “German” music, all the while maintaining cordial relations with Reicha, though because the latter “never cared to make painful efforts in pursuit of opportunities” to put his music on display, in Berlioz’s words, there was no focus for potential adherents.16 (We may none the less speculate that without Cherubini’s influence, Reicha’s music might have become better known). A glance at the appendix to Choron and Fayolle’s Dictionnaire historique des musiciens, published in November 1811, reveals that the “Horsch!” music to which Berlioz referred in 1835 (and which is described below) had actually been written before that dictionary went to press. So Reicha’s advocacy of experimental ensembles was fixed in his reputation even before Berlioz arrived in Paris, and it is indeed possible that Berlioz might have early hoped to study specifically with Reicha.17 In fact, Reicha does not conceive of an “ideal” orchestra in the 1825 treatise; he simply proposes the use of advanced acoustic considerations to “estimate the correct number of musicians to this or that particular space.”18 There is surely a

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direct filiation between this section of Reicha’s work and his pupil’s repeated assertion that “A correlation between the size and interior shape of the edifice and the number of performers is thus an absolute necessity.”19 The structure of Reicha’s final considerations of “haute composition” forms a blueprint for advanced composition in a new age: chapter seven constitutes “Reflections on the current state of music in Europe” and chapter 8 contains eight numbered (but unheaded) sections as follows: 1 and 2: On the use of rhythmicized chorus and solo performance in tragedy, using musical principles of notation 3 and 4: Advanced consideration of musical acoustics, including number and placing of instruments 5: On microtonal intervals 6: On non-symmetrical rhythms 7: On large-scale ensembles 8: Introduction to his own setting of “Horsch! Horsch!” The “Réflexions” of chapter 7, for all their apparent belief in imitation as opposed to emulation (“Les beaux modèles que nous ont laissés Mozart et Haydn ne sont point imités,” he bemoans—“The lovely models left for us by Mozart and Haydn are nowhere imitated”), are uncompromising in their elitist approach to music, and in their corresponding vision of what musical genius ought to aim at during a period when popularization is driving down standards.20 This fits precisely with Berlioz’s self-image. The modern masterpiece will necessarily be rare, Reicha says, but, especially in music, “the masterpiece which is conceived on a vast scale using extraordinary combinations, new ideas that are great and sublime, cannot be felt or appreciated by the multitude: it will be above its range”; its composer will be a rare genius who will “with noble courage brave the opinion of the multitude.”21 In other words Reicha appreciated the “modernist” implications in Haydn and Mozart and did not think that to imitate their example was the goal of the advanced composer: the latter, as they too had done, should challenge routine and be allowed to “surpass” early models. Reicha thus fostered no contradiction between past and present, rather an understanding of how to select what one should learn from the past. Reicha’s “Horsch!” exemplifies the belief that one way to the future masterpiece lies in new music especially created for extremely large ensembles: “No one has ever written music specifically for three or four hundred musicians. Since this proposition is eminently the responsibility of Advanced Composition [Haute Composition] [. . .] we shall therefore give more detailed clarification of it.”22 This fugal double-chorus, to words translated from Schiller, is scored for subdivided strings and eight timpani tuned semitonally and played by four timpanists (see Example 3.1).

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Tuning pattern for the 8 timpani (4 players):







Vns I





Allegro q = 112

1

Timp.









        p      

   

   

   

  







  

                   

Vlles I

   













Vlles II

   













Cb.

   













 Timp. Vns I Vlles I Vlles II

      

   

        p     

   

   



p

Cb.

      p





 

 

    

     p  

  





   

 

  



Example 3.1. “Horsch!” from Anton Reicha, Traité de haute composition musicale (Paris: Zetter, [1825]), 2:332.

Three of the timpani are rolled simultaneously at the start of the piece to accompany the opening poetic idea: “Horsch, wie orgelt, wie braust die Aeolsharfe der Schöpfung! Droben und drunten und rings tönet ihr bebendes Gold.”—“Ecoutez! . . . comme la harpe Éolienne de la création résonne et frémit! Au-dessus, au-dessous, partout vibrent ses cordes argentées”). The forces required are shown in Table 3.1. But merely to increase numbers of performers without writing a new type of music is a false route. By way of illustration Reicha refers to the

42

Berlioz and Before

Table 3.1. Forces required for the performance of Reicha’s hymn for double choir (“Horsch! Horsch!”) published at the end of his Traité de haute composition. Violin I: 6 Violin II: 6 Violin III: 6 Viola: 6 Cello I: 4 Cello II: 4 Double-bass: 6

Soprano I: 5 Soprano II: 5 Contralto I: 5 Contralto II: 5 Tenor I: 5 Tenor II: 5 Bass I: 5 Bass II: 5

Total: 38

Total: 40

Grand Total: 78

1823 York festival in England, when York Minster, he says, contained a performance by almost four hundred fifty musicians. (The officially recorded number was four hundred sixty-five, as we shall see.) He does not quote the musical program from 23 to 26 September, which in fact consisted of vocal music by Handel, Croft, Jomelli, Mozart, and Haydn,23 but makes the crucial point that “a symphony by Haydn or Mozart, played by forty or four hundred musicians, will stay the same symphony. It is perfectly possible that the first case would give us more pleasure than the second.”24 In developing the argument, Reicha’s next newly proposed ensemble—not an “ideal” so much as a way of emulating what York had done—is however so close to the instrumentarium and numbers that were used in York that it is worth setting out the two for comparison (see Table 3.2). Without providing precise music for this ensemble, Reicha suggested

Table 3.2. Forces used at the 1823 York Festival and the forces listed at the end of Reicha’s Traité de haute composition. York, 1823a

Reicha, Traité, 1825

Violins: 66 Violas: 20 Cellos: 20 Double-basses: 16 Flutes: 6 Oboes: 8 Clarinets: 6 Horns: 8 Trumpets: 6 Bassoons: 8 Serpents: 2 Trombones: 8 (2 alto, 2 tenor and 4 bass) Bass Horns: 2 Double Drums: 2 Total: 180

Violins: 60 Violas: 18 Cellos: 18 Double-basses: 18 Flutes: 12 Oboes: 12 Clarinets: 12 Horns: 12 Trumpets: — Bassoons: 12 Serpents: — Trombones: 6 Bass Horns: — Timpani: 6 pairs Total: 186

a John Crosse, An Account of the Grand Musical Festival Held in September 1823, in the Cathedral Church of York (York: J. Wolstenholme, 1825), 6–12. (The names of all the players and singers are also given here.)

Learning the Past

43

the variety of possible “new combinations” and “the means of producing great and unexpected effects” which it would enable. When Berlioz came to write the obituary of Reicha in the Journal des débats of 3 July 1836, he paid tribute to Reicha’s flexibility and vision as a teacher. “No living professor was quicker to recognize innovation, be it contrary to all the received rules, if it gave rise to a happy effect, and if he saw in it the germ of some progress.”25 And in a tantalizing coda, Berlioz refers to the many unpublished works by Reicha, some of which (the phrasing suggests) he has personally seen: “There exist [. . .] a great number of other works still in manuscript, several of which are of the highest importance for the art [of music].”26 Reicha probably knew that the York Festival explicitly linked itself back to the 1784–91 Handel Commemorations first given in Westminster Abbey. He may have been in touch with the musicians via, for example, Mariotti, the lead trombonist in 1823, surely a relative (if not the same man) of the Mariotti who was Cherubini’s trombonist at the Théâtre Feydeau in the 1790s.27 John Crosse’s book would do so partly by means of a large comparative table anatomizing these large-scale ensembles, of which we can give only the totals (see Table 3.3).28 Table 3.3. Performance forces at Westminster and various other festivals in England. 1784: 1787: 1791: 1823: 1st 4th 6th York Westminster Westminster Westminster

1823: 1823: Birmingham Liverpool

1823: Gloucester

526

231

130

828

1067

467

156

Reicha (and Berlioz, reading Reicha) might have been innocent of the connections between the Westminster performances and the resurgence of nobility and gentry in British politics.29 But he knew that in the service of a national commemoration large-scale forces performed the music of the past. One of his own solutions for larger-scale ensembles was to take the common route of universalizing a ceremonial that he conceived. Berlioz surely knew the result: the unpublished, undated Musique pour célébrer la mémoire des grands hommes for wind ensemble and percussion.30 In any case Reicha self-borrowed the first two bars of its Marche funèbre (see Example 3.2) for a counterpoint example in the 1825 Traité, so probably exhibited the original piece to his pupils for pedagogical demonstration. The scoring is divided into (in Baroque terms) a petit chœur and a grand chœur: the small one with pairs of oboes, clarinets, horns, and bassoons, and the ripieno ensemble with quadruple oboes, clarinets, and bassoons, plus six trumpets and three double-basses; the percussion section contains six smaller drums and four canons. Detailed instructions on Reicha’s manuscript insisted on the need to adhere exactly to his instrumental numbers (“sans cela, la pièce ne produirait pas son effet”) and also prescribed that

44

Berlioz and Before Maestoso, un poco adagio

  



       

ten.









 



                      14

p       

       

    

    

    







fz

        



  

ten.

 



cresc.

  

ten.

       



  

 



     





  



ten.

 

 



                









  

   



p

 

 





 

     

                      



fz



    

col.



 

fz

f

   30

  

ff





ten.

                 



 f    

ten.

             p                         f                 

p

27

     

ten.

 

20



 



f

        



         

    

                       





p

8

 

                   

    

p

          

f



    ff

  

   

     ten.

  

      

   



 





 

    

 

 

ten.







    



Example 3.2. Anton Reicha, Marche funèbre (undated). Ms.: Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Département de la Musique. See Désirée Dondeyne and Frédéric Robert, eds., Nouveau Traité d’orchestration à l’usage des harmonies, fanfares et musiques militaires (Paris: H. Lemoine, 1969), 182–83.

Learning the Past

45

the musicians should not stand too close to one another, so that the music might project further (“afin que le son s’étende plus au loin”). Regarding the inclusion of four cannons (which reminds us of Berlioz’s explosion of ordnance in the Hamlet funeral march),31 Reicha was again insistent: the armaments, he says, should be somewhat covered from view so that when they go off they will generate all the more “surprise.” It can also be demonstrated that Reicha’s band did not resemble any normal military instrumentarium: like Berlioz’s 1840 Symphonie funèbre, it used an individually conceived ensemble that related to, but did not reproduce, what we know of contemporary French military band practice. If we assume that Reicha was aware of Gossec’s most famous post-classical composition, we could claim that the Marche funèbre we have been speaking about is a superb example of “emulation,” in this case of Gossec’s pathbreaking Marche lugubre of 1790.32 On the conceptual level it takes forward Gossec’s neoclassical notion of a wind-ensemble piece based exclusively upon small units (a pervasive rhythm and a changing-note figure that fits with it) and pushes that notion to attain a quite different yet equally austerely disciplined musical result. In that quality resides its simultaneous evocation and reworking of the music of 1789. All French composers lived in the 1820s with a folk-memory of the great festivals of the Revolution: the smaller ones were conveniently forgotten, while engravings and paintings perpetuated the memory of the Voltaire reburial of 1791 or the Festival of the Supreme Being in 1794. At the exact moment when in London the Westminster commemorative series ceased, in 1791, in Paris large-scale musical performances in a very different cause gradually became not just institutionalized but also democratic emblems in themselves. The Conservatoire, established as a direct outcome of the needs of the festivals, carried with it an historical collective memory. In the following anecdote Berlioz provided evidence that he was affected by the power of that tradition, which could not be imitated publicly but stayed alive in the memory of his older contemporaries. Within that part of a review for the Journal des débats (dated 23 July 1836) which Berlioz omitted when assembling chapter 29 of the Mémoires, and its account of Les Trois Glorieuses, Berlioz’s narrative (discussing the desirability of giant musical ensembles and massed voices in particular) suddenly darts back to the year 1794—when a very different Paris, he claims, saw and heard “a meeting of all the capital’s musicians, amateur and professional alike.”33 This celebrated Napoleon’s victory at Fleurus, on 26 June, with an extraordinary concert in the Tuileries gardens that same night. Describing the immense orchestra, he gives historically accurate details of what was actually played: excerpts from Gluck, Grétry, Salieri, Philidor, and, finally, a playing of the Marseillaise. Only at the end of the account does he reveal that all this has been reported to him by a musical eye-witness—“M. G***, ancien artiste de la

46

Berlioz and Before

chapelle impériale,” perhaps François-René Gebauer or Jean-Jacques Grasset—who obviously provided Berlioz with the personal and conceptual link between Revolutionary past and Orléaniste present, the proof that huge public concerts produce enormous effects, given the right forces. The decisive moment in 1794 came near the end of the Marseillaise, at the refrain “Aux armes, Citoyens,” when three tocsin bells rang out, a hundred drums rolled, twelve cannons on the banks of the Seine were detonated, and the muskets of an infantry regiment were fired. Public panic almost ensued. But, said Monsieur G***, “Never in my life have I heard music of such thunderous effect, with such an equally thunderous accompaniment.”34 The heroic myth of the French musical past was indeed all around, and available for the asking. Berlioz in Context In the foregoing sections we have exposed a range of social and musical factors that help contextualize Berlioz’s “past.” In this section the aim is to contextualize Berlioz’s “present,” viewing from a different perspective the kinds of creative activity already hinted at. The first example is of symbolic uses of military instruments in the 1820s. If the “democratic” past resounded within memories, the monarchical past resounded here through certain stage works, trumpeted by musical forces we imagine would date from rather later. The lavish ballet-pantomime Alfred le Grand performed at the Opéra in 1822, for example, took the ninth-century English king of that name as a crude symbol legitimizing both the Bourbon restoration and Louis XVIII. Its “Note historique” is direct, to say the least: England was disturbed by continual troubles. A strong hand was needed. [. . .] The public will and the final wishes of the reigning monarch called Alfred to the throne. [. . .] This monarch deserved the crown by reason of his love for justice, his greatness of soul, and his extraordinary activities. He [in turn] honored it through a renaissance in literature, his protection of trade, and the creation of a navy [. . .].35 Alfred’s rout of the Danes was celebrated by an onstage band of piccolo, two oboes, seven clarinets, four bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns, six trumpets, two trombones, and percussion.36 The second example is taken from the life and work of Sigismund Neukomm (1778–1858). It allows us to estimate Berlioz’s activity more truly, since Neukomm can be taken as representative of contemporary musical currency: a phenomenally busy and well-traveled professional composer, active in Paris in the 1820s, his music is not without interest. His adventurous piano sonata entitled “Le Retour à la vie,” for example, dates from 1819 and was published by Breitkopf.37 (Le Retour à la vie is, of

Learning the Past

47

course, the title of the sequel to the Symphonie fantastique; presumably the phrase is too common to suggest a specific relationship.) Neukomm was born in Salzburg and gravitated towards Paris, where he lived between 1809 and 1826 save for five years spent traveling.38 From his personal work-catalogue, a regular supply of commemorative music is discernible— sometimes funerary works using the same opening rhythm as we find in Reicha’s Marche funèbre illustrated in Example 3.2 above. No. 93 (1812) No. 122 (1813) No. 124 (1813) No. 211 (1822) No. 221 (1823)

Funeral march for Dussek Funeral march for General Walter Funeral march for two ensembles of trumpets, trombones, horns and timpani Imperial march for the Emperor of Brazil March for large orchestra (etc.)

Neukomm became a regularly commissioned composer in England from 1829, for example at festivals in Birmingham and Manchester. On one occasion he left Birmingham on 12 October 1833 and two days later completed (in Paris) a “Military Te Deum to be performed at a grand review or on the battlefield for a very large band of Military Instruments and Chorus of mens’ voices.” At the end of the following month Neukomm composed for this Te Deum a “score of additional instruments to the military Te Deum, if performed at a festival.”39 But this, unlike Berlioz’s Fête musicale of 1835, was paradoxically envisaged without commission: the first performance occurred in 1837 for the Gutenberg celebrations in Mainz. The score (later issued by Schott) betrays the composer’s desire to adorn some ideal occasion with music whose immensity would be its own justification: “This work is for open-air performance, intended for the great ceremony of a large military review, or for the battlefield.”40 The known numbers of instruments in performance are shown in Table 3.4. There were also flutes, oboes, bassoons, strings, and an organ—some five hundred instruments in all. The choral forces were vast, some twelve to thirteen hundred, and cannon-fire was also employed.41 Mainz called Neukomm back in 1840 for another festival, when a Mass of his was heard with even larger forces. Table 3.4. Some of the instruments used in performance of Neukomm’s Te Deum in Mainz in 1837. Piccolo: 12 E-flat clarinet: 12 B-flat clarinet: 60 Trumpet: 12 Horn: 12 Trombone: 26 (soprano: 6; alto: 6; tenor: 6; bass: 8)

Ophicleide and serpents, etc.: 50 Timpani: 3 pairs Bass drum: 3 pairs Side drum: 6 Triangle: 4

48

Berlioz and Before

All is suggestive of pan-European efforts to emulate a musical past which seemed perhaps more solid than the present, and perhaps less ephemeral in its musical tastes. Neukomm himself prompts this argument. Further autobiographical material enables us to share his recollection of past stability and magnificence, both musical and social, experienced in Salzburg before he left for Vienna in 1797. While describing the provincial cathedral, where he would play one of the six organs, he digresses suddenly at length: On great feast-days the musicians were placed as follows: in the righthand rood-gallery [jubé] were set all the vocal soloists, some wind instruments, the Kapellmeister, Gatti [. . .], the first organist for the week [. . .], and lastly the cellos and double-basses. In the left-hand roodgallery were set the rest of the strings, while the two other rood-galleries were filled by two ensembles of trumpets and timpani, which alternately sounded fanfares. [. . .] On the hour fixed for the service the princebishop, robed in his great cardinal’s vestments, descended the palace steps [. . .] preceded by his pages, all youths from noble families. [. . .] At the entrance of the prince into the cathedral the great organ played with all stops out. [. . .]42 Neukomm at length recollects himself and apologizes: “May I be excused this digression: it is the faithful image of a scene of which the current generation, even in my own country, no longer has any idea.” Perhaps not, but its image was powerful enough to make the professional step back from commissions and compose to please himself. Berlioz could not do likewise because, without any concept of the performing circumstances, he could not envisage the correct music. Berlioz’s vision and preference were for a large-scale music apt for the present, but specifically built to replace music written for a time when a limited few had access to it. There was no tension in his mind between the notion of large-scale performance for mass audiences, and the type of music he envisaged, which in 1835 was responsive in a modern way to the ongoing demands of liturgy and ceremony. Thus he praises Cherubini’s CMinor Requiem fulsomely in the aftermath of public ceremonies following Fieschi’s attempt to assassinate Louis-Philippe on the anniversary day of 28 July. This is not music for normal or idealized death, he says: M. Cherubini has rather portrayed violent death, an angry, pitiless, passionate, insane death, which by chance swoops down on someone still full of life; which mutilates and tortures, crushes and tears as it strikes. [. . .] This is the perspective from which M. Cherubini, imagining his subject, could find inspirations that had escaped all who went before him, and could emerge bathed in glory from a contest with Mozart.43

Learning the Past

49

But in France the sheer numbers of performers were wanting, especially to furnish the typically vast spaces of metropolitan churches like the Invalides. In what follows we can perhaps catch another echo of Reicha: [G]iven the current state of our institutions, ceremonious music, great music for national festivals, intended to move the people and not just a small number of privileged hearers, music as it was dreamed into existence by the genius of great masters, an art so imposing through its colossal power, is impossible to bring about, above all in France.44 Germany, as he goes on to explain, has found the means. Remembering the Future Carl Dahlhaus’s suggestion of a crisis in musical training early in the “romantic century” provokes one unanswerable question—“What method would Berlioz have used had he been appointed professor of composition?”—and a partial resolution: can the changing status of the compositional model in music be related to dichotomies experienced in history painting, or in how the past should be imagined and portrayed? Delacroix is the natural exemplar of the Liberal (or even “Carbonarist”) view that such a painter should actually question one’s “ways of seeing.”45 In the case of music training in France, one fundamental aspect was the absence of an historical “museum” against which to “see” the past. In Katharine Ellis’s excellent summary: Neither Boyé nor Chabanon [in the late Ancien Régime] filled the lacuna with a theory of expression which went beyond establishing that music’s function was simply to please the ear. [. . .] As such, music could inspire neither reflection nor respect and was, implicitly, denied the status enjoyed by other arts, such as painting, whose historical traditions were both publicly accessible and a source of national cultural pride. A comparison of two Revolutionary institutions founded in the 1790s illustrates the disjunction between the status of the visual arts and that of music in the eyes of the French State at the end of the eighteenth century. In the summer of 1793 [. . .] the Louvre palace was opened to the public. Whereas the Louvre was “full of historical treasures, later enriched by Napoleon,” the Conservatoire, inaugurated two years later, “served only to reinforce the predominant image of music as a contemporary art lacking an historical dimension of any importance.”46 The “absent museum” for music was not even fulfilled by opera, which represented an essentially contemporary aesthetic index, and not an index

50

Berlioz and Before

of canonicity for the art as a whole. As we know, the gradual rise of “early music” was not an orientation Berlioz instinctively welcomed; as is suggested below, he already had a different historical grounding. Thus we arrive at questions, already asked one hundred twenty years ago by Octave Fouque, concerning Berlioz’s debt to Lesueur. Fouque (born in 1844) was a Conservatoire-trained composer47 whose literary activity Katharine Ellis has noted: “The new confidence of musicologists [including Fouque] is revealed by their studies of composers whose main service to music was to place the achievement of genius in perspective.”48 Fouque’s one-hundred-eighty-page essay on Lesueur argued convincingly for a diversity of influences upon Berlioz and for the early date at which Lesueur’s credenda emerged. The issue of what he called “program music” remains as important for us as for him, and he soon quotes from Lesueur’s crucial 1787 publication: “It is necessary to be aware of the dramatic intentions of a composer when we follow the reasoned outlines of a single, imitative composition. For that reason he is forced to publish them.”49 Concerning Berlioz’s concept of fugue, Fouque cites the same Lesueur source, which clearly anticipates it: “Fugues which depict nothing and whose only purpose is to display the composer’s empty learning and his overcoming of difficulties, should be completely excluded from our temples.” The foregrounding of narrative and symbolic context in Lesueur went with his avoidance of the problem of “autonomous” music and the debates over its significance; but his own productions effectively provided an alternative and a surrogate “music history” which his pupils could choose to emulate. That is, his music ostensibly recreated the music of the ancients, and bypassed that problem of continuity which is identified for the early nineteenth century by Dahlhaus. The Conservatoire may have lacked an understanding of “early music” in our sense, but Lesueur provided his own models purporting a privileged relation to the distant past. Berlioz accepted not only Lesueur’s view that ancient music knew of harmony as well as melody, but also that same continuity of past and present in which Lesueur believed. His 1837 article “On Music in General,” written as a dictionary entry, makes citation from Lesueur’s unpublished work and asserts his agreement with it: Our music contains that of the ancients, but theirs did not contain ours; that is to say, we can easily reproduce the effects of antique music, as well as an infinite number of other effects unbeknownst to antique music and impossible for it to render.50 Berlioz’s many published views of Lesueur’s achievement include a panegyric to his “couleur harmonique,” which gave Lesueur’s melodies “that character of antique greatness [grandeur antique] which constitutes its principal merit.” For Berlioz, Lesueur’s non-operatic music was all “essentially cathedral music.”51

Learning the Past

51

Like Reicha, Lesueur was a teacher who had resolved an overly dichotomous relation with the past; and both could imagine the future of music as constituting or comprising the adoption of vast spaces and ensembles (as against imagining a future of, say, only piano sonatas). For them, the continuing image of History was defined through music’s imbrication with text. Text guaranteed the presence of history. Lesueur’s Latin works required that music operate within a publicly comprehended narrative, whether liturgy or Bible. Berlioz’s music changed the type of book (i.e. Goethe, Byron, Shakespeare, perhaps Virgil) and stretched the audience, but not beyond the guiding historical thread of textual narrative. Berlioz’s reviews of Lesueur’s publications of the 1830s fail to mention the one obvious element that marks them as “romantic” in the same sense that Neukomm’s military Te Deum was an ideal work, and that Berlioz’s own Fête musicale funèbre remained in the realm of the imagination: their extravagant stage directions (especially in the Coronation Oratorios)—texts whose “programs” call for gigantic performing forces. Here was no mere substitute for a vanished ecclesiastical tradition, but an operatic emulation of history that embraced the memory of a Napoleonic past.52 The following directions, for example, precede a powerful movement whose first known performance was within Lesueur’s Napoleonic Chant du 1er vendémiaire An IX for four choirs and four orchestras and given in the church of SaintLouis des Invalides on 23 September 1800:53 Fourth Religious Scene. During this action and sacred ceremonial, the seven hundred musicians break into the following double chorus. A new and primary chorus of Christian warriors announces a motif of completely different character, and firmly and proudly sings the following words: GENTEM INCLYTAM FRANCORUM ET GALLIARUM, etc.: “This famous nation of Frankish peoples reunited with the peoples of ancient Gaul and the sovereign who rules over them [. . .].” “GENTEM FRANCORUM: Piece for double choir.” Soon after (see Example 3.3), we read: The first chorus of Christian warriors recalls the original coronations of French antiquity. The second chorus of people and of priests prays to Saint Rémy, gathered around the consecration of Clovis, and prays for the new prince, employing the motif announced in the first prayer from the first Coronation Oratorio. But Lesueur’s music was no jingoistic platitude such as the wind band might have played in Gallenberg’s Alfred le Grand. It was a new “way of hearing” that not only exploited the church’s acoustics through using four (later, two) spatially separated ensembles, but also rethought the issue of

52

Berlioz and Before Dessus

Chœur du dôme

[Allegro]

7

     













10



Haute-contre

     



Basses chantantes

             Haute-contre    Jour glo - ri - eux, Taille           Dessus

Chœur de la galerie de droite

Dessus

Chœur de la galerie de gauche

      



    

Haute-contre

           jour de mé - moi            

      Basse-taille

   

jour

    

 

         sors du tom - beau,        

ô Rome an - ti - que

 

 

                           

la France au - ra



 Ô

 

    

d'e - ter - nel





          la France au        

sors du tom - beau,

             

jour de mé - moi - re,

            

  

    la gloi   

          

ô Rome an - ti - que,

          

       

     re!         

      tou - te    







      au - ra    

    

   



      - ra la France                     

          

              

Ô

        

- re,

   

        

  



          



Jour glo - ri - eux,

       

Taille

   



jour

-

 

   

le

mé - moi [-re]



 



(etc.)



























tou - te la gloi - re!

Example 3.3. Jean-François Lesueur, “Jour glorieux!” from Chant du 1er vendémiaire An IX for four choirs and four orchestras, ed. Constant Pierre. From Constant Pierre, Musique des fêtes et cérémonies de la Révolution française (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1899), 167–72.

musical substance. The different groups are given starkly contrasted material instead of imitative material thrown antiphonally between them, as had been traditional since the Baroque, and as Méhul had done only a few weeks before in his Chant national du 25 messidor for three ensembles.54 An astute critic of the day praised Lesueur: It must be noted that the choruses, both in their leading-figures and their dialogues among the four ensembles, had absolutely different motifs and subjects, and that even when performing at the same time in one large grouping, each retained its own material together with the character that had distinguished it.55

Learning the Past

53

Indeed Lesueur arranged the same movement for the coronation of Charles X. Although the Paris Conservatoire did not function as a “musical museum” in our sense, it did debate, in the 1820s, its own methods of dealing with tradition. Those who occupied themselves with large-scale and ecclesiastical compositions, including Reicha, Lesueur, and Cherubini, all lived with, and bequeathed to students, a sense of continuity. Lewis Namier’s words, though intendedly descriptive of writers, can profitably be applied to other creative artists as well: One would expect people to remember the past and imagine the future. But in fact, when discoursing or writing about history, they imagine it in terms of their own experience, and when trying to gauge the future they cite supposed analogies from the past; till, by a double process of repetition, they imagine the past and remember the future.56 This freedom to draw enrichment from past events was something that Berlioz seems to have been ideally constructed to exploit.

Notes 1. Julian Rushton, The Music of Berlioz (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 347. The Carl Dahlhaus quotation is from his Nineteenth-Century Music, trans. J. Bradford Robinson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 27. 2. Michael Marrinan, Painting Politics for Louis-Philippe: Art and Ideology in Orléanist France, 1830–1848 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1988); Beth S. Wright, Painting and History during the French Restoration: Abandoned by the Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 3. Marrinan, Painting Politics, 24 and passim; Wright, Painting and History, 144, 167. 4. Wright, Painting and History, 30. 5. D. Kern Holoman, Berlioz (London: Faber, 1989), 168. See also Peter Bloom, The Life of Berlioz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 93–95 and, for remarks on the Requiem, 83–84. 6. Holoman, Berlioz, 149; the music was first published in NBE 12a. 7. Marrinan, Painting Politics, 79ff. 8. Ibid., 150f. 9. Ibid., 195, quoting first a letter written by François Guizot, the new Minister of Foreign Affairs, then from Victor Hugo’s Choses vues within Œuvres complètes (Paris, 1933), part VI, 1:50. 10. Holoman, Berlioz, 206. Berlioz’s account of the invitation to participate in the ceremonies at the Invalides is in the letter to his sister Adèle of 17–20 December 1840 (CG II, 670). 11. Julian Rushton, The Musical Language of Berlioz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 55.

54

Berlioz and Before

12. “Reicha, Antoine(-Joseph),” in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., ed. Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell (London: Macmillan, 2001), 21:131. 13. Ibid. Stone’s acknowledged source on the Conservatoire controversy is Maurice Emmanuel, Antonin Reicha (Paris: H. Laurens, 1937), esp. 35, 48. Emmanuel (1862–1938) relied on Antoine Marmontel (1816–98), a pupil of PierreJoseph Zimmermann, who had won the premier prix for piano in 1832: “Marmontel [. . .] avait sur cette période des souvenirs précis.” There is unfortunately no trace of the episode in the chapter “Zimmerman” [sic] within Marmontel’s own book, Les Pianistes célèbres (Paris: Heugel, 1878), 194–203. 14. CM II, 171. 15. Wright, Painting and History, 29, 144. Benjamin Walton has recently devoted an article to music criticism in Le Globe: “The Professional Dilettante: Ludovic Vitet and Le Globe,” in Reading Critics Reading: Opera and Ballet Criticism in France from the Revolution to 1848, ed. Roger Parker and Mary Ann Smart (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 69–85. 16. Berlioz published a biographical sketch of Reicha in the Revue et Gazette musicale (15 July 1838), cited here from CM III, 509–10. On Cherubini, see Emmanuel, Antonin Reicha. 17. Alexandre Étienne Choron and François Fayolle, Dictionnaire historique des musiciens, 2 vols. (Paris: Valade, 1811; reprint, Hildesheim: G. Olms, 1971), 2:467: “Dans un autre morceau, il veut peindre l’harmonie des sphères, indiquée dans les vers de Schiller. C’est un chœur à huit parties chantantes [. . . ] mais ce qui est curieux, c’est l’idée d’exprimer les mouvemens des corps célestes par six [sic] tymbales, dont chacune est accordée dans un autre ton, de manière qu’elles donnent des accords complets [. . .].” (“In another piece, he attempts to paint the harmony of the spheres, mentioned in the poetry of Schiller. This is a chorus of eight vocal parts [. . .] but what is odd is the idea of expressing the movements of celestial bodies by six kettle drums, each of which is differently pitched in such a way as to give complete chords [. . .].”) 18. Anton Reicha, Traité de haute composition musicale, 2 vols. (Paris: Zetter, [1825]), 2:329 (section 3, subsection 2). 19. Berlioz, in Le Rénovateur (19 July 1835); CM II, 222 (translation from Bloom, The Life of Berlioz, 84). 20. “Lorsqu’enfin tout le monde s’en occupe, il [un art] est sur le point de rétrograder. [. . .] Malheureusement les oreilles s’habituent peu à peu à la mauvaise musique comme à la bonne.” (“Finally, when everyone gets involved with art, it is at the point of regression [. . .]. Unfortunately, the ear gradually becomes accustomed to bad music just as easily as it does to good.”) Reicha, Traité, 2:328. 21. Ibid., 2:328 n 2. 22. Ibid., 2:330. 23. John Crosse, An Account of the Grand Musical Festival Held in September 1823, in the Cathedral Church of York (York: J. Wolstenholme, 1825). 24. Traité, 2:330. 25. CM II, 483–90: “Il est à remarquer que, malgré la sévérité apparente des préceptes de Reicha, aucun des professeurs vivants ne s’est montré plus prompte que lui à reconnaître une innovation, fût-elle contraire à toutes les règles admises, s’il en résultait un heureux effet, et s’il y voyait le germe d’un progrès” (489). I take

Learning the Past

55

this to mean that the younger or even the slightly older Berlioz would have felt comfortable about consulting Reicha about the viability or admissibility of certain experimental ideas in music. 26. Ibid. 27. Crosse, An Account, 10–12, shows that “Mariotti” led the York section. Public praise of the Paris Mariotti came as early as 1791 in the Almanach général de tous les spectacles for that year: “M. Mariotti, étonnant pour sa précision sur cet instrument, dont le bel effet était inconnu en France” (54). 28. Crosse, An Account, 174. 29. Or indeed the “broad kind of political unity’” represented therein; or that they were “seen by radicals as the embodiment of the system of aristocratic patronage, social favoritism and closed government.” See William Weber, The Rise of Musical Classics in Eighteenth-Century England: a Study in Canon, Ritual, and Ideology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 224, 228, 239. 30. See the Nouveau traité d’orchestration à l’usage des harmonies, fanfares et musiques militaires, ed. Désiré Dondeyne and Frédéric Robert (Paris: H. Lemoine, 1969), 74. 31. See NBE 12b, 115. 32. The work may be found in Constant Pierre, ed., Musique exécutée aux fêtes nationales de la Révolution française (Paris: Leduc, [ca. 1894]), 47–50. 33. Berlioz, in Journal des débats (23 July 1836); CM II, 513–20, here 516–17. 34. “De ma vie, je n’ai entendu un effet de musique aussi terrible, avec un pareil accompagnement” (CM II, 517). 35. Alfred le Grand, ballet-pantomime en trois actes, music by Wenceslas Robert Gallenberg (Paris: Barba, 1822), [3]–[4]. 36. Théodore de Lajarte, Bibliothèque musicale du théâtre de l’Opéra, 2 vols. (Paris: Librairie des bibliophiles, 1878), 2:102. 37. The work, completed in Rio de Janeiro, was Neukomm’s Op. 30. Each of its four movements is in a different key. See Rudolf Angermüller, Sigismund Neukomm: Werkverzeichnis, Autobiographie (Munich: Katzbichler, 1977), catalogue no. 174. Angermüller’s publication comprises a biography and facsimile reprint of Neukomm’s personal catalogue. 38. Gisela Pellegrini, “Sigismund Ritter von Neukomm. Ein vergessener Salzburger Musiker,” Mitteilungen der Gesellschaft für Salzburger Landeskunde, 71 (1936): 1–67. Neukomm wrote a cantata for Grétry’s seventieth birthday, knew Cherubini, and was attached to Talleyrand’s household following Dussek’s death in 1812. Neukomm’s Esquisse biographique (1859) covers this period. 39. Angermüller, Sigismund Neukomm, 400, 403; these entries are in English. 40. Pellegrini, “Sigismund Ritter von Neukomm,” 42. 41. “[T]he din was gigantic. God preserve us from injury” (Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, 23 February 1838; cited in Pellegrini, “Sigismund Ritter von Neukomm,” 43). 42. “Fragments des mémoires inédits du Chevalier Sigismond Neukomm,” La Chronique musicale 9 (15 July 1875): 49–58, here 51–52. A single sequel was published in the same periodical, vol. 9 (1 August 1875): 107–13. 43. Berlioz, in Journal des débats (9 August 1835); CM II, 247–54, here 248. 44. CM II, 251. 45. Wright, Painting and History, passim. 46. Katharine Ellis, Music Criticism in Nineteenth-Century France: La Revue et

56

Berlioz and Before

gazette musicale de Paris, 1834–80 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 4–5. 47. F.-J. Fétis, Biographie universelle des musiciens, Supplément, ed. Arthur Pougin, 2 vols. (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1878), 1:345–46. The book we are concerned with is Octave Fouque’s Les Révolutionnaires de la musique (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1882). 48. Ellis, Music Criticism, 63. Ellis describes Fouque’s work on seventeenthcentury precursors of Handel, for example. 49. Fouque, Les Révolutionnaires, 21–22, citing Lesueur’s Exposé d’une musique une, imitative et particuliere à chaque solemnité (Paris: Veuve Hérissant, 1787). 50. Berlioz, in Revue et Gazette musicale (10 September 1837); CM III, 243–52, here 252. 51. Berlioz, in Chronique de Paris (8 January 1838); CM III, 357–63, here 359; Berlioz, in Journal des débats (9 August 1835); CM II, 254. 52. Lesueur’s adherence to the Napoleonic man and myth is stressed by Fouque in more than one context. 53. “Sancte Remigi! Ora pro nobis!” See Constant Pierre, Musique des fêtes et cérémonies de la Révolution française (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1899), 167–72; cf. Troisième oratorio pour le coronnement des Princes souverains de toute la chrétienté n’importe la communion, 11me livraison (Paris: J. Frey [1837]), 51–68. See also Jean Mongrédien, Catalogue thématique de l’œuvre complète du compositeur Jean-François Le Sueur (1760–1837) (New York: Pendragon Press, 1980), 293, 352. Berlioz’s review of the first oratorio is in CM III, 360–61. 54. The short score of Méhul’s Chant national is published in Pierre, Musique des fêtes et cérémonies, 27–51. 55. François Guillaume Ducray-Duminil, in Petites Affiches de Paris (30 September 1800); cited in Jean Mongrédien, Jean-François Le Sueur, 2 vols. (Berne: P. Lang, 1980), 2:492, 514. 56. Lewis B. Namier, Conflict: Studies in Contemporary History (London: Macmillan, 1942), 70; cited in Wright, Painting and History, 8.

Issues of Berlioz’s Day and Ours

4

Joseph d’Ortigue’s “Autopsy” of Benvenuto Cellini Sylvia L’Écuyer The Scene For an aspiring composer in early nineteenth-century France, a fully staged performance of a lyric work at Paris’s prime venue, the Académie Royale de Musique, was likely to result either in triumph or disaster. Benvenuto Cellini, Berlioz’s first opportunity to conquer the house we know as the Opéra, turned out to be the latter. It was pronounced dead after only four nights. Evidence of foul play was offered by Berlioz himself, who insisted that he had been unfairly treated not only by Charles-Edmond Duponchel, the director, but also by members of the cast, including tenor Gilbert Duprez (who sang the title role), by the press, and by other antagonists largely generated by Berlioz’s acerbic critical writings. “Je marche à l’Opéra comme dans un nid de vipères [...]”—“I am entering the Opéra as I would a nest of adders, thanks to two or three intimate enemies I have in the house,” Berlioz wrote to his sister Adèle in May 1838, two months after rehearsals had begun.1 Bracing himself for strong opposition to his novel and difficult musical style, as well as to perceived improprieties in the libretto, he added: “I believe it will be a stormy first night [. . .] . If I have a success, it will be a violent and scandalous one, because of the argument and the satirical elements of the libretto.”2 Did the failure of the work result from some kind of conspiracy, as Berlioz implies? Or was it the natural consequence of quite discrete, if related, features of musical life in Paris in 1838, some of which remain prevalent even today in the dynamics of the performance of new works? The testimony of Joseph d’Ortigue, author of De l’école musicale italienne et de l’administration de l’Académie Royale de Musique à l’occasion de l’opéra de M. H. Berlioz,3 and a most knowledgeable and sympathetic supporter of Berlioz, can help us to understand why the hypothesis of a “conspiracy” must be taken with a grain of salt, and must be dissected with care. For while it is clear that d’Ortigue believes that foul play was involved, he nevertheless gives us enough evidence to conclude that the protagonists in

60

Issues of Berlioz’s Days and Ours

the affair acted predictably and without prior collusion in the string of events that eventually led to the opera’s demise. Some might have lacked vision and commitment, others might have been excessively influenced by Italian opera, and still others might have acted out of self-interest or out of revenge against Berlioz’s harsh criticism, but none expressly or overtly “conspired” against Benvenuto Cellini. In the preface to his book, d’Ortigue declares his intention to elaborate upon two points that he had treated in many of his previous writings: the nefarious influence of Italian opera upon French musical taste, and the fundamental incompatibility of the governing principles of the Académie Royale de Musique and the interests of the arts and of artists. In support of his first point, citing other commentators, historians, and critics of Italian opera, d’Ortigue pleads for the establishment of new aesthetic and critical criteria by which to judge a new work. In support of his second and more challenging point, d’Ortigue writes: “It is essential clearly to expose the fundamental principles of what one might call the structure of the arts in our society, a structure more expansive than one might think, for it includes within its reach both the press and the public.”4 In what follows, we shall see how this notion is developed in d’Ortigue’s book, and how the press and the public reacted to the first performances of Berlioz’s opera. But let it be said at the outset that so far as the critical reception of Benvenuto Cellini is concerned, we have no evidence of an organized cabal, for that reception was mixed, and by no means uniformly negative. Of twenty-eight major reviews of the première,5 eleven were rather favorable and in some cases even laudatory; only four or five were negative throughout; and the remainder found merit in at least part of the work. In almost all cases, the strongest objections were leveled at the libretto: only a few critics insisted that Berlioz’s music was unintelligible; and only a few chastised him for believing that there could be such a thing as romanticism in music as well as in literature.6 Indeed, contemporary criticism suggests that some of Berlioz’s most demanding and sophisticated numbers, such as the Act I trio (as we shall see below), were well received by both press and public. But let us turn first to the testimony of our leading witness. The Autopsy Established as a critic in Paris since the early 1830s, d’Ortigue, by 1838, had contributed scores of regular reviews to daily newspapers and had written learned articles for both literary and music journals.7 Seventeen of these were partly or entirely devoted to the works of Berlioz. D’Ortigue’s first book, a compilation of some forty texts entitled Le Balcon de l’Opéra, had received well-deserved attention in 1833.8 Justifiably identified as a supporter of Berlioz, d’Ortigue had no less a reputation for seriousness, integrity, and knowledge. As an observer of the Parisian musical scene and

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a specialist in Berlioz’s music, he was in an excellent position to analyze the circumstantial and musical evidence surrounding Benvenuto Cellini’s premature death. Given the unquestioned merits of the work, d’Ortigue had no doubt whatsoever that it did not deserve so utterly and so conspicuously to fail. In the eight chapters of his book, d’Ortigue thus painstakingly assembled the facts as he understood them and described in a broad context the circumstances of the opera’s performances. The first three chapters provide historical background, describing the old Italian opera, Gluck’s reforms, and the new Italian style. The fourth chapter, entitled “Benvenuto Cellini,” opens with a claim to the effect that little has changed since the time of Gluck. True expression is not to be found in the new Italian school, where set forms, conventional ornamentation, regular meter, boring instrumentation, and tedious harmony are still the rule, just as they were in the old Italian school. It goes on to explain that Berlioz’s music was poorly received because it did not conform to the norms of corrupt Italian aesthetics. The remaining four chapters are devoted to the protagonists in this intrigue: respectively, the administration of the theater, the press, the artist, and the public. In his preface, d’Ortigue makes it clear that De l’école musicale italienne is not merely intended to be “a long speech,” as Fétis put it, “in defense of the music of M. Berlioz, friend of the author.”9 In fact, d’Ortigue does not even mention the title of the opera on the cover of his book; nor did he review it in the daily press.10 He simply believed that the circumstances surrounding the production and fate of Benvenuto Cellini would provide him with the best evidence for unmasking the unfavorable conditions under which French composers were required to work in a period dominated by Italian musical taste and mismanagement at the Académie Royale de Musique. At first glance, circumstances would seem in fact to have favored Berlioz’s success. The libretto of his opera, written by Auguste Barbier and Léon de Wailly, with assistance from Alfred de Vigny, was inspired by the life of the great Florentine goldsmith and sculptor Benvenuto Cellini, whose Vita had been newly translated into French and published in Paris.11 Some of Berlioz’s orchestral and vocal compositions had been well received at the Conservatoire, and considering that he was both contemporary and French, such approval must have been hard-won. And in December 1837, the performance of his Grande Messe des Morts at the Église des Invalides had effulgently established his prominence in Paris. Despite his uncertainties, misgivings, and complaints, Berlioz was, by 1838, a major musical force in the city; anticipation of a new opera from his pen had run high for four or five years.12 Another favorable omen for Berlioz’s opera drawn from the life of Cellini was the successful run of performances, in March of 1838, of Guido et

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Ginevra ou la Peste de Florence, a work based on a similar historical and artistic subject with a libretto by Eugène Scribe and music by Fromental Halévy. Moreover, lavishness of production on the stage of the Opéra was an added attraction, and Benvenuto Cellini offered fine opportunities for rousing spectacle. The action is set in Rome, allowing for grand scenic decorations featuring such places as the Piazza Colona, for a lively and crowded carnival scene, and in the ancient Coliseum, for a scene with a blazing foundry fire, an explosion in the furnace, and molten metal pouring into a mold, as Cellini casts his famous bronze statue of Perseus. Benvenuto Cellini was also expected to benefit by the appearance in the title role of the leading tenor of the day, Gilbert Duprez, who had made a brilliant début at the Opéra as Guillaume Tell in April 1837 and was acclaimed for his performance in Guido et Ginevra in the following year. Moreover, Duprez was familiar with Berlioz’s music, having sung beautifully in the performance of the Requiem at the Invalides.13 The remaining roles were taken by some of the strongest singers at the Opéra. But according to d’Ortigue there was an insuperable obstacle to Berlioz’s success—or for that matter to that of any young aspiring artist in Berlioz’s position. This was the administrative system of the Opéra itself, which had been converted in 1831 to a private business venture: “One can generally state,” writes d’Ortigue, “that the interests of any commercially oriented institution will necessarily be incompatible with real artistic values.”14 Faced with financial risk when forced to present a new opera by an inexperienced or controversial composer, the administration would lie low and make no real effort to promote the work, happy to rake in the profits if there happened to be any. But this sort of laisser-aller, says d’Ortigue, should not have had to be faced by a seasoned composer such as Berlioz. While he concedes that the current entrepreneurs bear no responsibility for the nature of the system, d’Ortigue believes that they should be blamed when “systematic conspiracies are hatched against any given composer.”15 And it is this type of conspiracy that he sets out to reveal. The first performance of Benvenuto Cellini, on 10 September 1838, was, according to d’Ortigue, riotous. The overture and Teresa’s aria (No. 3)16 were warmly received. But there then followed continuous whistling and laughter that lasted until the end of the work. D’Ortigue presumes that this derision was mainly directed at the libretto, and that it was inspired by a cabal against the composer. “I strongly suspect,” he writes, “that some whistles coming either from the public or from elsewhere were meant to kill the music as well.”17 Since it would surely not have been in the interests of the theater itself to sabotage the work by seeding the audience with dissenters, we must surmise that d’Ortigue’s “from elsewhere” means participation in the catcalls from backstage. What is troubling, though, is that the claque did not immediately swing into operation to prop up the new work, as was the usual practice at the Opéra. Indeed, this practice was so

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well established that only one month later, in October 1838, during a performance of La Fille du Danube, an argument between the claque (then hired to promote ballerina Fanny Elssler) and the paying public (nostalgic for Maria Taglioni) degenerated into brawl so violent that the police had to intervene.18 In this context it is reasonable to assume that Benvenuto Cellini would have had a similarly raucous première. But the usual leader of the claque, “Monsieur Auguste,” was not in the theater on the 10th. According to the Gazette des théâtres, he resumed his duties on the 20th, “since his successor had not been able to handle Cellini.”19 A première at the Opéra without the claque was surely disconcerting for an audience used to hearing (and being guided by) strong manifestations of approval—and disapproval—during most performances in the house. After the disastrous première, both Berlioz’s supporters and the administration of the Opéra expected similar reactions on the following nights, but no such demonstrations materialized. Judicious cuts were made in order to satisfy misgivings about the dramatic structure and the libretto, misgivings apparently shared by the supportive d’Ortigue and by the composer himself. On the second night, “a few murmurs were heard, but died away,” as d’Ortigue reports, and “the numbers of the score, except for one scene, were well received, some with genuine enthusiasm [. . .], others with real applause, which came from the boxes, from the orchestra, and from all corners of the hall.”20 Other critics, amongst them Hippolyte Lucas in Le Siècle and Auguste Maurel in the Journal de Paris, confirm that the second and third performances were well appreciated.21 Unfortunately the box office takings were slim, says d’Ortigue, as adverse word-of-mouth criticism as well as negative reaction in the press had dampened public enthusiasm. Had the Opéra publicized the cuts made to the work, the outcome might have been drastically different, d’Ortigue tells us, citing the exceptional stance taken by the administration in 1837 for the ballet La Chatte métamorphosée en femme. Despite the presence of extravagant set decorations, a striking scene with an eclipse of the moon, and the enticing charm of the ballerina Fanny Elssler, the press declared the work “dull and boring” after the première.22 “What did the administration do?” writes d’Ortigue: The very next day it sent free tickets to every journalist, in accordance with the importance of his journal, for either a seat in the stalls or an entire box; with the tickets a letter was enclosed in which it was pointed out that “the public had perhaps been too hasty in criticizing the new ballet; that the wearisome passages of the first performance had been removed thanks to numerous cuts; that there was now reason to hope that the ballet was not at all unworthy of the patronage of the habitués of the Opéra, etc., etc.” 23

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It was common practice, d’Ortigue observes, to revise a work after the première and to cut some of the less successful parts. Halévy’s La Juive, for example, underwent what journalists called “skilful excisions” after the first performance in 1835, and went on to enjoy undisputed and durable popularity. D’Ortigue, the composer’s loyal apologist, pointed to the Opéra’s lack of similar efforts on behalf of Benvenuto Cellini as a central cause of its failure. But what we have here is not a conspiracy, or sin of commission, but rather a sin of omission. And it is one that is hardly surprising given the fact that the director, Duponchel (according to an article in the Revue et Gazette des théâtres of 9 September 1838), was himself rarely at the Opéra, preferring to ride his horse and to travel abroad. 24 It is not even clear that he was present for the première of Benvenuto Cellini. La France musicale stated flatly that Duponchel “was nothing at the Opéra; he did nothing, knew nothing, understood nothing, directed nothing, managed nothing.”25 The fatal blow was struck after the third performance (on 14 September), when the Cellini, Gilbert Duprez, abandoned his part. Described as “not very courteous” by d’Ortigue, Duprez later justified his departure in his Memoirs as the result of having become the father of a son on that very night. When the doctor signaled to him from the wings that his wish to have a boy was granted, his concentration on his role gave way to paternal joy.26 According to d’Ortigue, however, Duprez was forced by the administration of the Opéra to withdraw from the role: It became clear that that the name of the singer assuming the role of Cellini, whether by dint of his own actions or those of the composer, was more damaging than useful in these circumstances. The director of the Opéra certainly has the right to insist that a singer give up a role when he is clearly not up to his usual high standards, especially when [. . . ] that singer is his sole resource.27 D’Ortigue qualifies what might otherwise seem damning criticism of the Opéra for an exceptionally destructive act against Benvenuto Cellini by pointing out that the administration was in fact behaving in a conventional manner, and that the real problem for continuing the run of Berlioz’s work was the lack of an understudy. D’Ortigue’s specific analysis of the situation belies his general indictment of the Opéra’s management. Is the absence of an understudy evidence that the administration wished to sabotage Benvenuto Cellini? Or is it simply that there was a lack of qualified singers on the Opéra’s roster? In either case, continued performance of the opera was now impossible, as a new tenor, Alexis Dupont, had first to learn his part. For some months, from mid-September, all posters for the Opéra, d’Ortigue tells us, carried a notice in very small print that read: “En attendant la quatrième représentation de Benvenuto Cellini.” This “en attendant,” he

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says, was meant to silence Berlioz’s supporters while at the same time keeping the opera from the stage. D’Ortigue refrains from saying more, feeling that it would be wrong to wash the Opéra’s dirty linen in public, but he does admonish the administration that “the backstage walls have ears.” Moreover, Berlioz himself had asked d’Ortigue not to make known all the intrigues at the Opéra—“there are still many details that I asked him not to reveal,” he told his father on 26 November—in order not to break openly with the administration.28 Eventually, a fourth and last complete performance took place on 11 January 1839, with Alexis Dupont in the title role; the first act was then sung thrice more in February and March as a curtain-raiser for ballet. Meanwhile, only three days after his departure from Benvenuto Cellini, Duprez was singing in Valenciennes, where he enjoyed tremendous success performing arias from Tancredi, La Juive, Guido et Ginevra, and Guillaume Tell29—but nothing from Cellini, not even the romance that Berlioz had written specially for him, “La gloire était ma seule idole” (No. 7), which might have been a crowd-pleaser and promoted the opera. For d’Ortigue, the collapse of Benvenuto Cellini amounted to an act of “shocking injustice.”30 He asserts that the management of the Opéra never intended to give the work a fighting chance and offers as evidence an article published in the Revue et Gazette musicale as early as 14 May 1837. This, “Travaux de l’Académie royale de musique,” sounded like an official report on the business plan that Duponchel had promised to follow. First, Duprez, the new leading tenor, before tackling any new roles, was to establish himself as a worthy successor to Adolphe Nourrit. Hence, only after appearing in Guillaume Tell, Les Huguenots, La Juive, La Muette de Portici, and Stradella, would he appear in Halévy’s new Côme de Médicis (Guido et Ginevra), whose première was planned for September 1837. The Opéra would then produce two major works, one by the author of La Muette (Auber), the other by the author of Robert and Les Huguenots (Meyerbeer),31 but this would not prevent the house from putting on “several smaller operas,” added Duponchel, “in order to diversify the repertory or provide curtain-raisers for ballets.”32 Here is the proof, says d’Ortigue, that Benvenuto Cellini was never considered anything but a trifle. Many years later, reviewing the première of Les Troyens at the Théâtre Lyrique, in 1863, Johannès Weber said the same thing: From the beginning the administration at the Opéra attached no importance to the performance of this work [Cellini], and relegated it to the rank of the little pieces suitable only to diversify the repertory while serving as a curtain-raiser for a ballet.33 Once this well-wrought plan becomes clear, notes d’Ortigue, everything else makes sense: firstly, the administration would accept Berlioz’s work so

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long as it was only in two acts; secondly, there would be no ballet but simply a danced chorus in a finale performed by obscure, inexperienced, and “unprotected” dancers;34 thirdly, the work would be presented during the least popular season of the year; fourthly, there would be no grand publicity campaign in order in order to keep the public “fresh” for a more promising occasion; and lastly, nothing would be done to revive the work should it fail to have a successful première. It is clear that limiting the work to two acts without a ballet defined it as a minor production. But what about the poor timing of the première? Planned for the end of June, Benvenuto Cellini was postponed until September, at which time the Parisian musical elite would have been on vacation in the country. The one-week delay announced in early September, due to an undisclosed illness of the tenor, only made matters worse. Again, this tends to validate the notion of a deliberate attempt to destroy Berlioz’s opera, and yet Halévy’s Guido et Ginevra also suffered a six-month delay, from September 1837 to March 1838. Furthermore, critics regularly complained about changes and delays in the programs at the Opéra. Duponchel had taken over the administration of the Opéra in 1835 from Louis Véron, whose directorship (1831–35) was marked, as is well known, by enormous critical and financial success. Véron was the first to be granted the privilege of managing the Opéra as a profit-making venture, with subsidies and benefits distributed in accordance with a specific set of rules, one of which required that the theater put on works by young French composers, particularly those, like Berlioz, who had won the Prix de Rome. Véron, a doctor and proven entrepreneur, had made a fortune from commercializing medicine before taking over the management. Ignoring the obligation to produce new and experimental works, he further enhanced his personal fortune by satisfying the public’s taste with operas featuring spectacle, unabashedly sentimental plots, and ingratiating music. Duponchel, by contrast, had come up the hard way, starting his career at the Opéra as a scene painter. It was his practical experience and diligence that had recommended him to the post of director. Unfortunately he seems to have possessed little artistic imagination, and turned out to be a conservative and tentative leader. Even with an annual operating budget of 1,800,000 francs and government subsidy of 600,000 francs—a budget fully comparable to that of his predecessor—his regime ended in financial disaster in the 1841–42 season. Duponchel did, however, give Berlioz an opportunity that Véron would not have granted. Berlioz was an avant-garde composer with no track record in opera. But he was a winner of the Prix de Rome and had had some succès d’estime with several earlier works. When he accepted a libretto earlier refused by the Opéra Comique,35 Duponchel obviously took what was a risky gamble. In the face of his failure to follow through with courage and determination, even d’Ortigue was unable to make a coherent case

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for the director’s part in a “conspiracy” to sabotage Benvenuto Cellini. D’Ortigue’s more general indictment is that the Opéra did nothing to promote the work of this young French composer and that its treatment of Berlioz boded poorly for the fate of all others who aspired to the only stage on which an artist could win public acclaim. He is furthermore indignant that after refusing performances to Georges Onslow36 and for all intents and purposes rejecting Berlioz, the Opéra invited a foreigner—Donizetti— to Paris.37 The “Nest of Adders” and the Critics In 1838 Berlioz was a self-assured idiosyncratic composer of thirty-five who knew that he had written an extraordinary work of substantial dimensions. It was reasonable of him to have expected the Opéra to put its formidable munitions at the disposal of his new work. The failure of Cellini was a terrible disappointment to him, and it is understandable that he expressed his rage as he did. It is equally understandable that, as a far-seeing and sympathetic advocate of Berlioz’s music, Joseph d’Ortigue expressed a view of the failure in accord with Berlioz’s own. And yet the case for the Opéra as “a nest of adders” cannot withstand impartial and inclusive scrutiny. Duponchel extended the resources of the Opéra to Benvenuto Cellini, engaged the best singers available, and staged a production that satisfied even Berlioz. He hedged his bets on the work by presenting it after the peak of the season, when he had preferred reruns of Robert le diable, Le Comte Ory, Guillaume Tell, and Les Huguenots—all hits under the previous regime—as well as Guido et Ginevra and some ballets. Confronted with the conflicting objectives of staging new works (the raison d’être of the government subsidy) and selling tickets (the raison d’être of his job), he acted very much the way directors do today: he took a risk when failure would do least damage. The losses for the week during which Cellini was performed, according to La France, amounted to some 25,000 francs.38 Reading d’Ortigue critically, we may say that Duponchel’s greatest error was to have acted tentatively, and to have forsaken the real merits of Berlioz’s score. As for Duprez: he simply behaved like a temperamental tenor with a temperamental instrument, preferring the embrace of an adoring concert audience to the potential protest of an impressionable public at the Opéra. Was it then primarily the critics who caused this odd but remarkable opera to fail? This is a question with which d’Ortigue deals at length in De l’école musicale italienne. “The press,” he writes, “has gone well beyond the normal limits of severity.”39 Normally there exists an unwritten code between the public and the fourth estate: when the press speaks of a médiocre succès, or reports that a work succeeded with only a limited public—un succès contesté—

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everyone understands that the work is doomed. When unfavorably inclined towards an opera, says d’Ortigue, critics will invariably express two diametrically opposed opinions: in private, they will express scorn and hostility; in public, they will display benevolence and generosity, thus neither offending the director nor displaying excessive enthusiasm.40 In the case of Berlioz’s opera, however, given that the administration appeared indifferent to its success or failure, there was no need for the critics to spare the director. Moreover, Berlioz himself was not in the habit of granting quarter in his own reviews and made no secret of his contempt for the value of most contemporary critical writing. It is therefore perfectly reasonable to suppose that his struggles with his own ungainly offspring gave members of the press some satisfaction, and—independent of adverse first-night reaction and lack of administrative support—little reason to be fair-minded. Vindictiveness aside, there is another reason for the critics’ harshness towards Berlioz’s music: their widespread incompetence to judge it. Many music critics employed by the newspapers in the 1830s were still littérateurs with little or no musical training. D’Ortigue cites the case of the critic who had lately come out against Berlioz’s “beautiful Messe des morts” without having heard it in rehearsal or performance: To those who would say to us that the score of this Requiem has since been published, we would reply that, for this critic, the existence of any such score is entirely irrelevant, since he is completely ignorant of music and cannot even distinguish the treble clef from the bass.41 We have earlier mentioned that the press did not unanimously pan Berlioz’s opera, and that roughly forty percent of the reviews were moderately or entirely favorable. But it is true that the press was unanimous in attributing responsibility for its failure to an ill-conceived and uninspiring libretto. Even the loyal d’Ortigue (as well as Berlioz himself) recognized that aspects of its structure and text were flawed. D’Ortigue suggests that Cellini’s artistic ideals did not appear to be dramatically motivated, and that his language, often poor, sometimes verged on the ridiculous. He deplores the fact that such worthy music was brought down by the fall of the libretto. But it was not the artistic failings of the libretto—its lack of dramatic impulse or its poorly wrought verse—that upset the majority of critics (and, before them, the Opéra’s board of censors). The cause of the ill repute of the libretto was rather a certain impiety: the language was considered vulgar, the presence on the stage of a pope (or cardinal) was deemed inappropriate, and the morality of the main characters was judged dubious at best. The critic for La France expressed outrage at seeing the young Teresa fleeing her father’s house in the company of a dissolute homicidal artist, and at watching a cardinal—not to mention a pope!—granting easy absolution to a criminal merely because of his artistic gifts.42 Comparison with Scribe

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and Halévy’s Guido et Ginevra demonstrates that while all manner of mayhem and murder may be enjoyed if effected by villains, the hero and heroine themselves must be innocent of guile and ill behavior. In Halévy’s opera, performed some forty-four times between March 1838 and October 1841,43 the heroes are victims of despicable crimes, but, ultimately, virtue wins over vice. In Berlioz’s opera, Cellini and Teresa go unpunished. Guido’s libretto was itself criticized for exploiting such a morbid subject as the plague, but the success of the work remained undiminished, as Halévy took every opportunity provided by a twisted libretto to write shamelessly sentimental music that did not leave a dry eye in the house. From the administration, the opera received strong support, including a crafty publicity campaign that had the press announce, on 8 March 1838, two days before the première, that the hall was sold out.44 This extremely rare occurrence was due to the fact that all available orchestra tickets had been reserved for “hired supporters.” Some newspapers, including La Gazette des théâtres and La France musicale, were disgusted by such a scheme, and called the première “un grand succès de claque.”45 Critics of the day were often only too happy to dwell on the inanity of a text in order to avoid tackling the difficult task of talking about music. Though not from any lack of competence to do so, Berlioz himself sometimes used the same strategy, and thus could not rightfully complain when others in the press sidestepped his score in the way that he at times sidestepped the scores of others. While some critics do not mention Cellini’s music at all, most agree on three points. First, they acknowledge Berlioz’s work as one of an entirely new genre, in which the melody is not seductive in the Italian style, in which the rhythm is complex, and in which the orchestra takes part in the development of the action. Second, they associate Berlioz’s groundbreaking work with “German” aesthetics. Third, they recognize that some moments fully deserve the success they obtained at the second and third performances. The enormous popularity of formulaic Italian opera, with its romantic plots, weeping melodies, and rigid conventions that offered singers precisely arranged opportunities to address their adoring publics, had been the object of Berlioz’s critical mockery from the beginning of his career. The aesthetic debate of which popular Italian opera and German instrumental music occupied opposite poles is a paradigm for the politics of the arts that was understood then and that retains validity even now. It is in a sense unreasonable to expect protagonists of one view or the other to react otherwise than according to long established and observable patterns. Berlioz’s Cellini contains few of the set pieces traditionally used for vocal display and obeys none of the conventions of Italian operatic dramaturgy: the flow of its musical drama is rather more continuous. The critic Édouard Monnais, himself a successful playwright, confessed that he did not understand this music of another world and time, saying, in effect, that

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“if you will forgive me for writing French criticism of 1838, I will forgive the composer for writing music of 1990.”46 Monnais rightly suggests that Berlioz’s work signals a fresh path, one that would indeed later be followed by Ambroise Thomas, Charles Gounod, Georges Bizet, and Camille Saint-Saëns as they created the new genre of the French opéra lyrique. The use of sophisticated, symphonic effects for dramatic expression is a subject of the criticism of the opéra lyrique just as it was for Cellini. In his recent The Keys to French Opera in the Nineteenth Century, Hervé Lacombe writes that the opéra lyrique “might be seen as the acclimatisation of German aesthetics to France—or as a German renewal of French opera.”47 One might even wish to consider Berlioz’s work as a first opéra lyrique, since the hybrid Benvenuto Cellini forecasts many characteristics of the genre. Enthusiasm and Disdain Everybody agrees, says d’Ortigue, that Berlioz does not write in conformity with the style currently fashionable in Paris—the Italian style. His music is therefore said to be lacking in melody, regular rhythmic patterns, and a sense of unity and clarity. But for d’Ortigue, Berlioz can both create a beautifully crafted original melody and turn a perfectly regular tune, such as Teresa’s aria, into a crowd-pleaser. His way of modelling melody and rhythm to the natural spoken word creates an expressive flow that cannot be compared to Italian style, but that certainly does not put off the audience, which, for example, warmly applauded the nine-measure periods in the danced chorus of the first act (as in No. 6, bars 109–17, in the finale of the first tableau). It is true, says d’Ortigue, that excessive imitation of nature makes this scene confusing, and that the style of Cellini’s Romance in the first act (No. 7) is more lyrical than dramatic, but, as another critic mentioned, Berlioz certainly proved here that he knew how to write for women’s voices.48 It is also true that Berlioz’s motivic development is often too complicated for a lyric work and would be more appropriate in a symphonic one, but, for refusing to cater to mere sensual pleasure, the author in fact deserves our intellectual admiration. D’Ortigue asks whether Berlioz lacks spontaneity and writes according to a “system,” as some critics had suggested. Yes, just as did Rameau, Gluck, and Rossini, says d’Ortigue, who notes that Cellini is prefaced by the first major operatic overture to be composed since Rossini completed Guillaume Tell (1829). Faithful to his “system,” Berlioz avoids vulgarity, artificial formulas, and emptiness. It is tempting to assume that the scenes to which Berlioz brought particular originality and sophistication are the ones that were rejected by the audience and critics, but this is not necessarily so. Amongst the numbers that the critics tells us were well received are Teresa’s Cavatina “Entre l’amour et le devoir” (No. 3), the first-act Trio with Teresa, Cellini, and

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Fieramosca (No. 4), the chorus in the finale of Act I (No. 6), the Chant des ciseleurs (No. 8), the Pope’s aria “À tous péchés pleine indulgence”in the Sextet of the third tableau (No. 21), and Ascanio’s song “Mais qu’ai-je donc?” at the beginning of the fourth (No. 24). Some of these scenes, namely the two women’s arias, seem to have beguiled the public by means of their charming and clear-cut melodies. Others were successful because their style and atmosphere were perfectly adapted to the dramatic situation, even though the writing was extremely bold and learned. For example, almost everyone mentions the Act I Trio as one of the most successful scenes; its complexity seems to have disconcerted neither the critics nor the public. In this scene, Cellini and Teresa—unbeknownst to her father, the papal treasurer, Balducci—meet in her room. Believing they are alone, the lovers agree on a plan that would have Teresa “abducted” from her father’s house. But Fieramosca (the Pope’s official sculptor, to whom Teresa has already been promised), is hiding behind a door and takes part in the singing. The dramatic situation, cleverly laid out, is beautifully enhanced by the music, which flows with clarity and apparent simplicity despite being an extremely intricate piece of writing. The first section resembles the introduction of a traditional duet in the Italian style: a short motive is sung by one of the protagonists and is repeated with a few alterations by the other, after which a middle section acts as a transition to a two-part imitative duet followed by a final ensemble. But nothing here is predictable or symmetrical, and every detail is rigorously dictated by the dramatic interest. In the opening recitative, the meter oscillates between triple and quadruple, reflecting the lovers’ fear of being surprised by Balducci. Teresa hears a noise and is scared: “Je suis perdue, Je suis perdue!” (bars 13–15); “C’est le gai carnaval” (bars 17–18), says Cellini, at which point we hear the carnavalesque piccolo and tambourine (bars 19–20). He then sings in a soft and reassuring voice (the part is marked doux et lent), the tempo slows, and the phrase ends with a short and cajoling vocalise on the words “calmez votre frayeur” (bars 22– 26). Throughout the scene the music remains faithful to the natural prosody of the text, with each word repetition—such as Teresa’s reiteration of “Je suis perdue”—justified by the dramatic situation. Later in the scene, Berlioz uses a bold rhythmic juxtaposition similar to the destabilizing effect of the alternating triple and quadruple meters of the opening bars. This occurs (at bar 409) when Fieramosca is singing from his hiding place while the lovers still believe they are alone. Cellini, Teresa, woodwinds, and violins are in 3/4 while Fieramosca, bassoons, and lower strings are in 9/8. Once again, the words are perfectly clear, while the tension of the situation is emphasised by the temporal superpositioning. At an earlier point (after bar 134), the score is marked animez un peu, and a rapid ascending scale turns our attention to Fieramosca. Over a sweeping burst of indignation, climbing from the lower range of the cello to a high D in the violins, Teresa exclaims “Moi, sa femme! Je préfère la mort!”;

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she then sighs, on a descending motive (with woodwinds trembling above): “cent fois la mort la plus amère” (bars 139–41). For the listener, it is as though the orchestra, reacting to events as they occur, were a character on the stage. Many changes were made to the Trio in rehearsal, after the first performance, and yet again for Liszt’s revival of the work in Weimar in 1852. Most of these were aimed at creating a seamless flow between the sections or to rectify accentuation. In the Paris versions, the name Fieramosca was (wrongly?) accentuated on the last syllable; for Weimar the line was adjusted to place the accent on the penultimate syllable. Some of these alterations result in a simplification of the rhythm as the abduction plan is repeated; this takes something away from its simply stunning effect—of which there are many more in this still far too little-known score. Cellini and the Canon The understanding of the circumstances surrounding the reception of a work remains an enduring challenge for the musicologist, as such understanding requires contemporary evidence of a trustworthy sort. Joseph d’Ortigue’s De l’école musicale italienne is particularly valuable in this regard: readers of the book may well feel that new performances of Benvenuto Cellini are needed now more than ever, for today’s public—exposed of course to the Italian operatic canon but also to French opéras lyriques as well as to Wagnerian music dramas—is hardly intolerant of the impropriety of language, impiety, and immorality for which Berlioz’s opera was censured in 1838. And Die Meistersinger demonstrated (as Cellini might failed to do) that artistic ideals can inspire a good libretto. It is therefore legitimate to hope, as the modern edition is disseminated, that Benvenuto Cellini will take a well-deserved place in the repertory. Despite its innovative music, powerful effect, charm, and brilliance, the opera does of course present formidable challenges to even the extremely well-funded house. In the later nineteenth century the work found favor only in Germany, where the Wagnerian enterprise may have had the effect of rendering the Frenchman’s work less difficult and threatening. D’Ortigue’s autopsy suggests that in France it fell victim not to assassination but certainly to adverse circumstances, and that it deserved then, and deserves now, a better fate.

Notes 1. CG II, 435–37. 2. Ibid., quoted and partly translated in David Cairns, Berlioz II: Servitude and Greatness (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 163. For a complete account of Berlioz’s reading of the events, see pp. 157–75. The score of the original

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version of Berlioz’s opera, in two acts and four tableaux, is edited by Hugh Macdonald in NBE 1. 3. Joseph d’Ortigue, De l’école musicale italienne et de l’administration de l’Académie Royale de Musique à l’occasion de l’opéra de M. H. Berlioz (Paris: Dépôt central, 1839). A second, revised edition appeared in 1840 with the title Du théâtre italien et de son influence sur le goût musical français. 4. D’Ortigue, De l’école musicale italienne, ii. Translations here, unless otherwise noted, are my own. The original French is included only when misunderstanding is possible. 5. Compiled in Peter Bloom, ed., Hector Berlioz, “Benvenuto Cellini”: Dossier de presse parisienne (1838) (Heilbronn: Musik-Edition Lucie Galland, 1995). 6. In the conservative Revue des deux mondes, Henri Blaze blames Berlioz for following in the steps of Victor Hugo: “M. Berlioz, too, wanted to issue his Préface de Cromwell [. . .] and there began the gravest of errors” (Bloom, ed., “Cellini”: Dossier de presse, 154). On a more positive note, Théophile Gautier wrote in La Presse : “M. Hector Berlioz, the musical reformer, has much in common with Victor Hugo, the literary reformer” (Ibid., 115). 7. For a synopsis of his life and work, see my article on d’Ortigue in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., ed. Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell (London: Macmillan, 2001), vol. 18; and my Joseph d’Ortigue: Biographie et textes choisis (1829–1842) (forthcoming from Buchet/Chastel, Paris). 8. Joseph d’Ortigue, Le Balcon de l’Opéra (Paris: Renduel, 1833). After the main body of text, d’Ortigue added a hundred pages of “Pièces justificatives,” excerpts concerning the characteristics of the Italian operatic style from writings by Guillaume-André Villoteau, Jean-Benjamin de Laborde, Castil-Blaze, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Benedetto Marcello, along with two of his own articles from the Journal de Paris. 9. See Fétis, Biographie universelle des musiciens [1st ed.], 8 vols. (Brussels: Leroux, 1835–44), s.v. “Ortigue.” This particular description disappeared from the second edition of Fétis’s famous dictionary. 10. Why the critic who positioned himself as Berlioz’s most faithful friend and loyal supporter did not immediately review the première of Cellini in September of 1838 is something of a mystery, although one may presume that he felt no need to do so, knowing that his book was about to appear. 11. Vie de Benvenuto Cellini, écrite par lui-même et traduite par D. D. Farjasse (Paris: Audot fils, 1833). 12. In the spring of 1834, Le Ménestrel had announced that a new opera by Berlioz would be performed at the Opéra Comique. Rumor had it that this was the work of three authors: the young poet Léon de Wailly; Auguste Barbier, famous for the epic poem Il Pianto, published in 1833 in the prestigious Revue des deux mondes; and the celebrated Alfred de Vigny. In August 1834, the administration of the Opéra Comique refused the libretto (“On a refusé les paroles pour ne pas avoir à admettre la musique d’un fou,” as Berlioz put it; CG II, 197), and a few months later Berlioz brought his work to the newly appointed director of the Opéra, Duponchel, who had promised him a play. See CG II, 246–47. For a thorough account of the genesis of the opera, see NBE 1a, pp. xi–xv. 13. D’Ortigue himself had praised his “pure, powerful, penetrating voice” in La Quotidienne (6 December 1837).

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14. D’Ortigue, De l’école musicale italienne, 134. 15. Ibid., 135. 16. References are to the numbers of NBE 1. 17. D’Ortigue, De l’école musicale italienne, 148–49. 18. As reported in La France musicale (23 October 1838). La Fille du Danube, with music by Adolphe Adam, had been created by Filippo Taglioni for his daughter Maria, on 21 September 1836; this proved to be her last great triumph in Paris. 19. Gazette des théâtres (20 September 1838). 20. D’Ortigue, De l’école musicale italienne, 147. 21. See Bloom, ed., “Cellini”: Dossier de presse, 145, 79. 22. D’Ortigue, De l’école musicale italienne, 153. This ballet by Jean Coralli, on a libretto (based on a Chinese story) by Charles Duveyrier, with music by Alexandre Montfort, was first performed on 16 October 1837. 23. D’Ortigue, De l’école musicale italienne, 153–54. 24. See Auguste Lireux, “Chronique,” Revue et Gazette des théâtres (9 September 1838). In June 1838 Duponchel had gone off to London to attend the coronation of Queen Victoria. 25. La France musicale (10 June 1838). 26. See Cairns, Berlioz II, 166. 27. D’Ortigue, De l’école musicale italienne, 150. By “his sole resource” (“sa seule ressource”) d’Ortigue means that Duprez was the only leading tenor available for all current productions. 28. CG II, 476–77. 29. Gazette des théâtres (20 September 1838). 30. “Un acte d’iniquité révoltante” (d’Ortigue, De l’école musicale italienne, iii). 31. On 9 April 1839, the new work by Auber, Le Lac des fées, was premièred. Meyerbeer’s admirers had to wait until April 1849 to enjoy his new work, which became Le Prophète. 32. D’Ortigue, De l’école musicale italienne, 159. 33. Johannès Weber, Le Temps (17 November 1863), cited in Hervé Lacombe, The Keys to French Opera in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 215. 34. An “unprotected” dancer was one who, unlike many others, had no liaison with a powerful political or financial figure, who would look after her interests. 35. See note 12. 36. D’Ortigue had great admiration for the music of Georges Onslow (1784– 1853), composer of three operas. Guise ou les États de Blois was premièred at the Opéra Comique in September 1837, but lasted only a few nights. 37. Donizetti arrived in Paris in October 1838, and soon occupied the stage of the Opéra Comique (where La Fille du régiment was premiered in February 1840), the Opéra (where Les Martyrs was premiered in April 1840, and La Favorite in December) and the Théâtre Italien (where Don Pasquale triumphed in January 1843). 38. Théodore Anne, in La France (12 September 1838); see Bloom, ed., “Cellini”: Dossier de presse, 49. 39. D’Ortigue, De l’école musicale italienne, 171. 40. Ibid., 170. 41. Ibid., 177 n. 42. See Bloom, ed., “Cellini”: Dossier de presse, 42–51.

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43. Karl Leich-Galland reported on this opera during the panel session on “Berlioz et autour de Berlioz” at the meetings of the International Musicological Society in London, in August 1997. See David Greer, ed., Musicology and Sister Disciplines (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 473–76. 44. “Since all seats have been purchased in advance, none will be available at the door.” Gazette des théâtres (8 March 1838). 45. La France musicale (11 March 1838). 46. Monnais’s original text, in Le Courrier français, is more nuanced: “Nous sommes restés de notre temps, français et critique de 1838 ; si c’est notre faute qu’on nous le pardonne, comme nous pardonnons au compositeur d’avoir fait de la musique de 1990.” See Bloom, ed., “Cellini”: Dossier de presse, 37. 47. Lacombe, The Keys, 277. 48. D’Ortgue, in La Quotidienne (13 September 1838). See Bloom, ed., “Cellini”: Dossier de presse, 130.

5

Plots and Politics: Berlioz’s Tales of Sound and Fury Katherine Kolb Berlioz memorably frames his Memoirs with two versions of the same quotation, one in French, one in English: the grim passage from Macbeth dismissing life as a “tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Despite the announced gloom, readers of the Memoirs soon discover that this particular tale of sound and fury—told, to be sure, not by an idiot but a master storyteller—is balanced by frequent patches of light and a constant leavening of humor. The gloom of the epigraph coincides not so much with the book as with its preface. So well does the epigraph match the preface, indeed, and so lastingly did Shakespeare haunt Berlioz’s imagination, that the passage from Macbeth is likely to have been present in his mind, if not on paper, from the start. In the preface, that start is identified with a precise date and place: London, 21 March 1848, barely a month after the revolution that had ousted King Louis-Philippe and established the Second French Republic. Refugees, among them many artists, were flocking to England—the image in the preface is of seabirds coming to shore before a storm—where Berlioz had preceded them by several months. It was as though political events were amplifying his private exile, the year before, when he had left Paris to recoup the financial disaster of his Damnation de Faust. That had been a life-changing blow. Until then Berlioz had trusted the French concert public, on the whole—the public that had acclaimed his works faithfully, even when government taxes drained his profits and the musical establishment continued to rebuff or even sabotage him. But when “his” public did not turn out for La Damnation, in December 1846, it hit him like a betrayal— an et tu, Brute. It also sealed his disenchantment with democratic regimes. If a constitutional monarchy was ineffectual in providing for music, as he rather unfairly concluded, what chance would there be under an even more extreme form of democracy, a republic? Thus the Memoirs were begun in response to a crisis, according to a reflex that had become habitual: writing, during the previous two decades,

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had been his one dependable source of income. In his Memoirs he would be writing of his life but also, as usual, for his life. In light of the subject matter, the familiar purpose—the “for”—took on a touch of unreality: would the Memoirs constitute a means of survival, or an epitaph? Berlioz implies the latter. Soon, he declares, he may be like those stoic Indians of the Niagara who, after battling in vain against the river’s current, sing bravely as they face the plunge into the abyss. The image of the roaring falls seems to take up the Shakespearean “sound and fury” and set them in technicolor, complete with story line—a death story that replays, fast forward, his life story of constant battling against the current. Book and image tell of a life not recollected in tranquillity, as the genre usually implies, but caught in midstream. The projected ending is tragic, even apocalyptic: a whole world is going down with this noble savage. The preface to the Memoirs can serve to introduce Berlioz as a storyteller on the small and the large scale—his Memoirs being in many ways his greatest story—and the theme, shared by his principal nouvelles, of his life story. Each of his three major short stories is partly autobiographical; each is in fact closer in some ways to his life than his Memoirs, which—in a deliberate distancing from Rousseau—Berlioz was careful to distinguish from “confessions.” Under the cover of fiction, he was able to recapture in the raw some of the painful episodes of his life that the Memoirs occult, or treat from an ironic distance. Just as the Memoirs were begun in response to historical and life circumstances, so these stories can be read as responses to distressing events—“sound” to accompany his “fury.” Such a reading, as I propose it here, depends not so much on biography (though biography, with Berlioz, is always close by) as on the allegories and images that translate his ideals in the face of political and social realities. Helpful during his lifetime in what he called his “Thirty Years’ War against the routineers, the academics, and the deaf,”1 these literary tropes also have a role to play in the battles for canonical standing that have continued since his death. They, and the short stories in which they prominently figure, can help us sort out issues that recently arose, for example, when the French government declared its intention of translating Berlioz’s remains to the Panthéon—an important symbolic move—for the bicentenary of his birth. Neither his stirring orchestration of the Marseillaise nor his great Requiem, originally intended to celebrate the victims of the Revolution of 1830, sufficed to quell objections bearing upon his political views. For to questions from the French press it had to be admitted that—as we have seen—Berlioz was not always the staunchest of republicans. A letter to Le Monde went so far as to protest Berlioz’s admission to the Panthéon in the names of Victor Hugo and Jean Moulin.2 The comparison with Hugo is valid but bears scrutiny. Berlioz and Hugo were of equal stature in their respective arts, as they both recognized, but of contrary evolution in the realm of politics. Hugo’s early political conser-

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vatism is easily forgiven (and forgotten) in light of his legendary status as spokesman for the exiled and the oppressed. Berlioz’s late conservatism is harder to overlook and thus in persistent need of explanation. Why his revulsion for the Revolution of 1848 and rallying to Louis-Napoleon, when he was such an eager participant in the Revolution of 1830? The short stories I will discuss here, written between those two revolutions, can help put his views in perspective. They can help us understand, in particular, the often subtle dialectic of republicanism and imperialism in nineteenth-century France, an era when the very words “republic” and “democracy” had meanings different from ours and did not represent values universally taken for granted. They situate us, finally, in the aesthetic domain from which Berlioz’s political views—unlike those of Hugo—can never be fully separated. Whereas a writer such as Hugo could go into solitary exile, renounce theater, yet thrive as a poet and novelist, a musician such as Berlioz—one with a predilection for large-scale works—had no such options: his was an art dependent on public performance and thus on the regimes governing its conditions. Technically, Berlioz’s experience of republicanism began with his birth under France’s First Republic: his birth certificate specifies the year XII (December, or frimaire) on the Republican calendar. The date coincides with Napoleon’s consulship and greatest victories, a time when the French revolutionary armies marched across Europe bearing the noble principles of liberté, égalité, fraternité. That Beethoven should have angrily stricken the dedication to Napoleon of his Eroica Symphony upon learning of his hero’s coronation, as biographical lore has it, merely underscores the extent to which the young Bonaparte had represented, even to the conquered, the beacon of liberty and progress. In France, a nation still traumatized by memories of the revolutionary Terror, the Empire did not so much erase the revolutionary ideals, in the eyes of most Frenchmen, as fulfill them through auspicious new forms of glory and apparent stability. Not only did Napoleon offer in his own person a shining example of success beyond the confines of birth and class; better still, he offered advancement to others. Berlioz grew up under the promise of a society open to talent and a regime that, for ambitious and capable young men, made that promise concrete. He was among those to suffer the letdown of Musset’s enfants du siècle when the imperial bubble burst. For Berlioz and his generation, Napoleon’s way was the way things were supposed to have been. As Emperor and even as First Consul, Napoleon had been in many ways a godsend for musicians. He furnished state occasions for music; he commissioned large-scale works and rewarded them generously; he called forth two of the operas Berlioz admired the most in the world: Spontini’s La Vestale and Ferdinand Cortez. He attended more concerts and was a far more appreciative listener than any French sovereign Berlioz was to know under four later regimes. He founded a prize for opera, to be awarded

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every decade (it was actually awarded only once—to La Vestale).3 It was he, furthermore, who in 1803 (the year of Berlioz’s birth) founded the yearly prize competition for composers in which Berlioz was to compete. Among Napoleon’s favorite composers, finally, was none other than Berlioz’s teacher, Jean-François Lesueur. One should not underestimate the power on Berlioz’s mind and memory of his teacher’s repeated sighs of regret: “If only Napoleon were alive, I wouldn’t fear for your future!”4 When Napoleon’s nephew took power, in 1851, putting an end to the fledgling Second Republic, it may well have seemed to Berlioz that Lesueur’s impossible wish was, miraculously, about to be granted. Two of Berlioz’s three major short stories take place under imperial regimes.5 In Le Suicide par enthousiasme, written in 1834 but set in the glory years of the Napoleonic Empire, a young violinist falls in love, not with a young woman—that is a sub-plot—but with Spontini’s La Vestale. In the ambitious, novelistic Euphonia, ou la ville musicale of 1844, Berlioz imagines, five hundred years in the future, a paradise for composers who, under the generous protection of a benevolent, music-loving Emperor, need not concern themselves with the financing of their concerts. No matter that this fantasy empire is set in Germany rather than France: Napoleon remains the unspoken reference. The Germany evoked is that of Staël’s idyllic picture of the early nineteenth century, a storybook land of mountains and rivers, picturesque villages and Hoffmannesque characters, of small kingdoms, duchies, and principalities, of “poets and thinkers” and—especially—of Beethoven, Weber, and Gluck. It is also the land that had welcomed Berlioz on his German tour of 1842–43. At a time when France itself had long been the aggressor nation in Europe, the German invasion of 1870—let alone the wars of the twentieth century—was virtually unimaginable. Berlioz admired the military bands of Prussia in all innocence, never dreaming they might some day march threateningly to the West. His imaginary empire bespeaks a peaceful fraternité beyond national boundaries, in the original spirit of the Panthéon. A speech he gave in Strasbourg in 1863, for the opening of the new bridge to Kehl across the Rhine, expresses the universal spirit of his utopia: more even than technology, he declared, art was the power destined to build bridges between nations.6 As for the imaginary emperor in Euphonia, he is of a distant fairy-tale sort whose chief functions, patronage aside, are to provide ceremonial occasions for music, on the one hand, and to set an example of appreciative listening, on the other. Only qualified listeners—including, we infer, the Emperor himself—are admitted to Euphonian concerts and festivals, notably a Gluck festival held every ten years, like Napoleon’s prize competition. The active despotism in the story is not political but musical: Euphonia is run like a conservatory, opera house, and symphony orchestra all in one, with an autocratic director at the helm. Even the Emperor knows better

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than to interfere with the musical director in the exercise of his functions. As an artist and a genius, this director (the elder of the two composerheroes of the story) is by Romanticist definition a leader of men equal to any political sovereign, even Napoleon, who could attain no greater praise than to be counted himself an artist and genius. Euphonians rank by talent alone: no degree of favoritism can obtain a role for an unqualified singer. There is evidently a democracy embedded in Euphonia after all—a democracy of talent—in which emperors are men like others. We hear as much explicitly in writings where Berlioz speaks in his own name. A late letter to Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgenstein lets fly a scathing denunciation of those “pathetic little gangsters”: “Caesar, Augustus, Antony, Alexander, Philip [of Macedonia], Peter [the Great]” who, Berlioz declares, are “nothing but glorified brigands.”7 One of his letters from Germany, a few months before Euphonia, echoes Hamlet’s outrage at the thought that “Imperious Caesar, dead and turned to clay / Might stop a hole to keep the wind away”; but he amends at once: “One would feel a much greater sense of outrage if the humble and meek were alone fit for such base uses.”8 Such humanitarian sentiments were in no way incompatible, to Berlioz, with his support of Napoleon’s coup d’état in December 1851. As we learn from Euphonia, or from his eloquent tribute to Beethoven as benefactor of mankind in his review of the International Beethoven Festival of 1845 (reprinted in Les Soirées de l’orchestre), music was to Berlioz the humanitarian art par excellence, both in its public functions and as the art that best conveys the movements of the human spirit. Yet such broad egalitarian sentiments did not preclude a deep distrust—born equally of the revolutionary heritage—of mob behavior. “Nothing inspires me with deeper repugnance for the multitude, for the mob of whatever rank or class,” he once wrote, “than the horrible lust with which one sees it rush off on certain days to the place of execution.”9 The qualifier extending the definition of “mob” to all classes and ranks is worth noting. Victor Hugo himself discriminates radically, in the epigraph to Les Voix intérieures (1837), between a “sober respect for the people” and a “disdain for the crowd,” in a slippery distinction, common to liberals of the day, between the noble “people” and the ignoble rabble. In the aftermath of the 1848 Revolution, the distinction became especially tenuous for Berlioz, as his revulsion mounted against mobs of all kinds. It surfaces irrepressibly in his Memoirs at several striking moments. The narrative of his arrival in Paris in 1826 is interrupted by a description of the “hateful scene of destruction” he found on his return to Paris in July 1848, together with a dismayed report of the loss of life and livelihood among artists. A few chapters later, another interruption brings ghastly details of the torture and killing of Prince Lichnowsky, whom he had known in Paris and Berlin: “Vile human scum,” he explodes, “a thousand times more bestial and brainless in your fatuous revolutionary antics than the baboons and orang-outangs of Borneo!”10

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Much of his anger came to center on the Assemblée Nationale, the populist legislature that proved inadequate and inept in its policies towards art (“Wretched artists,” he writes again in the same passage of the Memoirs, “abandoned by this republic of pickpockets and costermongers!”). It is in the light of that anger, built up over several years, that one must read his expression of glee at the thought of those legislators being destroyed and Ridiculed by the new monarch (capitals and italics emphasize the word in a letter to his sister Adèle), as though enacting a political version of his own literary tactics. His further declaration that the Emperor “fulfills all my dreams about government” can be taken quite literally: Berlioz had fantasized an ideal empire in Euphonia.11 Given these strong sentiments, it is fitting that Berlioz composed his Soirées de l’orchestre, the comic volume into which he prominently inserts his three melodramatic short stories, precisely in the year between LouisNapoleon’s two coups d’état: the publication of the volume in December 1852 could hardly have coincided more exactly with the long-expected advent of the new Empire on December 2. Another noteworthy feature of the volume is that it was composed—in the sense of arranged and assembled, since most of its parts were written earlier—to emphasize a Napoleonic theme. Berlioz creates a lead storyteller and alter ego, Corsino, whose name and fiery character allude to the famous Corsican (as well as his own younger self). He devotes a long sequence to Spontini, who had just died in 1851, featuring the “Suicide” story about La Vestale. He includes a chapter on Napoleon’s musical tastes. Above all, he places Euphonia in the final Evening, letting it stand as a summary of his musical creed and an oath of allegiance to Napoleon III—originally performed, to be sure, eight years ahead of schedule.12 Dreams, indeed. Only one of Berlioz’s three stories makes so transparent a reference to the occasion of its writing as the preface to his Memoirs. That is Le Premier Opéra of 1837, written in direct retaliation for his mistreatment at the hands of the Ministry of the Interior. Having composed his ambitious Requiem on the strength of a commission from the Ministry and a scheduled performance, Berlioz had the work copied and rehearsed, only to receive word that the première had been canceled. Furious, he wrote and published, several months later, the semi-historical story of a sixteenth-century Italian composer, Alfonso della Viola, who has suffered a similar outrage at the hands of an arrogant Grand Duke of Florence. In the story, the work in question is a new and grandiose kind of music drama—an opera—conceived on a subject from Dante.13 Again, the great work is copied, rehearsed, and ready, when the sovereign who had commissioned it changes his mind and cancels the performance. The composer is enraged to the point of murder. Though no stranger to violence, his older friend Benvenuto Cellini— subject of the opera Berlioz had just completed the year before—persuades

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him instead to take his revenge by fame. Thanks to a subsidy from Cellini himself, the composer is to have his work performed elsewhere, establishing his reputation so solidly that he can forever snub the offending Grand Duke. The plan succeeds; the composer becomes rich and famous. Yet some years later, to Cellini’s disgust, della Viola agrees to have his newest work performed at the court of the same despicable Grand Duke. The court noblemen and ladies make much of the now-famous composer; crowds gather from all over Tuscany; excitement spreads among the assembled multitude; the performers are ready—when at the last minute the composer spirits away the music and sends a message: he, too, has changed his mind. He rides off in triumphant glee, leaving the Duke at the mercy of an angry mob. One lesson to be learned from this story, perhaps unintended by its author, is that aristocratic patronage is no more reliable than the republican variety. In that respect, Cellini’s gesture of support in rescuing his fellowartist is a significant detail. It is sometimes forgotten how often Berlioz was supported—or rescued—by private patronage, including loans from friends. The most celebrated instance, told movingly in his Memoirs, was the gift from Paganini of twenty thousand francs that enabled him to compose his symphony Roméo et Juliette. The story of Le Premier Opéra anticipates that gift by a little over a year—might it have helped inspire the idea? The gesture illustrates, in any case, a crucial theme in Berlioz’s life and writings: that of solidarity among artists. For all that he spoke of love—the Alpha and Omega of his existence, as Ernest Legouvé once testified—he relied more on friendship.14 His opera Benvenuto Cellini was in fact dedicated to Legouvé, who had supplied the “metal” for its composition. In Les Soirées de l’orchestre, the players in the pit who converse and read stories to each other illustrate this bond among artists of common ideals, akin to Schumann’s band of David—Davidsbündler—battling the Philistines. During the period when the volume came into being, Berlioz was putting this ideal of artistic solidarity into concrete practice by his efforts to establish a philharmonic society. But philharmonic societies, still in their infancy, were no more capable than providential rescues from friends of adequately supporting a career. A deus ex machina is not to be counted on, especially when the god is human. Just how human such a benefactor can be is brought home in the same passage of the Memoirs that tells of Prince Lichnowsky’s murder. At the moment of relating the performance of his first Mass, financed by a loan from his friend Augustin de Pons, Berlioz learns that this same friend, fallen on hard times and giving music lessons to survive, has committed suicide—the Revolution had dispersed all his students. Le Suicide par enthousiasme and Euphonia are also revenge stories, but the revenge in question is of a different sort, both more complex and—in

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Euphonia—more violent. The revenge is directed, moreover, against a woman, a brilliant but superficial musician modeled on Berlioz’s one-time fiancée, the pianist Camille Moke (later famous as Marie Pleyel), who broke their engagement, in 1831, to marry for wealth. In his Memoirs, Berlioz accords this episode the status of a mere interlude—a troubling and violent interlude, to be sure, not unlike the interruptions telling of Revolutionary violence. In his letters and stories, he betrays the extent to which this “interlude” affected him. The stories in particular tell a great deal about the depth of the wound and the bitterness it caused, besides portraying intimate scenes and interactions between the lovers that ring too true to be entirely fictional. Biography, then, is inescapable in the interpretation of these stories: the original version of Euphonia goes so far as to name the heroine “Emillac,” an anagram of “Camille.” Yet biography alone cannot explain a story that dates from thirteen years after the event it is supposed to punish. Even Le Suicide par enthousiasme, in which the heroine is scorned and rejected but not physically harmed, dates from 1834, not exactly the morning after. The question occurs: Did the revenge simply take a long time to ripen, like that against the Grand Duke in Le Premier Opéra? Or was the wound perhaps reopened at those times by other events? Both suggestions are plausible. But in Euphonia the violence takes on such monstrous proportions, and the heroine herself is branded as such a monster, that the issue of Camille as target fades before other questions, such as: Why the persistence and apparent excess of the fury? Or more precisely: What is it that Camille and the heroines based on her are being made to represent? To answer those questions it is necessary to take up the theme of betrayal broached earlier in connection with the unscrupulous Grand Duke of the story and the fickle public of La Damnation de Faust. Betrayal is a strong word, with no exact French equivalent: when English translators attempt to render “mais si elle le trompait!” in the program of the Symphonie fantastique—usually: “but what if she were deceiving him?”—they are obliged to choose the awkward “deceive,” which misses the sexual infidelity implicit in tromper, or the closer but unidiomatic “betray” (uncommon in the progressive form), or simply: “What if she were unfaithful?” (more colloquially, “What if she were cheating on him?”). But even if the word “betrayal” does not often figure in the translated program of the symphony, it is still the best indicator of what is at stake. Like the even stronger French word trahison (which includes both “betrayal” and the close cognate “treason”), it covers both tromperie—seduction and desertion—and breach of trust. In the case of La Damnation de Faust, the public’s desertion was so wounding to Berlioz that it felt like betrayal, even though the word he actually uses is indifférence, which rather suggests unrequited love. In the case of the Grand Duke, bound by definite agreement, breach of faith escalates to treachery. Like Berlioz with Camille Moke in 1831, or

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with the Minister of the Interior in 1837, the hero has been seduced, in effect—seduced and abandoned, like a hapless young woman—by the Duke’s “golden promises.” Betrayal is the core of the classic femme fatale love plot of passionbetrayal-revenge that we know, and Berlioz knew, from countless stories, operas, and plays. Othello is a pointed reference in both Le Suicide par enthousiasme and Euphonia. Berlioz had used that plot himself in his Symphonie fantastique, his master plot or Ur-story, so to speak, in which the imagined killing of the beloved foretells Euphonia and suggests a crime of equal weight. The details in the symphony are hazy. In the short stories the crime is not only explicit but is further implicated in another: a crime against music. The parallel between love and music is a constant in Berlioz, as at the end of his Memoirs, which is as memorable as the beginning: “Love or music,” he asks—“which power can uplift man to the most sublime heights?” Le Suicide par enthousiasme turns the comparison into a proposition: “This story proves that music is a passion like love,” declares Corsino, its author. Accordingly, the main plot leads the hero to a climactic joy at a performance of his beloved La Vestale, and to a love-death that spares him the return to ordinary life after such bliss. But this lofty ideal of love has its shadow side, strikingly illustrated by a secondary plot in which the hero falls under the spell of a brilliant but shallow musician. Though she proves no match for La Vestale, she does seriously threaten his idealistic equation between the musical and feminine sublime. In the wake of his misadventure he concludes that women are by nature frivolous, shallow, and promiscuous—however much, as he admits, the great singer Mme Branchu who portrays La Vestale (and presumably la Vestale herself) might argue the contrary. For Berlioz the writer of fiction, as for his admired predecessors Shakespeare and Rousseau, female promiscuity is the seed of all disorder, whether in art, society, or the cosmos itself. In Euphonia, the theme of fidelity (and its contrary, sexual infidelity), is the hinge that links the love story with the musical utopia. Fidelity is the very foundation of the Euphonian creed: the musicians are bound— trained—to love, honor, and obey the great composers whose works they perform. Their greatest god is Gluck—not Beethoven, as one might expect—because Gluck represents the famous reformer of Italian musical “promiscuity” in the name of fidelity to the text. Gluck’s opera Alceste, performed at the festival that forms the story’s climax, offers the ultimate example of patriarchal devotion: that of a woman resolved to give her life for her husband’s. Thus when the heroine enters the Musical City, richly bejeweled and demonstrating spectacular vocal prowess, she appears (the narrative distinctly implies) like the serpent in Eden. Her vocal and other ornaments are the counterpart to a sexual promiscuity that, temporarily

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subdued in the hero’s favor, reveals itself as shameless, innate, and irrepressible. The musical City, violated by such monstrosity, must be purged. If women are the obvious vehicle for such an attack, they nevertheless have no monopoly on musical crime. In Berlioz’s Memoirs, the greatest musical criminal is not a woman; indeed the heroines of that volume’s two principal love stories remain deliberately idealized, in marked contrast to the heroines of the short stories. The arch-villain of the Memoirs (an honor of sorts) is the critic and arranger Castil-Blaze, a special nemesis from the time Berlioz was a student, when as an ardent Gluckiste he wrote irate letters to the editor ridiculing the critic’s predilection for Rossini.15 But the far greater crime was Castil-Blaze’s cavalier treatment of the works of other composers, notably Mozart and Weber, which he cut up and rearranged (making his fortune in the process) to suit French taste. Berlioz’s attack on Castil-Blaze reaches the pitch of a Hugolian Châtiment: “Villain!” he exclaims. “And a wretched sailor gets fifty lashes for a minor act of insubordination!” Infidelity, here, comes very close to treason. It provokes what is perhaps the most violent tirade of the volume: resonant, reiterated protests—“Non, non, non, dix millions de fois non . . .” escalating to “mille millions de fois non”—against the crime of violating the integrity of a work of art. “Violation” is my own metaphor, but the act is unmistakably cast as a kind of rape (in the case of a work of art) or (in the case of a composer) as a parricide. In this postrevolutionary society, no less rigidly patriarchal than the ancien régime, parricide still remains the ultimate crime. A less Juvenalian but even more devastating attack on Castil-Blaze came by way of a wickedly hilarious review of the arranger’s own opera, PigeonVole (its title taken from the name of a French children’s game)—a belated revenge by ridicule. Whether moved by critical response or remorse, Berlioz removed this piece from the second edition of Les Soirées de l’orchestre, after giving it a central place in the first. But the date of the original review—August 1843, only a few months before the first installment of Euphonia—gives pause. It suggests that we look not only to reminders of Camille for the source of Euphonia but also to rekindlings of his early furies against Italian music. Between the mockery of Castil-Blaze’s opera and that of Italy and Italian music in the opening section of Euphonia there are indeed striking similarities. In both, music and composer are shown as frivolous, childish, and brainless—effeminate, in a word, or, to compound the insult, “eunuchs” (by implied association with the once-sovereign castratos). At the same time they are charged with the worst sort of greed and materialism, crimes that make them equally liable to characterization as “prostitutes.” In the 1820s, Berlioz had called Italian music “the Prostitute,” collapsing into a single epithet his various accusations of debasement, sensuality, exploitation, and treachery. Between male effeminacy and

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female hypersexuality, the targets of Berlioz’s attacks are caught between two seemingly contradictory tropes, each of which expresses the age-old misogynist notion that no fate is worse than to be—or to be like—a woman. Like the heroine of the Symphonie fantastique, the heroines of the short stories suit the prostitute profile as Berlioz conceives it but bear not the remotest resemblance, metaphorical or other, to eunuchs. These women— in particular the heroine of Euphonia—are goddess as much as whore, which is no doubt why the sense of betrayal, from the heroes’ point of view, is so great. Strong, active, independent, self-assured, and beautiful, women are by far the most powerful characters, as characters, in the narratives. In keeping with their masculine attributes, they are also the ones to initiate the love affairs. Like Mephistopheles, “l’esprit de vie” (the life spirit) of La Damnation de Faust, they are the characters who set the plot in motion and give it life. I began by proposing that, in reading the heroines of these stories, we look beyond Camille to what they represent musically—to what they symbolize or even allegorize as targets of Berliozian invective. I would like to end by suggesting that we go back and consider them now as real women, but again beyond Camille—most especially the Camille of 1831. For insofar as they are modeled on Berlioz’s former beloved, she is Marie Pleyel at least as much as Camille Moke: she is less the eighteen-year-old fiancée than the woman of international fame and sulfurous reputation who, soon after her marriage, was repudiated by her husband for immoral conduct and thereafter led a life unbound by convention and single-mindedly devoted to her art in a way that, in another, Berlioz might have admired. When the heroine of Euphonia is accused of having eighteen lovers, the number sounds either comical in its precision or drastic in its excess, leading some critics to speak of her—and consequently of Camille herself—as a nymphomaniac.16 I suspect that Berlioz is, rather, exercising a belated revenge on his erstwhile fiancée by conflating her with the Marie Pleyel of 1844, summing up in an arbitrary number the trail of lovers she was known to have had since the passionate but properly sanctioned affair of their youth.17 Such a detail points to a larger phenomenon affecting the lives of real women during the years surrounding Euphonia: the increasing visibility of professional or otherwise publicly active women, whose independence sometimes, as in the case of Marie Pleyel or George Sand, entailed a flouting of traditional notions of female sexual propriety. In the field of pianism, female virtuosos (including Pleyel herself) came into increasing prominence precisely in the mid-1840s, a development reflected, as Katharine Ellis has demonstrated, in the strongly misogynist response of much of the musical press.18 Feminism itself, moreover, as represented notably by the great French crusader Flora Tristan, came into sharp relief in the very year of Euphonia, which coincided with Tristan’s landmark tour of France (and with her death

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that same year). In literature, finally, the most famous of all French femmes fatales made her appearance in La Revue des deux mondes only a year after Euphonia: Mérimée’s Carmen, whose violent end at the hands of a lover is firmly etched in the mind of all opera-goers. Those who know the story in its operatic form may nevertheless be unprepared for the extreme misogyny of Mérimée’s version, next to which that of Euphonia seems almost tame. “Women have two good moments, in bed and dead,” reads the opening epigraph of Carmen, given (without translation) in Greek—a language taught, at the time, only to men. “Into closed mouth no fly can enter,” reads the cryptic quotation at the end, as though voicing a grim moral on the dead Carmen parallel to the eerie silence that falls over the Musical City after the doomsday close.19 It so happens that George Sand, the most visible feminist of the period, had been a major contributor to La Revue des deux mondes but was dropped in 1844, as Peter Robinson has noted, on the pretext that her novels were too “political” and not sufficiently “literary.” Mérimée’s tale, on the contrary, was welcomed, concludes Robinson, as part of the assault against emancipated women during these years.20 Between Mérimée’s heroine and Berlioz’s, one crucial difference deserves to be brought out. The vengeance in Carmen is purely private and individual (though Bizet was later to juxtapose it, brilliantly, with the public killing of a bull). In Euphonia, the vengeance represents a cosmic judgment day visited upon a heroine guilty of crimes affecting not only the avenger himself but artists, art in general, and the entire city. In neither story, to be sure, does the punishment itself go unpunished (nor does it in the Symphonie fantastique): the perpetrators of vengeance are killed along with the heroines. For all the fire-and-brimstone quality of his anger, there is never, with Berlioz, the slightest hint of an acte gratuit, of cruelty or violence for its own sake. The younger hero of Euphonia is moved to violence in avenging his friend and art itself, having learned to overcome violent impulses on his own behalf after his earlier abandonment by the same woman. For Berlioz as for his hero, the episode with Camille seems to have brought a lifelong lesson in self-control—a constant theme, from the mid-thirties on, of his stories and other writings. The conclusion suggests itself that, no matter how much we might deplore Berlioz’s lapses of political correctness in today’s terms, in the terms of his own day he was on the whole exceptionally tolerant, progressive, and humane. His critical cruelties were actually tame by contemporary standards, and over the years his furies were subject to softening.21 Thus he ended up on quite cordial terms with his old enemy, Fétis, and when he— or “the Author”—expresses remorse for his wicked spoof of Castil-Blaze’s opera, in the first edition of Les Soirées, there is no reason to suppose that this is entirely tongue-in-cheek.22 Although his verbal arsenal is liberally stocked with misogynist tropes, as we have seen, Berlioz is not among the

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critics Katharine Ellis finds responding with misogynist theories to the women virtuosos of the 1840s, even Pleyel; nor is he guilty of the antiSemitism rampant at the time.23 In his musical works, the parts for women tend to be positive and occasionally extraordinary: his Dido, he boasted, was the greatest and most flattering role ever created for a woman.24 Queen Dido’s peaceful kingdom in Les Troyens is indeed the best picture we have of Berlioz’s ideal state. Though that state is doomed to desctruction, sacrificed with Dido to the glory of Rome, the opera’s passionate mourning of their tragedy suggests Berlioz’s own ambivalence toward the rigors of empire. As for his response to the Republic of 1848, his denunciation of it as a disaster for the arts was seconded by many others, including Wagner, and he was far from the only artist (Mérimée and Vigny were others) to favor Napoleon III. We might wish to find concrete evidence of his enthusiasm for the great 1848 decree abolishing slavery on French territory, engineered by his friend of earlier days, Victor Schoelcher. Nevertheless Schoelcher and Hugo, companions in exile and in the Panthéon, have every reason to welcome into their midst a composer so obviously befitting the scale of the place and so ardently committed—though in ways different from theirs— to art for the sake of humanity. For us to accuse Berlioz of being unfaithful to the Republic is to repeat the very sort of gesture we are forced, in other circumstances, to criticize in him.

Notes 1. For the source of this remark, see NBE 25, p. 510. 2. Joël-Marie Fauquet, “Berlioz au Panthéon? Une fausse note!” Le Monde (29 February 2000). Peter Bloom responded to journalists’ questions about Berlioz’s politics at the press conference announcing the government’s decision. My thanks to him for filling me in on this episode of the struggle for a long-overdue honor. 3. See Patrick Barbier, La Vie quotidienne à l’Opéra au temps de Rossini et de Balzac, Paris, 1800–1850 (Paris: Hachette, 1987), chap. 1. 4. “Ah! si Napoléon revenait, je n’aurais pas d’inquiétude sur votre avenir.” CM I, 102 (and elsewhere). See also CM II, 482, for Berlioz’s mention of the founding by Napoleon of the Prix de Rome competition. 5. See my chapter, “The Short Stories,” in The Cambridge Companion to Berlioz, ed. Peter Bloom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), especially 275–76 n 1. 6. CG VI, 464. In the light of the debacle of 1870, the following lines are especially poignant: “Sous l’influence de la musique l’âme s’élève et les idées s’agrandissent, la civilisation progresse, les haines nationales s’effacent. Voyez aujourd’hui la France et l’Allemagne se mêler! L’amour de l’art les a réunies. . . .” (“Under the influence of music, the soul is uplifted and the mind enlarged, civilization progresses, national enmities subside. See how France and Germany join hands today! Love of art has united them. . . .”) 7. CG VII, 438; quoted in Cairns, The Memoirs (1975 ed.), 555, who notes that Berlioz cannot quite bring himself to mention Napoleon.

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8. Mémoires, Premier Voyage en Allemagne, VII; Memoirs, Travels in Germany, I, 7th letter (to Louis Bertin). The quotation is from Hamlet, V, i. 9. Les Soirées de l’orchestre, 233; Evenings with the Orchestra, ed. and transl. Jacques Barzun (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 183. 10. Mémoires, chaps. 4 and 8. 11. CG IV, 92: “notre admirable Président . . . a non seulement anéanti ces misérables ambitieux qu’on appelait Représentants, mais il les a rendus Ridicules” (“our admirable President . . . has not only crushed those miserable power-mongers called Representatives, but made them Ridiculous”). CG IV, 102: “Le président va de mieux en mieux, il réalise tous mes rêves sur le gouvernement. Il est sublime de raison, de logique, de fermeté, de décision” (“The president keeps getting better, he fulfills all my dreams about government. In reason, logic, firmness and decisiveness, he is sublime”). 12. On 16 January 1853 he sent a gilt-edged copy of the book to Napoleon III. See CG IV, 255, 263, 267; CG V, 63; and Les Soirées de l’orchestre, 634. 13. For more details, see “The Short Stories,” in The Cambridge Companion to Berlioz, ed. Peter Bloom; and James Haar, “Berlioz and ‘The First Opera,’” 19thCentury Music 3 (1979): 32–41. 14. Ernest Legouvé, “Hector Berlioz” (beginning of Part III), in Soixante ans de souvenirs (Paris: J. Hetzel, 1886). 15. CM I, 11. 16. David Cairns writes, for example: “Camille is shown as a superficially fascinating but brittle, vulgar, self-seeking nymphomaniac” (Memoirs [1975 ed.], 554). 17. Properly sanctioned, that is, by the engagement. Berlioz was to let his friends and family know—in what amounted to a first revenge on Camille—that she had once slept with him, on her own initiative. 18. Katharine Ellis, “Female Pianists and Their Male Critics in Nineteenth-Century Paris, Journal of the American Musicological Society 50 (1997): 353–85. 19. The full opening quotation reads: “La femme, c’est du fiel. Mais elle a deux bonnes heures: l’une au lit, l’autre à la mort” (“Woman is bitter as bile. But she has two good places, in bed and dead”). The final quotation closes an enigmatic Part IV that Mérimée added less than a year after publishing the story. As Peter Robinson demonstrates, this section—a disquisition on Gypsy language—makes sense as a final attempt, on the part of the learned narrator, to control and master the elusive Carmen, whose superior linguistic skills have put his to shame. Asks Robinson: “How can he master events if they are rendered in a language he cannot understand?” About the final quotation, Robinson writes: “The proverb with which the new story ends . . . thus takes on a chilling meaning, for after all, whose mouth has been closed?” See Robinson’s remarks in “Mérimée’s Carmen,” in Susan McClary, Georges Bizet: Carmen (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 14. 20. See McClary, Georges Bizet, 147–48. 21. See Kerry Murphy, Hector Berlioz and the Development of French Music Criticism (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1988), 54. 22. Les Soirées de l’orchestre, 267–68. 23. See Ellis, “Female Pianists”; and (on anti-Semitism) the chapter by Kerry Murphy elsewhere in this volume. Berlioz came to the defense of Mendelssohn in the face of criticism of the “Jewish” aspects of his music. 24. CG VI, 470.

6

Berlioz, Meyerbeer, and the Place of Jewishness in Criticism Kerry Murphy “Jewishness” In his introduction to the recent English translation of Meyerbeer’s diaries, Robert Letellier describes Berlioz as an “unassailable hero of modern musical political correctness.”1 For Letellier the remark is sarcastic, made when in the course of a passionate plea for the reexamination of Meyerbeer’s place in music history, he lumps Berlioz with Heine, Schumann, and Wagner, as villains responsible for a century of denigration, neglect, and misunderstanding of Meyerbeer’s work. Berlioz is described as contemptuous of Meyerbeer and is castigated—solely on the grounds of a much-quoted reference to Meyerbeer’s “snake-like flexibility”—for having contributed to his reputation of untrustworthiness. Although I agree with many of Letellier’s remarks, on this point, to which I shall return, I think he does Berlioz an injustice. On a number of levels Meyerbeer was a significant figure in Berlioz’s “present.” Their relationship is treated in most secondary literature on Berlioz, and the two most recent biographies of Berlioz, by Peter Bloom and David Cairns, both have interesting things to say on the topic.2 What I shall do here is look at critical writings on Meyerbeer during the July Monarchy and compare Berlioz’s writings with those of some of his fellow critics while focusing on the issue of “Meyerbeer as Jew.” Although there is little hard evidence of anti-Jewishness openly directed against Meyerbeer, the criticism of his work finds a curious and striking echo in the later antiSemitic stereotypes of the Jewish character of art. I shall conclude with a reexamination of Berlioz’s relationship to Meyerbeer. Meyerbeer’s “Jewishness” has not been widely seen as a crucial issue in discussions of the reception of his music in Paris during the 1830s,3 although later in the century, when anti-Semitic sentiments are openly and strongly voiced, it does becomes an important concern. Diana Hallman’s recent sociocultural analysis of Halévy’s opera La Juive has shown how the opera and its reception were enmeshed with contemporary views of the

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place of Jews in French society, suggesting that anti-Semitism did indeed play a role.4 Some of the criticism of Meyerbeer in the late 1830s and early 1840s can also be read as tainted by prejudice against Jews, and Hallman’s use of the term “anti-Semitism,” even though it did not gain currency until the later 1870s, is probably apt, since she refers not so much to reactions against the religion of the Jews as to “aspects of their character that found expression in their behavior.”5 Information on attitudes towards Jews in France during the middle years of the nineteenth century is relatively scarce; there is a gap in the literature between studies of the Enlightenment and studies of the Dreyfus affair, the Vichy government, and the rise of modern anti-Semitism. Jews had been made French state citizens during the Revolution in 1791, and were granted full legal equality during the July Monarchy. As Esther Benbassa comments, Jews in nineteenth-century France “distinguished themselves in the arts, literature, journalism, scientific research, the academy and the civil service [. . .] to a degree out of all proportion to the Jewish population’s size in relation to French society as a whole.”6 Jewish academics held important posts at all the major academic institutions—and Meyerbeer himself became a permanent associate member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in 1834.7 As is well known, Jewish composers nearly dominated the Paris Opéra in the mid-century, and they did not have to convert to Christianity in order to succeed, as was (or became) the case in other European countries. The “State” Jews of France became rapidly integrated into French society, calling themselves by the end of the century Français israélites as a sign of assimilation—French citizens of the Jewish faith.8 But integration into the State entailed neither total assimilation nor rejection of Jewish identity; and for many Jews, their relationship to Judaism remained very complex.9 (Hallman has shown that this was clearly the case with Halévy.) Appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, throughout the first fifty years of the century there was an abiding undercurrent of social intolerance of Jews. In the early decades, the emancipation of the Jews was strongly opposed by Catholic and other clerical groups who maintained a resentment that became less theologically and more racially prejudiced as the years went by.10 Jews were simply viewed as usurers, as one sees in the Dictionnaire de l’Académie française: “One calls a Jew, figuratively and familiarly, a man who lends at usurious rates of interest, who sells at excessively high prices, and who seeks in general to earn money by unjust and sordid means.”11 Many socialists developed a Judeophobic anti-capitalism that equated the Jews with “money power, banking, capitalism, and usury [. . .] symbolically incarnated in the Rothschilds.”12 For some, however, this equation resulted more in the condemnation of a perceived “rule of money” than in the condemnation of the Jews as a race.13 French attitudes towards Jews were crystallized by an extraordinary event that took place in the partly Christian town of Damascus, Syria, in Febru-

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ary of 1840, when a Capuchin monk and his servant disappeared, never again to be found. French consuls blamed the disappearance on the Jewish community, and a number of Jews were arrested, imprisoned, and tortured. The charge against them of ritual murder was supported by Adolphe Thiers, then president of the council of ministers, and the event became a major international incident, with most French newspapers expressing support of Thiers.14 As a critic for the Quotidienne rather tellingly put it, if one wanted the Jews to be innocent, “one would have to accuse Moslems and Christians. That is an unhappy alternative.”15 All the suspects were eventually declared innocent, and this became a factor that led to Thiers’ resignation on 29 October. The event was a significant one in the history of French Judaism and lent impetus to the establishment in France of a specifically Jewish press: for instance, the Archives israélites was itself founded in 1840. It is true that few critics during the July monarchy actually mentioned the fact that Meyerbeer was Jewish. The odd exceptions occur in the context of discussions of religion itself. The critic for the Gazette de France, for example, argues that Meyerbeer ought not to have so misrepresented the Catholics in Les Huguenots. As a Jew he ought to have been less in favor of the Protestants, who in Prussia subjugate the Jews “under the humiliating yoke of medieval laws,” and more in favor of the Catholics, whose religion the critic claims is full of “tolerance, sweetness, and reason.”16 To call for a more evenhanded approach to one of the darkest episodes in the history of religion in France is astonishing enough, but even more striking is the author’s failure to perceive that an obvious analogy could be drawn to the history of the persecution of the Jews. The following comment on Les Huguenots by Henri de Bonald,17 in the conservative paper La France, is more suggestive of anti-Jewish sentiments: Poetry surely has a certain license, but this license should have limits independent of those required by good taste. Indeed, constantly to sacrifice the sacred traditions on which are built the morality and religion of his own country—in order to satisfy the appetite for vulgar sensation, and out of a love of fashion, an affection for the charming harmonies of music, and an interest in the pleasures of the stage—and, for the sole purpose of serving the inspirations of a Jewish musician, here to create a Jewish apotheosis to the detriment of the dogma of our faith, there to create a holocaust of the Catholic religion [. . .]—all of this, it seems to me, is going too far.18 It is likely that Bonald’s reaction is more theological than “racist,” but his comment bears undeniable anti-Jewish connotations and foreshadows later nineteenth-century criticism that has Meyerbeer pandering to the “philistine tastes of the masses” by “sacrificing artistic merit.”19

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This point—that mid-nineteenth century views of Meyerbeer and his music foreshadowed racial stereotypes more overtly and frequently stated later in the century—is worth pursuing. One of the images used to symbolize the Jewish race in the nineteenth century is that of a “nation-less state”: the “wandering Jew” or the Juif errant became a widely-used figure in French romantic literature and art and was seen both positively, as a representative of toiling and suffering mankind,20 and negatively, as “a parasitic plant with no roots in the soil”;21 by the end of the century the French psychiatrist Jean-Martin Charcot went so far as to take “the wandering Jew” as a psycho-pathological type.22 Another common racial stereotype of the nineteenth century relates to the perceived inability of Jews to be truly creative or inspired. Both issues became dominant, and indeed linked, in Wagner’s essays of the 1850s and in the later writings of Vincent d’Indy.23 “Originality” Here I should like to consider some instances of such stereotyping, starting with the issue of originality. The notion is promulgated again and again in the daily press of the 1830s that Meyerbeer achieved his success through hard work and not through natural genius. This argument turned on a number of overlapping points: Meyerbeer was not inventive; Meyerbeer was a skilled imitator but not original; Meyerbeer was talented but lacked inspiration; unable to be creative himself, Meyerbeer borrowed extensively from others. A few examples will suffice. The notion that Meyerbeer lacks inspiration is found in the pages of the Gazette de France in 1836: Thus great skill can take the place of inspiration. Indeed, M. Meyerbeer is a composer far more talented than inspired. What others find in their soul and in the exaltation of their ideas, Meyerbeer owes to the intellectual or scientific understanding of his art, or to their combination. Talent, when directed by true and just feeling, can, with effort, produce what some imaginations can immediately conceive with no effort at all; talent can imitate the fire of inspiration.24 Louis Desnoyers, writing in Le National, is even more damning: We believe that it is a mistake to claim that [Meyerbeer’s] compositions are lacking in melody: melodies are there in numbers. No, what is lacking is only the composer. Meyerbeer in fact lacks melodic invention. It is rare that you can quote some phrase from one of his latest works that is entirely and completely new, or, like words written in another language, that doesn’t have roots in phrases we already know. [. . .] But if Meyerbeer has few melodic ideas of his own, he is on the other hand a most skillful

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Issues of Berlioz’s Days and Ours jeweler, who can make the most of others’ melodic gems [. . .]. He always chooses perfectly those that he wants to highlight, he fits them to the given situation, he modifies, colors, links, and cleverly disguises their original forms under the brilliance of the new setting.25

It is probable, though we cannot be certain, that the analogy to the jeweler, a profession well known as frequently practiced by Jews, is intentional. Desnoyers continues: For us, Meyerbeer is not a man of genius. [. . .] We have searched his works in vain for those inspirations that change or modify the face of art, for those innovations that mark an epoch, or those unexpected and spontaneous creations whose raison d’être is contained in themselves and not in works of the past. What we find there, on the contrary, is that groping manner, that absence of spirit, that patience and correctitude, that seeking out of effects, that attention to detail, and that forced originality [. . .] which distinguish those whom we conventionally call “men of talent.” [. . .] But if you absolutely insist on putting him into the other category [of “men of genius”], then you would have to say, despite the apparent contradiction in terms, that if he has genius, it is the genius of arrangement, the genius of imitation, in a word, the genius of not having genius [. . .]. [But] if he hasn’t got genius, at least in the eyes of many people, he gives the appearance of having it.26 Writing in the Chronique de Paris, Gustave Planche comments in the same vein: All the pieces are written with care and with the patience of a monk. One couldn’t find even amongst the most renowned Benedictines a more diligent and tenacious worker than M. Meyerbeer; but the patience that is sufficient for erudition is not sufficient for music; and M Meyerbeer, despite his unflinching courage, is not and never will be a first-class musician.27 A final example comes from Castil-Blaze, who argues obsessively in a series of four articles for La France musicale that Les Huguenots is nothing but a patchwork of reminiscences of other composer’s work and that Meyerbeer has “no great richness of ideas, sustained inspiration, or wellestablished flow of melody” since “he dreams above all of combining scenic effects”:28 To move the spectators, in the duos, trios, or whatever ensemble piece you wish, [Meyerbeer] employs the alarm signal, the curfew, fists, gunshots, assassinations, massacres [. . .]. He arranges Catholic psalms and

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Protestant hymns, he brings together priests, monks, nuns, witches, and gypsies [. . .]; he needs churches, cemeteries, caves, and battlefields; he exhausts all the resources of acoustics; he doubles his orchestra; he breaks all conventional rhythms [. . .]; he reinforces the voices of the chorus with paper cones [. . .]. The musical effects are in large part derived from this formidable apparatus.29 Castil-Blaze’s major point, which anticipates Wagner’s infamous “effects without causes,” is that Meyerbeer is concerned with only scenic effects, and that to provide music for these effects, he draws almost exclusively from the music of others. I am aware that the critics’ emphasis on Meyerbeer the “hard worker” must be put into the context of what was then the public knowledge of Meyerbeer’s meticulous attention to detail, his reworkings, long rehearsals, and hard slog. This must inevitably have affected how critics saw the final product. Yet the references to his industry in the reviews serve only to reinforce the view that industry is all there is, that Meyerbeer, despite his conscientiousness, lacks originality and inspiration.30 Some who write of Meyerbeer’s alleged lack of originality claim that it is the result of his extreme cultivation and urbanity. Heinrich Heine, for instance, writes of Meyerbeer, “A king’s ransom was spent on his education. [. . .] What he learnt he took as nature, and he developed to the fullest in the world’s school; he is one of the small number of Germans whom even France must acknowledge as models of urbanity.” Yet “cultivation destroys that sharp emphasis in the artist, that unexpected coloring, that originality of ideas, that emotional immediacy.”31 Accusations of urbanity and cosmopolitanism have been seen as having veiled derogatory anti-Semitic connotations and suggesting rootlessness and incincerity when used with reference to Jews.32 Given Heine’s extreme ambivalence towards Meyerbeer, and indeed towards his own Jewishness, such connotations may fairly be read here as well. The paucity of Meyerbeer lovers in today’s musical world may lead some readers to think that his critics, far from anti-Jewish, were in fact surprisingly perspicacious. But does this mean that the subterranean stereotype of the Jewish composer as an unoriginal imitator had no conscious or unconscious impact on critics’ references to Meyerbeer’s lack of inventiveness? Even if critics’ intentions were not anti-Semitic, their reviews did feed into later anti-Semitic stereotypes in Germany and France. We must be cautious not to use privileged knowledge of the future to interpret the past, but I cannot resist giving two brief citations from the writings of the well-known anti-Semite Vincent d’Indy to suggest what I mean: The Jew possesses a marvelous gift of assimilation, which permits him to produce surprising imitations, but the qualities of invention, which

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Issues of Berlioz’s Days and Ours alone can further art, fail him completely. The Hebrew race [. . .] has never and in no time been a creator of art.33 Gifted with admirable powers of assimilation, [Mendelssohn] quickly learnt all that it was possible to learn in music; but he almost totally lacked the spirit of invention. We would observe [ . . .] that such qualities and such faults are extremely widespread among the Israelites; always clever at appropriating the knowledge of others, they are hardly ever true artists by nature.34

Some Jewish artists and writers were themselves tormented by the perception of being unoriginal in their work because of their racial origins. The twentieth-century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein offers an interesting case in point: Even the greatest of Jewish thinkers is no more than talented. (Myself for instance.) I think there is some truth in my idea that I really only think reproductively. I don’t believe I have ever invented a line of thinking. I have always taken one over from someone else.35 Of course d’Indy and Wittgenstein are here referring directly and openly to Jews, and to the so-called Hebrew race. Still, the sentiments they express are not dissimilar to those we find among French critics of the 1830s. “Le Juif errant” The argument regarding the other principal stereotype, that of the “nationless” Jew, is more complicated. Critics constantly claimed that Meyerbeer combined the national characteristics of the music of three countries: Germany, Italy, and France. For some, Meyerbeer wrote German music in Germany, Italian music in Italy, and French music in France. And many felt positively about such an eclectic merging of styles, which they took as having definite artistic value. Others saw French music itself as a kind of fusion of German and Italian music or, as some expressed it, of melody and harmony. In 1836, Desnoyers claims, for example, “Meyerbeer now writes French music, that is to say, a mixture of Italian and German music, perfectly adapted to French taste.”36 But here, of course, the words “French taste” are the sting in the tail, and in the conclusion to his article, Desnoyers drives this home by describing the overall style of Les Huguenots as that of a diorama (in contrast to an artistic masterpiece): in France, he philosophically concludes, only few go to the Louvre, but many flock to the diorama.37 There were critics, however, among them Gustave Planche, who saw Meyerbeer’s mixing of various national styles as demonstrating a lack of national roots:

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[Meyerbeer] has not combined the German and Italian schools into the French school, he has not blended Mozart and Cimarosa into his own unique style; he has tried, it is true, to commingle and merge the styles of several schools. [. . .] As he did not feel that he had himself the ability to create a new style [. . .] he decided to borrow from all dynasties some feature of their armorial bearings; his plan was realized [. . .] but his coat of arms belongs to all races. He forcefully ennobled himself and forgot only one thing: to give himself ancestors.38 This critic seems indirectly to refer to Meyerbeer’s status as Juif errant while also drawing links between the lack of a “home base” and the need to borrow from others—the lack of an original style. What is interesting in all these reviews is that while they speak of national styles in music, Meyerbeer’s own national identity remains vague: he is of German origin, but no longer really German. Certainly as the century progressed and Meyerbeer’s operas gained in popularity in France, the French were increasingly inclined to treat him as an honorary Frenchman. At his death in 1864, the obituaries in the French newspapers almost all claimed Meyerbeer as their own. Berlioz’s friend Joseph d’Ortigue was especially picturesque: Meyerbeer is not only French because his principal operas are French, but because they are written with French taste and in the French spirit, and because he made himself French (just as, in the second period of his career, he made himself Italian). He made himself French by his mores, by his habits, by his welcoming relationships so rich with elegance and urbanity, by his fine and astute conversation with its surprises and its nuances atuned to the language of the salon—a language he used with that easy yet circumspect grace to which he knew how to add just the merest hint of German naïveté. It was in Paris that Meyerbeer learnt who he was, since until he arrived here, whether during his scholarly German period or during his even more brilliant Italian period, he wasn’t really himself. He was groping, he was seeking his voice. It was in Paris that he found it.39 From the reviews of the 1830s, however, one has little sense of Meyerbeer’s having any particular national identity. Berlioz on Meyerbeer It might be expected that Berlioz would feel jealousy or envy of Meyerbeer’s position at the Opéra, where the German composer could buy rehearsal time and exact the performance conditions he desired. Such feelings may have become more pronounced at the time of Le Prophète, in 1849, but

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even at the beginning of his review of the score of Les Huguenots, Berlioz feels it necessary to state that “We will try to remove all outside influences in the appreciation of the work that is the subject of this article.”40 Taken as a whole, Berlioz’s reviews of this opera convey genuine admiration, despite his serious reservations about lapses of taste in the first two acts, which he admittedly downplays. In places Berlioz seems to experience a sense of excess: he is overwhelmed; the opera is a “colossal success” which “surpasses everything in terms of dramatic expression that has been attempted to this date”; it shows “prodigious force” and conveys “passions whose energy is frightening”; some sections even produce in him a sort of “vertigo.”41 In contrast to the reviewers cited above, who comment upon Meyerbeer’s lack of inspiration, Berlioz remarks that Meyerbeer has not followed the cold thread of reason in his works, but rather that of instinct and inspiration.42 Maintaining his stated aim of objectivity, Berlioz conscientiously details passages which he feels are not of the same caliber as the rest of the opera, in particular passages of dramatic inconsistency; but his overall admiration for Meyerbeer’s manipulation of massed vocal forces and particularly for his instrumentation shines steadfastly through everything that he writes. In fact it is perhaps Meyerbeer’s originality in instrumentation that makes the greatest impact on Berlioz; it is certainly this aspect of his music that Berlioz immortalized by including so many examples from Meyerbeer’s works in the Traité d’instrumentation. Berlioz does not comment on Meyerbeer’s use of different national styles. He sees Meyerbeer not as lacking such styles, but rather as belonging to an international brotherhood of composers that goes beyond national boundaries. What he most dislikes in Meyerbeer’s music Berlioz identifies as Italian—the use of certain rhythms and certain vocalises—but what he appreciates is not identified by national characteristics. In other instances Berlioz could be sensitive to a lack of national style. In his infamous review of Hérold’s Zampa, for example, he wrote, “Hérold, without having a style of his own, is nevertheless neither Italian, French, nor German. His music very strongly resembles those industrial products manufactured in Paris, according to procedures invented elsewhere and slightly modified; it is Parisian music.”43 Meyerbeer, as we have seen, escaped this condemnation. I do not wish to claim that Berlioz was in some way unique because in his criticism we see no trace of the racial stereotypes that I believe might lie behind some criticism of the time, for other critics, too, were similarly free from such stereotyping. In particular, perhaps surprisingly, Joseph d’Ortigue, writing for the Catholic paper La Quotidienne, offers rhapsodic praise of Meyerbeer: considering whether Meyerbeer wrote Protestant music for Les Huguenots and Catholic music for Robert le diable (a much discussed point in the press), d’Ortigue argues that Meyerbeer’s music transcends such divisions and rather exemplifies “Christian music.” For d’Ortigue, Meyerbeer

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was the composer who “best understood religious music”;44 his own religious background was not an issue. To conclude I want very briefly to reassess the picture that we have of the relationship between Berlioz and Meyerbeer from their correspondence, memoirs, and dairies. Obviously there was an element of the friendship between Meyerbeer and Berlioz that was based on mutual expediency, as the one could be useful to the other in a number of ways. Yet there was between them an apparently genuine if complex friendship. Berlioz respected Meyerbeer as a composer, and if he was irritated or angered by the way Meyerbeer pandered to audience taste, this was chiefly because he felt that Meyerbeer should have known better.45 Berlioz was also grateful for Meyerbeer’s many levels of support, for his encouragement, and for his understanding and appreciation of his (Berlioz’s) music.46 On the whole Berlioz was indulgent of Meyerbeer’s insecurities and maneuverings with the press—which meant, for instance, that he could comment with some amusement, in a letter of 1853 to his sister Adèle, that tomorrow I am going to a big literary dinner at Meyerbeer’s, that is to say, at the Café de Paris, with MM. [Armand] Bertin, [Victor] Cousin, [Ludovic] Vitet, etc. You guessed it: Meyerbeer is about to mount a new opera, but at the Opéra Comique this time. He is more scared than ever. They say, however, that it is charming and quite new. He is a true Master!47 There is no evidence that Berlioz ever abused Meyerbeer’s sensitivity in order to bribe him, as other critics apparently did, including the unscrupulous Pier Angelo Fiorentino.48 But at times Meyerbeer’s machinations did lead to exasperated and even bitter tirades from Berlioz’s pen about his nefarious influence on operatic life, especially after the première of Le Prophète in 1849, when it must have been particularly grueling for Berlioz to see the dramatic improvement in the performance standards at the otherwise lackluster Paris Opéra that was clearly achieved through the composer’s power and influence. But even Berlioz’s much-quoted harangue about Meyerbeer’s pernicious influence on the Parisian musical world—“What a job it is today to make an opera succeed! What intrigues! What seductions to work, what money to spend, what dinners to give! This all makes me feel miserable. It’s Meyerbeer who has caused all this [. . .]”49—is directed not only at Meyerbeer, for whom Berlioz has kind things to say in the same letter, but also and perhaps even more so at the compliance of others. As he later wrote to the Princess Sayn-Wittgenstein, in 1859, it was not Meyerbeer’s avant-première dinners as such that irritated Berlioz (extremely busy at the time), but the fact that these had started a craze:

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And so many obligatory evenings taken up by these ridiculous preparations for success: there’s the composer’s dinner, the director’s dinner, the publishers’ dinners. So many givers of dinners! I am almost inclined to say to them: “But all this is crass, stupid, leave me alone with all your dinners on the night-before.”50 Berlioz was clearly aware of the complexity of Meyerbeer’s personality and of his almost compulsive need for flattery. Early in their friendship he speaks of the effort it sometimes takes to “get the truth out of him,”51 and even many years later he mentions the “snake-like flexibility” of his character.52 Meyerbeer’s courtship and financing of the press was of course public knowledge, and he was publicly ridiculed for it. An article in the satirical Charivari of 13 February 1841, for example, mentions the critical role of Meyerbeer’s agent in Paris, Louis Gouin, in priming the press: When Meyerbeer is not in Paris, when he is dipping his ill-tempered muse in the baths of Germany, Gouin, the faithful M. Gouin, replaces him; it is he who is in charge of burning the incense of publicity on the trivet of the feuilleton; he never runs into a journalist without saying to him, “I have just received a letter from the maestro in which he speaks a lot about you and your last article on the Huguenots, which, he says, is a masterpiece of musical intelligence.”53 Berlioz is then singled out for special mention: If [M. Gouin] encounters Berlioz, he also says to him, “I have just received a letter from the maestro; he asks me what you are working on; he tells me that he had your symphony performed before the Empress of Russia and it made her cry like a true Capulet. That composition is a true masterpiece of musical intelligence.”54 Le Charivari thus implies that Berlioz, too, was subject to Meyerbeer’s manipulations, as were others, but as we have said above, this does not appear at all likely. It is indeed possible to find in Meyerbeer’s correspondence letters that suggest that their contents were to be passed along to others. In the postscript of his letter to Berlioz’s friend Georges Kastner of 19 February 1840, for instance, Meyerbeer asks what Berlioz is doing and what his travel plans for Germany are; he asks that Kastner pass along his warm regards; and he expresses his wish to have the honor of having introduced a man of genius, the composer of the admirable Symphonie de Roméo, to his compatriots in Germany. Kastner was obviously intended to show these compliments to Berlioz: the body of the letter is written in German (of which Berlioz understood not a word), but this postscript is written in French.55

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Berlioz’s own correspondence tells us of many dinner parties and meetings with Meyerbeer. But Meyerbeer’s daybooks reveal that they met casually on a far more regular basis than we might have thought. During the 1840s Meyerbeer constantly noted visits from Berlioz, sometimes for casual meals (“Mittagbrod”), but more often than not for just a simple visit (“Besuch”). The daybooks also evidence Meyerbeer’s assiduous attendance not only at Berlioz’s concerts, but also at their rehearsals. It seems that beneath their rather public relationship, and the understandable misgivings that Berlioz had about Meyerbeer’s influence (misgivings mixed, perhaps, with a little envy), there was another more intimate and easy-going friendship between the two men. In that context, phrases such as “snakelike flexibility” may represent more understanding than condemnation; surely such a passing comment and others like it could never have sown the seeds of international distrust of Meyerbeer. David Cairns comments that the worlds of Meyerbeer and Berlioz, as revealed in their correspondence, were materially remote from one another, for Meyerbeer’s was one “of great riches and the power they conferred to do as you liked.”56 But it seems to me that there is also something pathetic in Meyerbeer’s anxieties and insecurities, which contrast rather vividly with the authoritative persona that Berlioz presents to us in his correspondence of the 1830s and 1840s, for he seems, despite all the obstacles, to have enjoyed a confidence and assurance as an artist that Meyerbeer never had. In his dealings with others, Berlioz conveys a firmness of moral conviction as well, and I would agree with the verdicts reached by both Bloom and Cairns that there is little trace in Berlioz’s writings of the anti-Semitism or anti-Jewish statements that were fairly common in his lifetime. Bloom and Cairns both cite Berlioz’s review of Wilhelm von Lenz’s Beethoven et ses trois styles, in which Berlioz takes Lenz to task for making remarks on Mendelssohn’s music that are based on anti-Jewish prejudice.57 Indeed, Cairns refers to Berlioz’s “incorruptibility of vision and purpose” as being “something that placed him apart from the values and venalities of contemporary society and in implicit criticism of them.”58 The same cannot be said of Berlioz’s colleagues in the press, many of whose writings may be read as displaying a decidedly ambiguous attitude to Meyerbeer; and although Meyerbeer’s Jewishness is rarely mentioned, the kinds of criticisms that are made of him mesh uncannily with later derogatory stereotypes of the Jewish composer.

Notes 1. The Diaries of Giacomo Meyerbeer: 1791–1839, ed. and trans. Robert Letellier, 2 vols. (Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson Press, 1999), 1:50. 2. Peter Bloom, The Life of Berlioz (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998); David Cairns Berlioz II, Servitude and Greatness (London: Allen Lane, 1999).

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3. James H. Johnson writes: “Notices of their works [those of Meyerbeer, Halévy, Auber, and Offenbach] in the 40s, 50s, and 60s did not refer to their Jewishness.” See Johnson, “Antisemitism and Music in Nineteenth-Century France,” Musica Judaica 5 (1982–83): 79–96; here, 80. 4. Diana R. Hallman, “The French Grand Opera La Juive (1835): A Sociohistorical Study” (Ph.D. diss., City University of New York, 1995). 5. See Jacob Katz, From Prejudice to Destruction: Anti-Semitism, 1700–1933 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980), 4. 6. Esther Benbassa, The Jews of France: A History from Antiquity to the Present, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999), 115. 7. Jews held posts at the École Normale, the Sorbonne, the Collège de France, and the École pratique des hautes études, as well as at the Académie des BeauxArts. See Benbassa, The Jews of France, 117. 8. Ibid., 126. 9. Ibid., 133. 10. This is a point that is made throughout the chapters on France in Leon Poliakov, The History of Anti-Semitism, vol. 3 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975). 11. Dictionnaire de l’Académie française (Paris, 1835), 2:81 (s.v. “Juif”). 12. Eugen Weber, My France: Politics, Culture, Myth (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1991), 289. 13. See, for example, Katz’s comments on Toussenel’s Les Juifs, rois de l’époque (Paris: École sociétaire, 1845): “This book can rightly be called an anti-Semitic classic. [. . .] However, there are no traces of overt racism in Toussenel’s book” (126). 14. The Journal des débats and L’Espérance (a Protestant newspaper) were notable exceptions. See Poliakov, The History of Anti-Semitism, 348. 15. La Quotidienne (9 April 1840); quoted in Jonathan Frankel, The Damascus Affair: “Ritual Murder,” Politics, and the Jews in 1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 114. 16. “A,” in the Gazette de France (10 March 1836), 1. 17. Surely a relative of Vicomte Louis de Bonald, a strong Catholic and vehement opponent of Jewish emancipation. 18. Henri de Bonald, La France (2 March 1836). Constraints of space do not allow us to include here the original texts of quoted passages. Our translations attempt to convey the sense of those passages; they are by no means literal. 19. Johnson, “Antisemitism and Music,” 81. 20. Poliakov, in The History of Anti-Semitism, sees Eugène Sue’s Juif errant of 1838 in this light. 21. Charles Didier, “Le Maroc,” Revue des deux mondes (1 November 1836), 267. 22. Jan Goldstein “The Wandering Jew and the Problem of Psychiatric AntiSemitism in Fin-de-Siècle France,” Journal of Contemporary History 20 (1985): 521–52. Charcot identified certain mental characteristics, related to nervousness and restlessness, as the result of the Jews’ lack of a “homeland.” 23. Wagner’s infamous Das Judenthum in der Musik first appeared in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik (3 and 6 September 1850); it is well translated by Stewart Spencer in Wagner 9 (January 1988): 20–33. Vincent d’Indy’s prejudices are on

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display in his Cours de composition musicale. [A translation is found in Merle Montgomery, “A Comparative Analysis (and Translation) of Vincent d’Indy’s Cours de composition musicale,” 7 vols. (Ph.D. diss., University of Rochester, 1946). —Ed.] 24. “A,” in the Gazette de France (10 March 1836). 25. Louis Desnoyers, in Le National (16 March 1836). 26. Ibid. 27. Gustave Planche, in Chronique de Paris 1 (March 1836): 252. 28. Castil-Blaze, in La France musicale (27 May 1838), 3. 29. Castil-Blaze, in La France musicale (22 May 1838), 1–2. 30. It is interesting to observe, in passing, that comments on Meyerbeer’s lack of originality bear a striking resemblance to remarks in reviews of works by women composers in the nineteenth century. The correspondence between perceptions of the “racial” and “female” Other is obviously an area that bears further investigation. I would like to thank Elisabeth Kertesz, who is working on the reception of the operas of Ethyl Smyth, for alerting me to this remarkable similarity. 31. Heinrich Heine, quoted in Anselm Gerhard, The Urbanization of Opera: Music Theater in Paris in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Mary Whittall (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 316. 32. See Michael P. Steinberg, “Mendelssohn’s Music and German-Jewish Culture: An Intervention,” The Musical Quarterly 83 (1999): 39. 33. Vincent d’Indy, Richard Wagner et son influence sur l’art française (1930); quoted in Johnson, “Antisemitism,” 84. 34. Vincent d’Indy, Cours de composition musicale (Paris: Durand, 1909), 2:406. The passage echoes Wagner’s remarks on Mendelssohn in Das Judenthum in der Musik. 35. Wittgenstein’s remark is cited in Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Duty of Genius (London: Cape, 1990), 316. 36. Louis Desnoyers, in Le National (16 March 1836). 37. Ibid. 38. Gustave Planche, in Chronique de Paris 1 (March 1836): 253. 39. Joseph d’Ortigue, in Le Ménestrel (8 May 1864), 1. 40. Berlioz’s principal articles on Les Huguenots appeared in the Revue et Gazette musicale on 6, 13, and 20 March 1836 (see CM II, 419–26; 431–38). My translations are taken from H. Robert Cohen, “Berlioz on the Opera (1829–1849): A Study in Music Criticism” (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1973); here, 152. 41. See Cohen, “Berlioz on the Opera,” 424–25. 42. Ibid., 436. 43. Berlioz, in Journal des débats (27 September 1835); CM II, 289. See also Kerry Murphy, Hector Berlioz and the Development of French Music Criticism (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1988), 99. 44. D’Ortigue, in La Quotidienne (22 April 1836). 45. Berlioz expressed this more strongly and openly in his reviews of Le Prophète (in the Journal des débats of 20 April and 27 October 1849) than in his reviews of Les Huguenots. 46. For instance, Meyerbeer attended Berlioz’s concerts and rehearsals, encouraged him with Benvenuto Cellini and helped to have it performed at the opera, offered assistance at the time of his travels in Germany, and, among other things, sat in on more than a few performances of Les Troyens in 1863.

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47. CG IV (letter of 10 October 1853), 371–72. 48. See Murphy, Hector Berlioz and the Development, 63. Berlioz himself maintained a long and friendly relationship with Fiorentino. 49. CG III (letter of 25 April 1849), 624–25. 50. CG V (letter of 10 March 1859), 666. 51. CG II, 554. 52. CG VI, 83–84. 53. See Giacomo Meyerbeer, Briefwechsel und Tagebucher, ed. Heinz and Gudrun Becker (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1975), 3:720. 54. Ibid. 55. Ibid., 243. 56. Cairns, Berlioz II, 110. 57. Bloom, Life of Berlioz, 182–83; Cairns, Berlioz II, 68. 58. Cairns, Berlioz II, 53.

7

Berlioz, Liszt, and the Question of Virtuosity Cécile Reynaud “Virtuosity” Virtuosity, both vocal and instrumental, is a phenomenon central to nineteenth-century musical life. As a sign of the musician’s need to seek out new audiences to replace the traditional protection of church and court, it plays a crucial role in the social history of music. And as an impetus to seek out newly expressive instrumental techniques and timbres, it plays a role in the history of composition itself. To speak of virtuosity in our context, therefore, is first and foremost to speak of instrumental music, and principally that of the violin and the piano. One may legitimately wonder how Berlioz might be associated with the question of virtuosity, having himself played neither the violin nor the piano, having rarely composed for these instruments in a solo capacity, and having at times expressed opposition to the use of the piano as the allpurpose stand-in for other instrumental combinations. Let us recall that the first cantata which Berlioz submitted for the Prix de Rome, La Mort d’Orphée, with its freshly conceived sonorities, met with a tragic fate precisely because it was impossible for the pianist hired for the day by the Académie des Beaux-Arts to “reduce” it, at sight, for the purpose of audition and judgment.1 Rather than as a failing of his own work, Berlioz saw this as a demerit of that sovereign instrument, the piano itself, which he considered “incomplete” and “perfidious” and thus unqualified by definition to reproduce a unique and complex orchestration: Does anyone seriously maintain that one can judge the true quality of an orchestral work emasculated in this fashion? [. . .] Is it not self-evident that the piano, by destroying all sense of instrumentation, by this fact alone places all composers on the same level? [. . .] For orchestrators, the piano is really a guillotine destined to cut off the heads of all the aristocrats, a guillotine from which only commoners have nothing to fear.2

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By drawing a distinction between those whom he would call instrumentalistes (“instrumenters,” or “orchestrators”) and instrumentistes (“players”),3 that is to say, between composers who are true connoisseurs of instruments and their resources and those who are simply performers, most obviously pianists, Berlioz puts forth, it seems to me, one of the key ideas of his vision of instrumental virtuosity. Just as he believes that the piano is little apt to capture the essence of an orchestration, so too does he believe that cultivating the individual tone color of each instrument is a necessary part of the compositional act. “An instrument that sums up all others”—such is the idea of the piano that Berlioz refutes. And yet this is precisely the idea that generates much of the pianistic virtuosity of the time and the very notion of the superiority of the piano. It is the larger nexus of ideas—which take us from the reign of the individual instrument (or voice) to the sovereignty of collective participation in the playing of the rather more vast instrument that is the orchestra—that I should like to study here. I take up, first, Berlioz’s critique of vocal virtuosity, which gives rise to some of his own “virtuoso” criticism; then, Berlioz’s critique of instrumental virtuosity, in particular the virtuosity of friends and colleagues, most notably of Liszt, for it seems to me highly significant that the man recognized as the greatest virtuoso of his day should make use of Berlioz’s music for some of his most remarkable pianistic experiments; and, finally, Berlioz’s notion of orchestral virtuosity. Berlioz’s Critique of Vocal Virtuosity It may have been Berlioz the critic who commented on virtuosity, but the person actually speaking was Berlioz the composer. What he develops is a classic double conception: deploring the lack of respect shown his work by his interpreters, Berlioz identifies a brilliant and empty sort of virtuosity, which fails to serve a larger purpose (something that he will continue to do throughout his career); he then identifies a creative and inventive virtuosity, one that offers new means of expression (of which Liszt, as we shall see, was the leading exponent). Most of the feuilletons that Berlioz devotes to interpreters are affected by this double conception: music, obviously dependent upon performers, is methodically exploited by some of those very performers, who do not serve the composition but rather make use of it to serve themselves. In an article entitled “On the Present State of Singing in the Lyric Theaters in France and Italy,” first published in 1853 and later reproduced in À travers chants, Berlioz makes this criticism explicit: It seems only commonsensical to say that in establishments called lyric theaters, the singers should be there for the operas; but in fact just the opposite is the case, for the operas are there for the singers. A score

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always has to be more or less adjusted, fitted, remodeled, lengthened, or shortened in order to put it into a state (and what a state!) in which it can be performed by the artists to whom it is delivered. One singer finds his part too high, another finds his too low; this one has too many numbers, that one has too few; the tenor wants every phrase to end with an i, the baritone wants only a; here, the one fusses about a bothersome accompaniment; there, his counterpart complains about a troublesome chord; this is too slow for the prima donna; that is too fast for the tenor.4 In this context, as Eric Bordas suggests,5 Berlioz brilliantly creates a stereotypical character: the composer who is the victim of the performer—in this instance, and most others, the vain and ignorant singer. His reproach is first and foremost social in nature, for by concocting this sort of personage, he displays among other things an abhorrence of the lust for money that is particularly common, he suggests, among the virtuosos. And in the course of a long series of ironic diatribes (his specialty), Berlioz makes it seem a commonplace that such artists appear only in order “to play their larynx.” Indeed, using as a prop the identity of the almighty singer, Berlioz turns out scathing satires of those who worry far more about their personal glory and well-being than about the music they are obliged to perform. These passages sound a moralistic note, but they remain nonetheless current and amusing because of the irony and humor that percolate through almost every line, and that turn, as we have said, on the singer’s conceitedness and craving for cash. In Les Grotesques de la musique, in an article soberly titled “Mme Stoltz, Mme Sontag—Les millions,” Berlioz evokes, with irony but not without sincere emotion, the death of Henriette Sontag (1806–54), the incomparable singer who had so moved him as Susanna during a performance of Figaro by voicing, in “Deh vieni,” a kind of “secret melody,” a “song of solitude,” a “mysterious song of the night.” “The admirable Sontag” has died in the pursuit of “millions” that led her all the way to the “summit of the Andes”: But why do you need so much money when you are only a singer? When you have a city house, a country house, extravagance, luxury, when your children’s futures are assured, what more do you need? Why not be satisfied with five hundred thousand francs, with six hundred thousand francs, with seven hundred thousand francs? Why must you absolutely have a million, or even more than a million?6 Berlioz reserves his most biting criticism for the tenor and his even more impertinent pursuit of revenue. In the Sixth Evening of Les Soirées de l’orchestre, he weaves a fiction around the character of the tenor, whose starting point is no doubt real:

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“The leading tenor gets one hundred thousands francs; why,” asks the second tenor, “shouldn’t I get eighty thousand?”—“And I fifty?” puts in the third. To feed these gaping vanities, to fill up these chasms, the manager vainly cuts down the expenses of the company, reduces and cripples orchestra and chorus by giving the artists who make them up porters’ wages. Vain are his efforts, useless his sacrifices—until the day when he tries to find out exactly how he stands, attempts to compare the hugeness of the tenor’s salary with the work done, and discovers with a shock the following curious result: The first tenor, with a salary of a hundred thousand francs, sings approximately seven times a month; he therefore takes part in eightyfour performances a year, and receives a little over eleven hundred francs an evening. Taking a role comprising eleven hundred notes or syllables, this represents one franc a syllable. Thus in Guillaume Tell: “Ma (1 franc) présence (3 francs) pour vous est peut-être un outrage (9 francs) Mathilde (3 francs) mes pas indiscrets (5 francs) Ont osé jusqu’à vous se frayer un passage !” (13 francs). Total, thirty-four francs: your words are golden, my lord. [. . .] So the manager pays, goes on paying, pays again and again, till the day comes when he can pay no more and is compelled to close his theater. As his brother managers are in a no more flourishing condition, some of the immortals have to resign themselves to giving lessons in solfège (those who can) or singing to a guitar in the public squares, with four candle-ends and a green carpet.7 By developing this sort of humorous criticism of a not entirely unreal phenomenon, by creating the one-hundred-thousand-franc tenor, Berlioz pillories singers who ignore or debase scores as composers conceived them, and institutions that bless what he elsewhere calls the “dépeçage,” or butchering, of composers’ works. Berlioz’s Critique of Instrumental Virtuosity Berlioz’s reactions to instrumental virtuosos lead to some issues that are the same as those considered above, and some that are new. Here, for example, he has much to say regarding the pianist’s quest for digital dexterity and pursuit of facile technical effects. At the end of his short story, “Le piano enragé” (The mad piano),8 an Érard instrument has been driven totally insane during a competition at the Conservatoire by thirty-one consecutive performances of the same Mendelssohn concerto, and thus, when the last contestant has gone off, begins to play the work by itself. The piano sows panic among the candidates and the judges, refuses to stop

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playing even when confronted by orders to desist from its master, Érard himself, and goes on even under a shower of holy water—which is presumably on hand to remind us of the literally diabolical dangers of an expressionless virtuosity that mechanizes music and that in the end prefers as its genitor not the musician but the automaton. Equally representative of Berlioz’s attitude regarding maestri of all species is the passage in his article on the piano in the Traité d’instrumentation, in which he expresses the desire to see eradicated that “unbearable tendency of the virtuosos, great and small, singers or instrumentalists, to put forth first and foremost what they take to be the attraction of their own personality, showing little concern for the everlasting respect that every performer owes every composer.”9 And yet we can see that Berlioz’s conception of instrumental virtuosity is nuanced: in the case of singers, he was dealing with those who were merely executants, but in the case of instrumentalists, he was dealing, at least most of the time, with those who were also composers. Virtuosity thus played a role in the creation of music that only the composer could play. The singer remained wholly an interpreter; the piano or violin virtuoso became the inventor of musical forms. Berlioz came to know two of the greatest virtuosos of his day, Paganini and Liszt, and it is noteworthy that the circumstances of his first meetings with both were associated more with composition than with execution: Berlioz composed Harold en Italie for Paganini, and Paganini, via his famous gift of twenty thousand francs, allowed Berlioz to compose Roméo et Juliette. Liszt arranged a number of Berlioz’s works for piano and thus rendered his music more widely known than it otherwise could have become. Liszt played in Berlioz’s concerts, too, of course, and by his presence lent them an added element of prestige. That a virtuoso should arrange symphonic or operatic music for piano is not surprising, but that Liszt should do so for Berlioz, who was apparently hostile to arrangements of any and all sorts (and famous for being so from the beginning of his career), requires comment. Was Liszt’s treatment of Berlioz in some way unique? Throughout his career, Liszt made “readings” of Berlioz. The pianist’s interest in the older composer, as well as his affection for him, was longlived. Their first encounter has subsequently been seen as historic, since it occurred on 4 December 1830, the eve of the first performance of the Symphonie fantastique. We must remember, however, that at that time, of the musicians and artists whose names were bandied about in the press, including Auber, Rossini, Boieldieu, Halévy, and Hérold, along with Harriet Smithson and Liszt himself, Berlioz was the least known of them all. We are well informed about this first encounter from several letters that Berlioz wrote to his father at the time, telling how he was honored by the presence of “le grand pianiste Liszt” and by that artist’s favorable reaction

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to the symphony. On 6 December 1830, Berlioz wrote that after the concert “Liszt, the celebrated pianist, practically forced me to dine with him, bombarding me with animated and enthusiastic compliments.”10 Berlioz sometimes seems to speak to Liszt as a student would speak to his teacher, even though Liszt was eight years his junior. Presumably thinking of a possible piano arrangement, Berlioz wrote to Liszt apropos of the Symphonie fantastique on 21 December 1830: Monsieur, I could not send you the score of my symphony any sooner, and I still have to keep the Scène du bal, which I am arranging for piano [myself]. I fear that I am abusing your patience and your kindness in asking you to examine the other movements. Please believe, Monsieur, that I am overwhelmed with gratitude for the encouragement you have already offered me, and for the future counsel that you have promised; both are to me simply invaluable.11 The ascendancy of the nineteen-year-old virtuoso provides a good illustration of the fundamental difference between the trajectory of the career of the pianist and that of the composer. The pianist—Liszt, that is—had the power to impress the public, to influence opinion, and thus to enhance the celebrity of selected composers by programming their works. Better than any critic or any publisher, Liszt could facilitate the dissemination of the labor of his peers. And Liszt did, of course, devote an important part of his repertory as a pianist to the music of his contemporaries. But his work in the domain of grand opera is better known than his work in less grandiose genres. Here, he was able to give, by the application of his name alone, a certain éclat to little-appreciated works. And he was able—via a mise-enpartition de piano, a transposition to the keyboard, and a translation into his own pianistic language—to analyze some of the original and most perplexing aspects of these works.12 Liszt’s mise-en-partition or “scoring” of the works of Berlioz is the result of no one clear or readily explainable request. Each work has its own raison d’être. If we look at Liszt’s versions of the Fantastique and of its sequel, Le Retour à la vie, for example, we see that that former led directly to Berlioz’s fame in Germany and elsewhere abroad through the intermediacy of Robert Schumann, who, thanks to Liszt’s careful orchestral indications, was able to pen the remarkable review of the symphony that appeared in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik in 1835.13 The latter, however, as we shall see, entitled Grande Fantaisie, gave Liszt one of his first opportunities to demonstrate his own capacities as an orchestral composer. One of the questions we must attempt to resolve is whether Liszt regarded Berlioz’s work simply as fertile terrain for his pianistic adventures, or whether Berlioz’s work rather caused him not only to challenge his skills as virtuoso pianist and interpreter, but also to reflect upon his own more personal creative aspirations.

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Liszt engaged with Berlioz’s music over a long period of time, as we may see from the following list:14 1833

1834–1835 1835 1837 after 1844 1845 1852–1853 1860 1865 before 1866

1852?–1879

Symphonie fantastique L’idée fixe, Andante amoroso d’après une mélodie de Hector Berlioz Grande fantaisie symphonique sur deux thèmes de M. Berlioz (piano and orchestra) Marche de pèlerins from Harold en Italie (piano solo) Harold en Italie (piano with viola) Ouverture du Roi Lear Le Carnaval romain (lost) Ouverture des Francs-Juges Bénédiction et serment, deux motifs de Benvenuto Cellini Danse des sylphes de la Damnation de Faust Marche au supplice de la Symphonie fantastique Marche de pèlerins de la Symphonie Harold en Italie (piano solo) (for the publication issued by Rieter-Biedermann in 1866) Harold en Italie (a revision made in view of the publication issued by Brandus in 1879)

As early as 1833 he made the famous piano score of the Symphonie fantastique and wrote a fantasy on the idée fixe; some twenty-seven years later, in 1860, he arranged the Danse des sylphes and perhaps even later revised his transcription of Harold en Italie on the basis of changes that Berlioz had made in the score—a clear sign of his respect for the will of the composer. Here we see Liszt as a faithful mirror of the composer himself. In the Grande Fantaisie (announced in November 1834 but first performed in April 1835), Liszt developed themes and motives from Le Retour à la vie, the mélologue that Berlioz completed in Italy in 1831 as a sequel to the Symphonie fantastique. Here we find one of Liszt’s first efforts to move beyond composition for piano alone. Indeed, before writing this fantasy for piano and orchestra, he had departed from the keyboard only once, in the mid-1820s, to compose his opera Don Sanche. May we therefore say that Berlioz was responsible for inspiring Liszt to take such an unfamiliar step, one perhaps unsettling to the otherwise secure virtuoso? Liszt’s works “after” Berlioz (Berlioz hated the word arrangement) are usually contemporary with concerts given by the two musicians. His versions of the Fantastique and the fantasy on the mélologue coincide roughly with the concerts of 22 December 1833, when the Fantastique was played at Berlioz’s concert at the Conservatoire, and of 3 May 1835, when Le

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Retour à la vie was given in the same hall, as the sequel to the Fantastique. The settings from Benvenuto Cellini were presumably prompted by the “Berlioz week” given by Liszt, in Weimar, in March 1852; Liszt played these at Berlioz’s home, in the presence of Wagner, on 11 October 1853, and at a soirée in Leipzig in early December of that year, in the presence of Hans von Bülow (who then, with Liszt, played his own four-hand arrangement of the overture to Benvenuto Cellini).15 The collaboration of the two musicians gave rise to a considerable and highly interesting epistolary exchange. On Berlioz’s side we may read what he thought the piano transcription ought or ought not to be from the composer’s point of view, and to what extent Liszt fulfilled his expectations. Indeed, in this enterprise, Berlioz seems to have been more the “talker” and Liszt more the “listener.” Still, Liszt knew that his transcriptions had earning power, and it is indicative of his generosity that he always insisted that the works belonged first and foremost to the composer. On 10 December 1837, for example, Liszt wrote to Berlioz: You will shortly receive the arrangement of your second symphony [Harold en Italie]. If it is your intention to put it on sale, along with the overtures to Les Francs-Juges and Le Roi Lear,16 Hofmeister in Leipzig pays me six francs per page for everything I send to him. This would all come, therefore, to about six hundred francs. You might decide to publish it only in Germany, assuming that it is impossible to sell it in Paris, but in any case you must protect your author’s rights for some later [French] publication, should one materialize. Let me know what you think of this when you find the time. While I would of course be happy to see these things appear in print, I want most of all to do what you believe is most advantageous to you.17 Berlioz later replied on 8 February 1838: I spoke to Richault about printing the two overtures of mine that you have reduced for piano. He doesn’t give a damn about them. For the symphony, if Hofmeister wishes indeed to offer me a reasonable fee, I should like nothing better than to have him publish it, along with the two other manuscripts that you sent to me. Please do the negotiating yourself; I leave my own interests entirely to you.18 Similarly, Liszt’s presence at Berlioz’s concerts, whether as composer or simply as performer, was also financially beneficial to Berlioz, as Berlioz was perfectly happy to admit. On 16 March 1844, he wrote to the pianist: You have so often offered to assist me with my concerts that, this time, I am going to accept. I’m told that you will arrive on the 22nd of this

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month, and, for this coming 6 April, a day when the royal theaters are normally closed, I have rented the Opéra Comique in order to give a brilliant soirée there with some one hundred eighty musicians. If your schedule allows you to play at least once [on this program], you will ensure the success of my efforts.19 In addition to the prestige that Liszt lent to Berlioz’s concerts, his presence as a collaborator allowed Berlioz not to have to worry about others’ arrangements that disfigured his works. On this crucial score, Berlioz sent a letter to Liszt on 28 April 1836, which has often been quoted: I have just received from Germany an overture to Les Francs-Juges ARRANGED for four-hands in such a way that I had a hard time recognizing my own work. It has been cut and chopped up in the style perfected by Castil-Blaze. I hate such impertinent liberties, and this latest proof of the dangers I incur by allowing my works freely to circulate has determined me once and for all to have nothing printed before I go on tour in Germany. I am being threatened with another arrangement of my first symphony, this one for four hands, made on the basis of your piano score. God only knows what all those chicken thieves are going to do to it, but I certainly do not want to offer them any more prey.20 Berlioz’s confidence in Liszt’s ability to arrange suggests confidence, too, in his ability to create and invent. Indeed, the two Berlioz weeks at Weimar, in March 1852 and February 1855, were in some ways a collaboration between two equal composers. Berlioz’s correspondence gives a good deal of evidence of Liszt’s contributions to the large-scale reworking of the score of Benvenuto Cellini, for example, and also of his help with matters of instrumentation and detail. Such a close and extensive cooperation between composers needs emphasizing, it seems to me, for it is quite rare in the history of music. In the letter to Liszt of 2 July 1852, for example, Berlioz lets his friend know that it was he (Liszt) who had best showed him how to improve both the score and the libretto of Benvenuto Cellini; these improvements eventually giving rise to the so-called Weimar version of the opera. Let me say, concerning your observations on Benvenuto, that they are entirely logical, and that that entire section which you propose to cut has always seemed to me icy and unbearable. But no one before had put me on the simple path that would allow such a cut: it was left to you to find it! Indeed, it is only a question of not having the Cardinal leave the stage after the scene with the statue and then of proceeding immediately to the dénouement. [. . .] The result of incorporating your ideas and mine is that the opera will now be cast in three acts, and that the set for

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the [new] third act will now be that of the [original] final tableau. The set for the [original] third tableau will be cut.21 On 4 July 1852, Berlioz wrote again to Liszt: I found your score of Harold, but not that of Le Roi Lear, which only confirms my earlier recollection of having sent that overture to Belloni [Liszt’s secretary] along with the overture to Les Francs-Juges. There will be a lot of things to change in your manuscript [of Harold] because of the changes I made in the score after you completed your work. The third movement in particular contains a number of modifications which, I fear, are untranslatable to the piano: it’s going to be necessary to sacrifice a lot of sustained notes. I would also kindly ask that you not employ the arpeggiated tremolo that you use in the introduction, in the left hand, for this effect on the piano is opposite to the effect in the orchestra and makes it difficult to appreciate the rather heavy but relaxed melody of the basses. [. . .] On another subject, don’t you think that the role you give to the viola, greater than the role it plays in the [orchestral] score, alters the physiognomy of the work? . . . The viola should be used in the piano score precisely the way it is used in the original. Here, the piano represents the orchestra, while the viola must remain apart and enfold itself in its own sentimental meanderings; everything else is foreign to it; it observes the action but never joins in.22 Reading such an exchange, we may well yet again wonder what Berlioz actually thought of the genre of the piano score: he is known for denigrating arrangements, but here it is clear, from the seriousness of his criticism, that he takes Liszt’s effort to be a work of art. While recognizing the practical utility of such a version for the wider diffusion of the symphony, he seems equally concerned that the pianist realize a translation that is both effective upon and idiomatic to his instrument as well as true to the original conception.23 Apart from Harold and the Fantaisie on the mélologue for piano and orchestra, which he never arranged for solo piano,24 Liszt’s arrangements of Berlioz are all for solo piano. What can we say of their aesthetic status? Liszt speaks to his own conception in the third Lettre d’un bachelier èsmusique, of September 1837, addressed to George Sand’s friend, the philologist Adolphe Pictet. He “defines” the piano, as it were, by comparing compositions for piano with compositions for orchestra: “You are surprised to see me occupied solely with the piano, and in no hurry at all to tackle the larger field of symphonic and dramatic music.” To a question posed to him by Pictet, Liszt offers a reply that is significant, I think, in revealing him in his identity as both composer and pianist:

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You seem not to realize that to speak to me of deserting the piano is to cause me to imagine a sad day indeed, a day that will obliterate the entire first part of my existence, [which is] inevitably linked to the instrument. For you see, my piano is to me what his frigate is to a sailor, what his steed is to an Arab, or even more so, because my piano, up till now, is myself, my word, my life. [. . .] Its strings have quivered under my passions, its docile keys have followed my every whim—and you, my friend, you want me to hurry up and abandon it in order to chase after the more brilliant reverberations of orchestral and theatrical success?25 Liszt’s response manifests the intimately entwined emotions of the virtuoso, the performer, and the composer. How else are we to understand his assertion that the piano, “c’est moi, c’est ma parole”? The instrument is at once the man and his music; for Liszt, it is impossible sharply to separate the multiple aspects of his artistry. Playing and writing for the instrument are almost one and the same thing; between the pianist and his own work, there is no barrier of an extraneous sort. Such a unity is not possible with the orchestra. One writes for the orchestra, but one does not really “play the orchestra”: that Berlioz used this very expression, “jouer de l’orchestre,” when pleased with a performance just conducted—as he does in the third letter of the Premier Voyage en Allemagne (of the Mémoires), which is addressed, and not by coincidence, to Liszt—is in a way proof of its literal impossibility. If the pianist can in himself amalgamate the roles of composer and interpreter, he can also publicize his music, as Liszt suggets, and make it known in ways that other creators cannot: Within the span of its seven octaves, the piano encompasses the range of the orchestra. And the ten fingers of a single individual are capable of rendering the same harmonies that it takes a hundred instruments playing together to produce. It is via the intermediacy of the piano that works are disseminated which, because of the difficulty of assembling an orchestra, would otherwise remain unfamiliar or unknown to the general public. Thus the piano score is to an orchestral composition what an engraving is to a painting: it multiplies it, it makes it available to everyone, and if it fails to transmit its colors, it still renders its lights and its shadows.26 Liszt ultimately refers to what he calls the “assimilating power” of the piano: We produce arpeggios as does the harp, sustained notes as do the wind instruments, and staccatos and a thousand other nuances that have here-

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tofore seemed to be the special prerogative of one instrument or another. And it is clear that technical advances in piano making will soon give us the varied sonorities that we are still unable to produce.27 Did Berlioz, who was happy to collaborate with Liszt, accept this notion? His ideal concert, in which he is at once composer, impresario, and conductor, does indeed resemble the piano recital as conceived and perhaps invented by Liszt. And he was indeed impressed by the imitative and assimilative powers of the piano in the hands of a virtuoso such as Liszt, to whom he consecrated a laudatory article in 1836: It would take a gifted pianist to enumerate and appropriately appreciate the varied resources, the new techniques, and the unknown effects by which [Liszt] has enriched his already very opulent performance. Although I was deeply moved by these novelties, I must declare myself totally incompetent to analyze the technical reasons for such incredible authority, having myself never even been able to play a C-Major scale on the piano with my right hand. The only observation I can make regarding new technical means, amidst the infinite choirs to which Liszt’s fingers gave birth, must be limited to those accents and dynamics widely seen as (and indeed in fact) unavailable on the piano until now; those grand and simple melodies composed of sustained and perfectly linked sonorities; those aggregates of notes sometimes struck with a certain violence and yet without harshness and without losing any of their harmonic splendor; those melodic progressions of minor thirds or those diatonic passages in the lower and middles ranges of the instrument (where, as everyone knows, the vibrations are most persistent) played staccato with a most incredible rapidity, such that each note produces only a dry sound that is extinguished immediately after it is played and is thus perfectly detached from the notes that both precede and follow, resembling passages of this sort as might be played at the nut of the bow on a fine double bass by a steam engine—because I can imagine no human arm, even that of some Dragonetti of Dragonettis, that would be capable of such incredible agility.28 This sort of admiration of a virtuoso, from Berlioz’s pen, is hardly common. Berlioz’s Notion of Orchestral Virtuosity It seems clear that orchestral virtuosity, for Berlioz, is intimately associated with the virtuoso conductor. Indeed, as we have already suggested, Berlioz sees the conductor as the virtuoso and the orchestra as his instrument.

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After explaining the trials and tribulations of a series of difficult but persistent rehearsals that have allowed him to hope for a successful performance, Berlioz writes, in the third part of the Premier Voyage en Allemagne, addressed to Liszt, that only then does the recompense begin: Then, I grant you, the composer-conductor lives on a plane of existence unknown to the virtuoso. With what ecstasy he abandons himself to the delights of playing the orchestra! How he hugs and clasps and sways this immense and fiery instrument! Once more he is all vigilance. His eyes are everywhere. He indicates with a glance each vocal and orchestral entry, above, below, to the left, and to the right. His right arm unleashes tremendous chords which seem to explode in the distance like harmonious projectiles. [. . .] Then, though only then, the composer-conductor often becomes oblivious to the public. He listens to himself and judges his own handiwork; and if he is moved and his emotions are shared by the artists around him, he takes no further heed of the reaction of the audience: they are too remote from him.29 The same idea may be found in the Le Chef d’orchestre: Of all creative artists, the composer is practically alone in having to depend upon a host of intermediaries who stand between him and the public—intermediaries, be they intelligent or stupid, friendly or hostile, alive or inert, who from the first to the last can either contribute to the wider diffusion of his work or disfigure it, insult it, or completely destroy it. Singers have often been accused of being the most dangerous of all such intermediaries, but this, I think, is incorrect. The most dangerous, to my way of thinking, is the conductor. A poor singer can spoil only his own role; the incompetent or iniquitous conductor ruins everything. [. . .] The conductor must see and hear, he must be vigorous and agile, he must know something about composition and about the nature and range of the instruments, he must know how to read the score and, in addition to certain special abilities of which we shall try to explain the components, he must possess other practically indefinable gifts without which it is impossible to establish the invisible bond between him and those placed under his command, without which he will be otherwise unable to communicate his emotions, and without which he will be altogether denied any directorial authority, influence, or achievement. [. . . ] It is essential that one feel that the conductor himself is moved, that he understands, for only then are his feelings and emotions communicated to those under his command, only then are they warmed by his inner flame, electrified by his inner electricity, and swept away by his intensity.30

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One can find many other passages in which Berlioz speaks to the centrality of the chef d’orchestre, a genus of which he was, of course, one of the most important early specimens. Of the orchestra as an ensemble, as an instrument in and of itself, Berlioz again has much to say. The famous chapter on the orchestra in the Traité d’instrumentation opens as follows: The orchestra may be considered a single grand instrument that is capable of producing, both simultaneously and successively, a multitude of sounds of different kinds—sounds whose intensity will be either moderate or colossal depending upon whether they are created by the entire mass of the performing forces that are now common in modern music, or by only a part of them, and depending on whether those performing forces are well or ill chosen, and well or ill placed in acoustical conditions that are more or less favorable to performance. All the individual players who comprise this grand instrument may then be regarded as its strings, its bores, its drums, and its wooden or metallic sounding boards—as machines become intelligent, under the control of the action of an immense keyboard played by the conductor, himself guided by the composer.31 Here we see that Berlioz’s very notion of the orchestra—“machines devenues intelligentes,” a sly phrase that is at once condescending and complimentary—is guided by a vision that is essentially pianistic: “soumises à l’action d’un immense clavier touché par le chef d’orchestre.” Why this vision? Was Berlioz in some way building upon his experience with Liszt, who envisioned his own interpretive work as partly directorial or conductorial? Liszt certainly felt that his own investigations of orchestral music had been prompted by his experience with Berlioz. For his part, in the letter to Adolphe Pictet of September 1837, Liszt wrote tellingly as follows: If I may be permitted to say so, I believe that in the piano score of the Symphonie fantastique I worked out for the first time a different way of proceeding. I came to know the score in scrupulous detail, as though it were a sacred text, in order to translate into the language of the piano not only the larger musical structure of the symphony but also the subtlety of its details and the richness of its rhythmic and harmonic combinations. [. . .] I titled my work piano score [partition de piano] in order to make it particularly clear that my intention was to follow the orchestra step by step and allow it to keep for itself only the advantages of numbers and of the variety of sounds. And what I undertook for the symphony by Berlioz I now continue to do for those by Beethoven. The serious study of these works, the profound emotions of their almost infinite splendors, and also the resources of the piano which, by con-

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stant reflection, have become quite familiar to me, render me perhaps not altogether unfit for this laborious task.32 How is it that Berlioz served as the catalyst for Liszt’s engagement with the artistic rather than the merely functional partition de piano, and for his production of piano scores whose essential grandeur does indeed match that of scores for orchestra? We must presume that the cause was a mixture of personal friendship and mutual faith in the “religion of art,” clearly revealed by Liszt’s notion of a “sacred text.” This was new at the time, for transformations of original texts were more normally and practically regarded as only money in the bank. When Berlioz appears in Liszt’s writings, his role as a virtuoso of the orchestra is never far from the surface, even when the subject is of a more general tenor. For example, in the context of his thoughts on the dependent social role of the musician, his subalternité, Liszt laments Berlioz’s position as compositionally “subaltern” as well, at least in terms of the easy success won by facile composers of romances: But what is Berlioz going to do? What will become of his powerful faculties? . . . Will he compose oratorios, Masses, religious music? . . . And who will perform it? Will he continue to write symphonies, overtures, quartets, and other instrumental music? . . . What is Berlioz going to do?33 After the première of Benvenuto Cellini, Liszt—in Florence, and inspired by statue of Perseus—wrote again (in one of the Lettres d’un bachelier ès-musique, dated 20 November 1838) of the struggles faced by the composer of this difficultly born opera, likening them to the heroic struggles of the artist himself: Like Cellini, Berlioz has found himself confronted by innumerable obstacles, surrounded by rivals bereft of talent but favored by circumstances. He, too, has been branded by the crowd as a “new musician”; he, too, has encountered only weak or lukewarm support from those unable to avoid recognizing his genius. Berlioz, like Cellini, does battle against blind ritual and obstinate ill will; but unlike Cellini’s, Berlioz’s work can come before the impartial public, the people, only via the intermediacy of the very individuals who oppose him. Indeed, most of his interpreters are openly hostile to him.34 The Perseus myth—which has Perseus, a “man of genius,” a man of mixed blood born of a god and a mortal woman, triumphing over magical force by killing the Gorgon—was in a sense rendered incarnate by the sculptor Benvenuto Cellini, who achieved victory via the casting of his statue. Liszt’s purpose here is to represent Berlioz and his opera as the ultimate step of that evolution, with the composer triumphant not in metal, but in sound.

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By Way of Conclusion The preaching and practice of virtuosity in the 1830s centered around essentially two instruments, the violin and the piano. Paganini fascinated audiences in cities across the European continent, and then Liszt—in “compulsive emulation” of the sensational violinist—translated that virtuosity to the piano.35 Aided by improvements in piano manufacture, Liszt developed not only a spectacular technique but also a sometimes ecstatic creative imagination that found its most convincing expression in the form of the free fantasy. He thus discovered that the phenomenon of virtuosity, far from being an element subservient to musical substance, was itself capable of participating in the romantic “revolution” whose first great spokesman was Victor Hugo and whose primary musical representative was Berlioz. Prior to encountering Paganini, Liszt faced the dilemma of being a pianist who was a “prisoner of the style brillant”36 and of being an artist who wished to create in the explosive mode of the avant garde, as his effort to produce as Symphonie révolutionnaire in 1830 would lead us to believe. The example of Paganini sparked his ability formally to amalgamate technical brilliance with compositional experimentation. Had Berlioz been a pianist, would he have been Liszt’s primary romantic forebear? The question is absurdly hypothetical, but perhaps it can serve to guide our thinking, for despite so much biographical research, it is not at all clear why the young Berlioz, once he decided to become a musician, never even attempted to master the instrument—the piano—then considered the sine qua non of the composer. That he became the master of the orchestra is usually seen as a result of this “choice,” if that is what it was, made at the opening of his career. Be this as it may, Berlioz, like Liszt, also profited from the loosening up of the old forms that was sparked by instrumental virtuosity, and, prompted by the conscientious efforts of that fellow genius of his who was Liszt, he also rethought some of his idées reçues regarding the kings of the keyboard. Of the possible ways of defining the “playing of the orchestra,” which is a phrase that one might use to describe Berlioz’s work as both composer and conductor, Berlioz chose to offer a Lisztian analogy: that of playing the piano. —Translated by Peter Bloom

Notes [Notes in square brackets are those of the editor and translator.] 1. See NBE 6, p. x. 2. Mémoires, chap. 22. [I have modified David Cairns’s translation.] 3. [The French word instrumentaliste looks familiar to readers of English, but is in fact a neologism. The French equivalent of the English word instrumentalist is instrumentiste.]

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4. À travers chants, 113. [I have modified the translation in Berlioz, The Art of Music and Other Essays, trans. and ed. Elizabeth Cscicsery-Rónay (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 58.] 5. Eric Bordas, “Bel ou mal canto? Le chant romantique selon Hector Berlioz,” Romantisme 103 (1999): 53–78, esp. 60 (where the same passage from À travers chants is cited in extenso). 6. Les Grotesques de la musique, 256–57. 7. Les Soirées de l’orchestre, 99. [I have slightly modified the translation in Berlioz, Evenings with the Orchestra, trans. and ed. Jacques Barzun (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 70–71.] 8. In the Eighteenth Evening of Les Soirées de l’orchestre, 277–81. 9. Berlioz, Grand Traité d’instrumentation et d’orchestration modernes, 2nd ed. (Paris: Schoenenberger, 1856), 100. 10. CG I, 385. 11. CG I, 393. If Berlioz published his own arrangement of Un bal, this has not come to light. 12. Liszt speaks of his work, with intentional simplicity, as merely a “partition de piano”; Revue et Gazatte musicale (11 February 1838). 13. The review appears in English in Berlioz, Fantastic Symphony, ed. Edward T. Cone, Norton Critical Scores (New York: Norton, 1971), 220–48. 14. The list is based on the work-list in The New Grove Dictionary, 2nd ed., ed. Stanlie Sadie and John Tyrrell (London: Macmillan, 2001), by Maria Eckhardt and Rena Charnin Mueller (with additions from NBE 17). But for the exceptions indicated, all works are for solo piano. 15. See Pierre Citron, Calendrier Berlioz (Cahiers Berlioz, No. 4; La Côte-SaintAndré, 2000), 159, 161. 16. Berlioz’s own four-hand arrangement of the overture to Les Francs-Juges appeared from Richault in 1836; Liszt’s two-hand arrangement would appear in 1845. Liszt completed a two-hand arrangement of Le Roi Lear by 1837, but for reasons unknown this was not published until 1987. 17. CG II, 387–88. 18. CG II, 412. 19. CG III, 170. 20. CG III, 294. 21. CG IV, 179. The various versions of Benvenuto Cellini are carefully presented by Hugh Macdonald in NBE 1. 22. CG IV, 183–84. 23. In 1859, when two publishers were in competition over the publication of a piano score of Berlioz’s version of Gluck’s Orphée, Berlioz suggested to Léon Carvalho (then mediating between Heugel and Escudier) that he try to “reconcile the two competitors and to turn their efforts to the benefit and glory of [Gluck’s] masterpiece” (CG VI, 54). 24. The Fantaisie has never been published in its original version. A copy is preserved in the Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv, Weimar, and a partial autograph is in the collection of the Département de la Musique of the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, these two sources having served Leslie Howard when he recorded the work for Hyperion in the late 1990s (Hyperion CDA67401). A version for two pianos, edited by Manfred Thiele, was published in 1981 by Breitkopf & Härtel.

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25. Revue et Gazette musicale (11 February 1838). [Here and in the two citations to follow I have much modified the translation in An Artist’s Journey: Lettres d’un bachelier ès musique 1835–1841, trans. and ed. Charles Suttoni (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 44–45. Like Suttoni, I assume that the word “éclaira” (“enlighten”) in the original French is a misprint for “écrasera” (“obliterate”).] 26. An Artist’s Journey, ed. Suttoni, 45. 27. Ibid. Liszt’s confidence in some of the gadgetry invented at the time to augment the sonorous possibilities of the piano proved, in the long run, to be ill founded. 28. Journal des débats (12 June 1836); CM II, 472. Berlioz earlier praised the talents of Domenico Dragonetti (1763–1846) in Le Rénovateur of 12 October 1835, but he seems not to have heard the Italian virtuoso in person. 29. Mémoires, Premier Voyage en Allemagne, III. 30. Grand Traité d’instrumentation, 299–300. Le Chef d’orchestre constitutes the final chapter of the second edition of this book. 31. Ibid., 293. 32. Franz Liszt, in Revue et Gazette musicale (11 February 1838). 33. Franz Liszt, “De la situation des Artistes dans la société et de leur condition dans la société,” Gazette musicale de Paris (26 July1835). It is curious that Liszt mentions string quartets in this context. Perhaps he assumed that Berlioz would eventually attempt to follow Beethoven in this genre as well? 34. Franz Liszt, in Revue et Gazette musicale (13 January 1839). 35. The phrase “compulsive emulation” is from Carl Dahlhaus (NineteenthCentury Music, trans. J. Bradford Robinson [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989], 135), whose view of virtuosity and interpretation is resumed here. 36. Ibid.

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Berlioz, Ophelia, and Feminist Hermeneutics Heather Hadlock Thoughts and affliction, passion, hell itself, She turns to favor and to prettiness. —Hamlet, IV, v, 191–92

Ophelia and “Vocality” In recent years, questions about female vocality, female singers, and the feminine qualities attributed to musical performance and to music itself have emerged as a diverse yet coherent body of concerns for feminist literary critics and musicologists alike.1 Much of the resulting work, which I characterize here as “feminist hermeneutics,” relies on a psychoanalytic model of creativity according to which the artist consolidates himself against inchoate matter—sound, color, or line—and against the existential dread of not-being. The fundamental assumption is that Freudian and post-Freudian models of individual development may be mapped onto the creative process; or (to put it the other way round) that the creative process recapitulates the developmental task of individuation, the subject’s sense of an individual self and of mastery over the Other. The artist’s presumed antagonism against his “feminine” material in this model resonates with narrative paradigms that align “Woman” with obstacles to be overcome—a structural presumption summarized in Teresa de Lauretis’s oft-quoted remark that “the hero is always male.”2 The result is a system of identification and projection according to which artist, protagonist, and audience share the position of an individual subject confronting a (feminized) other in the artwork. This essay will examine one element of that interpretive model, namely, the troping of the indispensable object of mastery as a female voice. The particular voice will be that of Ophelia: not in her muchdiscussed capacity as performer of mad songs, but as the singer of fragmentary death songs, “snatches of old lauds,” as she floated to her “muddy death.”

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Even at the outset, when Ophelia’s death is first recounted in Act IV of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, there exists a small but significant gap between the real event of the death (real, that is, within the play’s fictional universe) and its representation. Although the poetic beauty of Queen Gertrude’s narrative and the pathos of the events described imbue the story with an effect of vivid truth, the content of this narrative must logically be no more than an imaginary reconstruction of unseen events: any witness to Ophelia’s leisurely death would surely have intervened to stop it. This central enigma is heightened in Berlioz’s song La Mort d’Ophélie (1842), which will be my main object here.3 In Berlioz’s version, the story is recast as a ballad spoken by an anonymous narrator, and so it floats free of even Gertrude’s limited authority, making the question of origins more pressing. Removed from its dramatic context, the tale can no longer masquerade as a report even of “offstage” events; its fictional status—its status as a “made-up” thing—is laid bare. If the narrator is no longer Gertrude, then who is telling this story? Who made it, and to what purpose? What tale might the song be telling, beyond or beneath the simple and familiar one which begins, “There is a willow grows askant the brook . . .”? The simplest reading of La Mort d’Ophélie might take it as one testament among many to Berlioz’s infatuation with Shakespeare, as yet another example of the composer’s lifelong project of admiring Shakespeare through his own art. Biographers have read this lament, more particularly, as a document in Berlioz’s personal life, suggesting that the composer’s response to the pathetic text might reflect his grief for and estrangement from his wife, Harriet Smithson Berlioz, whom his imagination had linked indissolubly with the fictional Ophelia.4 I will return to the question of what imprint Harriet Smithson’s 1827 performance in Hamlet may have left on the composer’s musical representation of Ophelia’s death, but first I would like to look beyond biography to consider the song as a case study for other, farther-reaching concerns about the representation in art of women’s singing and women’s death, and the relationship between the romantic artist and the archetype of the “dead beloved.” Leslie Dunn, in an essay on Ophelia’s songs and their function in the play Hamlet, is only one of a number of feminist critics who have read representations of female song as narratives of repression and silencing. For Dunn, the “fair Ophelia” in her madness becomes a transgressive presence whom the narrative must ultimately sacrifice: “Ophelia’s disruptive feminine energy must be reabsorbed into both the social and the discursive orders of the play,”5 and her death by drowning silences a music that stands for feminine sexuality, “unmanly grief,” and even anarchy. For Dunn, as for other contributors to her recent anthology, female singers are invariably “transgressive” and are accordingly silenced by literal and metaphorical means—their wild songs appropriated by masculine poets; their turbulent noise “written out” of texts; their voices rendered aphasic, mute, or

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mad; their rebellions stifled by social mechanisms such as marriage; their bodies abused, murdered, drowned. The silencing of women takes place not only in plots, but in the operation of language itself, and thus Dunn implicates not only Ophelia’s death, but more particularly Gertrude’s poetic report in Hamlet’s repressive project, insofar as it “contains” the dead girl’s dangerous energies, repackaging her as a beautiful object. As Dunn writes, “Gertrude’s description of Ophelia’s drowning aestheticizes her madness, makes it ‘pretty,’ and in so doing makes it safe for the easier, distancing responses of pity and compassion [. . .]; it re-appropriates Ophelia’s music by inscribing it in the containing verbal structures, the metaphorical ‘music’ of poetry.”6 This account resonates with Elisabeth Bronfen’s theories of “femininity, death, and the aesthetic,” in light of which we would conclude that Gertrude’s speech—like innumerable depictions of the drowned Ophelia in nineteenth-century visual art—turns not only Ophelia’s madness, but also the image of her dead body, into something pretty and safe for contemplation. According to Bronfen’s “master narrative,” derived from psychoanalytic theories of mourning and melancholy, visual and narrative representation are mechanisms by which the human subject manages death and loss.7 We can summarize this narrative in three undeniably crude stages: It begins with the subject in possession of a beloved object, always troped as a beloved woman. The loss of this object, due to her literal or metaphorical death, creates unbearable grief and anguish, a “narcissistic wound,” as Bronfen and others have it. Once lost, the dead beloved becomes a fearsome taboo thing, so that simply to regain her is neither possible nor desirable. Only representation, the making “present, again” of the lost object, can heal the subject’s “wound” by bringing the beloved back in a perfected and idealized form. Thus, Bronfen argues, art both keeps the dead “present” in memory and image, in the form of talismans and memorials, and cordons them off from the living; the artist converts a terrible reality—death— into a source of aesthetic pleasure or comfort. This apparently normative operation—the double sublimation in art of female vocality and feminine death—is the starting point for my reading of Berlioz’s La Mort d’Ophélie. The song provides an opportunity to examine two central tenets in analyses of representations of women’s song and death: first, the muteness and inertness of the represented feminine, whether as silenced singers or as Bronfen’s icon of the “dead beloved”; second, a process of disavowal, the artist’s sublimation of a woman’s (disruptive) song or (taboo) body. Inevitably, questions will arise about the transferability of literary analytical models to musical objects: to what degree can a musical representation of a singing, dying girl preserve the represented object at a safe distance from those who create and contemplate her? And what other operations might the musical representation of this particular object perform?

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Beginnings The first gesture of “sublimation” in the text of La Mort d’Ophélie, and one which bears out Bronfen’s theory about art as disavowal, is the poet’s omission of Shakespeare’s unpleasant final image of “muddy death.” The detachment of the speech from the larger context of Hamlet means that the story of Ophelia’s death no longer includes its “aftermath” in the graveyard scene. Like so many nineteenth-century paintings of the drowned Ophelia, Ernest Legouvé’s text, perhaps written specifically for Berlioz,8 washes away the images of mud, earth, bones, and burial that accumulate around her after death. In keeping with this aestheticizing project, Legouvé amplifies the image of Ophelia singing as she floats, to which Shakespeare had only briefly alluded with the statement that the mad girl “chanted snatches of old lauds,” and the penultimate reference to “her melodious lay.” Her swan song now dominates the second half of the poem, and the “strange melody” that “passed as quickly as a sound” (“Mais cette étrange mélodie / Passa rapide comme un son”), the “melodious chanson” that falls silent when “yet hardly begun” (“Laissant à peine commencée / Sa mélodieuse chanson”), serves as an explicit metonymy for the singer’s short life and early death. Ophelia’s silence is the climax of the narrative, a silence all the more prominent because of the heightened significance of the singing that precedes it. Berlioz responded enthusiastically to the poet’s textual cues, organizing his varied strophic musical setting around a wordless refrain, a vocalise, that amplifies Ophelia’s swan song still further. In this refrain, the inarticulate and perfectly expressive sign of Ophelia’s presence, we may detect the trace of an experience that left so many and varied traces on the young Berlioz: Harriet Smithson’s performance as Ophelia in 1827. John Elliott has noted that Berlioz, like many of his fellow audience members, did not understand English, and attributes Berlioz’s and the Parisian audience’s enjoyment to “the immediacy of the Kemble company’s performance— unintelligible as their words may have been.”9 Contemporary comments suggest that the unintelligibility of the actors’ words actually heightened this immediacy: Charles Jarrin, for example, remarked of Harriet Smithson as Ophelia that, “we scarcely understood her language, but we immediately understood everything, as one soul to another, through her deep sighs . . .”10 Smithson’s unintelligible speech created an effect of pure presence in its nonverbal fascination, a utopian fantasy of soul-to-soul communication and perfect, collective understanding. Within the spoken drama, not only Ophelia’s mad songs but all of her utterances had become something more like instrumental music than like speech, and this effect is recorded in the vocalise refrain, a musical incarnation, perhaps, of Smithson’s “deep sighs.” In his preface to Roméo et Juliette, written three years before La Mort d’Ophélie, Berlioz had remarked that in order to depict the sub-

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lime passion and full impact of Shakespeare’s heroes and heroines, the musician requires “the imaginative latitude that the positive sense of the sung word would not have given him, resorting instead to instrumental language, which is [. . .] by its very indefiniteness incomparably more powerful.”11 Unimpeded by words, Berlioz’s refrain renders Ophelia “present” to the listener as something ideal and indefinite. Yet even as it seems to encode in music the memory of hearing and seeing Smithson, the wordless refrain in Berlioz’s song does more than reproduce the nonverbal immediacy of that experience. While Smithson’s embodiment of Ophelia—“the play of expression and voice and gesture,” as Berlioz put it in chapter 18 of the Mémoires—had made her performance intelligible and compelling, the song represents Ophelia as a disembodied presence. The singer takes on two personae (in Cone’s ever-useful formulation):12 a third-person narrator who describes the scene and the disembodied, anonymous voice of the refrain. These two personae are segregated so that the narrator never impersonates Ophelia; in verse 3, for example, the performer describes how Ophelia “floated, singing; singing like one native to that element,” but does not actually sing “ah,” and indeed the vocalise does not return to the scene until after the narrator has finished her story at the end of verse 4. “Ophélie” remains absent from the scene in body even as the whole action of the song becomes a frame for her ambiguously super-present voice.13 This paradox of presence-in-absence may be discerned in another aspect of contemporary writings on Smithson’s Ophelia and her ability to communicate “as one soul to another.” Ophelia had for centuries been an icon of the unconscious performer, and when Berlioz’s contemporary Charles Moreau remarked of Smithson that “The words she utters make no sense [. . .]; [she] sings, without being aware that she is singing,”14 he echoed Sir Joshua Reynolds’ much earlier opinion that “There is no part of this play, in its representation on the stage, more pathetick than this [Mad] scene; which, I suppose, proceeds from the utter insensibility Ophelia has to her own misfortunes.”15 We see in these remarks a mutual dependency between twin theatrical illusions: a “presence” defined as transparent or unmediated communication, and an actress’s ability to render a character present only insofar as she seems “insensible” or “unaware” that she does so, apparently absenting herself from her own performance. This presentation of the refrain as the wordless utterance of a disembodied voice suggests that an Ideal (such as Ophelia was in Berlioz’s imagination) becomes fully present to the listener only in the absence of an individual “impersonator,” and indeed Berlioz’s writings on another Shakespearean subject remind us of his conviction that theatrical representation always threatens to diminish the thing-represented. His disgust at such diminutions in conventional operatic practice is clear from his remarks on Bellini’s I Capuleti ed i Montecchi, in which he saw Romeo im-

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personated by and thus cruelly reduced to a “small, thin woman.” The unfortunate mezzo-soprano whom Berlioz saw in Florence in 1831, as he tells us in chapter 35 of the Mémoires, becomes, in the larger context of his diatribe, a risible shadow, an embodiment of Lack—“but a child,” a “eunuch,” a Romeo “shorn of his manhood” and “volcanic passions.” Remarks in a later essay on the plumpness, politeness, and serenity of operatic Juliets are similarly derisive.16 A singer’s body is more likely to obscure the Ideal essence of a “Juliet,” a “Romeo,” or an “Ophelia” than to make it visible, just as the “positive sense” of words interferes with the expression of sublime emotions, and thus their truest representation will be as disembodied sounds. Particularly interesting in Roméo et Juliette is the fact that human voices are not excluded—the bass soloist impersonates Friar Laurence in the finale; a tenor soloist impersonates Mercutio in the Prologue; the chorus sing as a passing crowd of “young Capulets” before the Love Scene. Thus the “Roméo” and “Juliette” invoked in the familiar orchestral movements are set apart, rendered more special by being represented as uniquely beyond visual representation. And just as Berlioz refused to embody “Romeo” and “Juliet” in individual performers, the vocalise refrain makes his ideal Ophelia present without compromising “her” through embodiment on the stage. This paradox—the process of becoming fully and even supernaturally present through self-loss, through the divestment of such “positive” trappings of individuality as words and bodies—is the real subject of Berlioz’s musical account of Ophelia’s death. The detachment of words from musical gesture occurs in the large-scale divergence of the musical “plot” from the verbal one as the music ceases to cooperate with and ultimately contradicts the poem. Initially, words and music tell the same story: as the poem paints a picture of Ophelia gathering flowers by the river, the piano supplies the sound of the water; the wordless refrain, sung in unison by voice and piano, evokes her singing as she walks. In the second verse, music remains subordinate to the text, for after “la pauvre Ophélie tombe”(over a melodramatic dominant-seventh chord, marked fortissimo), her voice is absent from the abbreviated refrain. The third verse offers the first suggestion that the musical setting will do other than illustrate the poem, for although the poem describes Ophelia’s singing, this swan song is performed only by the piano. The piano, too, supplies a final fragment of Ophelia’s “étrange mélodie” to illustrate how it “passed, quickly as a sound.” Yet immediately after the verbal account concludes with the singer sinking to a silent death, a sung postlude brings Ophelia’s song back—at the very moment when it is supposed to have fallen silent. The melody said to have “passed [. . .] hardly begun” returns, amplified and expanded, in piano and voice. The career of the song’s first prominent melodic motion, the semitone “sigh” on “O-phé-li-e’ in bars 5–6, provides a miniature illustration of a

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musical gesture gaining potency through being divested of name and word. Initially “labeled” with Ophelia’s name, the motive sheds that name and comes to saturate the musical texture, gaining expressive impact and structural significance with each new appearance. At the end of verse 1, for example, the semitone gesture highlights the affective change of the move to the minor dominant on “rose pâ-le” at bars 21–22; in subsequent verses the once-consonant figure appears as an increasingly expressive dissonance, culminating in the wordless, posthumous “sigh” near the end, at bars 151– 54. Furthermore, the refrain, a chain of sighs, is built entirely of descending appoggiature as at bars 5–6. But while the refrain clearly employs the motive as a pathetic sign of sinking or fading, the “dying fall” of this motive also functions throughout the song as a thread—sometimes attenuated to the breaking-point—that draws the music forward. Infinite Endings and Apotheosis If the song’s first refrain gives rise to epistemological uncertainty about where the “étrange mélodie” began—what is the source of this sound? is it Ophelia, or some other anonymous voice?—then the ending is equally cryptic about where that mélodie might end. Berlioz rewrites Ophelia’s story with a redemptive ending analogous to the one which Shakespeare had given to Hamlet; that is, not a conclusion that silences or represses her, but a “non-ending” that perpetuates her. Although the dying Hamlet famously concludes “the rest is silence” (which Berlioz frequently quoted, in English), Horatio’s final speech immediately contradicts him: Give order, that these bodies High on a stage be placed to the view; And let me speak, to the yet unknowing world, How these things came about.17 Hamlet’s “silence” will generate endless speech, for a re-presentation of the tragedy will follow immediately on the tragedy itself: the implicit coda to Hamlet is Hamlet. Similarly, Berlioz invites us not to believe the finality of endings in La Mort d’Ophélie; indeed, La Mort d’Ophélie proposes that Ophelia’s death results not in silence, but in the amplification of her song. Unlike his Shakespearean model, Berlioz apotheosizes his Ophelia in a final, “posthumous” refrain, when her étrange mélodie reappears harmonically enriched and distributed between the voice and its accompaniment. This is the first time the voice diverges from the piano, and the simple, quasi-improvisatory sighs of the vocalise are elaborated into a compositional product as voice and piano melody travel first in parallel thirds, then in a chain of suspensions, from bar 140 to bar 151. Without sacrificing the individuality

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of “Ophelia’s” monodic melody, Berlioz complicates and in a sense liberates it by amplifying it into this polyphonic texture.18 The final refrain musically encodes a fantasy of death as an emancipation from the constraints and limitations of individuality; in this postlude, Berlioz’s “counternarrative” overturns the poem’s conclusion by representing Death as a state of resounding super-presence, rather than absence. Similarly, the song contains no example of convincing musical closure. Although the music seems to sink down into silence at the end of each verse, it is each time “resurrected,” set in motion again by that semitone figure which appears persistently (at bars 26, 78, 111, and 134) and leads us on. The downward-spiraling refrain fades but has no inherent pull toward closure: it falls silent but never ends conclusively, as may be seen in the apparently spontaneous emergence of the second verse out of the silence at the end of the first refrain (bars 43–49). Repose on the tonic simply generates a new tonic arpeggio, and this not only undermines the listener’s faith in endings, but also creates the sense that another verse might quite naturally arise from the apparently final cadence of the coda (that is, after bar 138). The song’s penultimate measures echo the earlier “non-ending” of bars 43–47, and the closure imposed in the final bars seems both arbitrary and fragile, with its barely accompanied texture and weak harmonic progression (from IV6 to V6/5 to I). The long ritardando and decrescendo produce an effect of fade-out rather than climax—and we have previously heard the song recover and continue after similar “fades.” Despite the poem’s assertion that Ophelia’s drowning has resulted in eternal silence, this musical form could continue as convincingly as it ends. Berlioz’s song thus encodes a romantic fantasy of death as dissolution into an Ideal state, as sublimation of a “dead beloved” into abstract, disembodied music. Such an apotheosis of the dead beloved through and in art (Klaus Theweleit has suggested that it is a dubious triumph) is one form of “Orphic” power, as the artist overcomes death not by reversing it, but by translating the lost object into something beyond death.19 Through a similar operation, this song brings Ophelia “back” as an apotheosis of song; she dies as an individual, only to invest the natural world with her “melodious chanson.” In this sense, La Mort d’Ophélie conforms to Bronfen’s model of how the artist’s representational activity confers immortality upon the dead feminine subject, and in so doing disavows the threat of his own “muddy death.” But the dream of exchanging individual existence for immortality in music is also the artist’s fantasy: when Ophelia’s drowning produces immortal song rather than a “muddy death” or a beautified silence, we may read the “dead beloved” herself as the Orphic figure. “Ophelia,” in this reading, stands not (only) for “the feminine” but also for “the individual self,” and her final incarnation exceeds that most romantic icon, the beautiful dead woman. We might redeem the misogynist scenario of “feminine

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dead object/masculine subject” by claiming that that dyad overlays a more fundamental dichotomy between “individual subjectivity” and “transindividual state.” To be an individual, in this reading, is to be limited and isolated; the drive is not to consolidate such a subjectivity by purging a disruptive femininity (as Dunn would have it), but to dissolve it by immersion in larger forces: to lose the Individual in the Ideal. “Ophelia”—the more-than-human singer of infinite songs, never embodied on the ballad’s “stage”—is less an object for the artist-individual to consolidate himself against than an ego-ideal of self-loss and dispersal that promises access to otherwise inaccessible music and artistic authority. Finally, in representing feminine song and death without the apparently compulsory ending of female muteness and containment, La Mort d’Ophélie reminds us that representation itself need not—and perhaps cannot—impose a safe and aestheticizing distance between the artist and his object. The still-singing dead woman, as represented in music, has Orphic power which the artist craves and with which the artist identifies. The song records a double process, a two-fold fantasy that fulfills two tasks of representation: first, of neutralizing death’s terrible aspects of loss and absence by investing them with the beauty of the lost beloved; and then, of imaginatively following the drowned beloved—following “Ophelia”—into an “echoing flood” where the self dissolves into pure music, pure presence.

Notes 1. See for example Embodied Voices: Representing Female Vocality in Western Culture, ed. Leslie C. Dunn and Nancy A. Jones (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); essays by Elizabeth Wood, Susan McClary, Joke Dame, and Martha Mockus, in Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology, ed. Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood, and Gary C. Thomas (New York: Routledge, 1994); Felicia Miller Frank, The Mechanical Song: Women, Voice, and the Artificial in Nineteenth-Century French Narrative (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995); En Travesti: Women, Gender Subversion, Opera, ed. Corinne Blackmer and Patricia Juliana Smith (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995); Susan J. Leonardi and Rebecca A. Pope, The Diva’s Mouth: Body, Voice, Prima Donna Politics (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1996). All these writers build on the foundation laid by Kaja Silverman in The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988). 2. Teresa De Lauretis, “Desire in Narrative,” in her Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 118–19. Since Susan McClary’s propagation of it in her Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1988) and subsequent essays, De Lauretis’s paradigm has been central to “New Musicological” critiques of formalist analysis as well as to feminist approaches. 3. I focus on the first version of Berlioz’s La Mort d’Ophélie (May 1842), for soprano or tenor and piano, in B flat, found in Hector Berlioz, Werke, ed. Charles

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Malherbe and Felix Weingartner, vol. 17 (Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel, 1904), 212–19. (This is to appear in NBE 15.) Although the score allows for performance by a female or male singer, the song is almost always sung by a woman. The later version, for female chorus (sopranos and contraltos) and orchestra (July 1848), transposed down to A-flat, may be found in NBE 12b. 4. D. Kern Holoman remarks that “Berlioz associated La Mort d’Ophélie with Harriet and her decline,” and that the collection Tristia, in which the version for orchestra and female chorus appears, is “very obviously associated with Harriet’s melancholy condition.” See Holoman, Berlioz (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 364, 410. 5. Leslie C. Dunn, “Ophelia’s Songs in Hamlet: Music, Madness, and the Feminine,” in Embodied Voices: Representing Female Vocality in Western Culture, ed. Dunn and Nancy A. Jones (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 62. 6. Ibid., 63. 7. Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity, and the Aesthetic (New York and London: Routledge, 1992). Bronfen touches on the Ophelia theme in romantic painting in her discussion of Elizabeth Siddall, the model for Millais’s famous “Death of Ophelia” (1851–52). 8. NBE 12b, p. x, where it is noted that Berlioz may have envisioned an orchestral accompaniment already in 1842. 9. John Elliott, Jr., “The Shakespeare Berlioz Saw,” Music and Letters 57 (July 1976): 292–308, here, 293. 10. Charles Jarrin, in Journal des débats (1827), cited in Elliott, “The Shakespeare Berlioz Saw,” 302 (my emphasis). 11. “[Le musicien] a dû donner à sa fantasie une latitude que le sens positif des paroles chantées ne lui eût pas laissée, et recourir à la langue instrumentale, langue plus riche, plus variée, moins arrêtée et, par son vague même, incomparablement plus puissante en pareil cas.” From the “Avant-propos” to Roméo et Juliette [orig. 1839]; see NBE 18, p. 2. 12. See Edward T. Cone, The Composer’s Voice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974). 13. Although rare, performance of La Mort d’Ophélie by a male might tend to support my reading even more clearly than performance by a female. Sopranos can easily slide from evoking Ophelia’s voice to impersonating it in the vocalise refrain; tenors cannot. 14. Charles Moreau, quoted in Julien Tiersot, Hector Berlioz et la société de son temps (Paris: Hachette, 1904), 53. 15. Sir Joshua Reynolds, quoted in Peter J. Seng, The Vocal Songs in the Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967), 131. 16. Berlioz, “Romeo and Juliet: Opera in Four Acts by Bellini,” Journal des débats (13 September 1859), reprinted in À travers chants, 349–60. I use the translation in The Art of Music and Other Essays, trans. and ed. Elizabeth CsicseryRónay (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1971), 224. 17. This speech does not conclude the complete text of Shakespeare’s Hamlet; following eighteenth-century performance tradition, the actor-arranger Charles Kemble abridged it and conflated it with Fortinbras’s final directions to the soldiers. See William Shakespeare, Hamlet [. . .] adapted by Mr. Kemble, Act V, scene 3 (London: Printed for John Miller, 1814), 85.

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18. This dispersal becomes even more elaborate in Berlioz’s 1848 version for female chorus and orchestra, where the final statement of the refrain (NBE 12b, pp. 96–98, bars 138–60) is dispersed into a polyphonic soprano texture involving solo flute, solo clarinet, and violins as well as female voices. 19. See Klaus Theweleit, “Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo and the Technology of Reconstruction,” in Opera through Other Eyes, ed. David J. Levin (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994), 169, 174.

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Berlioz in 1900: Between Fervor and Fear Jean-Michel Nectoux In this paper I should like to examine and reflect upon the image of Berlioz in France in the later decades of the nineteenth century, and to offer in broad terms a reply to the following question: What was the status of this romantic composer in the opinion of the musically inclined public at that time, and in the minds of some of the great musicians of the surrounding generations, among them Camille Saint-Saëns, Gabriel Fauré, Vincent d’Indy, Paul Dukas, Maurice Ravel, and Claude Debussy? At the outset one may say that, generally speaking, and with the notable exception of his work for the stage, Berlioz’s music—long derided, minimized, and misunderstood—gradually found a place in the symphonic concert repertory. The historical development of the nation after 1870, on the one hand, and the remarkable development of the symphony orchestra, on the other, were factors that were clearly favorable to the dissemination of Berlioz’s œuvre. The dissolution of the Second Empire and the Prussian victory over France were deeply felt by a people who had known foreign occupation only fifty years earlier, a people still conscious of the grandeur of the revolutionary wars and the Napoleonic era. The burst of nationalism that followed the Franco-Prussian War immediately underscored the importance of the native French artist: Berlioz, recently crowned with a certain posthumous glory, was thus favored with newfound defenders, becoming as celebrated in death as he had been contested in life. Composers Such an auspicious evolution, to which I shall return, stands in marked contrast to the views of French composers of the fin de siècle. Indeed, the flamboyant romanticism of Berlioz, scorned during his career, seemed suddenly relegated to a bygone century: in 1890, the “music of the future,” in the public’s opinion, was clearly Wagner’s, not Berlioz’s. As for the most advanced composers, Debussy, Fauré, and the youthful Ravel, the main

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compositional issues concerned harmonic refinement, orchestral transparency, and expressive restraint. It is difficult to imagine works more distant from Berliozian splendor than the Requiem (1888) of Fauré, the Prélude à l’Après-midi d’un faune (1894) of Debussy, or the Pavane pour une infante défunte (1898) of Ravel. So it is difficult to be surprised by what we read in the letter Debussy sent the Prince André Poniatowski in February 1893: A young star is also rising on the musical horizon by the name of Gustave Charpentier, who appears to me to be destined to a celebrity as productive of riches as it will be devoid of aesthetics. This fellow is taking on the mantle of Berlioz, who in my view was a prodigious fraud who ended up believing in his own fraudulence. Still, Charpentier manifests little of Berlioz’s rather aristocratic nature.1 Ten years later, in an article on the capacity of instrumental music to suggest aspects of nature, Debussy wrote: Only musicians have the privilege of capturing all of the poetry of night and day and heaven and earth, of recreating their atmospheres and of rendering the rhythms of their immense vibrations. And this is a privilege that musicians do not abuse. It is rare that nature calls forth from them heartfelt lovers’ cries such as those that are responsible for the charm of certain pages in Der Freischütz. More often their passion accommodates itself to foliage of a literary sort that has been dried out between the pages of a book: Berlioz did this sort of thing throughout his lifetime. His particular genius took bitter delight in walking his nostalgia through the aisles of a market of artificial flowers. The music of our time has been able to avoid the shortcomings of this sort of romantic literary vision, but it has other weaknesses.2 That so many of his works are inspired by literature is a weakness for which Berlioz was reproached by many turn-of-the-century writers—even though, as is perfectly obvious, such literary inspiration in no way prevented him from portraying landscapes and impressions of nature with a rare degree of poetic beauty. Here I am thinking in particular of the symphonic tableau that is the “Chasse royale et orage” in Les Troyens, and of so many pages in the score of Harold en Italie. The single most positive critique penned by Debussy comes from an article of 1912: “Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique is still a feverish masterpiece of romantic enthusiasm in which one is astonished to see music capable of translating such extravagant emotions without apparent effort. It is as though we are witness to a moving struggle among the elements of nature themselves.”3 At the same time, Ravel, whom one might assume would have been more sensitive to Berlioz’s orchestral imagination, expressed himself rather

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severely in reaction both to Berlioz’s effervescence and to the awkwardness of his constructions. Speaking of the Tableaux symphoniques of a littleknown composer named Ernst Fanelli, performed under the direction of Gabriel Pierné at the Concerts Colonne, Ravel wrote in 1912 that “M. Fanelli’s impressionism is a direct consequence of Berlioz’s: his perception of the noises of nature is hardly stylized; the appeal of his melody and harmony is barely more appetizing than that of Le Carnaval romain or of certain passages in Roméo et Juliette.”4 In a later interview concerning the Viennese public, Ravel reveals his feelings more openly, declaring that Mahler, whom they love, is “impassioned, ingenious, and inept—an amateur of genius, rather like Berlioz.”5 And in another conversation, he went on: “Berlioz is the sort of genius who knew everything instinctively—except what every Conservatoire student knows in the twinkling of an eye: how to fit a proper bass line to a waltz tune.”6 In response to an earlier question from M. D. Calvocoressi, Ravel had gone on at some length: Of course, when speaking of the unsatisfactory quality of Berlioz’s harmonies, I was not thinking of ‘correctness’ according to school rules. [. . .] My contention is that Berlioz was the only composer of genius who conceived his melodies without hearing their harmonisation, and proceeded to discover this harmonisation afterwards [. . .]. When I say that Berlioz’s basses are generally ‘wrong’ or his modulations ‘clumsy’, I am not referring to the ‘rightness’ and ‘elegance’ that text-books profess to teach. Chopin has countless examples of harmonies that are unusual, and perhaps theoretically ‘wrong’; but to the musical ear they are always appropriate, and exactly in the right place. There are a few striking harmonies in Berlioz’s music; but as often as not what I feel about them is that they have happened by accident, so to speak, and not in accordance with a well-weighed purpose. In the ‘Valse des Sylphes’, for instance, there are one or two delightful things [. . .]; but I doubt very much whether Berlioz actually ‘heard’ them. One is the result of a pedal point which Berlioz seems to have kept going simply because he did not quite know how to get rid of it [. . .]. One thing I wish to add is that when I spoke of his not being capable of harmonising even a simple waltz suitably (not ‘correctly’), I used the word ‘waltz’, as is the custom in France, to connote ‘the simplest type of tune’. I was not thinking of the ‘Valse des Sylphes’, nor of the waltz in the Symphonie fantastique in particular.7 Ravel obviously viewed Berlioz from his position as a gifted master artisan who published nothing before it had been refined and perfected. But Berlioz’s unbridled romanticism and burning exaltation were not Ravel’s cup of tea: the latter’s responses to the empire of passion were always colored by reason and circumspection.

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This kind of professional critique of Berlioz’s style may be found as well in the writings of Vincent d’Indy, celebrated for the rigor of his appreciation of all music composed in the shadow of Beethoven’s achievement. In 1901–2, in his course on the symphonic poem at the Schola Cantorum, he wrote of Berlioz that “everything in the work of this master that does not belong to the lyric drama properly speaking belongs rather to the category of the symphonic poem, that is to say, subject to the exigencies of an extra-musical idea.” And he went on to suggest that this orientation was not a manifestation of a personal choice on Berlioz’s part but rather the result of a lack of technical skill: By his own admission his early musical training was quite rudimentary, and his biographers commonly tell us that he could easily have passed this up, although it is by no means clear that this was his own opinion, especially as he got older. On the contrary, we believe that he was painfully aware of this lack of early instruction and that he was in a sense forced to allow himself to be guided by a “program” because he did not possess the technical means that would have enabled him to avoid doing so.8 In such a concert of acerbic criticism, the measured words of Paul Dukas come as a pleasant surprise. Dukas, that great master of the orchestra, was clearly a close student of Berlioz’s Grand Traité d’instrumentation. The lyricism and glitter of the ballet La Péri and the fantastical burlesque and humor of L’Apprenti sorcier are obviously closer to Berlioz than is any page by Debussy, Ravel, or Fauré. As Dukas wrote in 1892: No one admires Berlioz more than we do, and nothing could be father from our mind than to issue some sort of pedantic criticism of his manner or style. As we wrote not long ago, à propos of Les Troyens, if Berlioz rarely manifests talent, he almost always manifests genius. And between the exactitude of talent and the confusion of genius, we do not hesitate for a second. [. . .] Berlioz’s shortcomings are relative, while his merits are absolute: we accept this man of genius as he is, and we do not fail to see that, if his expressive means fail on occasion to measure up to his ideas, those very ideas emanate from a soul that is both passionate and sincere. As for his technical errors, which are easy to catch for anyone with a modest musical education, we leave their reprimand to those who find it possible to prove their superiority only by uncovering parallel fifths in some symphony by Beethoven.9 In 1894, on the occasion of Édouard Colonne’s concert cycle of Berlioz’s symphonic and vocal music, Dukas wrote a long and enthusiastic article: Despite considerable formal incoherence, Roméo et Juliette, with Les Troyens and La Damnation de Faust, is Berlioz’s most perfect and com-

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prehensive work. In fact questions of form, in our view, are of secondary importance, for when an artist finds it necessary to express a thought that is new and beautiful, who cares whether he has broken such and such a rule or violated such and such a category! A handsome work in which the rules and categories are commingled and interpolated in an almost arbitrary way is a thousand times better than a work that is icily correct, that avoids all irregularity, that scales no new wall. We can hardly be angry with Berlioz for jumping over one or two fences. Indeed, we should give him credit for having done so, and for thus having left more room for his successors.10 In his youth, Gabriel Fauré is said to have seen Berlioz when he attended the end-of-the-year examinations at the École Niedermeyer. But his potentially intimidating presence, remarked upon by the press, was little noticed by the young man who at the time probably knew nothing of the great musician. It is furthermore difficult to imagine two musical aesthetics more opposite than those of Berlioz and Fauré. Everything sets them apart: their orchestral conceptions, their senses of form, their feelings for harmony, their notions of rhythm. Fauré’s display of refinement and discretion is the antithesis of Berlioz’s characteristic extravagance. In 1903 Fauré became the music critic for Le Figaro, and had frequent occasion in that year of Berlioz’s centenary to write about our composer. Like many other musicians, he was skeptical of the effort to stage La Damnation de Faust and regretted that the theatrical realism of Raoul Gunsbourg’s mise-en-scène took away from the “honeyed charm” of the “Danse des Sylphes” and the chilling terror of the “Course à l’abîme,” numbers that he cites, along with the “Invocation à la nature,” with great admiration. It is therefore surprising to see him write, farther on, that at least one of Marguerite’s two arias figures among “the weakest moments of the score.”11 Fauré returned to Gunsbourg’s presentation in April 1907, when the Opéra de Monte-Carlo gave it in Berlin, and he specifically mentioned the German critics’ reservations regarding Jane Lindsay’s feeble personification of Marguerite: In truth, it is to Berlioz himself that one ought to address this observation, for in the Damnation de Faust, where the loveliest pages are those of a descriptive nature, that is to say those in which he masters the “unreal,” the characters, with the exception of Mephistopheles, are rather thinly painted. In my view, the true Gretchen was translated in the ideal way by Liszt, in his admirable Faust Symphony.12 Like many musicians, Fauré was particularly fond of L’Enfance du Christ, of which he wrote: “Of all the works of Berlioz, this one may be considered one of the most endearing, as much for the simplicity of its style and sobriety

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of its means as for the serenity, refinement, and naïve charm that it exudes.”13 It is clear that the restrained modality and delicate sonority of “L’Adieu des bergers” in Part II, La Fuite en Égypte, for example, found an echo in the melodiousness of early Fauré—the Fauré of the Cantique de Jean Racine (1865). Fauré also demonstrated a special fondness for Les Troyens. In an article devoted to the revival that took place at the Opéra in 1921, he cites with high esteem a number of moments in Les Troyens à Carthage, where “the characteristic qualities of Berlioz’s genius [. . .] seem enveloped in an atmosphere of a tranquility, grandeur, and serene beauty—qualities that were not surprisingly engendered in the soul of this tone poet by his contacts with Greek antiquity.”14 This late text helps us to understand how deeply Pénélope is indebted to the grand French tradition of the tragédie lyrique, in which Fauré’s own work on an antique theme may be seen as an outgrowth in particular of Berlioz’s. But at the beginning of the century, Fauré saw that tradition less clearly, Pénélope (1913) was yet to come, and the anniversary of 1903 had given rise to such a glut of celebrations that the critic for Le Figaro became almost satiated. The announcement of the third of three successive performances of the Requiem at the Concerts Colonne, in January 1904, called forth a protest from Fauré’s pen, because in the Requiem “one finds in equal proportion an inclination to grand dramatic effects and an indifférence to religious music—or to music tout court.”15 Given Fauré’s own quite different sort of musical setting of the Messe des morts, one can well understand such a negative comment, for Berlioz’s innovative use of the sound environment and his pursuit of novel sonorities stand at the opposite end of the spectrum from the serene and melodious evocation of celestial Jerusalem that is key to Fauré’s Requiem. A few months later, in a review of the Concerts Lamoureux, Fauré again expressed his exasperation: “The concert opened with the overture to Benvenuto Cellini, which, composed of indifferent themes, misshapen forms, and vulgar sonorities, received a very chilly welcome from the audience.”16 This new frontal attack was enough to cause his mentor and friend Camille Saint-Saëns to write the following letter: Milan, 24 November 1904 Mon cher Gabriel, You don’t like Berlioz. There’s nothing I can do about that. But you express your dislike so vehemently that you risk humiliation, which is why I allow myself to speak to you about it once again. You really ought rather to attempt to offer more high-minded criticism, to rise above the commonplace in this arena as you do in so many others. However, in order to write such high-minded criticism, one must learn to appreciate what one does not like. Handel thought Gluck less of a musician than his own cook; he

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saw only Gluck’s deficiencies and valued neither his brilliance nor his capacity for drama. This is hardly the way a critic should make judgments. Berlioz’s deficiencies are plain for all to see. But he makes up for them with grandeur of character, with personality, with the astonishing invention of modern orchestration. This is what must never be forgotten. Does anyone speak about the platitudes and banalities of Tannhäuser and Lohengrin? The overture to Benvenuto Cellini may indeed not be Berlioz’s most congenial work, and the composer himself seems to have thought as much because he wrote another one [Le Carnaval romain] that is far superior, although it does seem to me that the melody associated with the cardinal [or pope]

is not all that bad. Be this as it may, the overture has the particular virtue of demonstrating for us, in the coda, a procedure that Wagner would soon appropriate: a broad melody executed by the unison trombones and accompanied by a lively and persistent gesture in the violins. This alone should cause us to speak of it with a certain respect. Finally, if truth be told, we don’t have all that many great [French] composers. Leave it to others to tear them down. Those others rarely belittle their own; they rather speak only of their merits. But enough said. Forgive me for these tyrannical remarks, the over-ripe fruits of my hopeless affection, and please remember me kindly to your family. C. Saint-Saëns.17 Two weeks later, Fauré replied: Paris, 7 December 1904 Cher Camille, I beg your pardon for not having replied sooner to your letter from Milan and for not having thanked you for the wise advice it contains, which, you may rest assured, I shall take into consideration. It’s only that I find it really annoying to hear in all corners and at every moment: “talent is useless, genius alone suffices. Look at Berlioz, look at Rodin, look at Puvis de Chavannes!” And a good number of our younger musicians, quite convinced of their own genius, tell us to go to hell when we urge them to develop some skill. And here I am not even speaking of a lot of people’s silly admiration for anything of Berlioz.18 Saint-Saëns’s letter demonstrates a wide knowledge of Berlioz’s works, which he never missed an opportunity to defend: at least half a dozen of Saint-

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Saëns’s articles are devoted to Berlioz.19 Of all the French composers quoted here, Saint-Saëns, thirty-two years his junior, is the only one to have known Berlioz personally. Berlioz “was the incomparable architect of the entire generation to which I belong,” he said;20 and he later told Adolphe Boschot: I frequently went to see him because I liked and admired him immensely, but I would not have done so had he been the person he himself describes. Of a nervous temperament myself, I would not have been able to endure such constant impetuosity. His opinions were bizarre; it was impossible to predict what he might like. . . . And his judgments were absolute. . . . He considered only his own views.21 Saint-Saëns’s article on the Requiem demonstrates mature reflection: “Do not look for Faith and Hope in this work,” he writes; “Berlioz’s supplications here seem like prayers that do not even aspire to be answered.”22 If Saint-Saëns seems to have thought that the tremendous forces required for the “Tuba mirum” were inefficient, he nonetheless had vivid memories of the performance of the Grande Messes des morts that he had had the chance to hear at Saint-Eustache, under Berlioz’s direction, on 22 October 1852—the performance which, as D. Kern Holoman reminds us, was the largest that Berlioz ever conducted, bringing together as it did nearly seven hundred singers and instrumentalists:23 “I had studied the score and was anxious to hear it in person,” Saint-Saëns recalled: it exceeded all my expectations. In the “Tuba mirum” I had the impression that every little column on the pillars of the church became a pipe, and the church itself an immense organ. More than anything, I admired the poignant emotions that predominated over this astonishing work, the continued elevation and originality of its style, far more apparent in performance than in reading the score, as is the case with all the works of this composer. My mother, a great admirer of Berlioz, came with me to the performance. When we came out, both of us overflowing with enthusiasm, we ran into one of my classmates. “Yes,” he said to us, “it’s all very pretty; but the melody!” We let out a bestial cry of anger and grabbed him around the throat; he ran off and was wise to do so, because we would have strangled him. . . . You can imagine how happy I was when, one day, having climbed up to my third-floor flat in the rue du Jardinet, Berlioz asked me to make a piano reduction of the score of Lélio, which was still unpublished. It was at this time that he did me the honor of bestowing his affection on me and of offering support and encouragement as I took the first steps of my career.24 In 1864, when the young composer decided to compete for the Prix de Rome (he was at the time twenty-eight years old), his cantata Ivanhoé did

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not curry the favor of the jury, of which Berlioz was a member. On 22 July of that year Berlioz wrote to his son Louis: We were all under the impression that Camille Saint-Saëns would win the prize. But the other contestant [Victor Sieg], who is still a student, has inner fire, inspiration, and feeling; he can do what cannot be learned, and he will more or less learn the rest. So I voted for him, even though I was painfully aware of the grief that that this rejection would cause Saint-Saëns. But one must above all be fair.25 According to Jean Bonnerot, Saint-Saëns’s secretary and authorized biographer, Berlioz also said of this disappointing development that Saint-Saëns “knows everything, but he lacks inexperience.”26 During the 1867 Exposition Universelle in Paris, Berlioz had occasion to atone for his earlier “sin” by supporting unreservedly the work submitted for the prize, Les Noces de Prométhée, by his protégé. Apropos of this cantata Berlioz wrote to Humbert Ferrand: I had the pleasure of seeing the prize unanimously awarded to my young friend Camille Saint-Saëns, one of the greatest musicians of our time. [. . .] I am still agog about the meeting of the jury! Saint-Saëns is going to be thrilled! I rushed to Saint-Saëns’s place to tell him of his victory, but he was out with his mother. He is a master and an extraordinary pianist. Finally, a bit of common sense in our little musical world!27 In an article written in 1890, Saint-Saëns himself spoke of his debt to Berlioz’s Traité d’instrumentation: One may say of Berlioz’s treatise what one says of his instrumentation: all of its oddities notwithstanding, it is simply marvelous. It is thanks to Berlioz that my entire generation was educated, and, I dare say, properly educated. He had the invaluable ability to kindle the imagination, to cause one to love the art he was teaching.28 The composition by Berlioz that Saint-Saëns most preferred was Roméo et Juliette: Neither lyric nor dramatic nor symphonic, but a little of all of those; a heterogeneous construction in which symphonic elements predominate— such is the work. This sort of repudiation of common sense could have only one excuse: the desire to create a masterpiece—and Berlioz did not fail to do so. Everything here is new, singularly personal, and marked by the sort of profound originality that simply discourages imitation.29

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He summarized his love of the great musician when he wrote, in 1912, that “Berlioz wrote poorly”: He mistreated the voice, and he sometimes indulged himself in some strange whims. But that does not mean that he does not represent one of the pinnacles of the art of music. His grand compositions make one dream of the mountains of the Alps, where one finds forests, glaciers, the burning sun, cascades, and chasms. Some people don’t like them. Too bad for them!30 Concerts Let us now consider the view of Berlioz from the quite different perspective of the music lovers of the larger Parisian concert public. Here, it almost seems as though the work of Berlioz was discovered in the years 1875–80, thanks to a burgeoning of symphonic concerts, for the lyric theater stood clearly apart from this inclination to “rehabilitation”: Benvenuto Cellini continued to sleep in profound repose, while the exquisite masterpiece that is Béatrice et Bénédict had to wait until 1890 for revival at the Opéra Comique. La Prise de Troie, given in concert version by both Pasdeloup and Colonne in 1879, was staged in Paris only in 1891, and even then by a provincial company, from Nice, on 28 January. (The work was reprised at the Palais Garnier eight years later, on 15 November 1899.) Finally, the Opéra Comique put on Les Troyens à Carthage in 1892. All of this appears paltry in contrast to the success that Berlioz was enjoying in the German theaters: Karlsruhe alone, for example, gave both parts of Les Troyens, on 6 and 7 December 1890. As for French symphonic concerts, those of the old Société des Concerts du Conservatoire, which had inherited all of Berlioz’s precious orchestral materials, greeted the composer with only timidity and reserve.31 He was more warmly embraced by the newer symphony orchestras: Jules Pasdeloup’s Concerts populaires, Édouard Colonne’s Concert national, and Charles Lamoureux’s Nouveaux concerts, founded respectively in 1861, 1873, and 1881. In the 1880s, Lamoureux played Berlioz only episodically, inscribing in his programs such sure successes as the overture Le Carnaval romain, La Damnation de Faust,32 and the Symphonie fantastique. His competition with Colonne was severe, and Lamoureux preferred to do battle over the still controversial music of Wagner. What needs emphasis is the pioneering role of Jules Pasdeloup—beginning in the waning years of the Second Empire and thus of the composer’s own life. At first he risked putting on only the shorter works or excerpts from the larger ones. Thus, in March 1864, he gave one scene from Les Troyens at a concert at the Hôtel de Ville—not even bothering to inform the composer of the performance. But he was

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very much in touch with Berlioz when, on 22 January 1865, he performed the overture to Les Francs-Juges: “This led to a kind of riot,” Berlioz wrote to Estelle Fornier on 16 February of that year: After the last measure there was a burst of applause; and after the third salvo, my three faithful noisemakers, following their ten-year custom, once again let out their shrill cries and whistles. At that point the applause was redoubled, four thousand pairs of hands went furiously into action, waving hats and handkerchiefs—a really extraordinary spectacle. When I went out, strangers stopped me on the boulevard to shake my hand, women had themselves introduced to me and presented me with their compliments. One of them said, “What verve, and what orchestral adventure there is there! It’s obvious that you have just written that work.” “Alas, Madame,” I replied, “that work was written thirty-seven years ago; it was my first independent orchestral composition.” There’s the Parisian public for you.33 Pasdeloup experienced another triumph on 7 March 1867, when he performed, and had to encore, the septet (No. 36) from Les Troyens. We must nevertheless question not Pasdeloup’s fidelity to the scores, but rather the credibility of his interpretations of them. In May 1867 we read the following rather disenchanted commentary in Berlioz’s letter to Auguste Morel: “My music is now played almost everywhere, even in America— but not in Paris, although from time to time Pasdeloup works over one of my compositions.”34 Ought we be disappointed by the mercurial nature of the Parisian public? or rather by the limited capacities of the conductor? When the still nearly unknown Symphonie fantastique appeared at the Cirque d’Hiver on Pasdeloup’s program of 23 February 1873—without the “Songe d’une nuit de sabbat”!—it met with only a cool reception. Success came to the work only when it was repeated, this time in its entirety, on 31 December 1876 and 15 January 1877. Adolphe Jullien, a witness to those concerts, remarked in turn that Pasdeloup and his orchestra often faltered before the difficulties posed by Berlioz’s music. Pasdeloup’s complete performance of La Damnation de Faust on 18 February 1877, too hastily put together, was a notable failure, particularly in comparison with the performance given on the same day by Colonne, which was so successful that the two originally scheduled performances had to be augmented by four more.35 To thank him, the composer’s family offered Colonne one of Berlioz’s batons. This, as is well known, marked the beginning of a tradition: the annual revival at the Châtelet concerts of La Damnation de Faust was carried out so faithfully that, on 11 December 1898 (Berlioz’s birthday), Édouard Colonne was able to celebrate both the twenty-fifth anniversary of his tenure as conductor and the one hundredth performance of his favorite score.

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Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

Figure 9.1. Henri Fantin-Latour, L’Anniversaire. Lithograph, 1875.

(The tradition was continued by his successor, Gabriel Pierné, so that by the time of the outbreak of World War I, Faust had been performed on no fewer than one hundred seventy-two occasions.) Colonne did not limit himself to only this work; he also rescued many others from obscurity. On 10 and 17 January 1875, he began his crusade with a revival of L’Enfance du Christ, with Célestine Galli-Marié (who would create the role of Carmen a few months later), and he went on to offer Roméo et Juliette on 18 November and 5 December 1875, the Fantastique on 28 October 1877, the Re-

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Figure 9.2. Henri Fantin-Latour, L’Anniversaire. Sketch for Le Monde illustré, 16 October 1886.

quiem on four occasions (17, 21, and 31 March, and 21 April 1878), and La Prise de Troie on 7, 14, 21, and 28 December 1879. Among the more unusual works that Colonne performed were Tristia (on 15 April 1881), the entire two-part Épisode de la vie d’un artiste (with, in the Fantaisie dramatique sur La Tempête, Camille Saint-Saëns and Louis Diémer at the piano), and the Symphonie funèbre et triomphale (on 22 January 1882).36 Let us finally note the cycle of twelve concerts, with all the major orchestral and vocal works, that Colonne gave during the 1894–95 season;37 and

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the cycle of six concerts, under the aegis of the Société des grandes auditions musicales de la France, that he gave during the centenary season in 1903.38 In 1907, Colonne and his orchestra recorded for Pathé the “Marche hongroise” (from Faust) and Berlioz’s orchestration of Weber’s Invitation à la valse. The Weber is the better recorded of the two, and demonstrates a quite remarkable energy and intensity, even though certain details leave something to be desired, given the impossibility of editing, and the score is shortened in order to fit the four-minute limit of one side of a 78 r.p.m. disc.

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Figure 9.3. Henri Fantin-Latour, La Musique. Pastel version; private collection (USA).

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Figure 9.4. Henri Fantin-Latour, Danses (Ballet des “Troyens”). Pastel, Musée de Pau.

Visual Reaction The burst of posthumous enthusiasm for Berlioz that we have described was felt in other arenas as well. In 1882 Adolphe Jullien published the first genuinely serious study of Berlioz, and this was followed by his monumental tome of 1888. One must also mention the studies by Alfred Ernst (1884), Edmond Hippeau (1890), Jacques-Gabriel Prod’homme (1904), and, of course, the extensive trilogy by Adolphe Boschot (1906, 1908, 1912). In the artistic world, Henri Fantin-Latour worked long and hard to give Berliozians a visual translation of both the composer’s successes and failures. The well-known lithographic plates completed explicitly for Jullien’s second volume, some of them taken from earlier works of his, portray here and there the composer himself.39 These compositions evoke Berlioz’s works in a somewhat naive manner, following indications no doubt provided to Fantin by Jullien himself. Fantin’s interest in Berlioz was piqued, at the same time as his interest in Wagner, in the 1870s (see Figure 9.1). This celebrated lithograph was completed concurrently with the grand homage to Berlioz, on canvas, titled L’Anniversaire (2.20 x 1.70 meters), dated 1876, now in the Musée de Grenoble—an homage rendered when the artist was still under the spell of Colonne’s rendition of Roméo et Juliette, which he had heard on 5 Decem-

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Figure 9.5. Henri Fantin-Latour, Italie! (Duo des “Troyens”). Pencil and charcoal, then lithographed in 1884.

ber 1875. Fantin himself offered an explanation of the tableau. To the left, we see La Musique, in tears; in the center, Clio, “the muse who narrates the actions of celebrated men and events”; to the right, Marguerite, from La Damnation de Faust, who “holds a crown of greenery [. . .] that she appears to wish to attach to the tomb; I rather like her gesture; I tried to express her naïveté with her two arms extended together as in prayer; behind her, Dido (from Les Troyens), who comes with an offering of Virgil’s golden branch.” Near the top, we see an angel from L’Enfance du Christ; below, Romeo and Juliet, and in the foreground, to the right, a tribute from a contemporary: “I portrayed myself, carrying a crown for the anniversary.” In 1886 Fantin again took up L’Anniversaire in order to have it published in the 16 October issue of Le Monde illustré, on the occasion of the inauguration of Alfred Lenoir’s monument of Berlioz, placed in the Square Vintimille in Paris (see Figure 9.2). Writing on the subject to his German friend, the painter Otto Scholderer, Fantin spoke as follows of his homage to Berlioz, which he considered of great importance:

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Figure 9.6. Henri Fantin-Latour, Duo des “Troyens.” Lithograph, 1894.

It seemed to me that a remembrance of him was urgent, for this great artist was an artist even more than he was a musician, in which capacity alone he cannot equal your great musicians, though he was certainly full of ideas. He was the first of the romantics [. . .] and was without doubt the first to sense the necessity of fusing modern drama with music.40

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In a new allegorical composition, La Musique (see Figure 9.3), Fantin inscribes Berlioz’s name symbolically among the German masters whom he admired—Schumann, Wagner, and Brahms—commenting on his choice as follows: “This illustration surely enraged the members of the current French school; they are horrified by the names of Schumann, Berlioz, Wagner, and Brahms.” And yet for Fantin these names “characterize the era.” “Today,” he wrote, “what other name could one possibly add to theirs?”41 Fantin’s devotion to Berlioz was based on long and profound experience. He seems to have attended one of the performances of L’Enfance du Christ that Berlioz conducted in February 1863, for the Société nationale des Beaux-Arts. More importantly, some months later, the artist saw Les Troyens at the Théâtre Lyrique and was simply overwhelmed. The opera motivated him to complete at least a dozen works, almost all lithographs (see Figure 9.4). But he was most profoundly inspired by the great love duet in Act IV (see Figures 9.5 and 9.6).42 In each case Fantin’s scenes, with their characteristic poetic imagination and remarkable sense of light, are far from the no doubt rather insipid reality of Léon Carvalho’s staging at the Théâtre Lyrique. Indeed, in a letter to the Princess SaynWittgenstein, Berlioz himself had written that “the director, while insisting that he wished only to carry out my intentions, put me through an agony that I will no longer tolerate, asking for frightful cuts and horrible changes in the staging.”43 If Fantin’s poetic interpretations are not all of equal quality, they nonetheless illustrate the spirit of the years that have concerned us here, 1875– 1900, years of enthusiasm and faith during which our composer was able to extract blissful posthumous revenge from the public at large as well as from many serious artists. I should like to conclude by citing the letter that Fantin addresed to Adolphe Jullien on 2 September 1887, when the two were still collaborating on their grand illustrated tome: Buré, 2 September 1887 Mon cher Jullien, Thank you very much for your good letter, in which I see with pleasure [. . .] that you remain preoccupied with Berlioz. What we must produce is a beautiful book, one filled with important documents. You will not have an easy time with this romantic figure, and please don’t make too much fun of him for his errors. In that lovely age of romanticism, they were less attentive to detail—and I really wonder if life itself wasn’t a lot more enjoyable in those days.44 —Translated by Peter Bloom

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Notes 1. “Il se lève aussi à l’horizon musical un jeune astre du nom de Gustave Charpentier qui me paraît destiné à une gloire aussi productive qu’inesthétique. Celui-là prend la succession de Berlioz qui fut, je crois, un prodigieux fumiste, qui arriva à croire lui-même à ses fumisteries; Charpentier a en moins la nature assez aristocratique de Berlioz.” See Claude Debussy, Correspondance, ed. François Lesure (Paris: Hermann, 1993), 72. [My translation differs from that of Roger Nichols, in Debussy Letters, selected and ed. François Lesure and Roger Nichols (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), 41. —Ed.] 2. Debussy, “Concerts Colonne—Société des nouveaux concerts” (Sammelbände der Internationalen Musikgesellschaft [S.I.M.], 1 November 1913), reprinted in M. Croche et autres écrits, ed. François Lesure (Paris: Gallimard, 1987), 246. 3. Debussy, “Concerts Colonne” (S.I.M. [November 1912]), reprinted in Debussy, M. Croche, 216. 4. Maurice Ravel, “Les Tableaux symphoniques de M. Fanelli (S.I.M. [April 1912]), reprinted in Ravel, Lettres, écrits, entretiens, ed. Arbie Orenstein (Paris: Flammarion, 1989), 300. 5. Maurice Ravel, in La Revue musicale (12 March 1931), cited in Ravel, Lettres, 359. 6. Maurice Ravel, in Le Guide du concert (16 October 1931), cited in Ravel, Lettres, 369. 7. “Maurice Ravel on Berlioz,” Daily Telegraph (12 January 1929), cited in A Ravel Reader, ed. Arbie Orenstein (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 461–62. The “Valse des Sylphes” is the “Ballets des Sylphes” in Part II of La Damnation de Faust. The pedal on D throughout this number might be viewed as an effort to evoke the “popular” effect of the drone. Ravel’s criticism is “composerly”; he would not have harmonized the melody in this way. 8. Vincent d’Indy, Cours de composition musicale, 2e livre, 2e partie, transcribed by Auguste Sérieyx (Paris: Durand, 1933), 315. 9. Paul Dukas, “L’Enfance du Christ,” La Revue hebdomadaire (December 1892), cited in Les Écrits de Paul Dukas sur la musique (Paris: Société d’éditions françaises et internationales, 1948), 78–79. 10. Paul Dukas, “Roméo et Juliette d’Hector Berlioz,” Revue hebdomadaire (December 1894), cited in Les Écrits de Paul Dukas, 235. 11. Later, Fauré praises Emma Calvé for having successfully been able to sing both the “highly pretentious and insipid ballad, ‘Le Roi de Thulé,’” as well “D’amour l’ardente flamme,” which he calls an “air pathétique.” (The adjective probably implies moving.) See Gabriel Fauré, “Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt: La Damnation de Faust,” Le Figaro (9 May 1903). These reservations are not reproduced in the truncated version of this text found in Gabriel Fauré, Opinions musicales (Paris: Éditions Rieder, 1930), 17–18. 12. Gariel Fauré, “L’Opéra de Monte-Carlo à Berlin,” Le Figaro (12 April 1907). 13. Gabriel Fauré, in Le Figaro (28 December 1903), quoted in Fauré, Opinions musicales, 20.

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14. Gabriel Fauré, in Le Figaro (9 June 1921), quoted in Fauré, Opinions musicales, 22. 15. Gabriel Fauré, in Le Figaro (25 January 1904), quoted in Fauré, Opinions musicales, 21. 16. Gabriel Fauré, in Le Figaro (21 November 1904). 17. Camille Saint-Saëns and Gabriel Fauré, Correspondance, ed. Jean-Michel Nectoux, 2nd ed. (Paris: Société française de musicologie, 1994), 79–81. The passage in the coda to which Saint-Saëns refers—one of Berlioz’s favorite devices—is marked “thème de l’adagio réuni au second thème de l’allegro.” See NBE 1a, pp. 55, 110. 18. Saint-Saëns and Fauré, Correspondance, 81. 19. See the following writings of Saint-Saëns: “Berlioz (Publication de ses Lettres intimes),” Le Voltaire (15 December 1881), reprinted in his Harmonie et mélodie (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1885) and again in his Regards sur mes contemporains, ed. Yves Gérard (Arles: B. Coutaz, 1990); “Hector Berlioz,” Revue bleue (26 July 1890), reprinted in his Portraits et souvenirs (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1899) and again in his Regards sur mes contemporains; “Ode à Berlioz” (in verse), Musica (March 1908); “Le Requiem de Berlioz,” L’Écho de Paris (12 May 1912), reprinted in his École buissonnière (Paris: Lafitte & Cie., 1913); “Pour Berlioz,” L’Écho de Paris (16 November 1914); “Berlioz errant,” Annales politiques et littéraires (22 February 1920); “Berlioz,” Le Ménestrel 83, no. 42 (21 October 1921): 405–7. 20. “Discours de M. Saint-Saëns” [on the festivities marking the centenary of Berlioz’s birth, at La Côte-Saint-André], Le Guide musical, nos. 36–37 (6–18 September 1903): 627. 21. This letter of Saint-Saëns, dated 19 January 1920, is cited in Saint-Saëns, Regards sur mes contemporains, 17. 22. “Le Requiem de Berlioz,” reprinted in Saint-Saëns, École buissonnière, 213. 23. D. Kern Holoman, Berlioz (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 433. 24. I cite the text, little known, from the address of 1903 (given in Le Guide musical). Saint-Saëns was indeed responsible for the piano reduction of Lélio, published in Paris by Richault in 1857. See NBE 7, p. 185. 25. CG VII, 77. 26. Jean Bonnerot, Camille Saint-Saëns (1835–1921): Sa vie et son œuvre (Paris: Durand, 1923), 43. 27. CG VII, 559. 28. Saint-Saëns, “Hector Berlioz”; Regards sur mes contemporains, 102. 29. Ibid., 102. 30. Saint-Saëns, “Le Requiem de Berlioz”; École buissonnière, 216. 31. Neither Alexandre Tilmant nor Georges Hainl, conductors of the Société in those years, seems to have appreciated Berlioz’s music. Hainl conducted La Fuite en Égypte on three occasions, at Easter time (on 3 April 1864, 1 April 1866, and 31 March 1872), as well as excerpts from La Damnation de Faust (on 7, 14 January, and 3 March 1872). It was only with the arrival of Édouard Deldevez at the helm of the Société, in December 1872, that the name of Berlioz began to appear regularly on the programs. The overture Le Carnaval romain was among Deldevez’s favorite scores, as was Roméo et Juliette, given in excerpts, and then in its entirety (on 5 and 12 January 1879; 28 January and 4 February 1883; and 6 and 23 March 1884).

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32. Three performances in February 1884 and three in December 1884 and January 1885. 33. CG VII, 217. 34. CG VII, 555. 35. Édouard Colonne, “Berlioz et les Concerts Colonne: La Damnation de Faust,” Musica (March 1908—a special issue devoted to Berlioz): 37. 36. These statistics may be found in Adolphe Jullien, Hector Berlioz: Sa vie et ses œuvres (Paris: Librairie de L’Art, 1888), 367–71, where an appendix lists “the works of Berlioz in Parisian concerts.” 37. Performed at the time were Roméo et Juliette (25 November and 2 December 1894); the overture to Les Francs-Juges, Le Jeune Pâtre breton, Rêverie et Caprice, La Captive, and the Requiem (9 December 1894); the overture to Benvenuto Cellini, “Absence” and “Villanelle” from Les Nuits d’été, the duet from Béatrice et Bénédict, and the Requiem (16 December 1894); L’Enfance du Christ (23 and 30 December 1894, the second performance augmented with the “Dies Irae” and “Tuba mirum” of the Requiem; La Damnation de Faust (13, 20, 27 January, and 3 February 1895); and the Symphonie fantastique, Lélio, and the Te Deum (10 and 17 February 1895). The programs are printed in the immediately contemporary issues of Le Ménestrel. 38. Performed at that time were the Requiem, La Damnation de Faust, L’Enfance du Christ, and Roméo et Juliette, each given twice, in December 1903 and January 1904. (The programs are preserved in the Département de la Musique of the Bibliothèque nationale de France). This Société, whose principal chief patron was the Comtesse Greffulhe, was responsible for the première in France of Béatrice et Bénédict. 39. See Jullien, Hector Berlioz, with lithographic illustrations as follows: “Vérité,” subtitled composition allégorique; “Tuba mirum,” from the Requiem; “Un Bal,” from the Symphonie fantastique; “La Harpe éolienne,” from Lélio; “Harold aux montagnes,” from Harold en Italie; “La Fonte du Persée,” from Benvenuto Cellini; “Juliette au balcon,” from Roméo et Juliette; “L’Apparition de Marguerite,” from La Damnation de Faust (also painted in oil in 1888); Sara la baigneuse; “Le Repos de la Sainte Famille,” from L’Enfance du Christ; “Nocturne,” from Béatrice et Bénédict; “Apparition d’Hector” and “Duo d’amour” from Les Troyens, and Apothéose (the lithographed version of the painting, L’Anniversaire). These works are described under Nos. 76–89 in Germain Hédiard, Fantin-Latour; Catalogue de l’œuvre lithographique du maître (Paris: Librairie de l’art ancien et moderne, 1906). 40. Fantin-Latour, Letter of 9 February 1876, cited in Douglas Druick and Michel Hoog, eds., Fantin-Latour, catalogue of the exhibition at the Grand Palais (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 1982), 220. 41. Ibid., 287. 42. The love duet is the subject of six lithographs and one pastel completed between 1876 and 1895. See Hédiard, Fantin-Latour, nos. 10, 22, 88, 90, 116, and 117. 43. Berlioz, Letter of 23 December 1863, CG VI, 544. Berlioz returned to this sad subject in the Postface of the Mémoires: “the staging, which Carvalho absolutely insisted upon directing himself, was entirely different from what I had specified; indeed, in certain places it was absurd, in others, it was ridiculous.” 44. Fantin-Latour, From a facsimile of this letter preserved in the dossier FantinLatour in the documentation department at the Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

10

Berlioz in the Fin-de-siècle Press Lesley Wright The Press as Mirror As the great Exposition of 1900 was nearing its close and the end of the nineteenth century was fast approaching, the journalists Eugène Allard and Louis Vauxcelles presented the readership of Le Figaro with the rationale for their forthcoming series, “Les Conquêtes du siècle.” They asked: “Are we ahead or behind? Should we be proud of ourselves or ashamed when we compare our work with the endeavors of foreigners?”1 Their efforts at digesting the accomplishments of the nineteenth century and ranking French contributions to various disciplines were designed to provide entertainment for the general reader. And so, between 25 September and 25 October 1900, they presented eight articles based on interviews with and letters from prominent composers and musicians, most of them French.2 In response to a preset list of questions, these figures commented on the evolution of the symphony, opera, and chamber music; identified some of the principal figures responsible for such change; and considered whether there had been any real progress in the general public’s appreciation of music. Like others, Adolphe Jullien, the historian, critic, and biographer of Berlioz, scoffed at the notion of a “top ten” and noticed with amusement how these composers managed with “touching ingenuity” to turn their interviews into proud assessments of their own achievements; but he also observed with approval that those interviewed agreed on two points: first, that the most significant advances in nineteenth-century music had taken place in symphonic style and orchestral sound (including the “conquest” of the opera by the symphony); and second, that these advances stemmed from the influence of three seminal figures—Beethoven, Berlioz, and Wagner.3 In fact, while Beethoven ranked high on everyone’s list and Wagner was mentioned frequently, only a few spoke for Berlioz. Augusta Holmès, for one, put Berlioz and Wagner in the same sentence and gave credit to both for their contributions to the evolution of harmony, orchestration, and theatrical forms. Gustave Charpentier, acknowledging Berlioz’s contribution to the symphony and praising his own maître, Massenet, spoke largely of the social utility of art, and of his own art in particular. Alfred

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Bruneau, music critic for Le Figaro and thus a colleague of Allard and Vauxcelles, dubbed Berlioz the greatest French musician of the century. In his response to the Figaro series, Jullien also roundly reprimanded one of the interviewees, Pierre Gailhard, director of the Paris Opéra, for his assertion that the four great musicians of the nineteenth century were Gluck, Verdi, Meyerbeer, and Wagner.4 Jullien archly noted that Gluck was an eighteenth-century composer and that Beethoven was missing from Gailhard’s list. As further proof of Gailhard’s myopia, Jullien questioned his omission of Berlioz: “Despite the modest profits of his Prise de Troie at the Opéra, is not Berlioz, whose influence has spread well beyond French borders, one of the greatest masters of music in this century?”5 This series of articles in Le Figaro and Jullien’s response to them gives some idea of the heightened interest in historical consciousness and national “ranking” that appeared regularly in the Parisian press during the Exposition of 1900—something that is not surprising given that the government’s aim in funding this endeavor had been precisely to highlight French contributions to progress in the previous century.6 After strolling though the fairground pavilions and attending concerts by groups from various European nations, even nonspecialist readers might have developed opinions on the relative merits of French music and composers of the nineteenth century. The music critics themselves also discussed whether Berlioz, despite his old-fashioned Romantic rhetoric, might be worthy of being dubbed, as Bruneau did, “the most glorious French musician” of the century then ending and what he called “our Wagner.”7 Was the renaissance of interest in his work during the decades after his death enough to grant him that status? After all, his prominence derived largely from the enormous popularity of La Damnation de Faust and a handful of orchestral works; his operas had never claimed a place in the repertory even though they were revived at the principal houses in the French capital. Using the press as a mirror of musical debate at the fin de siècle, and thus taking a vantage point different from that of the neighboring article in this volume by Jean-Michel Nectoux, I should like to investigate here how Berlioz’s posthumous image gradually achieved a central position in the French nation’s memory of his century. Since enshrinement at the Paris Opéra still symbolized official imprimatur, the evolving response to Les Troyens, from 1890 (when it was first presented in its entirety in Karlsruhe) through 1921 (when Adolphe Boschot’s trimmed-back version of the fiveact work appeared at the Paris Opéra), will serve as a focal point of my discussion. Berlioz’s great work was not “new” at this time (except, of course, to the general public), and critics were thus freed to write retrospective pieces that included comments on recent monographs and articles about Berlioz, and on those of his works deemed particularly worthy of admiration. In this situation, then, commentators’ remarks tend to reveal even more about their own cultural and political objectives than about the

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effectiveness of the music itself. They allow us to witness, as do the publications that are mentioned en route (Berlioz’s own Mémoires, Ernst’s study of the theater works, Jullien’s biography, and later Boschot’s) what we now may see as the writing of Les Troyens into French music history.8 That writing includes a demand for the “righting” of Berlioz’s status, as all observers suggest that a place for Berlioz, earlier denied, is long overdue in that Louvre of French music that was the Opéra: such an “exhibition” would dam the inundation by German cultural products and ensure that France not be drowned by German initiatives.9 Les Troyens as National Treasure Felix Mottl, the gifted conductor and promoter of French music, was first to present a complete Les Troyens, in Karlsruhe in early December 1890, on two successive evenings. Adolphe Jullien could not help but note that a momentous event had taken place on German soil, that France had been humiliated, that this little theater had accomplished something which the directors of the Paris Opéra had always shied away from because of “parsimony or incompetence, but also because of ignorance and misunderstanding of who Berlioz was and of what he is worth.”10 Though feeling the challenge to French honor, Léon Carvalho, director of the Opéra Comique, might well have ignored the pressure to mount Berlioz’s Les Troyens à Carthage, the last three acts of Berlioz’s grand opera that he had earlier staged in 1863, because, as few critics failed to mention, his image had hardly been enhanced by what Berlioz said in his Mémoires of the 1863 performances (which, of course, had themselves inspired limited enthusiasm among the Théâtre Lyrique’s Second Empire audiences). Jullien points out that what warmed Carvalho’s initially tepid interest in putting on Les Troyens à Carthage at the Opéra Comique in 1892 was the heat of coins: some 40,000 francs were given by the Société des Grandes Auditions Musicales to underwrite his new project.11 Some of the reviews of that 1892 production were colored by Wagnerian concepts and underscored their negative aspects. For example, Les Troyens à Carthage was sometimes described (ironically, one presumes) as the second part of a “bilogie.” Attributing his information to an anonymous friend of Jules Pasdeloup (conveniently deceased since 1887), Théodore Massiac suggested that Berlioz intended to write a trilogy, but that he had never had the time to write what would have been the third part, La Fondation de Rome.12 Expressing a clear preference for Wagner, Edmond Stoullig makes it clear that the general public would not embrace Berlioz’s “literary” conception at the same time that it was spontaneously embracing Wagner’s theatrically effective music dramas.13 Various comments about Berlioz’s old-fashioned use of arias and duets also imply certain critics’ preference for Wagner’s aesthetic.14

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Other critics, while tempted to do so, tried not to choose between the two masters. They rather acknowledged Berlioz’s imperfect musical grammar but praised such numbers as the quintet and love duet, which showed beauty and flashes of genius even in a score that had become “antiquated.”15 Still others were more directly forthcoming about the importance of righting history by bringing this opera by a “national musician” to the repertory of a national opera house. Paul Dukas may have recognized the unevenness of Berlioz’s scores, but he insisted upon the respect that they merited, and he found it shameful that Les Troyens had not entered the repertory of a major French theater, especially when the Opéra Comique had already opened its doors to the likes of Cavalleria rusticana.16 “This is an act of artistic reparation,” wrote Albert Montel, “which returns to us one of the masterpieces of our musical heritage.”17 Ernest Reyer wanted more. Berlioz’s old friend—and one of the leaders of the “renaissance”—felt that if the Opéra saw fit to welcome Wagner to its stage, then it should welcome Berlioz as well: “I declare without hesitation or preamble, spontaneously and categorically, that it is shameful for French art that a work like Les Troyens is reduced to failing in fragments ill-suited to some second-class lyric theater when the stage of the Opéra itself is barely vast enough to accommodate such a masterpiece.”18 But in Le Petit Journal, Léon Kerst, who characterized himself as an independent critic and stressed that he was no worshipper of Berlioz, showed annoyance at this campaign to boost national pride by acclaiming Les Troyens a masterpiece and the composer himself a national treasure. Though Kerst announces the success of the opera with cynicism, as though it had quietly been agreed upon in advance, he makes it clear that for him, Berlioz is the composer of only one work, La Damnation de Faust: “That, I imagine, should suffice.”19 In truth, the reception of the press in 1892 was more respectful than enthusiastic. Many critics seemed to feel that the history of French opera needed Berlioz in its pages in order to prove the continuity of a tradition that harked back to Méhul and, further, to Rameau. Nonetheless Carvalho chose to present Les Troyens à Carthage only twenty-five times in 1892– 93 and not at all in the following season.20 Seven years passed before Reyer’s challenge to the Opéra was answered. In the meantime, however, a minor incident revealed the increasing political tensions that spilled over onto the musical world and contributed to the sometimes contentious reevaluation of Berlioz in the next decade. In September 1894 Jullien acknowledged with contempt that Carvalho would no longer be presenting Les Troyens à Carthage. Carvalho’s unselfish gesture would make it possible for Felix Mottl, the enterprising director of the theater in Karlsruhe, to organize a cycle of Berlioz operas in Paris without the distraction of a competing production. Carvalho could therefore rub his hands with the satisfaction of a man who had done his duty

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and claim that he had given up the work not out of “indifference or disdain,” but rather out of “veneration.”21 Charles Lenormant, the entrepreneur who also had grandiose plans for a Wagner cycle, announced that Mottl’s cycle of Berlioz operas (two performances each of La Prise de Troie, Les Troyens à Carthage, and Benvenuto Cellini) would be given in April 1895 at the Théâtre de la Gaîté. (Jullien was skeptical that he would be able to pull it off.) Less than three months later, Jullien reported rumors that Berlioz would be accorded the grand distinction of a staging at the Opéra of the first two acts of Les Troyens, La Prise de Troie: “Mr. Gailhard is thinking about it, I’ve been told. I, myself, can only dream about it.”22 It hardly seems likely that such intense interest in La Prise de Troie should be a coincidence. Sure enough, in early January 1895 Mottl complained to Le Temps that his project to present the entire Les Troyens had had to be cancelled because of the Opéra’s plan to present La Prise de Troie. Both Gailhard and the publisher of the opera, Choudens, denied any underhanded dealings.23 But the tone of a comment in Le Ménestrel about this squabble over the right to present La Prise de Troie—“Hmm! Hmm! Berlioz est bien français pour avoir une pareille bonne fortune”24—suggests that something more was afoot. The comment implies that only a Frenchman such as Berlioz, and not a foreign composer, would be subject to such shenanigans. It is likely that Berlioz’s publisher, perhaps urged on by the family, struck a deal with Gailhard on the assumption that a permanent success at the Opéra would create more revenue that a temporary success at a lesser theater. Still, had the project at the Gaîté come to fruition, a page in French music history would have been written, for Mottl would have been able to take credit for the French and, indeed, the world première of the complete Les Troyens. Many years later Louis Marsolleau, commenting on the first “complete” performance of Les Troyens at the Paris Opéra in 1921, remarked that patriotism was not necessarily a virtue and that narrow-minded nationalism had deprived the Parisian public of the joy of hearing the whole of Berlioz’s work for twenty-five years.25 Though for the earlier project Choudens had chosen Xavier Leroux to coach the musicians (the Polish Jean de Reszke was to sing Aeneas), Felix Mottl (a German) would have led the orchestra, and Mme Reuss (from Vienna) would have sung Cassandra: Alas! narrow-minded nationalism [. . .] interfered. A German conductor! an Austrian singer! For shame! The Tannhaüser meddlers got upset. A newborn newspaper [. . .] made lots of noise and organized a cabal. The investors in the enterprise—investors are never heroic!—became fearful; the rehearsals were stopped, and everything was disrupted. And that is how Mr. Rouché will have the honor of being the first to present

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the complete score of the Troyens on stage. But you can see that he was not the first to think of doing so.26 Though Berlioz’s five-act masterpiece did not enter the repertory of the Opéra until 1921 (and then in condensed form), Mottl’s project most likely drew the attention of Gailhard toward Berlioz’s Les Troyens and played some role in bringing about the performance of the first two acts of the work at the Opéra in mid-November 1899. Increased ministerial attention, associated with the opening in 1900 of the International Exposition, also played a role in this presentation of part of Les Troyens, for art was crucial to the display of the grandeur of the nation to the many foreigners, especially the Germans, who came to Paris for this world’s fair. The secretary of the Ministère des Beaux-Arts officially noted the ministry’s preference for productions of French works at the Opéra in this context of national rivalry.27 Thus it is not surprising that virtually every reviewer patriotically echoed such sentiments, cited Berlioz’s Mémoires, and made it clear that this “musicien national” deserved justice.28 And yet La Prise de Troie was respectfully but not enthusiastically received. Once again, Léon Kerst acknowledged the historical significance of this event, but then pointed out what he saw as the opera’s principal problem— it was simply too old-fashioned and undramatic to suit current taste: Today the Opéra is doing its duty in signing La Prise de Troie into its repertory. [. . .] I remain convinced that it is a little late to do so and that Berlioz’s renown has nothing to gain by the resurrection of his theatrical works; we have come so far since 1863! But that is the public’s affair, and they will pronounce themselves for or against this genre that is already “old” but not yet old enough. [. . .] Finally, if I may be permitted freely to express a sincere opinion, I would say briefly that despite the evident splendor of this spectacle, one still has the right to be respectfully bored by La Prise de Troie—and I fear that one is making good use of it.”29 Critics generally praised Cassandra’s prophecy (though not Marie Delna’s acting)30 and Andromache’s mute appearance. Some liked the final scene with chorus. Several complained that Cassandra did nothing but continuously lament. Despite the splendid production, this “prologue” to a work already known to the public, Les Troyens à Carthage, because of its flat characterization and separate numbers, gave some the impression of being little more than a cantata.31 Certain critics did emphasize Berlioz’s role as ancestor of the modern French school. They credited him with providing an “iron pedestal” upon which a whole generation of French musicians had been able to climb: “It is under his banner that we must fight in the name of French art.”32 None-

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theless, Gaston Carraud, an admirer of Berlioz, could not proclaim that the performance was a true success. He expressed respect, but he also expressed disappointment, because he had expected something as revolutionary as the Symphonie fantastique.33 One might wish to say that history had been written and partly righted as Berlioz’s century neared its close; and one might assume that the process would have continued in the following year, when from 14 April to 12 November, that grandiose manifestation of France’s colonial power and contributions to human progress, the Exposition internationale universelle, opened its exhibits to the world and allowed visitors to compare French cultural and industrial products to those of its European and overseas neighbors.34 Berlioz did find a place in the official concerts organized by an executive commission presided over by Saint-Saëns, with excerpts from Roméo et Juliette, but he enjoyed greater acclaim when Gustav Mahler and the Vienna Philharmonic “unofficially” performed the Symphonie fantastique in its entirety—the only French work on programs otherwise devoted to the music of Mozart, Beethoven, Weber, Schubert, Wagner, Bruckner, and Goldmark.35 In the theaters Berlioz’s operas were nowhere to be found: despite the government’s desire that French works be on display at the Opéra during the Exposition, Gailhard withdrew La Prise de Troie from the stage of the Opéra on 4 April, after only sixteen performances, causing Jullien to remark ironically that the director deserved thanks for his heroic decision to spare a superior work from the gaze of so many uncomprehending tourists visiting Paris that summer.36 As secretary of the commission that had organized the official concerts, Alfred Bruneau wrote an extended report for the Minister of Public Instruction and Fine Arts.37 Foregrounding his own views on the history of French music, and ranging far beyond what the rest of the committee expected, Bruneau’s report provoked an immediate response by one anonymous committee member,38 and subsequent responses from other scholars and composers: to assess in earnest the accomplishments of the century just passed, the time had clearly come to define the essence of the French soul.39 Much like those whose ideas appeared in the “Conquests of the Century,” these critics designed criteria for historical and “national” significance—based on politics, musical style, or simple chronology—precisely in order to privilege the composers whom they favored. But substantive disagreements over Berlioz’s place in these various rankings may well have delayed the appearance of Les Troyens on the stage of the Paris Opéra. Bruneau’s report elaborated upon ideas he had been voicing in Le Figaro for at least a year. He characterized Berlioz as the father of modern music, the liberator of French practice from the stiflingly ornamental Italian tradition, and the spirit, with Hugo and Delacroix, of the Holy Trinity of French Romanticism. Acknowledging that its colossal score was still little appreciated, Bruneau praised Les Troyens as eloquent, moving, and completely

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French. Indeed, he claimed that the opera contained elements that would lead to a French renaissance in the twentieth century. In the years immediately after the centennial celebration of 1903, which produced a spate of publications from the gossipy to the grave, writers continued to struggle with the effort to categorize Berlioz.40 In 1904 Paul Landormy reacted to the centennial by wondering whether, aside from Rameau, Berlioz was the only candidate for a “great” French composer. Since he had neither created nor perpetuated a national tradition, and since he apparently had little affection for the classical virtues of grace, balance, and restraint, in what proper sense could Berlioz be considered French?41 Vincent d’Indy, in his Cours de composition musicale, classified Berlioz as a mostly literary genius, whose manifest lack of interest in form and concision made him more palatable to German taste and more influential on the other side of the Rhine. Debussy, too, in his various critical writings, found little particularly French or musical about Berlioz.42 On the other hand, Bruneau, Dukas, and especially Romain Rolland hailed his importance, his originality, and his innate “Frenchness.” Rolland, a republican known for his professional objectivity, was an ardent supporter. He dismissed the prejudice, pedantry, and intellectual snobbism he found in academic circles, suggested that Roméo et Juliette had given French composers a musical language as supple and nuanced as the mother tongue itself, and proposed that that work had laid the foundation for a national music that mirrored the traditional French preference for the picturesque.43 Commenting on the storm of controversy over Berlioz’s ranking, he declared that a single part of one of his works [. . .] reveals more genius [. . .] than all the other French music of his century. I could understand it if this question were being discussed in the land of Beethoven and Bach. But for us, who can measure up to him? Gluck was a truly great man. So, too, was César Franck. But neither was a genius of his stature. [. . . Berlioz] is not a musician; he is music itself.44 The political orientation of a turn-of-the-century critic is a poor indicator of his assessment of Berlioz (whose own politics continue to be the subject of some debate). True, in contradistinction to Rolland, the conservative Jean Marnold, a supporter of the Schola Cantorum, contemptuously dismissed Berlioz in 1905 for the “disconcerting clumsiness” of his harmony and his “innate unmusicality.”45 And yet in the same year, Lionel de La Laurencie, another conservative scholiste who had attacked both romanticism and Italian stylistic influence, came to the defense of that most romantic of all French composers, linking Berlioz to his provincial birthplace—as did Prod’homme in his biography of the composer of 1904—in order to signal his connection to the “genius of our race.”46

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Despite the apotheosis of 1903—the centennial celebrations that culminated the first cycle of Berlioz’s posthumous rehabilitation—a broad spectrum of views of Berlioz coexisted among those writing at the time, ranging from Marnold’s vitriol to Rolland’s warm support. The same spectrum was surely found, too, in the circles of power that could have brought his return to the stage of the Opéra. In 1903, however, no revival of La Prise de Troie took place at that theater; nor was there a production of Les Troyens à Carthage, despite Albert Carré’s announcement that such a performance was to take place at the Opéra Comique. Pierre Lalo remarked plaintively that commemorative statues were all well and good,47 but that Berlioz would certainly have preferred, as a tribute to his achievement, to see Les Troyens on the stage: “It appears that no one thought of it; unless we consider the performance of La Damnation de Faust in the theater as a tribute, which would be severely to abuse a paradox.”48 Faust as Theater Critics of all persuasions united in 1903 to condemn Raoul Gunsbourg’s stage adaptation of La Damnation de Faust, brought to the Théâtre SarahBernhardt after years of successful performances in Monte Carlo. Such a transformation, from the concert hall to the opera stage, had no authority on the basis of Berlioz’s Mémoires or letters, although Gunsbourg made the mistake of trying to justify his production on the basis of a letter that was in fact a forgery.49 With its splendid cast and ingenious staging, however, his production delighted the public, and seven years later, aware of the popularity of Gunsbourg’s adaptation in cities around the world, the Opéra opened its doors to his version of La Damnation de Faust. This 1910 production “wrote history” but surely did not “right” it. Some critics called it “musical vandalism”;50 others expressed outrage, as they had in 1903, that Gunsbourg should so mutilate a masterpiece. In Le Ménestrel, however, Arthur Pougin reluctantly swallowed what he knew would be a success with the public—an ingenious stage production that had triumphed abroad.51 A pragmatic writer for Le Figaro also remarked that while it would have been better to revive one of Berlioz’s operas, this would have proved a mediocre draw, whereas La Damnation de Faust was one of the big hits of the season.52 (By 1924 it had already reached its one hundredth performance at the Opéra.) Admission to the leading musical institution of France, the Opéra, had always been an indication of official approval, but in this instance the entry of the popular Damnation was rather an indication of shrewd (Faustian?) compromise: while a war of words was raging between the forces who saw Berlioz as the quintessentially French genius of the nineteenth century and those who saw him as a mere footnote to the history of romanticism, the

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staging of Berlioz’s légende dramatique would fill the coffers of the Opéra. Even those who understood Gunsbourg’s perfidiousness must have known that their desire to have Les Troyens produced by the Opéra could be realized by the recognition that Berlioz was making money in the opera house.53 Berlioz As Latin Genius As French men and women began to realize that war was on the horizon, certain intellectuals made an effort to reconcile the “aesthetic polarities in the French political world.”54 Support for this view surfaces even in Victor Debay and Paul Locard’s article on Berlioz for Lavignac’s grand Encyclopédie de la musique et Dictionnaire du Conservatoire, dated 1914. They wrote of Berlioz as one of the supreme glories of French music, and, acknowledging that his music still had its detractors, maintained that “no one dreams any longer of repudiating Berlioz’s genius or of refusing him a leading place among the most important musicians that France has ever produced.”55 A more united appreciation of Berlioz also prevailed after World War I, especially after the press announced that the Opéra would finally accomplish its “pious duty” by mounting Les Troyens.56 Support for staging his work was carried aloft by support for the glorious symbols of the genius of the nation. Expressing admiration for Berlioz’s score, even in advance of the première, seems to have become almost analogous to reciting a pledge of allegiance. Les Troyens deserved a permanent place in this museum: “Berlioz should reign in music as Ingres and Delacroix reign in painting; he is the Latin genius, illuminated by the torch that flames in the romantic night; Les Troyens deserves to be put before the grand listening public as a manifesto on the evolution of French lyric art.”57 Critics from newspapers across the political spectrum signed on to champion Berlioz’s opera. For example, the writer for the communist daily L’Humanité, who repeated several of the time-worn criticisms of Les Troyens, felt obliged to end his review with the hope that the work would remain in the repertory and receive a respectable number of performances each year because of its importance to the history of French opera.58 On the other hand, J.-H. Moreno defended the score purely for its musical significance. For him, Les Troyens did not need the symbolic weight of being a Latin epic that answered the German-Scandinavian epics; it was a self-sufficient masterpiece, and not susceptible to any “well-meaning indulgence born of national pride.”59 Another theme in the criticism of 1921 was the idea that the nineteenth century had now clearly become “history,” with the implication that it presented no danger to the present. What was “antiquated” (“vieilli”) in 1899 could now be seen as “antique” (“ancien”): No longer contemporary, no longer in need of any immediate “relevance,” Les Troyens merited

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revival in and of itself as an historic monument: “Several artistic revolutions have passed. The Berliozian era has ended and already seems to have receded quite far into the annals of history. This is not a reason that our generation should lose interest in him. Quite the contrary.”60 Finally, in a review that signals an accommodation of both the new and the old as part of the nation’s heritage, Pierre Lalo manages to compare Berlioz’s reserve to that of Debussy, who had died only three years before. Hearing the exquisite sonorities of Berlioz’s Act IV Septet, he writes, “one thinks of the brief paintings of the sea in Pelléas; however different their music, only Berlioz and Debussy have created so much poetry with so little in the way of sonorous material.” He dismisses one by one the usual criticisms of Berlioz and exhorts the public to embrace Les Troyens as a reflection of themselves. He finds Berlioz’s opera to be an expression of the essence of national values: “Go and pay homage to [. . .] this profoundly Latin and profoundly French composition by a great artist of our own race who, until his last breath, proudly pursued the noble dreams and ideas that came to him from a higher world. [. . .] Go and honor his thought and art, and, even more than that, love them.”61 Pierre Lalo’s supplication that readers find reflection of their collective memory and identity in Berlioz’s music is the sort of gesture that leads modern historians, such as Fulcher, to see music itself as “integral to the forging of a national ‘memory’ or myth,” as helping to define the nation’s “true soul.”62 And yet, even on the eve of his bicentennial, Berlioz’s place in that soul continues to be a matter of debate. Still, the entry of Les Troyens to the Opéra in 1921 must rank, as the editors of Le Figaro would have had it, as one of the conquêtes du siècle.

Notes 1. Eugène Allard and Louis Vauxcelles, “Les Conquêtes du siècle,” Le Figaro (14 September 1900). 2. The musical portion of “Les Conquêtes du siècle” includes: 25 September 1900 (Paul and Lucien Hillemacher); 4 October (Edvard Grieg, Augusta Holmès); 7 October (Alfred Bruneau); 8 October (Louis Bourgault-Ducoudray, Alexandre Guilmant, Samuel Rousseau, Georges Marty); 9 October (Victorin Joncières, Camille Erlanger); 11 October (Pedro Gailhard, Camille Saint-Saëns); 23 October (Gustave Charpentier); and 25 October (Camille Chevillard). Vincent d’Indy refused to participate because he violently disagreed with the newspaper’s support of Alfred Dreyfus, while Camille Saint-Saëns replied that the achievements of the nineteenth century could not be adequately assessed before at least fifty years had passed. 3. Adolphe Jullien, “Revue musicale,” Journal des débats (11 November 1900). 4. Pierre [Pedro] Gailhard (1848–1918) was manager of the Opéra from 1884 to 1906. His tenure is associated with fine productions of Wagner. 5. Jullien, “Revue musicale” (11 November 1900).

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6. See Richard D. Mandell, Paris 1900: The Great World’s Fair (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1967); and Jann Pasler’s study of nationalism and politics: “Paris: Conflicting Notions of Progress,” in The Late Romantic Era, ed. Jim Samson (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1991), 389–416. 7. Alfred Bruneau, “Les Théâtres,” Le Figaro (16 November 1899). 8. See Alfred Ernst, L’Œuvre dramatique de H. Berlioz (Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1884); Adolphe Jullien, Hector Berlioz: Sa vie et ses œuvres (Paris: Librairie de L’Art, 1888); Adolphe Boschot, L’Histoire d’un romantique: Hector Berlioz, 3 vols. (Paris: Plon-Nourrit, 1906–12). 9. For an analysis of nationalist discourse in the Third Republic, see Annegret Fauser, “Gendering the Nations: The Ideologies of French Discourse on Music (1870– 1914),” in Musical Constructions of Nationalism, ed. Michael Murphy and Harry White (Cork, Ireland: Cork University Press, 2001), 72–103. 10. Adolphe Jullien, “Les Troyens de Berlioz à Carlsruhe,” Revue d’art dramatique 21 (January 1891): 65–74. 11. L’Art 18, no. 12 (15 June 1892): 314–16. This well-connected society, founded and chaired by the Comtesse de Greffulhe, had in 1890 helped with the costs of presenting Béatrice et Bénédict at the Odéon and would later subsidize Édouard Colonne’s Berlioz Cycles in 1894–95 and in 1903, not to mention Raoul Gunsbourg’s staging of La Damnation de Faust at the Théâtre Sarah-Bernhardt in 1903. 12. Théodore Massiac, “Indiscretions théâtrales,” Gil Blas (8 June 1892). 13. Edmond Stoullig, “Les Reprises,” Le National (9 June 1892). 14. Louise Goldberg’s dissertation, “Les Troyens of Hector Berlioz: A Century of Productions and Critical Reviews” (Ph.D. diss., University of Rochester, 1974), is an invaluable source of information on the Paris presentations of Les Troyens in 1892, 1899, and 1921. See also Goldberg’s chapter in the Cambridge handbook Hector Berlioz: Les Troyens, ed. Ian Kemp (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 181–95. 15. “Les Troyens—Une première à l’Opéra-Comique,” L’Éclair (7 June 1892) (unsigned). 16. See Paul Dukas, “Chronique musicale,” Revue hebdomadaire 1/2, no. 6 (2 July 1892): 126–39. Cavalleria Rusticana was first presented at the Opéra Comique on 19 January 1892, and reached its hundredth performance only three years later. See Stéphane Wolff, Un Demi-siècle d’opéra-comique (Paris: A. Bonne, 1953), 40–41. 17. Albert Montel, “Les Troyens à Carthage,” Le Voltaire (9 June 1892). 18. Ernest Reyer, “Revue musicale,” Journal des débats (12 June 1892). 19. Léon Kerst, “Paris au théâtre,” Le Petit Journal (8 June 1892). 20. See Goldberg, “Les Troyens,” 205–10. 21. Adolphe Jullien, “Revue musicale,” Journal des débats (evening edition, 15 September 1894). 22. Adolphe Jullien, “Revue musicale,” Journal des débats (evening edition, 8 December 1894). 23. H., “Au jour le jour,” Journal des débats (morning edition, 7 January 1895). 24. “Paris et départements,” Le Ménestrel (6 January 1895), 6 (unsigned). 25. Adolphe Boschot’s version of Les Troyens for the Opéra, first performed in Rouen in 1920, and praised by many critics for permitting the performance of the entire work on a single evening, left only Act IV intact; omitted were parts of Act I, scene 2 of Act II, some of Act III, and much of Act V.

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26. Louis Marsolleau, “[D]es Troyens à l’Opéra,” L’Éclair (18 June 1921). Jacques Rouché (1862–1957) was director of the Opéra from 1914 to 1945. 27. See Frédérique Patureau, Le Palais Garnier dans la société parisienne (Liège: Mardaga, 1991), 241–42. In the summer of 1899 the Dreyfus affair was, of course, a factor in all such matters. Richard Mandell suggests that the pardon of Dreyfus in September 1899 came about precisely because international outrage had led to threats of boycotting the Exposition (see Mandell, Paris 1900, 93–97). 28. Arthur Pougin, “Semaine théâtrale,” Le Ménestrel (19 November 1899), 370–72. 29. Léon Kerst, “Premières Représentations,” Le Petit Journal (16 November 1899). 30. As Dido, in 1892, the seventeen-year-old Marie Delna, with her astounding voice, had been forgiven her deficiencies as an actress; but as Cassandra, in 1899, she was attacked for having made so little progress in seven years. Pougin found that she did not understand her role, overused facial expression, and looked rather like a sleepwalker trying to read the future (Le Ménestrel, 19 November 1899, 372). 31. Edmond Stoullig, in Les Annales du théâtre et de la musique, 1899 (Paris: P. Ollendorff, 1900), 14–16, writes a bland review, but expresses admiration for the principal object of the spectacle—the Trojan horse, seven meters high and five meters long, weighing 4000 kilos and dragged along (on rails) by twenty-four men. Le Théâtre published pictures of the horse and of various other scenes (vol. 3, January 1900): 6–14. 32. Tout-Paris [pseud.], “Bloc-Notes Parisiens” Le Gaulois (15 November 1899). 33. Gaston Carraud, “La Prise de Troie, les Premières,” La Liberté (16 November 1899). 34. A recent and useful study of the meanings of the Exposition is found in Jane Fulcher, French Cultural Politics and Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 35–48. 35. See Le Ménestrel (17 June 1900), 191. The Fantastique was one of Mahler’s great chevaux de bataille. 36. Adolphe Jullien, “Revue musicale,” Journal des débats (2 September 1900). 37. Alfred Bruneau, La Musique française: Rapport sur la musique en France du XIIIe siècle au XXe siècle. La Musique à Paris en 1900 au théâtre, au concert, à l’Exposition (Paris: Fasquelle, 1901). 38. See the extended reaction by “X” (a member of the commission) in Revue d’histoire et de critique musicales 1 (March 1901): 110–19. “X” is critical of the manner in which composers had been selected for official representation, and of Bruneau’s discussions of pre-eighteenth-century music. 39. Romain Rolland asserted explicitly that the nationalist movement in art, centered in Paris, was a natural consequence of the comparisons stimulated by the Exposition of 1900. See Rolland, Musiciens d’aujourd’hui (Paris: Hachette, 1908), 271. 40. See Fulcher, French Cultural Politics, 106–8. 41. Paul Landormy, “L’État actuel de la musique française,” Revue bleue 1/13– 14 (26 March–2 April 1904): 304–7, 421–26. 42. [For more specific comment on these composers’ views, see the article in the present volume by Jean-Michel Nectoux. —Ed.]

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43. Romain Rolland, “Berlioz,” Revue de Paris 11/2–3 (March 1904): 65–88, 331–51, here, 351. Even in Rolland’s supportive essay, which rails against snobbish intellectualism, we find echoes of Boschot’s sometimes cynical portrait of the artist, with references to Berlioz’s supposedly “defective” personality. 44. Ibid., 84–85: “Il n’est pas un musicien, il est la musique même.” 45. Jean Marnold, “Hector Berlioz, Musicien,” Mercure de France (15 January– 1 February 1905), 205–20, 362–78. 46. See Fulcher, French Cultural Politics, 139; Lionel de la Laurencie, “Le Romantisme de Berlioz devant le public de son temps,” in Le Goût musical en France (1905; reprint., Geneva: Slatkine, 1970), 320; and Jacques-Gabriel Prod’homme, Hector Berlioz: Sa vie et ses œuvres (Paris: Delagrave, 1904). 47. In March 1903, in Monte Carlo, Jules Massenet presided over the unveiling of a statue of Berlioz by Leopold Bernstamm. On 15 August 1903, a statue of Berlioz by Urbain Basset was inaugurated in Grenoble, in the Place Victor Hugo, in the presence of various celebrities, among them Felix Weingartner. (Alfred Lenoir’s statue of Berlioz had been unveiled in Paris, in the Square Vintimille, in 1886; a copy was inaugurated at La Côte-Saint-André, in what became the Place Hector Berlioz, in September 1890.) 48. Pierre Lalo, “La Musique,” Le Temps (14 July 1903). 49. [See the article in this volume by Richard Macnutt. —Ed.] 50. A.L., “La Damnation de Faust, à l’Opéra,” La Revue musicale (15 June 1910), 312. 51. Arthur Pougin, “Semaine théâtrale,” Le Ménestrel (18 June 1910), 195. 52. Robert Brussel, “Les Théâtres,” Le Figaro (11 June 1910), 5. Earlier, in Le Temps (2 June 1903), Pierre Lalo, criticizing the notion of staging the work, cites the text that (we must assume) Berlioz prepared for L’Illustration of 21 November 1846: “Ce titre insolite d’opéra-légende indique une œuvre destinée à être lue plutôt que représentée, et l’impossibilité de jouer convenablement au théâtre les principales scènes de divers actes, et notamment du dernier, justifie l’auteur de l’avoir choisi.” (“This unusual title of opéra-légende indicates a work intended to be read rather than staged, and the impossibility of adequately playing in the theater the main scenes of the various acts, most notably the last—thus justifying the author’s choice of it [i.e., of the title opéra-légende].) 53. See Frank Reinisch, “La Damnation de Faust in der Bühnenbearbeitung von Raoul Gunsbourg,” Die Musikforschung 34 (1981): 446–56. In the archives at the Opéra, in the Dossier d’œuvre: La Damnation de Faust, there is a document that tells us that the eighteen performances of 1903 earned 192,652 francs, with a note: “Sur leurs droits d’auteur (10%) les héritiers de Berlioz abandonnaient un quart à M. Gunsbourg et un autre quart à Mme Costallat, propriétaire de la partition.” (“Of the author’s royalties [10% of the total proceeds], Berlioz’s heirs gave one fourth to M. Gunsbourg and another fourth to Mme Costallat, owner of the score.”) 54. Fulcher, French Cultural Politics, 213. 55. See Victor Debay and Paul Locard, “Le grand romantique—Berlioz,” Encyclopédie de la musique et Dictionnaire du Conservatoire, ed. Albert Lavignac, part 1, vol. 3 (Paris: Delagrave, 1914), 1687–97. 56. Raoul Brunel, “À l’Opéra: Les Troyens,” Œuvre (9 June 1921). Paul-Marie Masson also pointed out that a change of attitude toward Berlioz coincided with the death of Debussy, which in a sense represented the passing of that younger

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generation of composers who, in order to distance themselves from “romanticism,” had allied themselves with the symbolist poets. In addition, while most critics were proclaiming Berlioz’s “Frenchness,” Masson dubbed him the first French musician who was truly “European.” See Paul-Marie Masson, “Berlioz: L’Artiste et le musicien,” La Revue musicale 4 (1 March 1923): 125–37. 57. Louis Schneider, “À propos des Troyens d’Hector Berlioz,” Le Gaulois (morning edition, 26 May 1921). 58. Georges Chennevière, “Au théâtre,” L’Humanité (19 June 1921). 59. J.-H. Moreno, “Semaine théâtrale,” Le Ménestrel (17 June 1921), 251. 60. Raymond Charpentier, “Chronique: Les Troyens d’Hector Berlioz à l’Opéra,” Don Quichotte (10 June 1921). 61. Pierre Lalo, “La Musique,” Le Temps (5 July 1921). 62. Fulcher, French Cultural Politics, 24.

11

Berlioz Forgeries1 Richard Macnutt Setting the Stage In the mid-1960s, as Berliozians were preparing to celebrate the centenary of the composer’s death with new editions of his collected musical works and letters and with major exhibitions in London and Paris, the autograph market was flooded by a glut of Berlioz forgeries. The earliest public reference to these came in a letter from Hugh Macdonald, David Cairns, and Alan Tyson that was published in the Musical Times in January 1969: A number of hitherto unknown Berlioz letters, drafts, musical sketches, album leaves, and “association copies” have recently passed into circulation. Most of the letters offer interesting information about Berlioz’s methods of composition, artistic intentions, musical opinions, and personal beliefs, and have thus aroused the curiosity of scholars working in the period. It is now clear, however, that many of these “new” documents are ingenious forgeries. . . .2 The London “Times Diary” of 2 January 1969 picked this up and, under the heading “Beware the Berlioz Fakes,” warned readers: “If you found a Berlioz autograph manuscript in your Christmas stocking, [you had] better have rather a careful look at it.” This warning was timely even if rather too generalized, since almost all the forged items were addressed or inscribed to members of Berlioz’s own family—his father, his uncle Félix Marmion, his sisters Nanci and Adèle, Nanci’s husband Camille and their daughter Mathilde, Adèle’s daughter Joséphine, Berlioz’s first and second wives, and his son Louis. Nonetheless, it was a scandal that needed exposing. And it still does. The purpose of the present article is to recount the affair in detail for the benefit of current and future scholars who might be unaware of it and who thus might base research on forged documents. In 1992 David Cairns published an article describing the Reboul-Berlioz collection, in which he noted that most of the Berlioz letters in the collection had already been published or were known through photocopies, but that

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quite a number which the Correspondance générale designates ‘Coll[ection] Reboul’ are no longer there. Some may have been sold, but some were stolen by a one-time friend of the family who for obvious reasons cannot be named here but whose activities, including wholesale forging of Berlioz autographs, will have to be put on record one day.3 In a footnote Cairns described the best of the forgeries as being “of high quality,” adding that it is quite possible “that some Berlioz letters that are accepted unquestioningly as genuine are not.” Earlier, in his 1974 dissertation that was published in 1980, D. Kern Holoman had drawn attention to the forgeries, noting that among what seem to be the most interesting items in the growing collection at [the Bibliothèque municipale de] Grenoble are forged sketchbooks and albumleaves. Collectors in the United States and England inadvertently acquired several forged letters. Their mistake was understandable, for the forger knew Berlioz’s biography well and used both contemporaneous paper and iron-galled ink. His best forgeries are thus virtually undetectable.4 Holoman went on to identify specific forgeries, to discuss the forger’s style, and to recommend that “a document should be considered false when suspicious details combine with an unlikely overall appearance to jeopardize its usefulness. A dubious signature is one such suspicious detail. . . .”5 In 1994, in a general book on the forgery of manuscripts, Kenneth W. Rendell also drew attention to the Berlioz problem, describing the collection of controversial papers as “one of the most accomplished archival forgeries.”6 This account of the scale and variety of the forger’s activities is in my view exaggerated, but it forcibly makes the point that Berlioz documents which first appeared on the market in the late 1960s, particularly those relating to his family, need exceptionally careful scrutiny. Rendell speaks (in 1994) of knowing of only one extant forged letter that had not been destroyed; but in fact many forged letters and documents survive in known locations—no fewer than one hundred fifty-five are inventoried below—and I fear that more remain to be discovered. My inventory provides whatever dates and details are currently known; it is based upon the records, experiences, and recollections of a number of friends and colleagues to whom I am very grateful.7 The Transmission of the Family Letters Berlioz had two sisters—Anne-Marguerite, always called Nanci, who married Camille Pal on 16 January 1832, and Adèle, who married Marc Suat on 2 April 1839—and both preserved family documents, including the numer-

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ous letters they received from their brother. After their deaths in May 1850 and March 1860, respectively, Berlioz maintained correspondence with their husbands and daughters, and many of these letters, too, have survived in the family archives. His letters to his son Louis, on the other hand, seem to have been separated from the family at an early date—probably before the publication in 1879 of Correspondance inédite de Hector Berlioz, with a preface by Daniel Bernard, in which a selection of them was published. The materials from Adèle’s side of the family (plus some of the letters from Berlioz to his parents and to his uncle Félix Marmion, and other family documents) were eventually inherited by the Abbé Robert Chapot, a descendant of the union of Adèle’s daughter Joséphine Suat and MarcAuguste-Antoine Chapot, and subsequently given, in 1981, to the Musée Hector Berlioz at La Côte-Saint-André, where they may now be consulted. The materials from Nanci’s side of the family, as well as further family letters and documents, were inherited by Nanci’s great-grandson, GeorgesMathieu Reboul-Berlioz (1889–1954). After his death the collection passed to his widow, Yvonne Reboul-Berlioz, who lived in Paris until her own death in 1990. She was an artist, a delightful woman, and a generous ally to scholars, to whom she unhesitatingly made her collection available. The Earlier Forgeries The texts of some three thousand letters of Berlioz have survived, but, apart from the forgeries of the 1960s, which we shall consider separately, serious doubt has been cast on the authenticity of only eleven letters and one musical album-leaf (all listed in section B of the inventory below).8 The earliest of these is the letter of 14 August 1819 (CG 5)9 addressed to “un éditeur de musique” in which the young composer expresses his irritation at not receiving the second proofs of a work he had earlier sent to this unspecified publisher. Berlioz was not yet sixteen at the time, and one must make allowances for possible experimentation with handwriting and signature. But it is difficult to see how the positive and fluent hand that can already be seen in the spring of that year in his two earliest surviving authentic letters (CG 3 of 25 March and CG 4 of 6 April)—with the slightly forward slant that is typical of his mature writing—could have changed in August into the uncoordinated, hesitant, and more vertical hand of this one, with its uncharacteristically uneven base lines (the imaginary lines, that is, on which the lower edge of the upper-case letters lie). In my opinion the document is an imitation of Berlioz’s early hand (particularly as seen in CG 3) and a forgery—though one probably copied from an original document, for the forger was unlikely to have been able to see any other example of Berlioz’s early hand. This hypothesis is supported by the plausibility of the text. The letter has been in the Collection François Lang, at the Abbaye de Royaumont, since the late 1930s.10

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Two further forgeries by persons unknown—one addressed to Théophile Gautier on 4 January 1845, the other to Prosper Sain-d’Arod on 11 August 1868—are copies of authentic letters, and a third, also to Sain-d’Arod, dated 27 October [1868], may well be. The first was made by tracing from the original onto light-weight paper; by chance, the forged and the authentic copy are both at the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York. The second (at the Macnutt Collection, Withyham), copied from the original, with the shaky handwriting of Berlioz’s last year, introduces a few apparently deliberate changes of wording. The third (Erasmushaus—Haus der Bücher, Basel) was undoubtedly written by the same person in the same shaky hand, but since no Berlioz original is known, it is impossible to say whether its text is copied (and, if so, how accurately) or fabricated. Both letters to Sain-d’Arod could be innocent copies of genuine letters and not forgeries at all. Still, the deliberate but poor imitation of Berlioz’s hand renders them suspicious. A group of six letters, allegedly written by Berlioz to Prince Vladimir Odoyevsky after returning to Paris from his second visit to Russia, in 1868, are of dubious authenticity, and are not included in the Correspondance générale. Odoyevsky was an amateur musician, an occasional journalist, and a keen admirer of Berlioz’s music. He met Berlioz in St. Petersburg soon after the composer’s arrival there at the end of February 1847. The last two of these six letters were published in Russian in 1937; the first four in 1968–69. The whereabouts of both the originals and the French texts are not known, but, on the basis of their uncharacteristic subject matter and their inordinate length for this period of his life, one may conclude that the first four are probably forgeries; the last two may possibly be genuine.11 A letter that is certainly fraudulent was published in barely legible facsimile and in transcription in the program of Raoul Gunsbourg’s production of La Damnation de Faust staged at the Théâtre Sarah-Bernhardt, in Paris, in May 1903. Undated and consisting of only a few lines, it has “Berlioz” asserting that he has completed an opera on Goethe’s work but, because no theatre director would be willing to stage it, has been obliged to resort to concert performance. This crude misrepresentation of Berlioz’s view of his légende dramatique, a work specifically designed for the concert hall, was no doubt perpetrated by or for the impresario, and was presented in the program as a justification for the staging.12 The only other known Berlioz forgery, aside from those considered below, provides an example of a type of artifact that has traditionally attracted counterfeiters—the musical album-leaf, which many collectors find appealing and which therefore commands a disproportionately high market price. This example consists of three bars from the duo-nocturne “Nuit paisible et sereine” at the end of Act I of Béatrice et Bénédict. There may be more forgeries, of course, particularly among those of Berlioz’s published letters whose autographs have not survived, of which

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there are some hundreds; but until recent years none was even suspected. Then, in the 1960s, the situation changed dramatically. The Forgeries of the 1960s I became acutely aware of the problem of modern Berlioz forgeries in the winter of 1967–68, when I made one of my regular visits to the eminent Paris autograph dealer Jacques Lambert, of the Librairie de l’Abbaye, and was confronted by a group of about sixty “autograph” letters from Berlioz to members of his family. These were of differing lengths and of varying interest; their dates spanned about thirty years. There was no immediate reason to be surprised by the sudden availability of family letters, for many of these, of absolute authenticity, had been appearing for sale, individually and in small batches, since October 1963. But three aspects of this large group provoked suspicion: 1) the handwriting itself; 2) the generally uniform quality of the paper and ink (odd in view of the time-span covered by the letters); 3) the fact that not a single letter had either an address-panel or an original envelope. I immediately told Lambert that the whole batch was forged—something he found hard to believe, because the vendor was precisely the same man who had been selling him authentic family letters during the previous few years. Indeed, the vendor was not only a trusted friend of Mme ReboulBerlioz, from whose collection the authentic family letters had emanated, but also someone whom I myself had met on two occasions, and who, in a letter to me of 3 April 1964, had referred (falsely) to Mme Reboul-Berlioz as his “aunt.” It later transpired that the person in question—whose name is not unknown to musicologists—had not been selling the letters “on behalf of” Mme Reboul-Berlioz, as had been thought, but had rather been stealing them from her. When his supply of authentic letters began to run dry, it is logical to suppose that he simply began to create forgeries. Lambert informed the family, and the family went to the police. A trap was laid in Lambert’s shop and the criminal was caught red-handed. He was successfully prosecuted for theft and was ordered to repay to the family the value of the stolen documents. It is my understanding that he has repaid only a small fraction of that value; but he was never charged with forgery—which is why he cannot be named here. Although Lambert was the main outlet for the thief-cum-forger’s wares, two other Paris dealers are known to have bought items directly from him, and, before it became widely known that many Berlioz family letters were forgeries, some had begun to move about on the world autograph market, principally in the United States. Members of the autograph trade attempted to recall stolen letters and forgeries that they had sold unwittingly, but it is certain that there remain in circulation unrecognized examples that have escaped the net.

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The Work of the Forger The forger, though careless, was extremely clever—so clever, in fact, that not only were Berlioz specialists, librarians, and eminent booksellers initially taken in, but so too was the police expert whom I consulted, a man respected for his work in forgery cases. I myself, before finding at Lambert’s shop the hoard to which I have referred, had been fooled by two of the forger’s more imaginative efforts—a manuscript of La Captive and an annotated score of Iphigénie en Aulide. And Cecil Hopkinson, the great collector and bibliographer, who was always ready to share his knowledge with others, was unfortunate enough to base an article on a forged album-leaf (of Le Spectre de la rose) and a copy of the vocal score of Lélio, supposedly annotated by Berlioz. The article had later to be retracted.13 With hindsight it is of course difficult to believe that so many specialists could have been fooled. But single examples of forgeries can easily deceive unsuspecting people accustomed to seeing exactly such items on the market. Furthermore, the forger was not only a competent penman, he was (and is) also well versed in musical culture generally—and particularly, as Holoman remarked, in the details of Berlioz’s life and works. He was highly inventive, too, and had a mastery of Berlioz’s epistolary style. After the forgeries became known and acknowledged, it was natural that all letters addressed to family members should come under suspicion, and this led to an unfortunate incident. In October 1963, long before there was any talk of forgeries, Mrs. Sarah Fenderson, that enthusiastic collector who generously bequeathed her great collection of Berlioz letters to the Pierpont Morgan Library, bought a letter, dated 30 March [1843], which “Berlioz” had addressed to his uncle Félix Marmion. During the preparation of CG III—the volume in which this letter was due to appear—its authenticity was questioned and eventually the letter itself was deemed too dubious for inclusion. For several years thereafter Mrs. Fenderson provoked discussion about this letter, fiercely defending its authenticity on the grounds 1) that it is written on paper embossed “BATH” (a paper that Berlioz did use for letters of this time); 2) that no one but Berlioz could possibly have written its high-spirited text (which fits with precision the facts of his career); and 3) that the penmanship of many individual words and phrases perfectly matches that of other contemporary letters. Eventually, but grudgingly, Mrs. Fenderson accepted that the letter was a forgery and returned it to the Paris bookseller from whom she had purchased it. She later had second thoughts and tried to buy it back—but it had already been resold. Alas, her initial defense of the letter and her second thoughts were entirely justified: the letter is authentic. The forger’s work was not confined to letters alone. He was and is himself a musician, and among his Berlioz creations are the “autograph” draft of the song La Captive, composed, as we know, in the mountains near Rome. The forger set it down on apparently authentic hand-ruled paper (such as Berlioz describes in chapter 39 of the Mémoires) in such a way as to demonstrate the

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Figure 11.1. Forged draft of La Captive. Macnutt Collection.

composer’s method of work. As can be seen in Figure 11.1, he chose to represent Berlioz struggling to find the right musical expression for the poem and making all sorts of deletions and revisions. However, he made a fundamental error: instead of basing his falsification on the original strophic form of the song for voice and piano, H. 60A, in E Major (as Berlioz wrote it in February

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1832), he instead drafted a version for voice, piano, and cello—the forces that Berlioz calls for in his version of December 1832 (H. 60C)—which follows Berlioz’s far more elaborate orchestral version, H. 60F, in D Major, dating from 1848. The forger’s version could not possibly have required the laborious workings-out shown in the manuscript. He evidently found a good market in musical album-leaves, of which some thirteen examples are known. The one showing the opening bars of his setting of Gautier’s poem Le Spectre de la rose, mentioned above, is inscribed “Pour ma femme, au jour de la naissance de notre fils Louis. Paris, le 15 août 1834.” The forger has been triply careless here: 1) the album-leaf pre-dates Gautier’s poem by almost three years; 2) Berlioz’s son Louis was born on 14, not 15 August; and 3) the eight bars of music quoted were not composed until Berlioz prepared the orchestral version of the song, in 1855–56. A comparable error, one of many, is found in his forgery of “autograph” additions to printed pages cut from a copy of Les Grotesques de la musique, published in 1859: the forger worked from a posthumous (1871) edition of the book. There are several extant examples of printed scores annotated with “Berlioz’s” comments, markings, and corrections, and graced with “his” signature in order to make them more marketable. A vocal score of Lélio has already been mentioned; but the forger also annotated other composers’ scores which Berlioz presumably had in his library—notably the full scores of two operas by Gluck and of three symphonies by Beethoven. Almost all the known forgeries of the 1960s relate to Berlioz, but there are also five Chopin forgeries concocted by the same man. One of these is as daring as any of his Berlioz creations: the complete “autograph” manuscript of the Mazurka, Op. 63 No. 2, bearing a forged inscription from Chopin to Berlioz. In another, of equivalent impudence, the forger signs Chopin’s name at the head of a printed copy of the Mazurkas, Op. 30, and has “Berlioz” authenticate the signature in the margin! All but two of the forger’s known attempts at letters fall into the category of complete fabrications. The exceptions are the letter of 8 March 1837 from Berlioz to his father (CG 490), where the forger has copied the authentic text verbatim, and the receipt for four hundred francs that Berlioz addressed to Camille Pal on 21 September 1864 (CG 2896). These and the fabricated texts vary greatly in interest, and cleverly exploit an autograph market that at one level demands letters of substantial musical and personal interest and, at another, relatively unimportant one-page signed documents that are suitable for framing, usually with an engraving or a photograph of the subject. The modern forger’s style, like that of most such falsifiers, tends to lack fluency. His base lines—those of complete lines of text and of individual words—are undulating when viewed laterally, from the side of the page, while Berlioz’s own, on the contrary, are notably even. Most of the forger’s individual characters are well observed and correctly reproduced; but certain mistakes tend to betray him, as we see in Figures 11.2 and 11.3.

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The most obvious of these mistakes, to cite characters that appear in almost every forged document, are these: 1) Figures: Berlioz tends to make figures the same size as his upper-case letters, whereas those of the forger are smaller.

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Figure 11.2. Berlioz, Autograph letter to Camille Pal, 24 September 1854. Macnutt Collection.

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Figure 11.3. Forged receipt, 20 August 1854. Guy Reboul-Berlioz Collection.

2) The figure “1”: Berlioz rarely has a stroke ascending to the top left of the figure, and when he does, it is short. The forger almost always has such a stroke, and it is usually rather prominent. 3) The upper-case “J”: Berlioz does not extend the letter below the base line; the forger usually does. 4) The lower-case “m” and “n” at the beginning of a word: Berlioz makes the first down-stroke almost the same height as the next; the forger makes the first down-stroke notably higher, with a pronounced ascending stroke to its top left. 5) The upper- and lower-case “s” at the beginning of a word: Berlioz rarely extends these below the base line; the forger usually does. 6) The circumflex accent: Berlioz makes his with two strokes that meet at the apex and sometimes intersect; the forger makes his with single stroke, slightly curved. 7) Berlioz’s signature: established by the late 1820s, Berlioz’s signature varied little thereafter. Its slant is slightly forward and its base line is normally level, with only the first stroke of the initial “H” and the tail of the “z” descending below. The forger’s attempt is characterized by a more vertical orientation and an uneven base line, below which—a vital difference—the lower right loop of his “B” usually descends. While again observing the individual characteristics of Berlioz’s musical hand with fair accuracy, the forger produces a general impression of weakness and quite fails to capture the fluency and conviction that are typical of Berlioz’s own work, as we may see in Figures 11.4 and 11.5. All his known

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Figure 11.4. Forged album-leaf, from Benvenuto Cellini. Martine Perrin Collection.

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Figure 11.5. Berlioz, Autograph album-leaf, from Harold en Italie. Macnutt Collection.

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musical forgeries also contain words, which, together with the overall impression produced by the documents, expose him almost instantly. Conclusion and Caveat After his unmasking in late 1968, the forger was persuaded by the ReboulBerlioz family to verify a list of the letters and other items that he admitted to having forged. The “other items” include a “projet pour Gluck” (perhaps one of the annotated scores mentioned above), a “carnet” (which may be one of the three sketchbooks listed in the inventory below), “musique—1839” (perhaps the musical quotation from Chopin’s Ballade, Op. 38), and “Wagner” (possibly the forged letter from Wagner to Berlioz, possibly the excerpts from Tristan). This list is in five parts: two parts are dated by the forger 4 January 1969; one part is dated 1 March 1969; and two parts are undated. The list is infuriatingly vague, usually giving in full the dates of the forged letters, but only twice giving the names of addressees. It is also far from complete: the forger acknowledges one hundred twenty-six letters and receipts and four further items, while I myself have seen originals or photocopies of one hundred sixty-one forged letters and receipts, and of thirty-three further items. Given that twenty-three documents on the forger’s list have not yet been identified with certainty, I conclude that the total number of his known forgeries of various sorts must be at least two hundred seventeen. Students, scholars, and collectors of Berlioz must remain cautious in the face of Berlioz autographs. In the New Berlioz Edition and the Correspondance générale d’Hector Berlioz there are numerous facsimiles of genuine Berlioz autographs which should be consulted whenever authenticity is in question. For collectors: caveat emptor.

Appendix The Berlioz Forgeries: An Inventory All the letters and receipts written by the 1960s forger are here amalgamated into a single list in section A(i). This list combines the items on the forger’s own list, the other forgeries by the same man, of which originals or photocopies have been seen, and a small number of items that appeared on the market in 1967–68 which, until the originals have been examined and verified as authentic, must—on the basis of their content—be regarded as dubious. In section A(i), undated items are placed first, followed by dated items in order of month and day, the year being supplied when known. (Although the forger normally included the year in his list of acknowledged forgeries, a substantial proportion of these and other forged letters that have been seen give only the month and day. Furthermore, the editorial dates sup-

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plied by the forger could themselves be wrong and thereby further confuse the picture.) The year is given in one of three styles: a) without brackets, when the letter has been seen and the year is included therein; b) within square brackets, when the year is not included in the forgery but can be supplied editorially; and c) within parentheses, when the year derives merely from the forger’s list and is not corroborated from an original or photocopy. When the recipient is known, from the forger’s list or from other evidence, it is so stated. Brief incipits are given only when ambiguity is possible. Abbreviations and conventions *

The original or a facsimile has been seen by the author of this article. The present location of original forgeries, if known, is given in parentheses. «» Comments by the 1960s forger are given within guillemets. (CV) Catherine Vercier Collection. D The document has not been admitted by the forger, no facsimile has been seen, but it is of dubious authenticity on textual grounds alone. F The document figures on the forger’s list of admitted forgeries. (G) Grenoble, Bibliothèque municipale. (MP) Martine Perrin Collection. n.d. no date. n.y. no year. (GRB) Guy Reboul-Berlioz Collection. Relationships “Père” or “papa” is Berlioz’s father, Dr. Louis Berlioz; “oncle” is assumed to be Berlioz’s maternal uncle, Félix Marmion; “oncle Auguste” is Dr. Louis Berlioz’s brother, Auguste Berlioz; “sœur” may be Berlioz’s older sister Nanci (until her death in May 1850) or his younger sister Adèle; “Camille” is Nanci’s husband, Camille Pal; “fils” is Berlioz’s son Louis, whom Berlioz often addresses as “ami”; “nièce” is Mathilde Pal (Nanci’s daughter) or Joséphine or Nancy Suat (Adèle’s daughters); “Jules” is Berlioz’s first cousin, the son of Victor-Abraham Berlioz (Berlioz’s father’s brother).

A. Forgeries by the 1960s Forger (i) Berlioz—Letters and Receipts Undated n.d. [ca. 3:1830]F «à ses sœurs»*, “Edouard vous remettra” (MP); n.d. [soon after 9 November 1834], oncle* (only pp. 2–3 seen), p. 2 begin-

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ning “été redemandé, l’adagio”; n.d. “jeudi” [early 1:1847] Nanci*, “Je ne t’ai pas donné” (MP); n.d. [ca. 10:1849]F «chère sœur» [Nanci]*, “Je commence à m’inquiéter” (MP); n.d. “ce vendredi 28” [after May 1850]F Camille*, “Si j’écris si mal” (MP); n.d. «ce mardi» [early 1:1854]F Camille*, “Je ne trouve guère de temps” (MP); n.d.F «Wagner»—which may be one of the two Wagner items listed below, A(ii) and (iv). January 1:1843F oncle*, 4 pp. incomplete (MP); 6:1844F oncle* (MP); 10:1850 Camille Pal*, receipt (GRB); 12:[1835]F Jules* (MP); 20:[1834]* Nanci (CV); 20:[1839]F oncle*, “Mon frère Prosper” (MP); 20:1854F Camille Pal*, receipt (MP); 20:1856 Louis*; 20:[1862] F ami [Louis]* (MP); 20:1866F nièce*; 20:1866F oncle* (MP)14; 24:[1846]F sœur* (MP); 25:[1865]F ami [Louis]* (MP); 28:[1846]F Camille* (MP); 30:1836F oncle* (MP). February 4:1844F père* (MP); 6:[1858]F oncle* (MP); 10:1867 Camille Pal*, receipt; 13:[1847]F père* (MP); 13:1850 Camille Pal*, receipt (Kenneth W. Rendell Collection, Wellesley); 13:[1861]F ami [Louis]* (MP); 15:[1850] oncle* (GRB); 15:1859F Camille* (MP); 16:1864F nièce*; 16:1864F oncle* (MP); 18:1834 sœur [Nanci]* (CV); 19:1840F sœur [Nanci]* (MP); 20:1843F oncle* (MP); 20:[1861]F oncle*, “La langue française”; 20:1862 ami [Louis]* (G, N.3300); 21:(1836)F; 21:1854F Camille Pal*, receipt (MP); 27:1837F sœur [Nanci]* (MP). March 2:1847F père* (MP); 2:1852F oncle* (MP); 4:[1854] oncle* (GRB); 5:1855F oncle* (MP); 8:1837F papa* [copy of CG 490]; 8:1866F ami [Louis]* (MP); 10:[1849] oncle*, “Mon œuvre prend figure” (GRB); 10:[1857]F oncle*, “Oberon a obtenu”; 10:1857F sœur [Adèle]* (MP); 10:[1865] Camille*; “samedi” 15:[1845]F oncle*, “J’ai appris ce matin” (MP); 15:1861F oncle* (MP); 16:1861F Camille* (MP); 18:1845F père* (MP); 20:1854F Camille Pal*, receipt (MP); 22:1865F Camille* (MP); 25:1838F oncle* (MP); 25:1854F Camille Pal*, receipt (MP); 28:[1843]F sœur* (MP); 30:[1851] oncle*; 31:[1847]F oncle* (MP). April 2:1851F oncle* (MP); 2:[1854]F sœur [Adèle]* (MP); 3:(1850)F; 5:(1864)F; 12:1854 nièce* (MP); 12:1863F nièce* (MP); 15:(1851)F; 17:1846F sœur* (MP); 17:(1854)F; 19:[1861]F Camille* (MP); 19:1863F

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Camille* (MP); 20:[1863] ami [Louis]* (GRB); 20:1865F oncle* (MP); 24:(1850)F; 24:1859 Adèle* (MP); 27:1855F Louis* (MP); 29:1852F sœur [Adèle]* (MP). May 3:(1852)F; 6:1835F papa* (MP); 7:[1836]F oncle* (MP); 10:1838F père* (MP); 10:[1843]F oncle*, “Je ne vous ai rien dit” (MP); 10:[1846] oncle*, “Vous désirez” (GRB); 10:[1849]F sœur*, “Il est impossible” (MP); 10:[1865]D oncle or Camille, 2½ pp.; 14:1847F oncle* (MP); 18:1845 Camille* (Collection Thierry Bodin, Paris); 30:[1847]F père* (MP); 31:1853 oncle* (GRB). June 1:(1849)F; 1:[1853]F oncle*, “Vous me voyez” (MP); 2:1839F oncle Auguste* (MP); 2:1851F Camille* (MP); 3:1839 oncle*; 4:1851 fils [Louis]* (GRB); 10:1852 sœur [Adèle]*; 14:1862F fils [Louis]* (MP); 14:[1862]F nièce* (GRB); 15:[1837] oncle* (GRB); 20:1843F sœur* (MP); 24:[1847]F père* (MP); 29:1853F Camille* (MP); 30:[1867] oncle* (GRB). July 2:1834 oncle*; oncle* (MP); 19:[1859]F fils venue” (GRB);

2:(1852)F; 10:1852F sœur [Adèle]* (MP); 14:[1851]F 18:[1837] père*; 18 or 19:[1848]F Camille* (MP); [Louis]* (MP); 20:[1846] oncle*, “J’apprends votre 20:1849F oncle* (MP); 26:(1851)F.

August 2:[1848]F oncle* (MP); 4:(1830)F; 4:1867F Camille Pal*, receipt (MP); 10:1836F oncle* (MP); 12:n.y.F; 15:[1844] oncle* (GRB); 15:(1868)F; 16:[1851]F oncle* (MP)15; 18:1853F Camille* (MP); 20:1842F oncle* (MP); 20:[1850] Camille* (MP); 20:1854F Camille Pal*, receipt, Figure 11.3 (MP); 20:[1862]F nièce* (MP); 22:[1850]F Camille Pal*, receipt; 23:1850F ami [Louis]* (MP); 25:[1850]F sœur [Adèle]* (MP); 25:(1861)F; 25:[1865] oncle* (MP); 30:1839F oncle* (MP); 30:1853 Camille* (MP); 31:[1854] sœur [Adèle]* (GRB); 39[sic]:(1853)F. September 5:1848F Camille Pal*, receipt (MP); 10:1866 Camille Pal*, receipt; 11:[1847]D oncle, 1 p.; 12:1856F nièce* (MP); 20:1841F oncle Auguste*

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(MP); 21:1864F Camille Pal*, receipt [copied from an authentic receipt of this date (CG 2896)] (MP, 2 copies); 30:1852F oncle* (MP). October [–]:(1848)F; 10:[1841]F sœur* (MP); 10:1842 oncle*; 10:1845F père* (MP); 12:1866 Camille Pal*, receipt; 20:[1840]F oncle* (MP); 20:1864F Camille Pal*, receipt (MP); 22:1849 Nanci* (GRB); 24:[1852] fils [Louis]*; 24:[1852] oncle* (MP); 24:(1854)F; 25:[1861]F oncle* (MP); 26:(1854)F; 30:1864 Camille Pal*, receipt (MP). November 3:1840F oncle* (MP); 8:[1842]F oncle* (MP); 12:1852 Camille Pal*; 15:1866 Camille*, receipt; 20:[1843]F Camille* (MP); 20:[1853] nièce*; 26:(1864)F; 28:1863 Camille* (GRB); 29:[1847]F sœur [Adèle]* (MP). December 1:[1860]F Camille* (MP); 2:1848 Nanci*; 7:1837F sœur* (MP); 10:1842 oncle*; 10:1866 Camille Pal*, receipt; 10:1866 oncle*; 18:1866 Camille* (G, N.3306); 19:[1866] oncle* (G, N.3307); 20:1853F Camille Pal*, letter and receipt (MP); 23:[1845]F sœur* (MP); 23:1857F Camille* (MP); 24:(1848)F; 25:[1842]F sœur [Nanci]* (MP); 25:[1854] oncle* (GRB); 27:1836F oncle* (MP); 29:1847 oncleD, 2 pp.; 30:1867F nièce* (MP); 31:[1834] oncle* (CV); 31:[1866]F oncle* (MP). (ii) Berlioz—Musical and Literary Documents (a) Forgeries of Berlioz’s Own Works Absence*: album-leaf, the opening 14 bars on 9 staves, inscribed «Pour mon fils Louis, au jour de sa naissance [. . .] Paris, 15 août 1864. Hector Berlioz»; described and illustrated in Hans Schneider, Catalogue 136, item 54. La Belle Isabeau*: album-leaf, 24 bars on 4 staves, beginning “Dans la montagne noire, ” inscribed «Pour Mademoiselle Marie Recio, souvenir affectueux de Hector Berlioz 1844». La Belle voyageuse*: album-leaf, 2 pp., 15 bars on 3 staves, beginning “Elle s’en va seulette,” inscribed «Pour Mademoiselle Marie» and signed «H. Berlioz»; (MP). Benvenuto Cellini*: album-leaf, 8 bars on 2 staves, from Teresa’s Act I cavatine, beginning “quand j’aurai votre âge,” inscribed to his niece, «Pour mademoiselle Joséphine Suat, affectueusement, son oncle. Hector Berlioz», undated; (GRB); see Figure 11.4. Benvenuto Cellini*: album-leaf, 12 bars on three 4-stave systems, from Fieramosca’s

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Act I aria, beginning “Je t’aime tant que pour te plaire,” inscribed «Pour Adèle Berlioz, ma sœur, mon amie. Paris, 1839. Hector Berlioz»; (MP). La Captive*: sketchbook of the entire song, title-page and 21 pages of music, 8vo, bound in vellum; (Macnutt Collection, Withyham); see Figure 11.1. Dans l’alcôve sombre (from the sketchbook of 1832–1836, H. 62): two separate album-leaves: (a)* the opening of the song, 3½ bars, inscribed to Nanci, September 1848; (G, N.3298). (b)* The beginning of verse 3, “Songe qui l’enchante il voit des ruissaux,” 4 bars on 1 stave, inscribed «à Nanci, ma sœur, souvenir de notre cher pays, de notre enfance [. . .] la Côte St André sept. 1848 H. Berlioz»; (G, N.3298). L’Enfance du Christ*: orchestral sketch, 3 bars on 11 staves, from the duet “O mon cher fils,” signed «H. Berlioz»; NBE 11, p. 87, last 3 bars; (Collection Saggiori, Geneva). Les Grotesques de la musique*: five anecdotes—“Le régiment des colonels”; “Une cantate”; “Un programme de musique grotesque”; “Est-ce une ironie?”; and “Un concerto de clarinette”—made up from pages cut from the 1871 edition of the book to which “autograph” annotations on plain paper have been pasted; (GRB). L’Île inconnue*: album-leaf, 16 bars on 3 staves, beginning “Dites, la jeune belle,” inscribed «Pour Monsieur Acquarone, au bons soins de Louis Berlioz [. . .] avec les sentiments reconnaissants de Hector Berlioz 1857». Lélio*: printed vocal score, Paris: Richault, plate number 11036.R., with “autograph” title-page and numerous forged annotations throughout the text; titlepage illustrated in Fontes Artis Musicae, 15 (1968), 14–16. Le Matin*: album-leaf, “Pour chanter le retour du jour,” inscribed to his niece Mathilde [Pal], «Pour Mathilde la mélodie qu’elle a si bien chantée [. . .] l’auditoire! H. Berlioz 1864»; (G, N.3289). La Mort d’Ophélie*: sketchbook, title-page and 33 pp. of music, 2 staves per page, oblong 8vo; containing a draft of the song, dated 1848 at end; (G, N.3299). Petit Oiseau*: album-leaf, 12 bars on 2 staves, beginning “Pour chanter le retour du jour,” headed «Petit oiseau chanson de paysan» and inscribed to his niece Mathilde [Pal], «Pour ma petite Mathilde son oncle affectioné Hector Berlioz»; (CV). Roméo et Juliette*: sketchbook, title-page and 8 written pages, 8vo, entitled “Roméo et Juliette (8). Matériel pour le Prologue,” with “H. Berlioz 1839” written on the facing flyleaf; (CV). Le Spectre de la rose*: album-leaf, 8 bars on 4 staves, inscribed «Pour ma femme, au jour de la naissance de notre fils Louis. Paris, le 15 août 1834 [. . .] Hector Berlioz»; illustrated in Fontes Artis Musicae, 15 (1968), 14–16. Symphonie fantastiqueF*: album-leaf, 15 bars on 2 staves, inscribed «Pour ma fiancée, Mademoiselle Henriette Smithson. Hector Berlioz mars 1833.»; (MP). Les Troyens à Carthage*: a printed copy of morceau séparé no. 7, “Tout conspire,” plate number A. C. 988 (7), paginated 177–194, has been seen with a forged inscription on the title-page: «Votre tout dévoué Hector Berlioz». Sketchbook*: containing a few miscellaneous musical phrases and rhythmic annotations; 13 x 9.5 cm, 10 leaves (of which 5 are blank), blue boards; the final page is inscribed «Estelle chez Monsieur Fornier notaire St. Symphorien d’Ozon»; (G, N.3276). [Unidentified]F: «carnet». This may be one of the three sketchbooks mentioned above.

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Berlioz Viewed Posthumously

[Unidentified]F: «musique—1839». This may be the Chopin Ballade, Op. 38, mentioned under (b) below. [Unidentified]F: «projet pour Gluck». This may be one of the full scores of an opera by Gluck mentioned under (b) below.

(b) Forgeries of Berlioz’s Annotations in Works by Other Composers Beethoven*: Symphony No. 5, printed full score, Paris: A. Farrenc [1831]; forged annotations on several pages. Beethoven*: Symphony No. 6, printed full score, Mainz: B. Schott’s Söhnen [1867–1868]; forged signature on verso of title-page and forged annotations on several pages; (MP). Beethoven*: Symphony No. 7, printed full score, Wien: S. A. Steiner [1816]; forged signature on dedication leaf and numerous forged annotations (e.g. p. 124). Gluck*: Alceste, printed full score, Paris: Des Lauriers (Auguste Le Duc’s label pasted over imprint), plate number 2; forged signature on title-page and numerous forged annotations in the text; (G, 99322 Réserve). It is to be noted that the full scores of Gluck’s Armide (G, 99290 Réserve) and Iphigénie en Tauride (National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh) contain authentic annotations by Berlioz. Gluck*: Iphigénie en Aulide, printed full score, Paris: Des Lauriers (Auguste Le Duc’s label pasted over imprint), plate number 3; forged signature on title-page and numerous forged annotations in the text; (Macnutt Collection, Withyham). Wagner*: forged excerpts from Tristan und Isolde, entirely manuscript, 2 pp., oblong 4to. «Agréable mélodie!» at the foot of one page; described and illustrated in Hans Schneider, Catalogue 200, item 23.

(iii) Forgeries of Musical Works and Annotations by Chopin Ballade, Op. 23*: printed score, Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel; forged inscription on title-page «à son cher Ami Hector Berlioz F. Chopin». Mazurka, Op. 30 No. 1*: printed score, Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel; forged signature of Chopin at top of first page of music, with forged authentication by Berlioz in the margin; illustrated in Ray Rawlins, The Guinness Book of Autographs (Enfield, Middlesex: Guinness Superlatives Ltd, 1977), 46; see also ibid., 17. Scherzo, Op. 31*: forged album-leaf of the opening 22 bars, on 3 systems, dated Paris 1836; inscribed by “Berlioz” «Pour Louis, ce souvenir si cher à sa mère février 1865 H. Berlioz»; (CV). Ballade, Op. 38*: forged album-leaf of the opening 6 bars, on 1 system, inscribed «Paris 1839 Hommage à Mme Berlioz F. Chopin». Kobylañska I, no. 606, illustrated II, p. 209. Mazurka Op. 63 No. 2*: forged manuscript of the complete work, 2 pp., oblong 4to; page 1 (the only page seen) written on five systems, inscribed at the head «pour mon ami Hector Berlioz»; signed on p. 2 and dated Paris 1846. Kobylañska I, no. 844; described and illustrated in Hans Schneider, Catalogue 136, item 113.

(iv) Forgery of Wagner Wagner*: undated letter to Berlioz, 4 pp., 8vo, beginning “Bien que je suis plongé dans la composition d’une immense œuvre”; (CV).

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B. Forgeries of Berlioz by Those Other Than the Principal Forger (All Mentioned in the Main Text) Undated letter to an unidentified correspondent*: relating to staging La Damnation de Faust; the episode is recounted in Tiersot, Le Musicien errant (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1919), 164. Letter of 14 August 1819 to an unidentified publisher (CG 5)*; (François Lang Collection, Royaumont). Letter of 4 January 1845 to Théophile Gautier (CG 934)*; (the autograph and forgery are both at The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York). Six letters, apparently all to Prince Odoyevsky, 1868: [21 or 22 February], [April or May], 28 June, 19 September, 23 October, and 30 November. The last two were published in Sovyetskoe Iskusstvo (Moscow, 1937) and the first four in Sovyetskaja Muzyka (Moscow, 1968–69); all were published in English translation by John Ahouse in the Berlioz Society Bulletin, Nos. 88–89 (London, 1975). The originals have not been seen in recent times; they are reputed to have been at one time in the hands of A. M. Vdovichenko, a horn player in St. Petersburg, who is said to have allowed copies to be made by the staff of the historical museum there. Letter of 11 August [1868] to Prosper Sain-d’Arod*: (the original, CG 3371, is at the Bibliothèque de la Ville de Lyon, Album Sain-d’Arod; the forgery is at the Macnutt Collection, Withyham). Letter of 27 October [1868] to Prosper Sain-d’Arod* (Erasmushaus—Haus der Bücher, Basel). Béatrice et Bénédict*: album-leaf, 3 bars on 1 stave, with the text “Nuit paisible et sereine,” inscribed “Pour l’album de Mlle Lang, Bade 12 août 1862 Hector Berlioz”; an inept forgery; illustrated in J. A. Stargardt, Catalogue 588, item 544.

Notes 1. The first version of this article was published as “The Berlioz Forgeries” in Bunte Blätter für Klaus Mecklenburg zum 23. Februar 2000, gesammelt von Rudolf Elvers und Alain Moirandat (Basel: Moirandat, 2000), 152–76. I am grateful to M. Moirandat for giving permission for its publication here in revised form. The substantive revisions primarily concern the inventory, published in the Appendix, which has benefited from my having had recent access to two further Berlioz collections and to the original manuscript of the principal forger’s lists of admitted forgeries: these have together revealed about fifty forgeries more than those listed in the original article, and they have provided the names of the addressees of approximately one hundred further letters as well as clarification of the dating of these and many other documents. I ask all readers to help to extend and amplify this survey by reporting to me or to the editor of this book if and when they encounter Berlioz documents that give rise to suspicion. 2. Letter from Hugh Macdonald, David Cairns, and Alan Tyson, The Musical Times 110 (January 1969): 32. Readers of this book need no introduction to Macdonald and Cairns, nor to the late Alan Tyson, the distinguished Mozart and Beethoven scholar. 3. David Cairns, “The Reboul-Berlioz Collection,” in Berlioz Studies, ed. Peter Bloom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 1–16, here 16.

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4. D. Kern Holoman, The Creative Process in the Autograph Musical Documents of Hector Berlioz, c. 1818–1840 (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1980), 6. 5. Ibid., 90. See also 55, 83, 87–90. 6. Kenneth W. Rendell, Forging History: The Detection of Fake Letters & Documents (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994), 63–64. 7. Here I should like to mention with particular gratitude Thierry Bodin, David Cairns, Pierre Citron, D. Kern Holoman, Hugh Macdonald, and the late François Lesure. I have also been greatly assisted in various ways by Marie-Françoise BoisDelatte, Peter Bloom, Lucien Chamard-Bois, Joël-Marie Fauquet, Yves JocteurMontrozier, Wolfgang Mecklenberg, Oliver Neighbour, Jocelyne Paris, Martine and Jacques Perrin, George Platzman, Guy Reboul-Berlioz, Albi Rosenthal, Catherine Vercier, John Wilson, and (notably in connection with handwriting) by Renato and Rosine Saggiori. To all I extend my warm thanks. 8. Doubt was at one time cast on the authenticity of two further manuscripts, both in the Rudolf Nydahl Collection, Stockholm—an album-leaf of the opening twenty-one bars of Villanelle and a three-page list of cuts and changes in Benvenuto Cellini. Both are now established as being authentic and will be recorded in NBE 15 and 1d respectively. The manuscripts are described by Ralph Locke in his review of CG II in 19th-Century Music 1 (1977): 71–84. 9. [The numbers following CG are the numbers of the letters. —Ed.] 10. See Denis Herlin, Collection musicale François Lang (Paris: Klincksieck, 1993), 227, where “trois lettres aut.” are mentioned but not described. 11. See CG VII, 715 n, and the Appendix, part B, here. 12. The episode regarding this undated letter is partially recounted in Julien Tiersot, Le Musicien errant (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1919), 164. [The first printing of the 1903 program, which was on sale at the première on 7 May, carried this text, supposedly by Berlioz: “Je viens d’écrire un opéra sur l’œuvre de l’immortel Goethe, je ne sais si je me suis approché du géant, mais je sais qu’aucun directeur de theatre ne voudra le monter et que je serai hélas forcé de faire exécuter des parties en concert afin de pouvoir les entendre.” This was followed by an editorial note: “Nous publierons dans un prochain programme un fac-simile de cette lettre.” In subsequent printings of the program, the facsimile itself appears. The barely legible writing, to say nothing of the verbal expression, is clearly not Berlioz’s. Copies of the program may be found in the archives at the Opéra, in the Dossier d’œuvre: La Damnation de Faust. In his articles for the Journal des débats of 24 May and 7 June 1903, Adolphe Jullien cast doubt on the authenticity of this fragment, which Gunsbourg claimed was from a letter that Berlioz wrote to Louis, his son. But in the autumn of 1846, when “Berlioz” might have written such a letter, Louis Berlioz was only thirteen years old. —Ed.] 13. See Cecil Hopkinson, “Two important Berlioz discoveries,” Fontes Artis Musicae 15 (1968): 14–16; and the retraction in the same journal, vol. 16 (1969): 28–29, where Hopkinson exposes the two items as forgeries and states that they were admitted as such by the forger himself. 14. Two forgeries exist for this date, whereas only one appears on the list acknowledged by the forger. The same applies to the dates of 16 February 1864, 10 March 1857, and 14 June 1862. 15. This is misdated 1852 in the forger’s list.

Afterword

Fourteen Points about Berlioz and the Public, or Why There Is Still a Berlioz Problem Jacques Barzun I begin by describing how I came to choose this subject and to jot down points, which turned out to number fourteen—you may well think of a few more. I was leafing through a thick up-to-date guide to recordings and my eye fell on the entry for the Symphonie fantastique. I learned there that it was “by that wayward composer Berlioz.” I leafed through further but failed to find the Bruckner Sixth as being “by that neurotic composer”—you know how he used go obsessively to the morgue in Vienna to look at corpses. Nor was Siegfried Idyll “by that insolvent and adulterous composer Richard Wagner.” In short, Berlioz is still given special treatment. That is my Point One, recently confirmed by the London Daily Telegraph. A splendid half-page article by our incomparable David Cairns about Colin Davis’s Berlioz concerts at the Barbican was given a headline that refers to “the Maverick Frenchman’s Music.”1 What is to be noted is that the labeling is automatic, traditional, absent-minded, and it is usually contrary to fact. So far from being wayward, Berlioz steered an uncommonly straight course in his musical conceiving and composing. Read his earliest critiques or listen to his earliest cantatas for the Rome Prize and you find his mature work clearly prefigured. There are in his life no “periods,” no mid-career Revelation causing a change of style. What then contributes to the persistent use of epithets dating from his lifetime? Tags, mostly unfriendly, are stuck on every artist when his vision is new, but once he is dead enough to cease being a threat, every journalist devises a couple of complimentary clichés that show his insight, scholarship, and taste. This turnaround is standard even for the most minor talents, and quite properly so; it is part of the informative role of the newspaper reviewer, the writer of program notes, and the compiler of guidebooks. Musicologists and academics pass more complex judgments, mixing praise and criticism, but they take pains to argue their points of disapproval,

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which others can argue against. This debate goes on in the secrecy of learned journals and does not affect the public’s ready-made and favorable opinions. What I am talking about is not universal admiration based on knowledge, but automatic acceptance as a member of the masters’ circle, ensuring the right to be treated without name-calling. It matters, because the tone given to public opinion and maintained there by the printed word determines the range and frequency of performances. As long as Shakespeare after his death was known as a wild, irregular playwright who “never has six lines together without a fault”—I am quoting Dr. Johnson,2 who edited the plays—actor-managers had little cause to produce them respectfully. When King Lear was ventured upon in the mid-seventeenth century, the audience was kept amused by performing bears between the acts. It took a century and a half before one bold spirit began to put on several of the plays with some care and frequency. That was David Garrick in the latter third of the eighteenth century; and even he changed what he thought could be improved. Point One defines the situation. Point Two raises the question of cause. It has a double aspect: cultural conditions that keep things as they are, and contributing factors intrinsic to Berlioz himself. To begin with conditions: he and his music have had to be self-supporting; I mean by this, unaided by any extraneous interest—the kind that helps to put artists beyond the reach not of criticism but of disrespect. Making this situation clear is Point Three. Berlioz alive or dead has never had the backing of his native country. Though this may seem a curious need, the lack of that support is damaging. National pride promotes and defends. Only in France could it happen that among the concerts explicitly given in Berlioz’s honor on the one-hundredth anniversary of his birth, two of the half-dozen contained not a note of his music. Such facts carry a message and have influence. Until today, the attitude of more than one French critic toward Berlioz has been grudging and, at times, openly hostile. Current events confirm this tradition. A recent Minister of Culture decided to mark the Berlioz bicentennial in 2003 by the transfer of the ashes to the Panthéon. This is the building in Paris where, as the façade declares, the nation signifies its gratitude to its great men. I confess that my response to the news was: “I’ll believe it when I see it.” The proposal has to be ratified by President Chirac and I was ready for objections to be raised in the interim. Sure enough, in an open letter to the leading newspaper Le Monde, a super-conscientious music critic, who professes to be a Berlioz admirer, promptly raised the objection that the Panthéon is reserved for true-blue republicans and that Berlioz was “a fervent reactionary.”3 An editorial in Le Monde supported this contention. The facts are these: Berlioz lived the last part of his life during the reign of Napoleon III; he was not a supporter of the regime, nor was he a benefi-

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ciary—as Wagner was in 1861. Indeed, it would be hard to find a less political artist in France than Berlioz. True, in his Mémoires, to explain his self-exile to England in 1848, he has hard things to say about the Second Republic, which stalled economic activity and forced artists to find a living elsewhere. Many “lovers of liberty” noted the fact then and have since. In youth and middle age, without joining political groups like Liszt, Berlioz willingly wrote music for liberal causes—a cantata on the Greek revolt (1825–26), a Requiem originally for the heroes of the French Revolution of 1830, a Funeral Symphony celebrating its tenth anniversary, not to mention his emerging from the Rome Prize competition in the midst of that struggle itself and leading a group of bystanders in singing the Marseillaise, which he shortly harmonized and orchestrated to characteristic effect. What we see now is the spectacle of a posthumous “candidate” for the Panthéon—something unheard of—being attacked as if a political campaign were going on about an issue to be voted on—in other words, Berlioz once again treated like nobody else. It is, I suppose, sheer good luck that in the years following Germany’s defeat of France in 1870, Berlioz, being recently dead, was not suddenly taken up as a national champion against Wagner in a stupid Kulturkampf. Only a few voices proposed it. Later, between 1890 and the First World War, German conductors and critics made a point of showing the French how much the Germans admired Berlioz: the première of the complete Troyens was in Karlsruhe; Benvenuto Cellini was revived in Hannover; Weingartner came to Paris, also with Benvenuto, and he gave a stunning Requiem in the Trocadéro—all this while the first complete edition of the scores was being published by Breitkopf & Härtel. The French paid little attention; they were putting on a premiere of Lohengrin, writing Wagnerian operas, and, though repeating that Berlioz was musically three-quarters German, neglecting him as before. Then came the First World War. Overnight, Wagner became detestable and Debussy was the opposing national hero, referred to as “notre Claude de France.” A second missing aid—Point Four—is that Berlioz wrote no music amateurs can play. They form a large and influential body, whose efforts at the piano or on one of the domesticated instruments make them familiar with the composers’ names and the titles, the fragments, and the arrangements of big works. Struggling over the notes teaches a style and trains the ear to intelligent listening in the concert hall or opera house. Add to these the professional instrumentalists, and for them, too, available solo pieces create a bond with the composer. Amateurs and professionals together form a party that protects against ignorant slurs. The strength of that influence is seen in the amount of indifferent music that it keeps alive, along with the composer’s repute. Point Five is something for which Berlioz himself must bear the entire blame. Without trying to, he blossomed into a man of letters. He did not merely write a few reviews like Debussy or long pedantic essays like Wagner.

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His work is literature, imaginative, eloquent, readable; his style is his own, the mark of a classic. For a composer this is very bad. The division of talents is felt to lower the value of each. Berlioz can be quickly classed with such musicians as E. T. A. Hoffmann and Nietzsche, praised for the written word and not esteemed for their compositions. Berlioz compounded the misdeed, making our Point Six, by writing an Autobiography, again highly readable. Later composers have told how these Mémoires spurred their courage by the example of perseverance against obstacles of all kinds. But that very theme has caused harm. People like tales of conflict, and critics have fastened on the early chapters of Berlioz’s life, ignoring the rest. Thus was born Berlioz the wild and wayward, always embattled. It makes better copy than the Berlioz who in the central years of the odyssey crisscrosses Europe, training orchestras in how to play modern music and audiences in how to listen to it. The best witnesses have testified to the artistic results: Hanslick, Cornelius, von Bülow, Leopold Damrosch—the first of them all being Wagner. Nor have portrayers of Berlioz noticed that in his critical writings the early pieces, when he was making his way, are steadily sedate. Later, when he was well known, he projected the image of the ebullient creator, fanatical in matters of artistic integrity. He was after all—or rather, above all—a dramatist. Like his music, his mature writings display his sense of drama, which is why they are still readable and being reprinted in full. I have elsewhere suggested a parallel with Bernard Shaw.4 Both were shy men who fashioned for themselves the public image of an aggressive Galahad and behind it pursued with calm and patience works that they knew to be out of tune with the times. Still dealing with Berlioz as a writer, we turn to a document that has closed the conventional mind to a proper view of his music, and we chalk up Point Seven, rooted in the word Program. The great myth of program music has been perpetuated by the link between Berlioz’s first and bestknown symphony and such a document. The time was 1830. Beethoven had died three years earlier and was beginning to be appreciated, even if his symphonies were played incomplete. The appreciation was due to the efforts of his German admirers, chiefly E. T. A. Hoffmann, who supplied “programs” for works that defied the familiar patterns.5 Hoffmann declared the modern instrumental genre to be opera without words. A libretto seemed implied, or the synopsis of a libretto, which he and other interpreters were happy to furnish as an aid to understanding. Later, Berlioz did the same in French for the nine symphonies. Being musicians, these men knew that Beethoven’s music did not “tell a story,” for that cannot be done. The stories they made up merely proposed plausible occasions for some of the dramatic turns in the musical form and texture. For example, the opening of the Fifth was likened to Fate Knocking at the Door. Since these stories all differed for the same symphony, their strictly

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suggestive role should have been evident to all. But Literalism as usual made people deaf and dumb, so that when Berlioz gave the Fantastique a program, a story, and then a sequel for Lélio ou Le Retour à la vie, the notion took root that he had invented a new kind of music. His young friend Franz Liszt praised and imitated the scheme, and the pair were henceforth the inventors of program music, something that requires reading words before the music can be followed. That Berlioz composed his symphony before the program and never wrote another has been ignored. But commentators cannot let go. They find it easier to retell the story and carry on about Harriet Smithson, the Anglo-Irish actress whom Berlioz married, than give pointers about the music—or even explain how “programs” came to be written and thereby started the now universal practice of handing concert-goers something to read. It was unknown before Beethoven. And of course, to report that Berlioz, after using five or more different versions of the story, said that none was necessary—the titles of the movements sufficed—such a piece of news would violate a comfortable tradition.6 A special point, number Eight, must be made about the thoughtless survival of “program music” as a category. Since the days of Berlioz and Liszt the public has welcomed dozens of symphonic works, tone poems, and overtures that come with evocative names, literary titles, and composers’ associative remarks. They are swallowed without demur. Indeed, commentators often add their own fancies without a by-your-leave. For example, within the recent decades when Mahler has been lifted out of obscurity, his symphonies have been swamped in a torrent of programmatic discourse. In keeping with modern taste, it has been psychological. Mahler the mystic, Mahler the sentimentalist, the hero, and the weakling have paraded before us in the music: here he summons courage, there he wallows in self-pity. But Mahler has not been charged with writing program music, while the authors of the psychologizing have not given up the idea that there is such a thing. The truth is that whatever music arouses in us can be associated with any number of things. The modulation to C Major in Haydn’s Creation goes beautifully with the words “Let there be light!” but it would go equally well with love triumphant or escape from jail. One fine critic put it with finality: what dramatic music offers through the ear to the mind-and-heart is not moments of namable expressiveness but a stream of exact, unnamable impressiveness. While on the subject of Mind, we may as our Point Nine give a glance at the Berlioz temperament. It has been described as “fire and ice,” romantic and classical, aristocratic and populist. One gathers that he combines opposites, which ordinary minds mistake for contradictions. Berlioz is thus found baffling, wayward, maverick. Donald Tovey said it outright: “You never know where you are with Berlioz.”7 He is not even the standardized

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man of genius, the defier with panache of bourgeois conventions, which appeals to the dormant instinct of revolt; or the pathetic victim of an unjust society, which appeals to sympathy and a secret feeling of superiority. He led a life as disciplined as his music and his criticism. It is this difference from any familiar type—national, social, emotional, or artistic—that still makes him difficult to “place.” That is most annoying and it probably explains why even his admirers and defenders cannot refrain from occasionally kicking him under the table: giving little jabs in their writings and therefore in their inmost hearts. It is their challenge to his aloofness, an aloofness, again, combined with the friendliness of the affable cosmopolitan conductor who was his own impresario and who got on well with a host of musicians, writers, statesmen, crowned heads of state, and janitors. Another trouble afflicts those well-wishers who are attracted to Berlioz either by his music or by his personality and who undertake to do something on his behalf by performance or publication: they do not always see what he and his music require. Concerts and biographies that have done his reputation more harm than good are not exceptional. This Tenth Point is what led to the old cliché that Berlioz appeals most to the non-musical. The charge has lost its force, witness the gathering in this book and, as I write, the International Committee planning 2003.8 But not all good musicians are good organizers, performers, or critics, and each demi-failure is a full setback that confirms existing doubts and prejudices. Here again Berlioz himself supplies a sort of excuse for these misguided efforts. Performing Berlioz demands great precision coupled with forward drive; above all, precision in rhythm but free of the metronome effect. These correspond to the twin characteristics of ice and fire. When either quality is missing, so is the music of Berlioz. I could furnish several historic instances that illustrate this Point Eleven, but will cite only the outcome of one such. A famous conductor of the New York Philharmonic chose for his farewell concert La Damnation de Faust. In his honor, the whole New York crowd of composers, critics, and musical stars were there. The performance was rhythmically strict. It was also pure ice; I was shivering. On the way out with William Schuman, he said to me, “As you know I always admired Berlioz, but this makes me think again. He is a bore, and that was the consensus during intermission.” To make the Damnation of Faust boring is a feat of strength. Bad performances are not the whole story. At a good rendering of a Berlioz score the disappointment of some concertgoers comes from one element in the music itself. Point Twelve is truly Berlioz’s fault. His melodies are all his own in shape, rhythm, and length, and some people cannot follow them. If this were not so, one might ask why his songs are not the playthings of the amateur vocalist. They are not disliked; they simply are not heard as melodies. One must learn to hear them and this calls for guidance. More than once I have had to take a friend by the ear, and coach him

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or her through a Berlioz melody that he or she had totally missed—for example, in the Fantastique the main theme of the third movement or again at the opening of Part II of La Damnation of Faust the hero’s dramatic soliloquy before the Easter Hymn (“Sans regrets, j’ai quitté ces riantes campagnes”). Felix Weingartner tells in one of his essays how he found the Benvenuto Cellini overture chock-full of melodies after being told that it was a string of “incoherent effects.” And about the Dignare in the Te Deum Ernest Newman makes the same point that I am making as a generality. This situation reminds us of a forgotten truth, which is that in order to hear a melody—not just a two-bar theme—it must meet our expectations more than halfway; it may sound new but must fit a familiar pattern. Is this not exactly what we find on hearing unusual words or proper names? For example, we can grasp at once and repeat the name Gorbachev, but let a Russian say Pobietonostsev and it’s a blur that leaves no trace. Berlioz was the first to point out that his melodies differed from the expected type. He might have added that his mode of variation also requires a hearing aid, not of the electronic kind. He did mention that he supplied these extended melodies rather lavishly. This habit, Point Thirteen on the list, figures as another hindrance to right perception. Many composers plug their good tunes—sometimes till we are ready to cry for mercy. Berlioz’s concise treatment and dramatic speed disconcert in one of two ways: the listener fails to follow and is bored; or does take in the variety and is oppressed. I have seen receptive souls knocked out by the rapid pace and melodic profusion of the symphony Roméo et Juliette. As we near the final point, perhaps we can begin to see the kind of commentary that Berlioz’s works call for if they are to be heard and enjoyed, for surely pleasure must come first. We may admire works that do not move us, but purely technical appreciation is not enough. Explanation must lead to enjoyment. To do so, it must be description without apology, without argument. Take for example one more stumbling block. Listeners used to opera are often taken aback by the way in which Benvenuto Cellini, Les Troyens, and Béatrice et Bénédict are constructed. They move forward in the way that Berlioz learned from Shakespeare: a series of significant scenes carry the drama with little or no palaver in between. This feature and the source of it need to be stated in such a way as to seem not an excuse but the great merit that it is, with possibly the accompanying remark that it shows Berlioz was no program composer: he presents situations inherently musicable, thus avoiding the usual mass of details given in long recitatives. In the symphonies, and notably in Roméo et Juliette, the movements are united, without words, by one or more musical themes that undergo local variation for dramatic fitness. Point last and Fourteenth is that all the previous obstacles that I have put forward as being Berlioz’s own doing, he might have taken care of

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himself, by talking method and aesthetic. He could have done so on a coherent plan and far better than any of us. But he disdained to write a theory of his art, he refused to justify his methods—his use of harmony, melody, rhythm, continuity through timbre, types of dramatic accent, and compositional forms. He only dropped hints, in his essays, in letters, in conversations that have been reported, and in the Treatise on Orchestration. He was aware of living in an age when the volume of talk about art was outstripping the output of art itself, but Berlioz was too proud to join the troop of self-expounders. As readers of these words know, it is only recently that competent students have made a start to repair this culpable omission. Before this audience I need not list these pioneers in exegesis, but I must point out that we have been given mostly special studies of single works or single components of the music. The great need is an exposition of the total “aesthetic,” to use a word Berlioz detested. Remember what Romain Rolland said about his encounter with the music of Wagner: when taken aback and full of doubts about it, he would go to Wagner’s writings and gain confidence and understanding. It seems that original music does not speak for itself. The number of topics I have sketched brings to mind President Wilson’s Fourteen Points for a durable peace and a world safe for democracy.9 Neither ensued, but the Western world has not given up the effort. I would hope that my fourteen, which may well need additions, could help to define what is to be done for a durable and safe state of public opinion about Berlioz. I like to think that this goal is rather more achievable than President Wilson’s.

Notes [Like his monumental book, From Dawn to Decadence (New York, 2000), Jacques Barzun’s contribution to this volume was written almost entirely from memory. I have taken the liberty of supplying the several notes that follow. —Ed.] 1. “As conductor Colin Davis begins a season devoted to his work, the composer’s biographer David Cairns talks to him about his love for the maverick Frenchman’s music.” London Daily Telegraph (26 November 1999). 2. The remark is cited, of course, in James Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson, originally published in 1887. 3. Joël-Marie Fauquet, “Berlioz au Panthéon? Une fausse note!” Le Monde (29 February 2000). (M. Fauquet, “super-conscientious” perhaps, is a scholar, not a “music critic.”) 4. Jacques Barzun, “Berlioz and Shaw: An Affinity,” in Unpublished Shaw, ed. Dan Laurence (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996); reprinted in the Berlioz Society Bulletin, 157 (Summer 1997): 4–8. 5. Here the word “program” is of course an abbreviation for a complex phenomenon. See David Charlton’s commentary on Hoffmann’s extraordinary imagery

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in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Musical Writings, ed. Charlton, trans. Martyn Clarke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), passim. 6. In his edition of the Symphonie fantastique (NBE 16), Nicholas Temperley identifies fourteen versions of the program. The footnote suggesting that only the titles of the movements and not the program itself need be made known to the public is found in Version 14—printed in a later issue (of 1855 or thereafter) of the first edition of the score (originally published in 1845). 7. The comment—intended positively, and expressive of surprise at how gigantic and convincing was the opera Les Troyens—occurs in Tovey’s Essays in Musical Analysis, vol. 4 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1937), 89. 8. See the editor’s Foreword. 9. President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points were delivered to a joint session of the United States Congress on 8 January 1918.

Contributors JACQUES BARZUN, University Professor Emeritus, Columbia University, is best known in the world of Berlioz studies as author of Berlioz and the Romantic Century (1950; 1956; 1969) and translator of Les Soirées de l’orchestre as Evenings with the Orchestra (1956; 1973; 1999). He is recently the author of the best-selling From Dawn to Decadence (2000). His Sidelights on Opera at Glimmerglass appeared in 2001. PETER BLOOM, recently the editor of Berlioz’s Grand Traité d’instrumentation et d’orchestration modernes (2002) for the New Berlioz Edition, is Grace Jarcho Ross 1933 Professor of Humanities at Smith College. He is author of The Life of Berlioz (1998) and editor of several collections of Berlioz studies. DAVID CHARLTON, member of the editorial board of the New Berlioz Edition and recently the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Grand Opera (2002), is Professor of Music History at Royal Holloway, University of London. SYLVIA L’ÉCUYER, author of Joseph d’Ortigue: Biographie et textes choisis (1829–1842) (2002), is music producer at Radio-Canada and Adjunct Professor of Musicology at L’Université de Montréal. PETER GAY, the author, most recently, of Schnitzler’s Century: The Making of Middle-Class Culture, 1815–1914 (2001), is Sterling Professor of History Emeritus at Yale University and Director of the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. HEATHER HADLOCK, author of Mad Loves: Women and Music in Offenbach’s “Les Contes d’Hoffmann” (2000), is Assistant Professor of Musicology at Stanford University. KATHERINE KOLB, recently the author of “The Short Stories” in The Cambridge Companion to Berlioz (2000), is Associate Professor of French at Southeastern Louisiana University. RICHARD MACNUTT, antiquarian bookseller and independent scholar, has lately published The Macnutt Berlioz Collection (2001), a description of his collection of letters, manuscripts, books, and other documents of critical importance to all aspects of Berlioz research.

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CATHERINE MASSIP, Director of the Département de la Musique at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, is recently the author of L’art de bien chanter: Michel Lambert (1610–1696) (1999). KERRY MURPHY, author of Hector Berlioz and the Development of French Music Criticism (1988), is Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Music at the University of Melbourne. JEAN-MICHEL NECTOUX, whose Fauré (1972) appeared in English in 1991 and in a concise third edition in 1995, is Conseiller Scientifique at the newly created Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art, in Paris. CÉCILE REYNAUD, Secrétaire Générale of the Comité International Hector Berlioz and author of Berlioz (2000) in the collection Pour la musique, is Conservatrice in the Département de la Musique of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. LESLEY WRIGHT, recently the editor of Carmen: Dossier de presse parisienne (1875) (2001), is Professor of Musicology and Chair of the Music Department at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa.

Index Adam, Adolphe, 36 Fille du Danube, La, 63, 74 n. 18 Adorno, Theodor, xvi Ahouse, John, 191 Alembert, Jean le Rond d’, 26 Alexander the Great, 80 Alizard, Adolphe-Joseph-Louis, 28 Allard, Eugène, 158, 159 Antony, Marc, 80 Artusi, Giovanni Maria, 24 Auber, Daniel-François-Esprit, 36, 102 n. 3, 109 Lac des fees, Le, 74 n. 31 Augustus [Emperor of Rome], 80 Bach, Johann Sebastian, xiii, 19–21, 165 Saint Matthew Passion, 28, 33 n. 33 Baini, Giuseppe, 38 Barbier, Auguste, 61, 73 n. 12 Barzun, Jacques, xii, xvi, 14, 193, 200, 202 Baudelaire, Charles, 7 Beethoven, Ludwig van, xi, xiii, xv, xvi, 3–4, 7, 9, 10, 29, 79, 80, 84, 118, 122 n. 33, 140, 158, 159, 164, 165, 180, 196, 197 An die unsterbliche Geliebte, 4 Fidelio, 29 Heiligenstadt Testament, 4 Sonata in C-sharp Minor, Op. 27 No. 2 (“Moonlight”), 14 Symphony No. 3 (“Eroica”), 78 Symphony No. 5, 190, 196 Symphony No. 6, 190 Symphony No. 7, 190 Bellini, Vincenzo I Capuleti ed I Montecchi, 127 Belloni, Gaetano, 114 Benbassa, Esther, 91 Benjamin, Walter, xvi Berlioz, Adèle-Eugénie [sister], 53 n. 10, 59, 81, 99, 173, 174, 185, 189 Berlioz, Antoinette-Joséphine, née Marmion [mother], 6, 10–11

Berlioz, Auguste [uncle], 185 Berlioz, Jules [cousin], 185 Berlioz, Louis-Clément-Thomas [son], 173, 175, 180, 189, 190, 192 n. 12 Berlioz, Louis-Hector Absence, 188 À travers chants, 32 nn. 15, 16, 17, 106 Béatrice et Bénédict, 146, 157 n. 31, 169 n. 11, 176, 191, 199 Belle Isabeau, La, 188 Belle voyageuse, La, 188 Benvenuto Cellini, xiii–xiv, 59–75, 82, 103 n. 46, 113, 119, 142–43, 146, 157 n. 31, 157 n. 39, 162, 183, 188, 192 n. 8, 195, 199 Captive, La, 157 n. 31, 178–80, 189 Carnaval romain, Le, 139, 143, 146 Chef d’orchestre, Le, 117 Corsaire, Le, 91 Damnation de Faust, La, xv, xvi, 10, 76, 83, 86, 139, 140–41, 146–48, 150, 152, 157 n. 31, 159, 161, 166, 167, 176, 191, 192 n. 12, 198, 199 Dans l’alcôve sombre, 189 De l’instrumentation, 30 Enfance du Christ, L’, 31, 141–42, 148, 152, 154, 157 n. 31, 157 n. 39, 189 Euphonia, 79–87 Fête musicale funèbre à la mémoire des hommes illustres de la France, 36, 47, 51 Francs-Juges, Les, 113, 147, 157 n. 37 Grand Traité d’instrumentation et d’orchestration modernes, 31, 32 n. 13, 98, 109, 118, 140, 145, 200 Grotesques de la musique, Les, 26, 32 n. 18, 107, 180, 189 Harold en Italie, 109, 138, 157 n. 39, 183 Hymne des Marseillais, 77, 195 Île inconnue, L’, 189 Impériale, L’, 35

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Berlioz, Louis-Hector (continued) Invitation à la valse, L’ [Weber], 150 Jeune Pâtre breton, Le, 157 n. 31 Lélio ou le Retour à la vie, 110–12, 144, 157 n. 39, 178, 180, 189, 196 Marche funèbre pour la dernière scène d’Hamlet, 45 Matin, Le, 189 Mémoires, xiv, xvi, 3, 6, 7, 11, 14 n. 1, 32 n. 27, 45, 76–89 passim, 115, 117, 127, 128, 157 n. 43, 160, 163, 166, 195, 196 Menace des Francs, La, xi Messe solennelle, 82 Mort d’Ophélie, La, xiv, 124–33 passim, 189 Mort d’Orphée, La, 105 Nuits d’été, Les, 157 n. 31 Petit Oiseau, 189 Piano enragé, Le, 108 Premier Opera, Le, 81–83 Requiem (Grande Messe des morts), 10, 35, 37, 61, 62, 67, 77, 81, 142, 144, 148–49, 157 nn. 31, 39, 195 Rêverie et Caprice, 157 n. 31 Révolution grecque, La, 195 Roméo et Juliette, xvi, 82, 100, 109, 126, 128, 139, 145, 148, 151, 152, 164, 165, 189, 199 Rubini à Calais, 4 Sara la baigneuse, 157 n. 39 Scène héroïque, 36 Soirées de l’orchestre, Les, xiv, 13, 15 n. 15, 80–82, 85, 87, 107 Spectre de la rose, Le, 178, 180, 189 Suicide par enthousiasme, Le, 79, 82– 84 Symphonie fantastique, xv, 10, 12, 47, 83, 86, 87, 109, 110–13, 139, 146– 49, 157 n. 31, 164, 170 n. 35, 189, 193, 196, 199, 201 n. 6 Symphonie funèbre et triomphale, 35, 36, 45, 149, 195 Te Deum, 35, 37, 157 n. 31, 199 Tempête, Ouverture de la, 149 Tristia, 149 Troyens, Les, xv, 88, 103 n. 46, 138, 140, 146–47, 149, 151–54, 157 n.

39, 159–64, 166–68, 189, 195, 199, 201 n. 7 Villanelle, 192 n. 8 Vox populi, xi Berlioz, Louis-Joseph [father], 6, 7, 65, 173, 180, 189 Berlioz, Marguerite-Anne-Louise [sister; called Nanci], 9, 173, 174, 185, 189 Berlioz, Victor-Abraham [uncle], 185 Bernard, Daniel, 175 Bernard, Pierre-Joseph, 27 Bertin, Armand, 99 Bertin, Louise, 89 n. 8 Bizet, Georges, 70 Carmen, 87, 148 Blaze, François-Henri-Joseph [called Castil-Blaze], 73 n. 8, 85, 87, 94– 95, 113, Pigeon-Vole, 85 Blaze, Henri, 73 n. 6 Bloom, Peter, xi, xviii n. 2, 5, 31, 53 n. 5, 54 n. 19, 88 n. 2, 90, 101, 120, 154, 201, 202 Boieldieu, François-Adrien, 10, 20, 109 Bonald, Henri de, 92 Bonald, Louis de, 102 n. 17 Bonnerot, Jean, 145 Bordas, Eric, 107 Boschot, Adolphe, 144, 151, 159, 160, 169 n. 25 Boswell, James, 200 n. 2 Botstein, Leon, xviii n. 12 Bottée de Toulmon, Auguste, 20, 22, 31 Bourgault-Ducoudray, Louis, 168 n. 2 Boyer, Pascal, 49 Brahms, Johannes, 3, 7, 34, 154 Branchu, Alexandrine-Caroline, 84 Brandus, Louis, 111 Bronfen, Elisabeth, 125–26, 130 Bruckner, Anton, 164 Symphony No. 6, 193 Bruneau, Alfred, 158–59, 164, 165, 168 n. 2 Bülow, Hans von, 112, 196 Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 51 Caesar, Julius, 80 Cairns, David, xviii n. 16, 12, 14, 15 n.

Index 10, 15 n. 12, 27, 72 n. 2, 88 n. 7, 89 n. 16, 90, 101, 173–74, 193 Calvé, Emma, 155 n. 11 Calvocoressi, Michel-Dimitri, 139 Carpani, Giuseppe, 29 Carraud, Gaston, 164 Carré, Albert, 166 Carvalho, Léon, 121 n. 23, 154, 157 n. 43, 160, 161 Cellini, Benvenuto, 21, 61, 81–82, 119 Vita, 61, 73 n. 11 Chabanon, Michel-Paul-Guy de, 49 Chapot, Marc-Auguste-Antoine, 175 Charcot, Jean-Martin, 93 Charlton, David, xiii, 34, 200 n. 5, 201, 202 Charpentier, Gustave, 138, 158, 168 n. 2 Cherubini, Luigi, xv, 9, 20, 38, 39, 43, 53, 54 n. 16, 55 n. 38 Requiem in C Minor, 48 Chevillard, Camille, 168 n. 2 Chirac, Jacques, 194 Chopin, Frédéric, 139 Ballade Op. 23, 190 Ballade Op. 38, 184, 190 Mazurka Op. 63 No. 2, 180, 190 Mazurkas Op. 30, 180, 190 Scherzo Op. 31, 190 Choron, Alexandre, 20–22, 31 n. 2, 39, 54 n. 17 Choudens, Antoine de, 162 Cimarosa, Domenico, 97 Citron, Pierre, 14 n. 1 Clarke, Martyn, 201 Clovis, 51 Colonne, Édouard, xv, 146–51, 169 n. 11 Condé, Gérard, 19 Cone, Edward T., 127 Coralli, Jean, 74 n. 22 Cornelius, Peter, 196 Cousin, Victor, 99 Croft, William, 42 Crohn, Burrill, xviii n. 16 Cross, John, 42 n, 43 Dahlhaus, Carl, 34, 49, 50, 53 n. 1, 122 n. 35

207

Dalayrac, Nicolas-Marie, 19 Damrosch, Leopold, 196 Dante, 81 Darwin, Charles, 31 David, Jacques-Louis, 36 Davis, Colin, 193 Debay, Victor, 167 Debussy, Claude, xv, 137, 140, 165, 168, 195 Pelléas et Mélisande, 168 Prélude à l’Après-midi d’un faune, 138 Delacroix, Eugène, 49, 164, 167 Deldevez, Édouard, 156 n. 31 Delna, Marie, 163, 170 n. 30 Desnoyers, Louis, 93–94, 96 Diderot, Denis Encyclopédie, 13 Dominiquin, le (Domenico Zampieri), 21 Dondeyne, Désirée, 44 Donizetti, Gaetano, 67, 74 n. 37 Dragonetti, Domenico, 116, 122 n. 28 Dreyfus, Alfred, 91, 168 n. 2 Ducray-Duminil, François-Guillaume, 56 n. 55 Dukas, Paul, 137, 140, 161, 165 Apprenti sorcier, L’, 140 Péri, La, 140 Dunn, Leslie, 124–25, 131 Duponchel, Charles-Edmond, 64–67, 73 n. 12 Dupont, Alexis, 28, 64, 65 Duprez, Gilbert, 21, 62, 64, 65, 66, 74 n.27 Durante, Francesco, 21, 22 Dussek, Jan Ladislav, 47, 55 n. 38 Duveyrier, Charles, 74 n. 22 Eckhardt, Maria, 121 n. 14 Ellis, Katharine, 32 n. 12, 49, 50, 86, 88 Elssler, Fanny, 63 Emmanuel, Maurice, 54 n. 13 Érard, Pierre, 108–9 Erlanger, Camille, 168 n. 2 Ernst, Alfred, 151, 160 Escudier, Louis, 121 n. 23 Euripides Alceste, 25

208

Index

Fanelli, Ernst Tableaux symphoniques, 139 Fantin-Latour, Henri, 148–54 Fauquet, Joël-Marie, xviii n. 7, 32 n. 33, 88 n. 2, 200 n. 3 Fauré, Gabriel, xv, 137, 140–43 Cantique de Jean Racine, 142 Pénélope, 142 Requiem, 138, 142 Fayolle, François, 22, 39, 54 n. 17 Fenderson, Sarah, xv, 178 Ferdinand Philippe, duc d’Orléans, 5 Ferrand, Humbert, 145 Fétis, François-Joseph, xv, 38, 61, 87 Fieschi, Giuseppe, 48 Fiorentino, Pier Angelo, 99 Flaubert, Gustave, 7 Flotow, Friedrich von Stradella, 65 Fornier, Estelle, née Dubœuf, 8, 147 Fouque, Octave, 50, 56 nn. 48, 52 Franck, César, 165 Freud, Sigmund, xii Fulcher, Jane, 168 Gailhard, Pierre, 159, 162–64, 168 n. 2 Gallenberg, Wenceslas Robert, 55 n. 35 Alfred le grand, 46, 51 Galli-Marié, Célestine, 148 Garrick, David, 194 Gatti, Luigi, 48 Gautier, Théophile, 73 n. 6, 176, 191 Spectre de la rose, Le, 180 Gay, Peter, xii, 3, 15 nn. 2, 3, 202 Gebauer, François-René, 46 Géricault, Théodore, 39 Gluck, Christoph Willibald, xiii, 8–10, 15 n. 7, 19, 21, 25, 27–28, 31, 34, 45, 60, 70, 79, 84, 142–43, 159, 165, 180, 184, 190 Alceste, 26, 84, 190 Armide, 28, 32 n. 27, 190 Iphigénie en Tauride, 9, 20, 190 Orphée, 121 n. 23 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 51, 176, 192 n. 12 Goldmark, Karl, 164 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 199

Gossec, François-Joseph, 45 Marche lugubre, 45 Gouin, Louis, 100 Gounod, Charles, 70 Grasset, Jean-Jacques, 46 Greffulhe, Comtesse, 157 n. 38, 169 n. 11 Grétry, André-Ernest-Modeste, 9, 20, 45, 55 n. 38 Grieg, Edvard, 168 n. 2 Guglielmi, Pietro Alceste, 25–26 Guilmant, Alexandre, 168 n. 2 Guizot, François, 53 n. 9 Gunsbourg, Raoul, 141, 169 n. 11, 176, 192 n. 12 Gutenberg, Johannes, 47 Haar, James, 89 n. 13 Habeneck, François-Antoine, 36 Hadlock, Heather, xiv, 123, 202 Hainl, Georges, 156 n. 31 Halévy, Fromental, 36, 62, 65, 91, 102 n. 3, 109 Guido et Ginevra, 61–62, 65–67, 69, 70 Juive, La, 64, 65, 90 Hallman, Diana, 90, 91 Handel, George Frideric, 19–25, 42, 43, 142 Admetus, 24 Alceste, 25–26 Israel in Egypt, 29, 33 n. 29 Hanslick, Eduard, 196 Hasse, Johann Adolf, 20–22 Haydn, Joseph, 40, 42 Creation, The, 197 Heine, Heinrich, 90, 95 Hennion, Antoine, xviii n. 7 Hopkinson, Cecil, 192 n. 13 Hérold, Ferdinand, 109 Zampa, 98 Heugel, Jacques-Léopold, 121 n. 23 Hiller, Ferdinand, xi, xiv, xviii n. 4, 7, 15 n. 5 Hillemacher, Paul and Lucien, 168 n. 2 Hippeau, Edmond, 151 Hoffmann, E. T. A., 20, 21, 196, 200 n. 5

Index Hofmeister, Friedrich, 112 Holmès, Augusta, 158, 168 n. 2 Holmes, Rachel and Eleanor, 15 nn. 5, 10 Holoman, D. Kern, xviii n. 2, 38, 132 n. 4, 144, 174, 178 Howard, Leslie, 121 n. 24 Hugo, Victor, xi, 36, 77, 78, 88, 120, 164 Préface de Cromwell, 73 n. 6 Voix intérieures, Les, 80 Indy, Vincent d’, 93, 95, 102 n. 23, 137, 140, 168 n. 2 Cours de composition musicale, 165 Ingres, Jean-Dominique, 167 Jarrin, Charles, 126 Jaurès, Jean, xi Johnson, Samuel, 194 Jomelli, Niccolo, 22, 42 Missa pro defunctis, 30, 33 n. 30 Joncières, Victorin, 168 n. 2 Jullien, Adolphe, 147, 151, 154, 158– 61, 164, 192 n. 12 Kastner, Georges, 100 Kemble, Charles, 126, 132 n. 17 Kerst, Léon, 161, 163 Kertesz, Elisabeth, 103 n. 30 Kolb, Katherine, xiv, 76, 88 n. 5, 202 Laborde, Jean-Benjamin de, 73 n. 8 Lacombe, Hervé, 70 La Laurencie, Lionel de, 165 Lalo, Pierre, 166, 168 Lambert, Jacques, 177–78 Lamoureux, Charles, xv, 146 Landormy, Paul, 165 Lang, François, 175 La Rochefoucauld, Sosthène de, 9 Lauretis, Teresa de, 123 Lavignac, Albert Encyclopédie de la musique, 167 Lecerf de la Viéville, Jean-Laurent, 26 L’Écuyer, Sylvia, xiii, 59 Legouvé, Ernest, 82, 126 Leich-Galland, Karl, 75 n. 43 Lenoir, Alfred, 152 Lenormant, Charles, 162

209

Lenz, Wilhelm von, 101 Leo, Leonardo, 21 Leroux, Xavier, 162 Lesueur, Jean-François, xiii, 9, 20–22, 30, 34, 35, 37, 50–53, 56 n. 49, 79 Chant du 1er vendémiaire An IX, 51– 52 Troisième Messe solennelle, 32 n. 8 Veillée de David, La, 22 Letellier, Robert, 90 Lichnowsky, Prince Felix von, 80, 82 Lindsay, Jane, 141 Liszt, Franz, xiv, 14, 22, 38, 72, 105– 22, 195, 196 Bénédiction et serment, deux motifs de Benvenuto Cellini, 111–12 Carnaval romain, Le [for piano], 111 Danse des sylphs de la Damnation de Faust, 111 Don Sanche, 111 Faust Symphony, 141 Francs-Juges, Ouverture des [for piano], 111–12 Grande Fantaisie symphonique sur deux thèmes du Mélologue, 110, 111, 114 Harold en Italie [for piano], 111–12, 114 Idée fixe, L’, 111 Lettre d’un bachelier ès-musique, 114, 119 Roi Lear, Ouverture du [for piano], 111–12, 114 Symphonie fantastique [for piano], 111, 118 Symphonie révolutionnaire, 120 Locard, Paul, 167 Louis XVIII, King of France, 46 Louis-Philippe, King of the French, 5, 35, 36, 39, 48, 76 Lucas, Hippolyte, 63 Lully, Jean-Baptiste, 20, 25 Alceste, 25–26 Bourgeois Gentilhomme, Le, 25 Macdonald, Hugh, 15 n. 11, 73 n. 2, 121 n. 21, 173 Macnutt, Richard, xv, 173, 202 Mahler, Gustav, 139, 164, 197

210

Index

Mainzer, Joseph, 23, 32 n. 12 Marcello, Benedetto, 20, 22, 32 n. 7, 73 n. 8 Mariotti [trombonist], 43, 55 n. 27 Marmion, Félix, 27, 173, 175, 178, 185 Marmontel, Jean-François, 38, 54 n. 13 Marnold, Jean, 165, 166 Marrinan, Michael, 34 Marsolleau, Louis, 162 Marty, Georges, 168 n. 2 Masaccio, 21 Mascagni, Pietro Cavalleria rusticana, 161 Massenet, Jules, 158 Massiac, Théodore, 160 Massip, Catherine, xiii, 203 Masson, Paul-Marie, 172 n. 56 Maurel, Auguste, 63 McClary, Susan, 89 n. 19 Méhul, Étienne-Nicolas, 20, 34, 161 Chant national du 25 messidor, 52, 56 n. 54 Melani, Jacopo Potesta di Colognole, Il, 29 Mendelssohn, Felix, 8, 13, 15 n. 7, 96, 103 n. 34, 108 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A, 13 Mérimée, Prosper, 88, 89 n. 19 Carmen, 87 Messiaen, Olivier, 24 Mestitz, Paul, xviii n. 16 Meyerbeer, Giacomo, xiv, 32 n. 27, 90– 104, 159 Huguenots, Les, 65, 67, 92, 94, 96– 97, 100, 103 n. 45 Prophète, Le, 74 n. 31, 97, 99, 103 n. 45 Robert le diable, 67, 98 Michaud, Louis-Gabriel Biographie universelle, 22, 32 n. 7 Millais, John Everet, 132 n. 7 Moke, Camille [Marie Pleyel], 83, 86–89 Molière, 25 Mongrédien, Jean, 56 n. 53 Monnais, Édouard, 69–70 Monsigny, Pierre-Alexandre, 19 Montel, Albert, 161 Monteverdi, Claudio, 20, 23–24, 32 n. 13

Montfort, Alexandre, 74 n. 22 Chatte métamorphosée en femme, La, 63 Moreau, Charles, 127 Morel, Auguste, 147 Moreno, Jacques-Henri, 167 Mottl, Felix, 160–63 Moulin, Jean, xi, 77 Mozart, Leopold, 4, 7, 40, 42, 48, 85, 97, 164 Mozart, Wolfang Amadeux, 4, 12 Noces de Figaro, Les, 107 Mueller, Rena Charnin, 121 n. 14 Murphy, Kerry, xiv, 89 n. 23, 203 Musset, Alfred de, 78 Namier, Lewis, 53, 56 n. 56 Napoléon Ier [Napoléon Bonaparte], xiv, 27, 35, 36, 45, 49, 80, 81, 88 n.4 Napoléon III [Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte], xi, 78–81, 88, 89 nn. 11, 12, 194 Nectoux, Jean-Michel, 137, 159, 170 n. 42, 203 Neukomm, Sigismund, 35, 37, 46–48 Mass, 47 Retour à la vie, Le, 46 Te Deum, 47, 51 Newman, Ernest, 15 n. 5, 199 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 196 Nourrit, Adolphe, xvii, 65 Offenbach, Jacques, 102 n. 3 Odoyevsky, Prince Vladimir, 176, 191 Onslow, Georges, 67 Guise ou les États de Blois, 74 n. 36 Ortigue, Joseph d’, xiii, 23, 59–75, 97, 98 Balcon de l’Opéra, Le, 60 De l’école musicale italienne, 59–75 passim Paganini, Nicolò, 82, 109, 120 Painter, Karen, xviii n. 8 Paisiello, Giovanni, 20, 22 Pal, Camille [Nanci’s husband], 173, 180–82 Pal, Mathilde [Nanci’s daughter], 173, 185, 189

Index Palestrina, Giovanni Pierluigi da, 20–24, 32 n. 12 Alla riva del Tebro, 21–22, 31 n. 5 Improperia, 24 Parker, Roger, 54 n. 15 Pasdeloup, Jules, xv, 146, 147, 160 Pedro I, Emperor of Brazil, 47 Pergolesi, Giovanni Battista, 20 Stabat mater, 24 Perrin, Martine, 183, 185 Peter the Great, 80 Philidor, François-André-Danican, 45 Philip of Macedonia, 80 Pictet, Adolphe, 114, 115 Pierné, Gabriel, 139, 148 Pierre, Constant, 52 Planche, Gustave, 94, 96 Pleyel, Marie. See Moke, Camille Poniatowski, Prince André, 138 Pons, Augustin de, 82 Pougin, Arthur, 166, 170 n. 28 Prod’homme, Jacques-Gabriel, 151, 165 Puvis de Chavannes, Pierre, 143 Quinault, Philippe Alceste, 25 Rameau, Jean-Philippe, 19, 20, 25–28, 70, 161, 165 Castor et Pollux, 26–28 Indes galantes, Les, 28 Ravel, Maurice, xv, 137, 140 Pavane pour une infante défunte, 138 Rawlins, Ray, 190 Reboul-Berlioz, Georges-Mathieu, 175 Reboul-Berlioz, Guy, 182, 185 Reboul-Berlioz, Yvonne, 175, 177 Récio, Marie, 173 Reicha, Antonin, xiii, 30, 35, 37–44, 49, 51, 53, 54 n. 16 Cours de compositionl musicale, 38 Horsch! Horsch!, 39–42 Marche funèbre, 43–44, 47 Musique pour célébrer la mémoire des grands hommes, 43 Traité de haute composition musicale, 38, 39, 41–42, 43 Traité de mélodie, 38

211

Rendell, Kenneth W., 174 Reszke, Jean de, 162 Reuss-Belce, Luise, 162 Reyer, Ernest, 161 Reynaud, Cécile, xiv, 203 Reynolds, Joshua, 127 Richault, Simon, 112, 121 n. 16 Rieter-Biedermann, Jakob, 111 Robert, Frédéric, 44 Robinson, Peter, 87, 89 n. 19 Rodin, Auguste, 143 Rolland, Romain, xi, xii, xv, xviii n. 1, 24, 32 n. 14, 166, 170 n. 39, 200 Ross, Alex, xviii n. 9 Rossini, Gioacchino, xviii n. 7, 8, 11, 70, 85, 109 Comte Ory, Le, 67 Guillaume Tell, 62, 65, 70, 108 Tancredi, 65 Rothschild, Baron James, 91 Rouché, Jacques, 162 Rouget de Lisle, Claude, 11 Marseillaise, La, 11, 45, 195 Rouher, Eugène, 143 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, xi, 73 n. 8, 77 Rousseau, Samuel, 168 n. 2 Ruolz-Montchal, Henri, comte de, xvii Lara, xvii Rushton, Julian, xviii n. 11, 34, 37 Sain-d’Arod, Prosper, 176, 191 Saint Rémy, 51 Saint-Saëns, Camille, 70, 137, 142–44, 164, 168 n. 2 Ivanhoé, 144 Noces de Prométhée, Les, 145 Sand, George, 86, 87, 114 Salieri, Antonio, 45 Sayn-Wittgenstein, Princess Carolyne, xiii, 15 n. 13, 80, 99, 154 Scarlatti, Alessandro, 22 Scheffer, Arnold, 39 Scheffer, Ary, 39 Schiller, Friedrich, 40, 54 n. 17 Schlesinger, Maurice, 32 n. 26 Schoelcher, Victor, 88 Scholderer, Otto, 152 Schott [publishers], 47

212

Index

Schubert, Franz, 34, 164 Schuman, William, 198 Schumann, Robert, 34, 82, 90, 110, 154 Schweitzer, Anton Alceste, 25–26 Scott, Walter, 35 Scribe, Eugène, 62, 68 Sechter, Simon, 34 Shakespeare, William, xiii, 11, 51, 77, 194, 199 Hamlet, 80, 123–33 King Lear, 194 Macbeth, xvi, 76 Othello, 84 Romeo and Juliet, 128 Shaw, George Bernard, 196 Siddall, Elizabeth, 132 n. 7 Sieg, Victor, 145 Smart, Mary Ann, 54 n. 15 Smithson, Harriet, xiv, 11, 109, 124, 126–27, 173, 180, 189, 190, 196 Smyth, Ethyl, 103 n. 30 Sontag, Henriette, 107 Spinoza, Baruch, 13 Spontini, Gaspare, 34, 81 Ferdinand Cortez, 78 Vestale, La, 78, 79, 81, 84 Staël, Madame de, 79 Stoltz, Rosina, 107 Stone, Peter Eliot, 38, 54 n. 13 Stoullig, Edmond, 160 Strauss, Johann, 24 Strauss, Richard, xi, xvi, xviii n. 1 Elektra, xvi Salome, xvi Suat, Joséphine [Adèle’s daughter], 173, 185, 188 Suat, Marc [Adèle’s husband], 174 Suat, Nancy [Adèle’s daughter], 185 Suttoni, Charles, 122 n. 25 Taglioni, Filippo, 74 n. 18 Taglioni, Maria, 63, 74 n. 18 Tallyrand, Charles-Maurice de, 55 n. 38 Tchaikovsky, Pytor Symphonie pathétique, 4 Temperley, Nicholas, 201 n. 6 Theweleit, Klaus, 130

Thiele, Manfred, 121 n. 24 Thiers, Adolphe, 92 Thomas, Ambroise, 70 Tilmant, Alexandre, 156 n. 31 Tovey, Donald, 197, 201 n. 7 Tristan, Flora, 86 Tyson, Alan, 173 Vauxcelles, Louis, 158, 159 Vdovichenko, A.M., 191 Vercier, Catherine, 185 Verdi, Giuseppe, 159 Vernet, Horace, 39 Véron, Louis, 66 Victoria, Queen of England, 74 n. 24 Vigny, Alfred de, 61, 73 n. 12, 88 Villoteau, Guillaume-André, 73 n. 8 Viola, Alfonso della, 81–82 Virgil, xiii, 51, 152 Vitet, Ludovic, 54 n. 15, 99 Voltaire, xi, 45 Wagner, Richard, xiv, 12, 34, 88, 90, 93, 95, 103 n. 34, 112, 137, 143, 146, 151, 154, 158–60, 162, 164, 184, 190, 195, 200 Judenthum in der Musik, Das, 102 n. 23 Lohengrin, 143, 195 Meistersinger, Die, 72 Siegfried Idyll, 193 Tannhäuser, 143, 162 Tristan und Isolde, 184, 190 Wailly, Léon de, 61, 73 n. 12 Walker, Nicholas, xviii n. 13 Walton, Benjamin, 54 n. 15 Weber, Carl Maria von, 9, 34, 79, 85, 164 Freischütz, Der, 9, 138 Weber, Johannès, 65 Weber, William, 55 n. 29 Weingartner, Felix, 195, 199 Wilde, Oscar, xiv, 3 Wilson, Woodrow, 200, 201 n. 9 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 96 Wright, Beth, 34, 39 Wright, Lesley, xv, 158, 203 Zimmermann, Pierre-Joseph, 54 n. 13 Zola, Émile, xi

Berlioz: Past, Present, Future Edited by Peter Bloom The first of five international bicentenary conferences organized by the Paris-based Comité International Hector Berlioz was held at Smith College in Northampton, Mass. Berlioz: Past, Present, Future is based upon papers presented at that conference. Featured are essays by the prominent historian of culture, Peter Gay, and by one of the most eloquent of Berlioz scholars, Jacques Barzun. A long-awaited article by Richard MacNutt meticulously investigates and inventories more than two hundred forged Berlioz letters and documents. Other contributors include David Charlton, Heather Hadlock, Katherine Kolb, Sylvia L’Écuyer, Catherine Massip, Kerry Murphy, Jean-Michel Nectoux, Cécile Reynaud, and Lesley Wright. They present Berlioz’s views of the music of the “past,” his interactions with music and musicians of his “present,” and views of Berlioz during the several generations after his death (the “future”). Peter Bloom, is Grace Jarcho Ross 1933 Professor of Humanities in the Department of Music at Smith College. A member of the Panel of Advisors of the New Berlioz Edition, he is the author of The Life of Berlioz and the editor of other volumes on Berlioz.