Berlioz and the Romantic Century. Volume I 9780231878937

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B E R L I O Z and tbe

Romantic Century

VOLUME

I

Books by Jacques Barzun

Darwin, Marx, Wagner Classic, Romantic, and Modern Berlioz and the Romantic Century Berlioz and His Century New Letters of Berlioz Berlioz' Evenings with the Orchestra (Translation) Music in American Life Pleasures of Music

B e r l i o z in 1 8 3 2 , b y

Signol

" T h u s I saw h i m six years ago f o r the first time — and t h u s 1 shall see him in niv m i n d f o r e v e r . " — Heine (1837)

BERLIOZ and the

ROMANTIC CENTURY JACQUES BARZUN VOLUME

I

Third Edition

Columbia University Press NEW

YORK

AND

1969

LONDON

COPYRIGHT 1 9 4 9 , 1 9 5 0 , 1 9 5 6 B Y JACQUES BARZUN COPYRIGHT ©

1 9 6 9 B Y JACQUES BARZUN

For permission to quote from Laurence McKinney's People of Note, the author acknowledges obligation to E. P. Dutton and Co., Inc. Copyright, 1940, Laurence McKinney; from B. H. Haggin's Music m the Nation, to William Sloane Associates, Inc.; from Matthew Josephson's Victor Hugo to the Doubleday Company; from Nicolas Slonimsky's Music Since ifoo, Frederick Dorian's History of Music m Performance, The Musorgsky Reader, and from Harold Bauer: His Book to W. W . Norton; from Paul Rosenfeld's Musical Portraits to Harcourt, Brace and Company; from Thomas Craven's Men of Art to Simon and Schuster, Inc.; from Cecil Gray's History of Music and André Gide's Journal to Alfred A. Knopf; and from John Rewald's History of Impressionism to the Museum of Modern Art. For supplying certain of the illustrations, the author is indebted to Miss Ruth Forbes, Mr. Bernard Van Dieren, Jr., Mr. Cecil Hopkinson, the Joseph Muller Collection of the New York Public Library, the Culver Service Collection, J . M. Dent and Sons, and the Theodore Presser Company, publishers of The Etude.

First edition 1950, Little, Brown and Company Second edition, revised and abridged, 1956, Meridian Books Third edition, revised from first edition, 1969 Columbia University Press, by Arrangement with Little, Brown and Company SBN 231-03135-1 Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: ηη-$η$04 Printed in the United States of America

THIS EDITION IS DEDICATED TO M Y FRIENDS AND FELLOW-STUDENTS OF BERLIOZ RICHARD M A C N U T T

DAVID CAIRNS

H U G H MACDONALD

AND IN THE SAME SPIRIT TO THE M E M O R Y OF W . ERNEST GILLESPIE

Neither to excuse him nor to revile him, but to explain, to feel what he is. — HEROER

on Shakespeare

Author s Note is not a biography in the ordinary sense, and even less strictly a "musical life." The size of the book implies rather the traditional "Life and Times," except that here an effort has been made to organize the materials so as to satisfy most economically the interest of different readers. A glance at Volume T w o will show that much of it is taken up with Supplements and Bibliographies for professional users.1 From the rest, the general reader himself need take only so much as meets his wants. He can, so to speak, carve from these pages several different books: the life of a man who was at once artist, thinker, and doer; a concert or record guide to twelve great works increasingly valued by connoisseurs; an essay on esthetics; an account of nineteenth-century culture; and, I dare say, a tract for our times as well.

T H I S BOOK

In the battle of Berlioz with his age a typical story is dramatized by the events themselves. History spins the plot around the Artist, and the four corners of our society are illumined like a stage. For in a high civilization all social facts and forces become the matrix, and sometimes the subject, of the artist's work; and in the forms and conditions of a collective art like music we find again the elements of familiar history — politics, economics, and other struggles of human groups. T o learn a creator's ways, come to see through his eyes, and discover how past and current achievements affected his gifts in the making of great new work is the business of the historical critic; to generalize and show by a massive instance how in a given age great work gets accomplished, fought over, and slowly assimilated is the business of the cultural historian. It is as an artisan in both kinds that I have tried to present Berlioz in the century of Romanticism. 1

In the footnotes throughout, the first number refers to the c o r r e s p o n d i n g item in the B i b l i o g r a p h y and the second number to the page. F o r B e r l i o z ' letters and other writings, abbreviations are used in accordance w i t h the k e y g i v e n in the B i b l i o g r a p h y . In the text and footnotes, square brackets show additions made in 1969, except that in the B i b l i o g r a p h y , w h e r e square brackets w e r e already used f o r another purpose, additions have been explicitly dated.

Preface to the Third Edition BERLIOZ T W E N T Y YEARS A F T E R Damn braces; bless relaxes. —BLAKE I N A PERIOD when names and faces, subjects and objects flash by with camera speed into instant oblivion, it is cause for surprise that a book of twenty years ago, and one of uncommon bulk, should still be in demand. Five years after its first appearance in 1950, I constrained myself to fashion a single volume of biography from the matter here set out. I then believed my duty fulfilled. So when the present publisher began arguing the need for a new and revised edition of the "life and times," I felt not exactly unmoved, but moved in two contrary directions: gratified, of course, by the thought that these pages were deemed of value still, and appalled at the idea of plunging once more into the sea of facts and sources. No doubt in twenty years several new generations have grown up, to whom everything is fresh, and their thirst for knowledge deserves quenching. But I had believed that just because the newcomers had matured in this particular span, they would need nothing from me. For in that interval the works of Berlioz have become household furniture: the long-playing disc conveys to the ear all I had said that anyone needs to know. Berlioz has passed from the status of mysterious stranger to that of familiar friend. He has ceased to be the composer of a curious work called Three Excerpts from The Damnation of Faust and become the composer of The Damnation of Faust tout entière—plus other large works that an interested listener can hope to hear, "live" as well as on discs, more than once in a lifetime.

And he hears this music with ears unconsciously re-trained by the fall of the piano from absolute monarchy in music and the rise in its

xiv

Berlioz 1

place of the classical guitar, the vogue of polytonality, of electronic music, musique concrète, Theremin sounds, the Partch scale and instruments—and jazz: it is Duke Ellington who is generally credited with discovering the effect of timbre on harmony, a century and a quarter after Berlioz. In a word, the weather has changed, and many a puddle that looked like an inland sea barring access to Berlioz has simply evaporated. An important part of the altered scene is the new tone of the comments in the press, on the air, in concert programs and post-concert conversations. In the place of conventional, dismissive words, of lofty contempt for "empty rhetoric," of chuckling condescension toward "romantic wildness," there have come the sober and informed comparison of performances, the awareness of passages omitted and liberties taken, the preference for one work over another, and that familiarity with the structure of whole works which permits an audience to understand what it is hearing when given only excerpts—all this, of course, being nothing more than the normal contents of the listener's mind in relation to other great composers. For Berlioz the new status has been achieved by applying the usual standards of evidence and reasoning to his music and his life and to the century that produced them both. One modern instance will stand for a thousand: in a recent paragraph in Stereo Review (July 1969) about a new tape of the Berlioz Requiem, the critic notes half a dozen serious faults of performance and sums up the resulting travesty by saying: "The original, in all its glorious and terrifying brilliance, is more impressive." So assured a judgment would have been impossible thirty years ago. Instead, the garbled performance would have been taken as "the original" and been found the reverse of impressive, thus confirming the accepted view. There is no question, then, that first-hand knowledge of the music was the key to revising the public judgment. But the ability to exercise that judgment had to be set free before the sounds themselves could force an entry. When we speak of prejudice causing a certain blindness in human beings, we are not referring to an abstract passion, but to a mass of strongly held "facts" and "principles" and steadily reinforced 1 In Berlioz' youth (and not just in his native t o w n ) , the piano was by no means common. Of the 404 musical instruments taken in Paris f r o m Émigré families between 1790 and 179$, only 61 were forte-pianos, or about 15 percent, though the personages named in the checklist at the Conservatoire are ambassadors, noblemen, or well-to-do bourgeois, (pio, II, 1 4 5 - 1 7 0 )

Preface

xv

conclusions. This was manifestly the state of mind that kept so many from hearing Berlioz when he chanced to be played. The mental set was sustained by the invariable re-appearance of the same anecdotes of his wilfulness, the same "romantic" quotations from his Memoirs, the same bons-mots at his expense by other wits. His relations with Wagner, completely inverted as to fact and significance, were always retold to Berlioz' discredit. And since the only large score of his that orchestras occasionally attempted was his first symphony, the Fantastique, the program notes, free for once of musical analysis, would rehearse the story of the love affair with Harriet Smithson, and say or imply that the music about to be heard would tell it again. So Berlioz was the program composer par excellence, a strange, undisciplined, ill-trained being, who used a talent for orchestral "effects" to become a scene painter in sounds. In short, all the ways of perceiving Berlioz were false, misleading, or blocked. T o be sure, there had begun to appear after the First World War a number of qualified critics who were convinced that Berlioz was superior to his reputation. This new opinion, scattered in various countries, made converts one at a time and by the 1930s provided an encouraging sign that change was possible. But being critics for the press or musicologists addressing a special public, these writers dealt in conclusions or took up single points. The large body of educated readers and listeners continued to be served as I described above. In these circumstances what was needed was not merely the correcting of a large number of downright errors, but the re-creation of a context for the life of the man and the work of the artist. Events have justified the enterprise and shown that an imperfect tradition can be revised. Besides serving the reader of biography and history, these volumes of mine could be used as a source of reference for new anecdotes, new quotations, biographical sketches less shopworn than those in stock, and better accounts of many "well-known" incidents and relationships. This is in fact what has occurred. By disposing of a host of clichés and by facilitating the preparation of notes for record jackets and concert programs, my pages fulfilled one of the purposes I had in writing; seeing which, I was ready to see them superseded. Moreover, the reappearance of Berlioz' music shortly after my publication naturally stirred new waves of scholarship and criticism. T w o Berlioz societies were founded, one English, one American, in whose bulletins researchers brought out fresh opinion and findings. Performances of unfamiliar works multiplied, especially in England. Unpublished

xvi

Berlioz

letters, works, fragments, portraits, and other documents came out of their hiding places in private collections. The culmination of the new activity was the plan to edit in England and publish in Germany the complete musical works, an enterprise generously aided by a grant from the Gulbenkian Foundation. A t that point even the asbestos curtain which France had kept lowered against one of her greatest creators caught fire. A national association was formed and Berlioz* birthplace rehabilitated as a museum. And though in 1953 two French orchestras found a way to celebrate the Berlioz sesquicentennial in concerts containing not one note of his music, by 1969 the editing and publishing by French scholars of all his prose works (including his voluminous correspondence) had begun. In this undertaking the influence of André Malraux, spurred by the urgings of his friend Edgard Varèse, must be noted with gratitude. 2 This is the position today—satisfactory indeed when one compares past and present. But I can imagine it further improved without being in any way Utopian. Take the music first. W e have yet to hear and see an adequate performance of one of Berlioz' greatest works, the opera Benvenuto Cellini. When Covent Garden attempted it, the effort suffered from the all-too-common impulse that overtakes producers when they venture on the new—"let's make everything different!" Berlioz' music was novelty enough; I will not specify the gratuitous handicaps superadded. Clearly, what we need first is an authoritative recording of Benvenuto, preferably under Colin Davis, after which the public knowledge of the score will insure somewhere its fit production. Similarly, we need right recordings of the Te Deum (including the Prelude and March), the Funeral and Triumphal Symphony (with the full complement of players), the March for the Last Scene in Hamlet (with voice obligato), and Les Troy ens complete. As to the last-named, the whimsical potpourri on two sides of the one disc now on the market may be (as someone called it) a wonderful appetizer, but it is artistically a mutilation and it must be replaced by the work in full. As I write I learn that Colin Davis has recorded the Romeo and Juliet Symphony. W e may expect that under his baton the Finale is properly done. N o living person has so heard it, not even under Toscanini. When we have singer, chorus, and orchestra in balance and in tune, we shall at last perceive that the conclusion, instead of being the spiritual letdown that some have termed it, is as noble as the music of love and death that comes before. 2 A further favor would be to make official the use of Berlioz' harmonization and orchestration of the Marseillaise. (See below I, 135; 147-8 and n.)

Preface

xvii

With the same view of giving us possession of new music, conductors might think of extracting from Lélio a choral-orchestral suite. Nothing of value is lost in omitting the ballad with piano accompaniment and the words of the monodrama; whereas the remaining five pieces are happily characteristic of Berlioz' earliest style—some are in fact his "examination papers" at the Conservatoire, like the Cléopâtre, which Mr. Leonard Bernstein has made famous, and the Mort d'Orphée, which deserves to be. Finally, we need the complete songs, if only to dispel the idea that Les nuits d'été is all that Berlioz wrote in the lyric form. Toward the fulfillment of this program, the new edition of the music will bring the aid of correct and easily accessible scores and parts. So much for the music. The prose works, as we saw, are being reissued. Remains the illimitable field of biography and criticism. Here one's legitimate demands are doubtless harder to get fulfilled. I set them down nevertheless. T o begin with, the public had a right to expect that someone would before now have composed a well-proportioned, exact, and agreeably written life, free of the great load of nonsense which my work had to take up in order to dispose of it. Berlioz' own memoirs, it is true, have just been retranslated and edited by David Cairns. But for reasons that Berlioz was the first to state, the memoirs do not cover "the life." Besides, the many documents that have come to light in the last few years, and the new feeling which surrounds Berlioz' work, alike call for a fresh young view of the whole dramatic tale of his existence. Recent critical essays do not encourage my hopes, not because thev are not astute and scholarly, but because they betray a compulsion to go back to the old absurdities in order to show them up once more. For example, an excellent discussion of Berlioz' "radical harmonic innovations" opens with a paragraph from an ignorant attack in Grove; a student of Berlioz' orchestration quotes a sally of Ravel's out of context; an expounder of the order and consistency of Berlioz' musical thought reminds us of a strongly skeptical view held by Newman in 1905, "which Newman himself recanted in 1925. All this is worse than a waste of time. What it does, actually, is to prolong the life of hoary prejudices, confuse the public mind by restating error, and, while maintaining an atmosphere of contention, postpone the positive note, the straightforward exposition and criticism that are wanted. T o sum up: new writings on Berlioz should take it for granted that he was great as man and artist and that the secret of his creation has not yet

xviii

Berlioz

been unriddled. T h e t w o propositions can be separately followed, o f course, but they have interconnections which we tend t o neglect in the study of genius generally and which are worth pursuing. Being a man of honor, as Berlioz was, is considered today a sort of handicap. W e are accustomed to the artist scoundrel or specialist in vice, and unaccustomed to the creator in whom passion and reason and moral integrity hold in balance. B u t greatness of intellect and feeling, of soul and c o n d u c t magnanimity, in short—does occur; it is not a myth for b o y scouts, and its reality is important, if only to give us the true range of the term "human," which we so regularly define b y its lower reaches. Especially instructive is the relation of magnanimity t o high art, for although the first is not prerequisite to the second, its presence exerts an influence which is the puzzling element, notably at the stage of conception: the first vision of the unknown thrill desired comes from the spirit and reveals its quality. As to execution, I have said that Berlioz' method was still to be disclosed. W e have had wise words on his harmony foreshadowing the twentieth century and rediscovering the sixteenth, that is, overcoming the relentless grind of the continuo. W e have had his melody and counterpoint justly evaluated; lastly we have had studies of his sonic and spatial experiments. T h e conclusions on these aspects of the art of sound should be amplified and summed up and then completed b y the study of one more—rhythm. From the outset Berlioz attached to it great importance, for which reason I have added to this edition a translation of his early essay on the subject. 3 But separate studies will remain sterile until someone versed in all these technical elements (and not just sensitive to one or two, as is frequent among musicians) will undertake to show how Berlioz characteristically shaped his musical substance as one whole. F o r in a manyfaceted art there are internal oppositions and obstacles, material prohibitions against taking advantage of all qualities at once and all the time. Subordination, emphasis, contrast, distortion and compromise are compulsory if form and lucidity are to result; so that until the interaction of his full resources is examined in Berlioz' scores—as the like conditions have been scrutinized and theorized about in Shakespeare—we shall not really know much about Berlioz' art. W e shall only be left with the typical mystery embodied in the dialogue between the late Manfred Bukofzer, a first-rate musicologist, and Leon Kirchner, a

first-rate

con-

temporary composer. T h e musicologist pointed out "false relations" in 3

See Supplement j .

Preface

xix

the counterpoint of the second movement of the Harold Symphony, and the composer asked: "All right, but then explain to me why the passage is sublime." It may well be thought that someone as demanding as I sound should either carry out his own program or stop criticizing the present state of scholarship. Such an ultimatum would be a piece of oblique flattery: I am not competent to do what is required—and, on the other side, perhaps I have earned the right to make the particular criticism I offer. From young manhood to early middle age I sacrificed my pleasure (not to say endangered my reason) by scavenging through the Berlioz "literature," in order that I might rescue from that kitchen midden, not merely the truth of fact, but the wealth of just opinion which accompanied or followed Berlioz' career—from Schumann's to Nietzsche's and beyond to Varèse and Van Dieren. Having done it so that it would not have to be done again, I naturally hate to see the desire for picturesqueness induce a return to the old dungheap. I claim no property rights in it, but I would bid new structures of thought to rise on decontaminated ground. What have I meanwhile done to make the present two volumes of renewed use to the new times? Much less than I wished to do, for reasons typical of the new times themselves. Technology is so far advanced that its modes and its cost alike preclude resetting the type of such a long work as this. Instead, the old text is photographed, with alterations. But possible alterations are limited to those that can be fitted into the spaces of the original edition. The mosaic workers of Ravenna had a simple task compared to mine. I wanted to remove or condense a paragraph here, a page there, and recast sentences with a free mind: all I might do was tinker. I consoled myself with the thought of Valéry, who once wrote for an Egyptian review an article that had to contain a specified number, not of words, but of letters. It is only fair to add that my publishers were as generous and helpful as they could be in this contingency. Another hindrance, which no one could alleviate, is the modern fact that time, like matter, comes in small particles. It did not prove possible to squeeze out of the round of duties and demands one uninterrupted week for the kind of attention that might have let me be more adept at making changes. As it is, I have corrected most slips and errors of fact and rectified a good many of my own judgments and faulty phrasings. I have removed the "Index of Misconceptions about Berlioz,"

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Berlioz

which caused so much annoyance and derision at first, but served (as the very objections showed) to stimulate a healthy self-consciousness. It is no longer needed, and its room enabled me to insert the essay on Rhythm. To put it among the Supplements, I pushed back to a later place the list of major blunders in the so-called German Edition of Berlioz' Works. The new English edition so far consists of three volumes out of twentyfive, so for some years to come it will be useful for performers to have the corrigenda I collected twenty years ago. Having two pages at my disposal, I have reproduced for the benefit of owners of Berlioz letters the table of his domiciles, which I first compiled for my New Letters of Berlioz (1954) and which assists in dating. In the Bibliography and at several other points, I have added citations, remarks, names, and dates. Nowhere did space permit me to be thorough, only indicative. Let this incompleteness spur competition, and produce the book by another hand that I desiderate. This one, in the meantime, is rich in quotations from Berlioz and his peers, a feature which, as I look back on it, is enough by itself to justify republication at this or any other time. J. B.

Contents V O L U M E

O N E

Author's Note

xi

Preface to the Third Edition

xiii

Introduction: Berlioz as Man and Artist

3

France ι. Time, Place, Persons

23

2. Ce Qu'on Entend sur la Montagne

34

3. Opera and Conservatoire

46

4. Faustian Man

84

5. Revolution in July

119

6. Reveries and Passions: Symphonie Fantastique

147

7. INTERCHAPTER: Program Music and the Unicorn

169

Italy 8. Roman Holiday: Lélio

199

9. Recollected in Tranquillity: Harold in Italy

231

10. The Gothic Tradition: Requiem Mass

257

11.

The Hero as Artist: Benvenuto Cellini

289

12. The Dramatic Symphony: Romeo and Juliet

309

13.

Vox Populi: Funeral and Triumphal Symphony

340

14.

INTERCHAPTER: The Century of Romanticism

367

Germany 15.

Music for Europe: A Travers Chants

399

16.

The Art of Composition: The Treatise

432

xxii

Contents

17.

Form and Philosophy: The Damnation of Faust

470

18.

Song in Time of Revolution

504

19.

Vision of a Virtuoso: Te Deum

542

V O L U M E

20.

T W O

I N T E R C H A P T E R : Memoirs of A r t and Life England, Germany,

3

and Russia

21.

Victorian London: Evenings with the Orchestra

32

22.

Religious History: The Infant Christ

70

23.

Virgilian Music Drama: The Trojans

106

24.

Esthetes Abroad: Wagner, Liszt, and the Princess

154

25.

Prospcro's Farewell: Beatrice and Benedict

203

26.

Empire and Industry: Les Grotesques

228

27.

H o l y Russia and Giddy France:

275

28.

Memory's End

Melodies

294

SUPPLEMENTS

I.

Berlioz' Afterfame

301

Biographer's Fallacy: Boschot's Berlioz

312

III.

Desiderata; Present State of Berlioz Studies

321

[V.

Euphonia and Bayreuth: Musical Cities

327

V.

Berlioz on the Future of Rhythm

336

VI.

T h e Fetish of Form

340

Chronology

351

Berlioz' Domiciles

356

II.

Errors in the "Complete"

Edition of the Scores

358

Bibliography

383

Acknowledgments

459

Index of Names and Subjects

461

Illustrations V O L U M E

I

Berlioz in 1832, by Signol

Frontispiece

La Còte St. André

32

The Alps at Grenoble

32

Harriet Smithson in 1827, by Deveria

96

Camille Moke in 1830, by Alophe

128

Berlioz' Requiem, by Fantin-Latour

256

A Session at Liszt's House, by Kriehuber

384

Berlioz in 1845, by Prinzhofer

480

Eminent Berliozians: 1835-1890

544

V O L U M E Berlioz in 1867

II Frontispiece

Berlioz in 1850, by Courbet

38

Berlioz conducting, by Dore

54

Berlioz in a familiar pose

118

Berlioz imagined by Daumier

230

Berlioz playing the guitar

278

Louis Berlioz, aged about thirty

278

Death bust, by S. Lami

294

Eminent Berliozians: 1890-1950

326

B E R L I O Z and the

Romantic Century

Introduction. Berlioz as Man and Artist We challenge posterity to bear witness: . . . we have maintained from the start that genius burned in this Frenchman. . . . But far be it from us to seek to impose our faith by force. — ROBERT SCHUMANN

IN THE repertory of most modern orchestras, there is a work entitled Symphonie Fantastique which was composed well over a century ago by a French youth of twenty-six named Hector Berlioz. A good performance of that work usually leads some thoughtful critic to say that it is still astonishingly modern, or to recall its historic significance at the threshold of a great age of music. 1 This "vivid and dramatic" score has been frequently recorded, and each time the work elicits renewed comments on the brilliancy of its orchestration, the marvel of its originality, or the romanticism of its "program." 2 So much is common knowledge, and this, with a f e w biographical facts thrown in, was the standard equipment, so to speak, with which I began some [forty] years ago my acquaintance with Berlioz. Feeling a certain dislike for the "program" of the symphony, I read it no more than once or twice and soon forgot its details. But I kept hearing the music itself, at least semiannually, and I continued to read the notes and reviews about it, though with ever-increasing discomfort: I became convinced that while dwelling on the "program" they scarcely touched the work of art, and while retailing bits of the artist's life they utterly misconceived his character. B y the time that Weingartner's recording — the first electrically transcribed symphonic work to be issued by the Columbia company — came to supplement the live performances, I was familiar with the miniature 1 E.g., Mr. Olin Downes, Ν. Y. Times, Nov. 2, 1931; June 15, 1941; Mr. Mark Schubart, Ibid., Mar. 17, 1946; [N.F. Times Magazine, Mar. 9, 1969.] 2 E.g., Philip Hale, Boston Symphony annotator (£35, 56) and G. E. Abraham (692, 71 and 118). There are at least [twenty] notable sets of records, the latest having appeared in the summer of [1968]. (See 1463.)

4

Berlioz

score, Liszt's piano transcription, Robert Schumann's famous essay, and the Memoirs of Berlioz himself. I had also looked into the two overtures which formed the remainder of the "repertory," and curiosity had led me to the obvious reference works. I consulted Grove, the Britannica, and some others in an effort to collect from reliable sources the technical and other insights which I felt to be lacking in Berlioz' current interpreters. I had entered the jungle — for I found that what I read seldom tallied with what I heard. Conversation with musical friends brought out the same discrepancy. Some heard what I heard and were puzzled or untouched by what they read; others adopted this or that view of Berlioz from among the many contradictory ones available in print.

THE

BUBBLE

REPUTATION

T o me, the conflict seemed to go deeper than tastes and to point to unbridgeable divergencies of assumption and of fact. I read (or was told) that Berlioz had every gift but the melodic, yet listening to him my ear distinctly made out melodies, abundant and remarkable in form as well as varied in kind. Critics moreover assured me that all Berlioz' works, and the Fantastique in particular, illustrated events or depicted objects. Yet left to myself I could make out no such storytelling; my mind's eye remained blank, and while having no clear recollection of the "program," I could follow the five movements like any other music. The same authorities made numerous other assertions that ran counter to the evidence. They declared for example that Berlioz had "a rooted objection to contrapuntal treatment," 8 though a look at half a dozen scores showed a good many passages of fugato, canon, and other devices of melodic combination. The Symphonie Fantastique itself ended with a double fugue and included several stretches of impressive counterpoint. Similar contradictions, flat, fatal to logic and almost to sanity, rose up in one's path as one went on to explore Berlioz' life, character, and ideas. How was it that a man who had lived so recently, and in the glare of lifelong publicity, could be the object of so much confident misrepresentation? Being by then committed to the study of cultural history and specializing in the modern period, I began to keep systematic notes, both on this provocative figure and on the nature of the historical myth-making process wherever found. I soon discovered that Berlioz was not the only sub8

M. D. Calvocoressi: 77Í, 38.

Introduction

5

ject of critical error and that I was not alone in my concern about him. Two statements by eminent musicologists confirmed the validity of my inquiry. One was by Romain Rolland, whose great essay on Berlioz has recently been reprinted; * the other by Ernest Newman, the biographer of Wagner and the editor of Berlioz' Memoirs in English. Both told their readers that no composer was so entirely — they would not say unknown — but "misknown" as Berlioz.5 Another English writer, Mr. Cecil Gray, prefaced an enthusiastic chapter in his tough-minded History of Music6 by bringing this failure of criticism home to all concertgoers. For some of them, he said, Berlioz is a "less than second-rate figure, a mere scene painter in sounds, with nothing save a gift for orchestration to commend him"; whereas for others "he is simply one of the very greatest of all composers who have ever lived." 7 T H E PROTEAN BERLIOZ

This head-on collision about an artist is not, as we shall see, so unusual as it seems. But as regards Berlioz, the normal division into two camps was obscured by the very literature that discussed it: there seemed to be as many camps as there were critics. And the reason for this was not hard to fathom: Berlioz, as any reader of his Memoirs is aware, was no withdrawn spirit cultivating music in a private shrine. He ranged over its whole domain as critic, theorist, conductor and producer, and for forty years bore the brunt of fighting for the modern art of his epoch. His musical mission was not simply to dethrone Routine in Paris by means of his orchestra and his writings in the press. It was an ecumenical reform carried by him from Moscow to London, and from Vienna to Prague and Berlin. He taught Europe whenever he wielded the pen or baton, supplementing action and publication by an enormous correspondence. Nor is this all. As a cultured man and observant traveler he thought and wrote about many other things than music; as a dramatic musician and poet he breached the operatic tradition; and as a leader of the musical world he left the impress of his uncommon personality on nearly every important figure in his century. Kings, ministers, and public institutions, no less than poets and musicians, in one way or another came under his spell. 4

Essays on Music, Ν . Y . 1948. T h e text of this edition is, however, not c o m plete, nor have omissions been indicated. See 504. 5 j 0 4 , ι and Sunday Times ( L o n d o n ) June 19, 1 9 1 1 . 6 In T h e H i s t o r y of Civilization series, Ν . Y . 1 9 3 5 . 7

719,

21'·

6

Berlioz

T h e story of his life's work therefore bears a double character: it is first the epitome of an age; it brings us face to face with every familiar contemporary, raises every intellectual question, and illustrates every practical problem in the life of art. Between Waterloo and Sedan — that is to say from the downfall of one Napoleon to the next — it would be difficult to find any other European whose activity spread over wider territory or engaged the attention of more, and more diverse, minds than that of Berlioz. In the second place, the story of his life is that of one of the world's very f e w complete artists. As in a bustling Elizabethan play, the hero moves against a background of historic triumphs, accidents, and revolutions, but he also lives through a private drama of passion, moral conflict, and philosophic doubt. T h e perfect symmetry of plot and subplot in Berlioz' particular tragedy appears moving and memorable as soon as one enlarges one's view to take in both his public career and his inner life and thus discovers the hidden spring of his actions; in other words, as soon as one looks at the man in history — a Renaissance figure transplanted into the nineteenth century, who by will and genius stamped his effigy upon it. This view is naturally that of the panorama which one sees all unfolded at the end of the journey. But its scope makes it less surprising that Berlioz' deeds and character should have failed to shine vividly and accurately in the minds of the many who have written about him. M y initial assumption that any man who died eighty years ago must have had his measure adequately taken was wholly unjustified. I had overlooked the relation of magnitude to distance which we call perspective. Until recently we were at the foot of the mountain; the foreground of Berlioz' fame was cluttered up with particulars in which his interpreters soon lost themselves, noting at random what they hoped was significant. 8 T h e clearest disproof of their estimates was the presence of many contradictory views and the persistence of a debate in which everyone shouted and few listened.® ONLY

THE LIVING

INVITE

VIOLENCE

One good reason f o r not listening, that is, f o r not accumulating bit by bit the results of research and insight, was that Berlioz' music and opin8

The author of a "Berlioz" in a popular musical series ten years ago still declared himself "baffled" at every turn. (2η8.) "The late Sir Donald Tovey, having had occasion to revise an earlier unfavorable judgment, exclaims: " W e must be careful! You never know where you are with Berlioz." {590, 89 τι.)

Introduction

η

ions kept cropping up in many parts of our culture at a time when a determined reaction to his epoch was under way. He therefore had to be slain over and over again, quite as if he were still alive. Thus his French biographer, Boschot, toiled patiently between 1906 and 1913 to bury him under a monument of denigration. His three volumes (of six hundred pages each) undoubtedly rendered a great service by exhibiting the facts of Berlioz' daily life — where the musician was on a given day and how much he received for a given concert; but by adroitly neglecting Berlioz' artistic existence in favor of the domestic, and by piling up insinuations upon trivia, M. Boschot was also able to create the impression he desired, namely that Berlioz was a wild, "romantic," and largely ineffectual being. T h e biographer apparently could not or would not see the paradox he had created f o r himself: he had (so he said) chosen his man because he was a great genius, yet he had shaped and colored his narrative to show a pantaloon. It was left a mystery how Boschot's Berlioz could have accomplished what the Berlioz of history had actually done, including the twelve great works which his critic analyzed with such flourishes and such ambivalence. A dozen years after Boschot's acrimonious effort, English-speaking readers were offered the same paradox, applied to other great figures by the skill of Lytton Strachey and his myriad imitators. Few could know that this debunking treatment, which from its beginnings in France had not been reserved for Berlioz alone, was part of a deep-seated anti-Romantic movement with primarily political and religious motives.10 From France it had spread to this country through adaptation by Irving Babbitt and his disciples — still under the guise of scholarship — so that before and after Strachey, M. Boschot's three dense volumes were taken as a mine of accurate fact. 1 1 Writers of reviews and concert notes could hardly be blamed for relying on what they found the fullest source, though in 10 In his excellent Victor Hugo, Mr. Matthew Josephson passes judgment on Edmond Biré's four-volume life of the poet in terms that could be transcribed, with nothing changed but the names, to fit Boschot and his Berlioz: "Edmond Biré was a pious Royalist and Catholic, . . . his lifelong study . . . making up the testimony of one who was a Boswell-in-reverse, and piling up iyoo pages of denigration and hatred. For a long time this curious performance dominated the Hugolian literature by its weight and accumulated arguments. Biré does not deny the importance of Hugo as a writer and artist, but endeavors to paint him as a fraud and . . . an irresponsible. . . . Even today, Biré's fifty-year-old work is used more than any other writer's by American and English literary scholars, and the most complete existing biography in the English language . . . is a faithful copy of Biré's debunking job and incorporates all of Biré's mistakes as well as his animus." (1186, îoj-6.) 11 For Boschot's "mistakes as well as his animus" see below, Supplement 2.

Berlioz

8

doing so they inevitably absorbed and disseminated some of the critic's errors and venom. This, while lowering Berlioz to the uses of a scapegoat, strengthened the distaste for an epoch that was just then passing through the normal purgatory of the years. Allowing f o r this cultural interlude, one can assess M. Boschot's laborious work more justly: it is at once indispensable and untrustworthy — which necessarily brings us back to history as the great corrective, and to the vision of Berlioz as an agent in cultural conflicts still unresolved. Born in 1803, with his roots in revolutionary and Napoleonic France, he was one of the precocious geniuses destined like Delacroix, Victor Hugo, and Stendhal to create a new culture amid the fossil remains of the old regime. Yet the word "revolutionary" does not classify Berlioz, any more than does "Romantic" in its usual acceptation. For he transcended as well as embodied his time, and his greatness for us lies precisely in this, that he gives us text and commentary in one living shape: at all key points his life and art furnish an explicit critique of his age. Hence his lack of immediate usefulness to partisans of every kind. He refuses to fit into any familiar category, which would further explain — if need be — w h y some observers still see him as through a fog.

A R T CRITICISM

AND T H E M U S I C A L

FLUID

What has so far been said represents half the solution to the supposed "problem of Berlioz": the problem is no more his doing than it is that of Delacroix or Hugo or Stendhal, unless w e blame him for a many-sidedness which multiplies the number of facts to be interpreted in an historical light. But the parallel with artists in words or paint suggests the obvious difference that Berlioz worked in a far more volatile medium than they, and one could assert that the relative standing of each today is roughly proportional to the permanence of the impression made respectively by a book, a painting, and a symphony. For many obvious reasons, the value of a printed score in enlightening the critic or amateur is extremely slight; even performance cannot compare with the fullness of effect of a book which may be reread and studied at will; nor with the canvas which, though not always on view, is at least stationary and reproducible. 12 T h e second half of the Berlioz problem is therefore inherent 12

It is a challenge to those w h o consider Berlioz a mere contriver of specious "effects" that the regular and frequent broadcasting of his recorded works within the last dozen years has done more to attract listeners to him than all the previous concert performances at wide intervals.

Introduction

9

in the nature of music, and what is worse, in the nature of music criticism. The unfortunate separation of music from the other arts no doubt comes from the lack of an adequate critical vocabulary, and reflects the indolence and other limitations of those who write about music." Moreover, the belief that painting and literature are closer to the world's concerns because they ostensibly represent objects finds an apparent justification in usage: while the music critic mumbles about dominant sevenths, the art critic can point to the blue sky. But this exclusion of music from the realm of ideas rests also on a thorough-going misconception of all the arts — one that dates back precisely to the anti-Romantics. When we say that we find chairs and tables in a painting or in a novel but not in a symphony, we are falsely assuming that life consists of objects and that some arts copy them. T o the artist, life consists of sensations, and these may be reproduced with equivalent effect by widely different physical means. A chord, a shape, or a word are such means. The meaning in the so-called representative arts thus arises from contrasts, rhythms, and evocations which exactly correspond to contrasts, rhythms, and evocations in music. It is an illusion — or better, a convention — that Hamlet is a prince and that we see apples in a Cézanne. Actually, the words and shapes only arouse in us unnamable vet lifelike sensations — as does music; this art is just as representative of human experience, and just as devoid of actual chairs and tables.14 The high arts in fact all bear the same relation to life; they are all different from it and expressive of it, else they could not be felt to be equally "significant," "profound," "moving," and "great" in the sense commonly ascribed to them. On this point, the argument put forward by purists who despise subject matter and worship design has not even a ghostly likelihood of being true. We may prize Form as much as they do, share their reverence for the fundamental art of design, and even be ready to grow ecstatic with them about a superb rug, a magnificent rug, a great rug, but we are never tempted to say: "This rug I would place between the Iliad and the Eroica" 13 An experienced practitioner, Mr. Mark Schubart, has declared that nothing too harsh can be said against music criticism as we find it. (Ν. Y. Times Book Review, Apr. 14, 1946.) This opinion was confirmed at two recent conferences where music criticism was treated as an element of general culture. (Harvard, 1947; Hartford, 1948, 903 and 902.) 14 This question is taken up more fully in the discussion of Program Music (Chapter 7 below).

Berlioz

IO BERLIOZ N O

PROGRAM

COMPOSER

This view of art — dramatic, presentative, and lifelike though opposed to any confusion between art and life — was properly speaking the Romanticist view; and feeling it to be both congenial and practicable, Berlioz dedicated his genius to exhibiting it in music. His cardinal principle was expressiveness, which does not mean imitation, does not mean formlessness, and does not mean program music. Neither does it mean the destruction or neglect of traditional elements which are rooted in pure sensation and call forth design — from melody and rhythm to harmony and counterpoint. Indeed, to these elements Berlioz was enabled by the technological advances of his age to add the new one of timbre or tone color, which before him had been used for ornament and expression rather than as a part of structure. Lastly, working as he did after a great social revolution, Berlioz was able to fuse the scattered elements of musical life by combating the prejudices which still tended to keep opera, instrumental music, and church music constrained and separate. In a word, the art of sound was for him a comprehensive social art, recognizing different genres and occasions, but making a clean sweep of the Chinese routines which had previously enfeebled or degraded the uses of music." Music

AFTER T H E L I B E R A T I O N

So complete was this revolution, based like all the revolutions of mind on a knowledge of the great traditions, that we have almost forgotten it took someone to bring it about. W e suppose that music always was what it has been since 1850, because the modern musician, no longer a mere entertainer, has at last taken his place among the great artists as a seer and a thinker. W e take it moreover for granted that the public for serious music should be as broad as for any other art instead of remaining a clique of dilettanti.1® T o be sure, Berlioz did not effect this revolu15 Lord Chesterfield in 1749: "Sculpture and painting are very justly called liberal arts; a lively and strong imagination, together with a just observation being absolutely necessary to excel in either, which, in my opinion, is by no means the case of music, though called a liberal art. . . . The former are connected with history and poetry; the latter, with nothing that I know of, but bad company." (1244, 110-1.) 1β Emerson: "How partial, like mutilated eunuchs, the musical artists appear to me in society! Politics, bankruptcy, frost, famine, war —nothing concerns them but a scraping on a catgut, or tooting on a bass French horn." (Heart of Emersoli s Journals, 294-5.)

Introduction don singlehanded. His model and inspirer Beethoven preceded him in the conception; his other masters, Weber and Gluck, were before him in practical propaganda; and the neglected musicians of the French Revolution had set important precedents. But owing to die incompleteness of these efforts, it was left to Berlioz to create the modern orchestra and its music, and to demonstrate its many possible functions in a modern state. One has only to read in Berlioz' life about the musical conditions of Paris in 1830, of the Germanies in 1840, of London in the fifties, and b y comparing what he found with what he left to obtain the measure of his accomplishment. Though he was alone when he launched his attack against Italian opera and parlor songs and began his crusade in behalf of Beethoven and modern music, he was ultimately seconded by a small army of coadjutors, from Liszt and Wagner in the thirties to Saint-Saëns and the Russians in the sixties, all of whom had their awakening or drew their inspiration from Berlioz. That this is no mere surmise, any more than it is a denial of others' genius, appears from the testimony of the beneficiaries themselves, with such disclaimers and reservations as one should expect about matters of personal esthetic." Broadly speaking, after the death of Beethoven, Weber, and Schubert (all before 1830) the one seminal mind in music was Berlioz. 18 It was in fact the abundance of the results he begot in others for fifty years after his death which partly cut him off from our view during that time: Wagner emerged in the seventies, the French composers of opera, symphony, and song swarmed in the eighties, with Debussy and the Impressionists treading close behind; while from Russia an astonishing new 17

Wagner's recollection of what Berlioz meant to him in 1839-1840 may stand as representing this significant relation: "All this [the hearing of Berlioz' first three symphonies] was altogether a new world to me. A t first die grandeur and masterly execution of the orchestral part almost overwhelmed me. It was beyond anything I could have conceived. The fantastic daring, die sharp precision with which the boldest combinations — almost tangible in their clearness — impressed me, drove back my own ideas of the poetry of music into the very depths of my soul. I was simply all ears for things of which till then I had never dreamt, and which I felt I must try to realise. [Objections follow] . . . It was however the latest work of this wonderful master, his Funeral and Triumphal Symphony . . . [i.e. the fourth] which had at last thoroughly convinced me of the greatness and enterprise of this incomparable artist. . . . It is a fact at that time I felt almost like a litde schoolboy by the side of Berlioz." (My Life, Part I, "Paris.") 18 "In those seven years [1827 to 1834] he had not only said things that music had never uttered before, but he, and he alone, had brought French music, at a bound, into line with all the new work that was being done in poetry, in prose, and in art." (Ernest Newman: 481,119.)

12

Berlioz

school claimed attention, and England, Norway, Finland, and the Germanies added their highly diversified contributions to the stream of music. These successive revelations confused the public by their strangeness and force, which criticism was too hypnotized by minutiae to explain. There could be no history of nineteenth-century art while the nineteenth century lasted. T H E N E W BERLIOZ CRITICISM

By 1920 the tide had apparently spent itself and competent observers, fully alive to the variety of genius and tendencies in this great output, began to discern its intimate connections with the work of Berlioz. M. Boschot himself, mellowed by the passage of time and the increase of dissonance, was able to see that much of Berlioz' "madness" had been method, and that his music, "though it resembles no other, has sown germs from which all subsequent musicians have profited and continue to profit, even when they do not know it." " Meanwhile students of the Russian school or of French Impressionism, of Wolf or Mahler, and above all of Wagner and his epigoni, traced the same relation, direct or indirect. Berlioz was in fact seen to be the fountainhead of modern music as Delacroix is of modern painting.20 Put in historical terms, the relation of style, form, and subject matter between the Romanticist founders and their successors is constant. Only, in painting and in music this originating power is virtually concentrated in the work of a single man. This does not preclude real independence and great genius in those who came after, much less imply that music from Berlioz to the present is of one kind: no two artists could differ more than Berlioz and Richard Strauss, yet when Strauss celebrating his eightythird birthday in London acknowledged his debt to Berlioz 21 he recorded an influence which goes deeper than orchestral effects and is not to be measured by simple borrowings. The last twenty-five years, in short, have seen the growth of a new Berlioz criticism. It has been especially abundant in Britain and America, and its task has been not so much to bring forward a neglected artist as to place him in his proper niche. The writings of Ernest Newman, Constant Lambert, Cecil Gray, Bernard Van Dieren, W . H. Meilers, Richard Capell, W . J. Turner, Ferruccio Bonavia, Guido Pannain, T . S. Wotton, 18

77o, 7 j. Exception must be made for the domain of the piano, for which Berlioz did not write. 21 Musical America, Nov. 15, 1947, J. 20

Introduction

13

Paul Rosenfeld, Β. Η. Haggin, Virgil Thomson, Philip Greeley Clapp, Herbert Weinstock, Peter Hugh Reed, Laurence Powell, James Agate, Sacheverell Sitwell, and others have so to speak taken the mystery and the contradiction out of the old description of Berlioz given in Grove: "A colossus with few friends and no direct followers." 22 The colossus still stands, the friends have grown numerous, and the followers are everywhere. B E R L I O Z AS

ARTIST

Still it is an obviously difficult operation, when the bas-relief of history shows its serried ranks of great figures set as in granite, to reshuffle them and clear a large space in the middle distance for one who has so far been marginal and ill-identified. What is more, the claim to historical importance, though it leads to much that is new and exciting, does not finally captivate our hearts. Rather, in the realm of the spirit we want things-inthemselves and persons-in-themselves: works and men intrinsically admirable. With regard to Berlioz, happily, historical and intrinsic virtues are intimately allied. One cannot reassess his role and substantiate the startling conclusions of modern opinion without at the same time delineating an artist who would deserve our praise and affection even if he had never stirred from his desk, or penned anything but notes. The only difficulty is to re-create the living Berlioz from the still unsorted mass of fact and testimony. For although the modern critics scoff at the errors enshrined in older authorities, they correct them piecemeal and in a multitude of confusing contexts. Cecil Gray can assert that Berlioz is "a melodist, first, foremost, and all the time"; 23 Weingartner can write that Berlioz was no program composer; 24 Koechlin can show that Berlioz' musical mind was naturally contrapuntal;25 but these important conclusions remain scattered in a vast sea of books, essays, and newspaper articles, none of which by itself projects a clear image of the man and artist. Even the best modern books, W. J. Turner's and T . S. Wotton's, divide the subject between them, and while one deals with the life and the other with the works, neither aims at fullness and both neglect history.26 Once again, the "problem of Berlioz" resolves itself into something for 22

A Dictionary of Music and Musicians, London, 1879 (1896), art. "Berlioz." 24 2h 719, 21 3 . 394, 208. 453, 1 9 3 · W. J. Turner, Berlioz: the Man and His Work, London, 1934; T. S. Wotton, Hector Berlioz, London and New York, 1935. My debt to Wotton is, however, immense, and I beg to refer the reader to my imperfect acknowledgment below. 23

26

i4

Berlioz

which he is scarcely responsible: how to round up the literature in six languages and bring veracity and order into it by scholarly method. T H E SWERVE OF THE ATOM

Research soon confirms the impression that the printed sources are from one point of view altogether adequate. Everything has been said that needed to be said. T i m e and again I have found my own unaided reflections upon Berlioz' life or music anticipated by a critic of the present or past century — a corroboration for which, given the nature of my task, I would gladly barter any claim to originality. 27 But this same body of print bears one feature which shows equally clearly that my exploration was not superfluous: the very best of the literature is shot through with error; the most competent judges suffer from sudden and serious lapses. F o r instance, in the splendid essay by Romain Rolland one finds Berlioz persuasively depicted as a creative artist of the first magnitude; but nearly every remark about his character as a man or an abstract thinker is demonstrably wrong. One turns then to intimate observers of the living man — to Saint-Saëns or to the playwright Legouvé. And here again caution proves indispensable. Legouvé has a real sense of Berlioz' candor, warmth, and greatness of soul, but he tells us that Berlioz was ill-educated, "a man of one b o o k " — although every page that Berlioz wrote shows his wide reading, not only of literature but of history and the sciences in several languages. 28 As for Saint-Saëns, invaluable as are his remarks upon Berlioz' works and personality, he is not to be trusted when it comes to certain aspects of Berlioz' teachings and attitudes. These examples could be multiplied by the hundred; indeed I have hardly come across any critical document, however brief, which did not contain a grievous error. Like the atom of Lucretius, each writer follows a straight line for a shorter or longer time, then swerves. H o w is the unprejudiced reader seeking truth and being carried steadily along by a Romain Rolland or a Saint-Saëns to know when he should alight? These considerations necessarily dictated the plan of the present work. Since the Berlioz literature contained all the truth and all the falsehood side b y side, 27

Citing the names of critics once well-known but destined, like most of their kind, to the shadows, is not merely a duty and a pleasure; it is also a guarantee that the many "revised judgments" that I put forward were the original perceptions or conclusions of a great variety of competent minds over a span of 125 years. 29 Berlioz was perhaps the only Frenchman of his time to whom it would occur naturally to take a motto from Pope's Essay on Criticism for one of his own articles (Grot., 169), which served also as the Preface to the score of La Fuite en Egypte.

Introduction

15

and since the thousands of casual references in other books, in concert notes, in publicity for discs and broadcasts reproduced the same anarchy,28 what was needed was a canon of correct belief, a summa of ascertained truth, a reasoned orthodoxy for the faithful. To

P L E A S E L A Y M E N AND PROFESSIONALS

Accordingly, the twenty-five biographical chapters of this book are flanked by twenty-five critical essays that take up the composer's major scores, and, in connection with each, some characteristic feature of his life or art: Berlioz' melody, orchestration, and so on are discussed in close proximity to the work that best exemplifies each, and so is his work as critic, dramatist, and conductor. Likewise treated in concentrated form are the still broader topics raised by his relation to the thought and events of his time. AU these "second sections" or subchapters fit into the chronology and present fresh facts that carry the story forward. But they are marked off by a telltale heading coupled with a quotation from Berlioz, so that on a first reading they may be skipped by the impetuous."0 For the contemplative, three of the critical portions have been labeled Interchapters, to suggest resting places where in the light of Berlioz' theory and practice one may find reconsiderations of, respectively, Program Music, Romanticism, and the Mind of the Artist. It is important to add that not merely the student of character and lover of music will find here what he may be looking for. Anyone with an interest in history or in art may approach this life of Berlioz, musical matters included, just as one would a book on Leonardo even though one cannot mix paints. And perhaps the working out of this conviction will show that music can enter into the general life of ideas, and that the large number of people who listen to broadcasts, concerts, and discs need not hesitate to reason and argue about their vivid and truthful impressions. A

HANDBOOK FOR FRIENDS AND DETRACTORS

This does not mean that the aim of the present work is to propagandize for either music or Berlioz. No one familiar with the critical dissensus 29

Mr. Elliot Paul, for example, having been aroused to enthusiasm by a Paris performance of Berlioz' Requiem goes on to speak of the other great works that Berlioz was composing "during the late sixties of the last century." (The Last Time I Saw Paris, Ν. Y. 1942, pp. 95 and 173.) The facts are that the Requiem was composed in 1837, Berlioz ceased composing by 1862, and died in 1869. Mr. Paul's mistake is not culpable but it is symptomatic. 30 The reader who wants pure narrative first may begin with Chapters 1 and 2, omit 7, 14, and 20, and read the first sections of all the rest.

Berlioz

ιό

which exists about all art and artists " would expect to persuade everybody that Berlioz was "simply one of the greatest composers who have ever lived." If any agency can attempt this universal conversion it must be Berlioz' music, which, given a chance, can be safely trusted to exercise its inherent powers. But it is desirable for all concerned that the endless battle of opinions should be as efficient as possible. T h e proffered "orthodoxy" is therefore an answer to Tovey's plaintive phrase: it is to help Berlioz' admirers "know where they are"; it is also, and in equal degree, a manual which may enable Berlioz' detractors to damn him intelligently. Consequently, although the size and substance of this work suggest the improbable term "definitive," I should prefer it to be considered a defining book which, while telling the story of a complex career, treats the assumptions and the practices of the creative artist as choices .which he makes and which no one is bound to endorse. One need only recognize, assess, appreciate the reasons for the choice. "Appreciation," I know, is today a meaningless word. T h e search for an infallible kind of criticism has discredited the historical method and substituted a number of systems wholly concerned with materials and techniques. This has yielded valuable results, but it has also brought great losses. W e have come to forget that the work of art alters with the passage of time and that the observer's mind affects the reality he sees — absolute reckoning is no more possible in art than in astrophysics. And in abandoning the one available and safe way, which is an exacting relativism, we have lost sight of the common goal which the arts aim at. W e have denied their common relation to life, which is to say their relation to History. T o set forth this relation no doubt requires a method different from the one condemned as the historical method. It must not be reductive: art is no more a "social index" than it is a "neurotic dream" or a set of contrived echoes among pure sensations. A r t is art and its study must yield the fullest identification of the unique object. This is but an additional reason for the extent of the work in hand. A t the cost of explaining more than some readers will seek — though I trust not more than all 31

In his little book on Musical Taste, the late M. D. Calvocoressi tells of his dismay after sampling opinion: "In due course, 1 learnt to take nothing on trust, not even praise or blame emanating from the writers whom I considered soundest and most sensitive and thoughtful; for I encountered a bewildering discrepancy of views. Here were two authors who agreed in their appraisement of Beethoven and Wagner but disagreed in their appraisement of Berlioz; another two agreed on Beethoven, Wagner, and Berlioz, but disagreed on Liszt; others, agreeing on Beethoven, Wagner, Liszt, and Berlioz would disagree on Strauss or Hugo W o l f , and so on." (775·, 2-3.)

Introduction

17

taken collectively will want — this canon of reason and virtue in Berliozian matters should serve the needs of any given reader, who may skip what he will allow to pass unargued. 32

THE

STRUGGLE FOR T R U T H S

For although the unprejudiced reader dislikes argument, preferring the dogmatic tone as more authoritative, it is neither possible nor healthy that he should be indulged in this. T h e life of ideas thrives on conflict, and good history, as Shaw points out, is mainly recrimination. 33 It is rarely possible to arrive at desired truths without opposition and dispute, and one finds hardly any current biography of the great — were one to go back as far as Euripides — which does not open with fighting words. 84 Given Berlioz' rating in the many works that still indoctrinate young and old, the traditional processes of controversy remain unavoidable and the reader must grow inured to them. As for Berlioz' detractors, it is idle for them to say that defense of him is special pleading: they are the ones who by their confident misstatements bring on the litigation. 35 N o r can they deprecate full documentation and inquiry into disputed points; they would demand it if it were omitted and claim a kind of victory by default. Lastly, it is simple childishness to complain — as has been done — that favorable views of Berlioz by able critics are prejudiced views, whereas the dwindling band 32 Despite appearances I did not try to unwind every type of quirk one meets in current criticism. This, for example, is the pattern of many an "objection": a reviewer of the Fantastic symphony writes that he finds a simple recitative from Bach's Saint Matthew Passion "far more thrilling than all the heroics of Berlioz' March to the Scaffold." How is it the writer does not see that his comparison is null and void? Suppose he was told "For my part I find a simple recitative in Berlioz' Infant Christ far more thrilling than all the dramatics of Bach's two choruses shouting 'Barabbas!' " Would the inversion show him that all he has said is: "I prefer quiet recitatives"? If he means to say more, he must either state his preference for Bach dogmatically, or if he wants to argue it, present us with things similar enough to make comparison rational. 33 121η, 4o. 34 E.g.: Hadas and McLean's Euripides, Wilbur Cross's Fielding, Lewes's Goethe, Krutch's Johnson, Carl Grabo's Shelley, Ricardo Quintana's Swift, Mark Schorer's Blake, Trilling's Matthew Arnold, Pulver's Paganini, Wright's Rousseau, Sassoon's Meredith — even Murdock's Increase Mather: the list is as extensive as biography itself. 35 Special pleading, correctly defined, is — or should be — the very principle of biography. It is, says Fowler, "the adaptation to the particular circumstances of the typical formulae or pleadings that may be applicable to them, and that are ready to be used by either party." [Italics added.] Modern English Usage, 552·

Berlioz

ι8

of antagonists are veritable Daniels and Solomons come to judgment.®· Happily the newcomer to Berlioz' art may take all this wrangling in his stride, learning from it only how to beware of dogmas that do not disclose their underlying principles, and acquiring the true critical temper which indulges passion without possessiveness. Thus if the sincere amateur finds himself in disagreement with Berlioz' conception of dramatic music, or with his sense of the limits of musical expression, the advantage in having these assumptions explicitly stated is that on hearing the works the listener will discover why he has been puzzled or annoyed and this very knowledge will free his mind for enjoyment. If he should still like to quarrel, the debate will at least be anchored in fact and logic instead of surmises and non sequiturs." This is a point of capital importance, for in the last analysis what marks off the "Berlioz problem" from any other — the Blake or Brahms or Moussorgsky problem — is the failure of Berlioz' admirers to act with enlightened self-interest as guardians of his fame. I speak of self-interest because it is obvious that the supply of his music available for our enjoyment depends on his reputation at large, and I may add that one of my strongest motives in writing has been the simple desire to hear more of his work and be allowed to talk less about it.™ B E R L I O Z ' P O W E R OF S U R V I V A L

The extraordinary fact is that without any cult to support him, whether national or snobbish, without any "sample pieces" to carry his name into the musical amateur's home, or any vested interests to nurse his fame f o r M

It is curious testimony to the power of convention that almost every second reference to Berlioz stresses his "overbalance in the direction of volume" — in spite of the better informed view of other observers. Why is this? Because seeing the score, or seeing the instrumentists on the stage paralyzes the judgment. In 1948 the recordings of the Requiem were issued and nearly every critic pointed out how moderate and well-balanced the orchestration was: for the first time, they heard. One writer went so far as to say that the large forces were "merely incidental" to the music! 87 See, for instance, the "refutation" of Berlioz' "system of program music" which is to be found in the third edition of Grove (I, 360) and which consists of the arguments maintained by Berlioz himself in A Travers Chants, p. 157. As for logic, see the inference that because Berlioz wrote chiefly for full orchestra, he must have had a "restricted capacity" for appreciating chamber music. (775", 56·) 38 [Section 10 of the Bibliography has been kept in this edition to give an idea of what the collector of discs had available before the advent of the long-plaving record.]

Introduction

19

the sake of royalties, Berlioz has survived. From the beginning he has had the freely given suffrage of the most gifted musicians — composers as well as performers — and in every generation he has found numerous fervent admirers among theorists, academics, and intelligent laymen.™ It would be still more extraordinary than such proof of the vitality of his music if this spontaneous, unorganized, and unostentatious following had grown out of illusion or frivolous feeling. The reverse being true, it puts a clear obligation on friends and enemies alike. The latter must either drop him entirely (it is mere sadism to keep on writing chapters in which he is loftily patronized) or else they must find a way to express their disapproval in civil words which square with the facts. As for his admirers they must familiarize themselves with the full range of his achievement so as to be able to turn the tide of misrepresentation.*0 The excellent biographer of Tchaikovsky, Handel, and Chopin, Mr. Herbert Weinstock, justly writes that "the picture of Berlioz, that solemn and many-gifted musician, as an irresponsible and wild-eyed romantic, does little credit to its creators"; 41 but the erasing of that picture will not occur by itself. As long as writers on music escape unchallenged when they make the stock references to Berlioz' "sacrificing form to effect"; when they blandly impute to him "love of size," or "inadequate technique"; when they glibly depreciate — as if it were a single entity — "the school of Berlioz, Liszt and Wagner," the conscience of his wellwishers, and even of those who are indifferent to him but who love truth, will carry a burden of guilt.42 m I may cite at random (besides Schumann, Liszt, Strauss and Wagner) Hugo Wolf, Bizet, Mahler, Bruckner, Gounod, Van Dieren, Busoni, Weinartner, Motti, Moussorgsky, Sidney Lanier, Paul Dukas, Cornelius, Lalo, eter Warlock, and G. B. Shaw. Among writers and artists: Gautier, Huysmans, Richard DehmeL, W . £ . Henley, James Agate, Odilon Redon, Flaubert, Nietzsche, Van Gogh, and André Gide. And among the professors: Lobe, Ambros, Goetschius, Daussoigne-Méhul, Spalding, Prout, Emmanuel, Otto Luening, Robert Prescott Stewart, Charles Koechlin, William Schuman, and Roger Sessions. 40 From time to time in these pages, a footnote under the caption "Scholarship" will show — with no sense of pride or any other animus — how wide of the mark a report in good faith may be. 41 1308, art. Berlioz. 42 Dealing with the comparable ease of The Puritans and Music, Mr. Percy Scholes says "it will need a bonfire of schoolbooks and popular novels" before the new and correct idea will replace the generally accepted one. («71, 377·)

Î

20

Berlioz T H E APPERCEPTIVE

MASS

It may at this point be asked why Berlioz' own Memoirs have not long ago dissipated all these mists and why even now the reading of them would not show the man and his work in the best possible light — his own.43 The answer is simply that although the Memoirs faithfully show Berlioz in his fighting trim — or perhaps because they do — the book, is by no means a satisfactory portrait; and as an apologia it falls far short of making a sufficiently large claim. This is not the place to examine the Memoirs' truthfulness or exaggeration; it will appear later that, as autobiographies go, that of Berlioz is unusually veracious. But addressed as it is by the principal actor to his near-posterity, it takes much of what we need to know for granted; and, Berlioz being at once fundamentally modest and aristocratically reserved, he refrains from marking in a sharp didactic way the significance of his many activities. Hence the reader who comes unprepared to this fluent, humorous, allusive, and closely packed narrative sees only its drama, or feels only the overriding will of its protagonist; he has no means of judging, comparing, and confirming what he is told. He lacks, in short, what the older psychology called an "apperceptive mass" — previous facts and categories with which to take in and organize new knowledge.44 T H E T O N E OF T I M E

Such a mass is here, in the pages that follow, and no small part of. it consists of the expressions of pleasure, admiration, love, and even worship, which through the years have greeted the revelation of what Mr. 43 In response to the visibly changing attitude towards Berlioz, M r . Ernest N e w m a n was asked b y his publisher some years ago to write a n e w life. H e declined on the ground that Berlioz had himself done this unsurpassably well, and he contented himself with revising and annotating the English translation. M r . N e w m a n was right to respect the integrity of the book and I have followed his lead to the extent of quoting f r o m it just as little as possible. [ A new and scholarly edition of the Memoirs, bv D a v i d Cairns, appeared in 1969.1

" " W e r e w e in perception chiefly passive, could the things of the outer world impress themselves immediately upon our minds and thus stamp their nature upon it, they w o u l d necessarily always leave behind the same ideas, so that a variety of apprehension w o u l d be impossible and inexplicable. T h e fact, however, that e v e r y observer contributes something to the sensation, and thus alters and enriches it, speaks unmistakably f o r the activity of the mind, w h i c h , upon occasion of sense-excitations, must perform the main office and create the perception. . . . T h e mind apprehends the things of the outer w o r l d with the assistance of w h a t it has already experienced, felt, learned, and digested." Karl Lange, The Theory of Apperception, 4.

Introduction Bernard Haggin with fine respect calls "the Berlioz mind." For Whitman was right to say that "no really great song can ever attain full purport till it has accrued and incorporated the many passions, many joys and sorrows it has itself aroused." Now, a century and a [half] after Berlioz* first songs, this accrual is impressively large, and of a character no one could infer from that of the more familiar cant. Only by pondering these authentic responses and matching them with the "song" can we become better attuned to the spirit of the man whom Wagner called an "enormous musical intelligence" and "an incomparable artist." Today, when we are nothing if not social critics, we may find Berlioz most accessible as an avenger of intellect in its struggle with a corrupt society. Certainly, that spectacle is tragically satisfying: to pomposity and pedantry Berlioz opposed wit and irreverence; on easy optimism and the trumpery faith in progress he turned a scornful glance; and against Philistine commercialism he raised a religion of art and nature for which he testified and suffered. Insofar as he stands for the spirit of his age he carries forward the great European tradition of the Gothic artist, of Shakespearean drama, of Renaissance Latinity, and of the Romanticist revolution which revived art by drawing on its native and popular sources. In music considered as an institution, Berlioz was heir to the hopes of Mozart, Beethoven, and Weber, and he lived to fulfill them; for as composer, conductor and organizer of musical celebrations he presided over the establishment of a new spiritual force — the musician as artist.

BERLIOZ AMONG THE

POWERS

But Berlioz himself towers above this not inconsiderable achievement and he needs but to be known for his metal to be felt as transcending the common stuff of geniuses. "If genius means creative power," writes Romain Rolland, "I hardly see more than four or five of his caliber in the world, and when I have listed Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, Handel, and Wagner, I know of no one in music who is his superior or even his equal." 45 T o describe the natural bent which Berlioz' creation takes we have onlv the term "originality" or "invention." As Weingartner said, "he does not have to seek, he finds." 46 And this unsought freshness and force, this daemon or magic of the unconscious, was matched in Berlioz by a mind and character of superlative strength and fineness to which his five peers listed above would perhaps not lay claim. It is this which in the 45

504, 25.

" 394, 205.

22

Berlioz

estimation of those who know raises Berlioz to a high and separate pinnacle; and it is this which has so often made him the easy victim of inferior beings. For within the limits of human perfection he had everything, and his offense is not merely that his spiritual riches goad the envious and impotent, but that it deprives even the well-meaning of the chance to pity, condone, or assist.47 Any lapse of his is at once magnified by contrast and eagerly pilloried by those who would prefer having more to condemn or forgive. 48 Hence his arduous career and hence his kinship with the embattled great, whose biography is bearable only after the passage of time has dulled the pain and dimmed the apparent confusion: one thinks of Dante, Michelangelo, and Swift. For these reasons it is a portent when we find a critic describing the art of Berlioz' Faust as "so inventive, so varied, so cleanly classical." 49 It is fit that this final unexpected term should crown a work whose theme is held to be peculiarly romantic and thus ideally suited to a "fantastic" composer. For if we finally discern the order in Berlioz' romantic life and art (which is all that the writer's "classical" means) we have indeed found the clue to all the mazes on our way, and we must be close to the moment in a creator's afterlife when, as for Shakespeare in Berlioz' day, the eyes of all are opened, black turns into white, and every living part — work, intellect, character and artistry — is reborn and transfigured. After which, the world inherits as if by an act of its free will a new and miraculous legacy from an undoubted master of reality. 47 Compare the many expressions of protective sympathy for César Franck, in whom various incapacities are exhibited, for example by Vincent d'Indy, as real merits. (94S-) 48 When T. S. Wotton's book was ready for the press, a publisher's reader was disappointed to find that Berlioz' Memoirs were, after all, trustworthy; "he preferred," said he, "to consider Berlioz an outrageous liar." ( i f f , 26.) "Richard Capell ($62).

1. Time, Place, Persons January i8oj to November i8ij

There is a harmony . . . between men's lives and their names: a poetic justice. . . . Hector Berlioz could not have pursued his high-fevered career under the name of Georges Jourdain. — THOMAS BURKE,

1929

1803 opened with renewed preparations for war. Europe had been under arms for a decade, but the previous eight months had seen a truce between Bonaparte dictating to France and Great Britain leading the Allies. N o w another hundred thousand Frenchmen must join the colors, a new fleet was being built, and the First Consul moved on three continents. Though he was losing India, he held title to Louisiana and had an army in Haiti. President Jefferson was alarmed, and shortly negotiations were begun to buy the future American Middle West from France, whose master was planning the invasion of England with barges and balloons. B y the end of the year his army on the Channel had been designated for the Battle of Britain.1 Yet in retrospect the time would mark its men with other signs than those of war: a new century inheriting the Enlightenment, a new order growing out of the mightiest revolution in history, a new conception of life most vividly embodied in the headlong career of Napoleon. Just before the year ended and only a few days before Louisiana became American, on Sunday, December 1 1 , at five o'clock in the afternoon, Hector Berlioz was born in the small town of La Còte St. André, thirtyfive miles northwest of Grenoble. At that time and place, the date of his birth was set down as the nineteenth Frimaire of the year XII, for France was still nominally a republic and used the emancipated calendar. The child's given names, Louis and Hector, of themselves suggest a period of transition, for Louis is Christian and Hector fulfills the revolutionary behest that parents remember the heroes of antiquity in naming the future heroes of the First French Republic. The revolution, it is true, had at no time been very violent in the southeastern province of Dauphiné. T H E YEAR

1

Varmée d'Angleterre, so named on December 2, 1803.

24

Berlioz

Insurrection had been characteristically prompt and self-controlled. Two years before the nationwide upsurge of the Third Estate, the magistrates of Dauphiné had defied royal encroachment in a fashion resembling England's resistance to "ship money." Again, nearly a year before the outbreak of the revolution, Dauphinois lawyers and notables had held unauthorized assemblies of their own, and in a twelve-hour session at Vizille had "passed" most of the reforms which were later to shed glory on the National Assembly. Moreover, considering itself a recent acquisition of the French crown — only five centuries old — the Dauphiné still felt stirrings of particularist feeling. Its local heroes were Bayard, the outspoken Knight without fear or reproach, and Lesdiguières, the invincible defender of Protestantism. At La Côte itself Servetus had preached before his exile to near-by Geneva, and from the same village came another Protestant family which was to produce the nineteenth-century economist and historian Sismondi. During the Terror, isolation in mountainous country and moderation in carrying out new laws had spared the region the worst of civil strife; so that by the turn of the century, and in the Berlioz family especially, party feeling had died down. It had not been replaced by enthusiasm for Bonaparte. The household was mildly royalist. Hector's father, Louis Berlioz, was a physician descended from a long line of residents at La Côte who have been traced back with certainty to 1600. In the attempt to go farther, the name Berlioz (in which you must sound the ζ after the long o, all Parisians to the contrary notwithstanding) has been the subject of much profitless speculation on the part of race-thinking critics. The ending in -oz is common enough in the southeast, but the root Beri has been taken by some to signify Germanic descent. Others, finding the name in Savoy, argue for an Italian origin and so "vindicate" the Latin genius. Finally, there is mention of more than one Berlioz in an ancient roll of noble Crusaders, from which still others deduce a racial superiority of caste. The simple fact is that three centuries in a narrow corner like La Côte St. André would suffice to acclimatize any alien strain, whether of slave or master race, and turn its representatives into the variable cultural product which you may call at once Dauphinois, Frenchman, and European. The desire to make Hector Berlioz' musical genius come out of either Germany or Italy via the chromosomes of possibly tone-deaf farmers and artisans of La Cote is as childish as it is unhistorical. Where was German music at the time of the Crusades? And why did Berlioz grow up with a particular distaste for Italian music? The effcct of time,

Time,

Place, Persons

25

place, and living persons is a truer aid to understanding the art and temper of the man than all the word-juggling of modern nationalists.2 Engaged from the first in the locally important tanning industry, the Berlioz clan had gradually risen in station until by the middle of the eighteenth century its descendants were men of property and education. So much so that Hector's grandfather, the lawyer and tax official, Joseph Berlioz, found himself on a list of suspects during the Terror and suffered the confiscation of his goods. This was the time when the name Côte St. André sounded counterrevolutionary and had to be changed to Côte Bonne-Eau.s But Joseph Berlioz gave no further cause for suspicion and he eventually got back his property, both at La Côte and near Grenoble, where at Les Jacques he had a large estate overlooking the great valley and mountain screen of the Grésivaudan. It was this same Joseph Berlioz who rebuilt at La Côte the house which still stands, and which in 1935 was made into a museum in honor of his grandson. It is a solid, flat-fronted stone house with sloping roof. The spacious rooms are well-proportioned and, except for wainscoting, bare of ornament. From the upper stories one has a superb view of the whole plain, framed within a silver-blue edging of mountains. Behind the house is a courtyard and beyond, a quiet garden with a small stream. When Berlioz was born, the grandfather lived in the house, a widower retired from professional life, but still busy as the largest landowner of the place — virtually a country squire. His physical appearance, as one can judge from a painting, was largely reproduced in his grandson Hector — a thin, high, hooked nose, fine lips with a sardonic curl at the corners, deep-set eyes and a sturdy build. The son of the suspect, Hector's father Louis, born in 1776, seems by contrast a milder man. For a time, it is true, he was politically at odds with his father. The "noble words Liberty and Equality," the doctor tells 2

T h e s e conjectures have not been confined to fanatics. In the last century men of the stature of Hans von Btilow and A l f r e d Fouillée gravely discussed Berlioz' "racial" temperament, ( 5 4 Í , I, 90 ff.; 16;, passim.) T o d a y , critics rely on e y e - and hair-color ( F r . Baser, 411, 2 5 9 ) , or draw inferences from generili impressions of style. T h u s the late Paul Rosenfeld thought he saw "in men like Rabelais only the Frank and in men like Berlioz only the atavism to GalloR o m a n times." (yoy, 1 3 5 . ) Contrariwise, Koechlin finds in the art of Rabelais and of Berlioz an exact parallel ( 7 3 0 , 6 8 1 ) ; while P. L . Robert deems the composer "the fine flower of Latin genius" (668, 1 ) , and Edouard Schuré is sure he "incarnates the Celtic soul." ( 4 4 2 , 1.) F o r the assumed connection between the Frankish race and noble birth, see m y monograph, The French Race: Theories of Its Origins, N . Y . 1932 3 T h i s name does not refer to any natural waters of the place, but to its excellent distilled liquors.

26

Berlioz

us in a diary, had aroused his youthful zeal, which was enhanced by "the success of die citizen armies and the republican evocations of Athens and Rome." He became "quite wild, like many others." * But events disillusioned him. He grew very self-contained, although generous feeling and independence of mind were characteristics that remained and influenced Hector, his first-born. It was in keeping with this quiet but steady unconventionality that Louis Berlioz took to medicine, after giving up the law which his father had chosen for him. The young man taught himself by reading and attending lectures in the metropolis when these were available. Wartime schooling, then as now, is a chancy thing, but finally, two months after Hector's birth, Louis Berlioz went once more to Paris, defended his thesis, and obtained his degree.6 His age was twenty-seven. All the while, he had pursued other intellectual interests, notably music, and had learned English and Italian to keep up with contemporary literature and philosophy. The doctor was the first of his family to enjoy moneyed leisure, and he made use of it in the traditional way, for cultivation. Even beyond the small community of five thousand souls which he tended, he would have stood out as an unusual man. A great reader, who also wrote voluminously for his own use, he could combine the meditative life with action, in a manner which we shall find again in his son. The doctor was among the first to practice hydrotherapy and he developed and described other original methods of cure in a prizewinning essay chosen by the Montpellier Faculty in 1810.· When rivals used his discoveries without acknowledgment, he remained unruffled and said only, "Let the truth prevail." Dr. Berlioz soon enjoyed the trust and respect of his neighbors. He overcame their prejudices so quietly that he gained both their affection and the power to help them; and his interest in the welfare of the poor took the practical form of supplying them with housing and hygienic facilities at his own expense. He died a universally beloved public benefactor, a counterpart if not a model of Balzac's famous Médecin de Campagne.τ * Α. R., XXXViii. 'The essay, a 2j-page affair, dealt with the onset of the menstrual cycle; it had been published, or at least dated, the preceding year. {¡66.) •See 167. 7 The accredited belief, which there is no reason to dispute, is that Balzac's original was Dr. Amable Rome, a physician practicing at Voreppe, also in the Dauphiné, where Balzac met him while on a walking tour in 183z. (See 10fp.) The social oudooks of the fictional Dr. Bénassis and the actual doctors, Rome and Berlioz, naturally coincide; their personal characteristics also; but there is a further external coincidence that has not been noted. By the time

Time, Place, Persons

27

Hector's mother was cast in a different mold. Whereas her husband was a gently skeptical philosopher, bred on Voltaire and Rousseau, poetry and natural science, Madame Berlioz was a passionate, devout, one-idea'd woman — the daughter of a Grenoble lawyer named Marmion. She was considered a beauty, tall, slim, and remarkable for her fine coloring and glowing health, though in spite of her apparent vitality she suffered from an obscure liver complaint. Friends and family, as is their wont, called it hypochondria, which did not improve the sufferer's irritable temper. Disappointed perhaps at the narrow life afforded to one of her sociable gifts, and driven by the demon of aggressive piety, Marie-Antoinette Berlioz was capable of turning every event of the day into an occasion for outcry — to the point of rousing even the patient doctor to a sudden burst of anger. The household atmosphere might accordingly be charged with electricity, and although the bolts did not destroy the tight bonds of French family life, the boy Hector undoubtedly sensed the strain. A nightmare he tells of having had in early manhood pictured the attempt of three burglars to kidnap his father: Hector perhaps felt that the doctor had been his guardian angel.8 Certainly, though the boy was attached to his mother, he never felt for her a completely trusting affection. She lacked moral gentleness, and she was moreover puzzled from the start by her son's character and inclinations. Besides the young couple with their first child, and Dr. Berlioz' aging father, the house at La Côte came to shelter five more children, of whom two girls, Nanci and Adèle, survived to maturity.® The house was also a center for the visits of an extensive cousinage scattered among the neighboring hills and reaching as far as Grenoble where both sides of the family had property. 10 Balzac's novel was published, he had met the rising young composer Hector Berlioz in Paris and was on such friendly terms with him that he dedicated to him his tale "Ferragus," published the same year as the Médecin. In this latter work, the nature descriptions and the references to local folk songs suggest the possibility that Berlioz was pumped by the fact-thirsty novelist, and that he furnished useful information about a country doctor's life as well as about its Dauphinois setting. * A. R., 158. 9 Nanci or Nancy, as she was called, had been baptized Marguerite-AnneLouise. She was born in 1806; Adèle-Eugénie in 1814. Prosper, the last child, was born in 1820. 10 Another great Dauphinois, Henri Beyle, known in literature as Stendhal, was in Napoleon's army and stationed at Vienna in 1809. He writes from there to his family: "You must keep this project confidential. Any such thing, mentioned in Grenoble, comes back here: MM. Berlioz, Delaunay . . . Périer, etc. etc. are in the Army or in Vienna. . . ." (168, III, 199.)

28

Berlioz

In this ensemble, an infrequent but distinct note was struck by Mme. Berlioz' younger brother, Félix Marmion. As an officer in training at the Paris Polytechnic School, he was the only Bonapartist of the family, and thereby at odds both with his sister and with her strongly antiimperialist father-in-law: more wrangling — this time political — for the child Hector to grow resistant to. T h e young lieutenant nevertheless remained an important link between La Côte and the outer world of great events and distant places. His campaigns took him as far as Prussia and Poland; he fought for four years in Spain; he was shot, enfevered, sabre-cut. Because of his royalist family he did not rise to a captaincy until the Bourbons' first restoration in 1814. In spite of handicaps, Félix Marmion was gay, gallant and reasonably vain. Sociable like his sister, fond of music and competent on the violin, but even fonder of using his fine voice on a large repertoire of parlor songs and light opera "selections," we can see him as a representative guardsman, in costume and character. Yet the coloring went deeper than the scarlet coat. Like so many of his generation, he was truly enamored of the Napoleonic way of life — that mixture of recklessness, rapid motion, and obsession with glory — which men as different as Balzac, V i g n y , and the two Dauphinois, Stendhal and Berlioz, found so gripping and so rich in artistic suggestion. T h e young Hector's first acquaintance with imperial institutions was of a different kind. A t the age of six, he was sent to the seminary — an agency of mixed monastic and military discipline, designed to form all over France a Napoleonic Youth. There Hector presumably learnt by heart the catechism which told of the Emperor's goodness and divine mission, and he was set to play the drum in uniformed parades with his fellows. Fortunately, a rescript of 1811 abolished this infant prison and Hector was returned to his family, not to leave it again until he went to Paris ten years later. T h e doctor took charge of his son's education and made a success of it. Music, mathematics, Latin, history, French literature, astronomy, and geography formed the course of study. Geography occupied a special place, for one of the usual responses to the feeling of mountain fastness is a passion for travel. In Hector it was matched by a thirst for stories of remote parts, and luckily the doctor's library contained many travel books, including the voyages of Bougainville and other explorers, whose daring had enlarged the eighteenth-century horizons. These, with more recent authors — such as Bernardin de St. Pierre and Chateaubriand —

Time, Place, Persons

29

gave Hector glimpses of wild America and the south seas — regions which Diderot and the Encyclopedists had used to prove human diversity and preach tolerance. While still a boy Hector became a cosmopolitan, and he remained true to this vision of earth and mankind. The great book in the child's curriculum was Virgil's Aeneid. It was ideally suited to develop Hector's visible inclinations — the romance of travel, the love of nature, the quick sympathy with varied emotions, and the cultivation of a delicate ear. Indeed the effect of so much art once proved too much for the pupil's peace of mind. In translating for his father the passage that tells of Dido's despair after her desertion by Aeneas, the boy was choked by strong feeling and only saved by his father's adroit overlooking of the trouble and ending of the lesson.11 The happy chance of a domestic education helps to explain why Berlioz seems so fully himself so young. Though not a prodigy, he undoubtedly acquired a conscious inner life earlier than most. No one can guess or explain all that goes into the making of an artist, but one element is surely the power to feel intensely and remember past feelings undimmed. It is as if the first impressions of childhood were there forever, fresh and producible, not to be worn away by explanations or worldly maturing. What Berlioz felt about Dido at eleven, he still knew at fifty-five, and the music he then wrote for her death scene echoes these early pangs.12 For this capacity to experience which, as Wilde said, is an instinct, there is no substitute. Yet it is that instinct which education, and particularly French education, carefully uproots or overlays, so that it takes years of disapprenticeship, or else the sturdy gift of a dunce, for the artistic nature to recover itself. Berlioz was spared that struggle; he learned without losing sensitiveness. But he paid for the privilege. The home-reared child escapes narcotic schooling but stays too sheltered. T w o years older than his oldest sister, with whom he was not especially congenial, Berlioz had too little of that rough-and-tumble with equals and contemporaries which toughens the outer, social skin. Study and solitude were his chief resource, besides 11 12

Mem., I, 8.

This is no figure of speech: when Berlioz as a student competed for the Rome Prize and had to set The Death of Sardanapalus, he found accents of noble grief and antique grandeur for the king's farewell. Twenty-six years later, he used three of these melodic figures, doubtless unconsciously, for comparable swan songs in Les Troyens; and he then wrote to a friend that so far as the musical expression of the feelings in the Aeneid, "it was from the outset the easiest part of my task. 1 have spent my whole life with that tribe of demigods, and I have known them so long that I have come to believe they know nie." (S. W., 95.)

3o

Berlioz

the associations — usually with older companions — that music brought him. His relation with his father was close and tender, but even that was hardly free or demonstrative enough. T o the end of their days Berlioz never addressed either parent otherwise than as vous. One's elders exacted a heavy toll of the staple Respect, and made behavior run ahead of emotions, so that childish impulse had to play hide-and-seek through the forms of a premature savoir-faire. In another way, the same was true of religious belief, on which Hector's mother dwelt obsessively. Lacking a proper guide to the half-reticences and half-spontaneities of social intercourse, Hector had to give himself wholly or not at all, and to be trusted in return before he could feel at ease. Then the pent-up feelings, gay or sad, would overflow, much to everyone's astonishment. Hence his favorite within the family was his second sister Adèle, who was lively and tender and unconventional like her father and himself. But owing to the difference in their ages, Hector could scarcely count on her companionship until his second return from Paris when he was twenty-five and she fourteen. Despite all this, young Berlioz was not a hothouse plant. On the contrary, his broad shoulders and muscular physique made of him an indefatigable walker and climber, to whom some weathers might seem better than others, though all were good. 13 True, he had what is called the nervous temperament, but his health can be described as robust, for "nerves," until they are overstrained, mean simply energy and responsiveness, not debility. One proof of Hector's health in childhood is that he remained a candid, open, and affectionate character despite the quietism of his father, the tantrums of his mother, and the opportunities of moping afforded by his freedom from school discipline. As an adolescent, to be sure, he went through a period of melancholy marked by religious fervor and a hopeless love affair. But these manifestations are by no means abnormal. Only their intensity at the time and their aftereffects betray an unusual nature. The story of the boy's infatuation is familiar to the readers of the Memoirs. During one of the vacations taken by the Berlioz family at Meylan, the maternal grandfather's house near Grenoble, there was an outdoor party where the military uncle and some neighboring young ladies were brought together. The officer was spirited and duly attentive, but he did not fall in love with either of the prizes submitted to his inspection: as someone has remarked, "he had been in Spain." It was his unhappy nephew Hector who conceived 18 He and Adèle were fond of going for a walk in the rain, perfecdy silent and happy, though the others called them "young fools." (S. W., 149; pi, 751.)

Time, Place, Persons

31

in secret a violent passion for Estelle Duboeuf, seven years his senior, and naturally disposed to treat Hector as a child." Rather wickedly, however, she teased her helpless and embarrassed admirer in order to amuse the company and possibly to awaken the captain to a sense of opportunity. What the child saw was a tall, rather determined young woman of nineteen, with black hair and a somewhat provocatively cold glance. That she wore pink slippers — the first he had ever seen — remained indelibly fixed in his memory; which suggests how he kept his eyes shyly lowered. Yet perhaps the dominant fact was her association with the most beautiful landscape he knew: the Saint-Eynard, which one climbs halfway to reach Meylan, and the broad valley of the Grésivaudan, crossed by two rivers and ringed with snow-capped peaks — a majestic panorama. Turning the experience at once into poetry, he christened her his Stella Montis, Estelle of the Mountain, an unattainable star, who centered in herself his need to adore, his vague but insistent wish for self-expression, and his religious feeling at the sight of nature. The varied consequences of this early attachment, unfolding through half a century, show it to have been something more than a laughable episode. It was rather the situation of another and equally romantic boy-poet, Dante, with a differently cast Beatrice. What Berlioz does not tell us about this same formative period is the rapid succession of deaths within the family. Between his sixth and ninth years, three members of the older generation died, including his maternal grandmother and a cousin on his father's side who lost his way and perished in a swamp. In 1815, within two days, his grandfather Joseph Berlioz died and his own eight-year-old sister Louise Virginie; and again, in 1818, his younger brother Louis-Jules-Félix. Then, in Hector's sixteenth year, occurred the presumable suicide of his friend and mentor, the son of his music teacher Imbert. It happened during vacation time, after a solemn and mysterious farewell taken by the older boy. The younger, returning and finding his friend gone, was never able to learn the exact truth. These were but the beginning of a series of sudden losses that kept shattering his life until the end. If it is true, as Boschot imagines, that in playing about the house the boy sought to harden his feelings by handling the doctor's wired skeleton and staring at anatomical plates, it is even more certain that the succession of deaths, emphasized by the ritual black 14

Mem., I, 9-11.

32

Berlioz

drapery, the visits of condolence and the restraint on laughter and games, played a part in the grown man's sense of life's fragility. His whole generation, as Musset and Vigny were to remark, had grown up in the company of death and in the belief that extinction must be redeemed by heroism." Despite young Berlioz' true religious faith — perhaps because of it —this series of shocks, complicated as they were by the conflict between his infidel but loving father and his devout but harsh mother, left him subject to bouts of anxiety during which life seemed remote, outside himself. Hector moreover seems quite early to have felt at one with the poets, who are traditionally cast by Fate for sorrow. His father's teaching and his own developing gifts made the identification natural enough, but the sentimentalism carried over from late eighteenth-century literature made melancholy worse. Reading the memoirs of Voltaire's protégé, Marmontel (which about the same time were bringing tears to the eyes of the young John Stuart Mill), responding to the gentle wails of the versifiers of the period, or to the grave accents of Chateaubriand's Genius of Christianity, strengthened in Hector the link between dark thoughts and artistic feelings. From Chateaubriand's great work on what may be called the poetry and passion of the Christian religion, the boy copied out in a notebook still extant a revealing passage about André Chénier. This austerely fine poet had been executed by Robespierre in 1794 but his fame waited upon a proper edition of his works in 1820. In that year, the seventeen-year-old Berlioz, writing out the words and music of a song attributed to Chénier, made a note: "The author of these words was a young man who fell a victim to the French Revolution. This unhappy youth" (here Berlioz is quoting Chateaubriand), "on climbing the scaffold could not help exclaiming, as he struck his forehead, 'To die! when I feel something— there!' " 16 The remark is doubtless apocryphal but the Keats-like fear is of the time and mood, and we shall find it again embodied in music. For a youth endowed with imagination, the Red Terror did not seem very far in the past. Nor was the Napoleonic legend very far in the future. Berlioz was eleven when, after the Emperor's first abdication, La Còte St. André 15 Musset: " D u r i n g the Napoleonic W a r s . . . our mothers into the world a fiery generation, pale, nervous, . . . reared in the sound of drums. . . . Death itself had become so beautiful looked so much like Hope, that no one believed any longer (1266, 2 - 3 . ) O f V i g n y , see " T h e ^ Malacca Cane."

10

'24Ì, I, *79·

had brought seminaries to and great, it in old age."

La Cote St. André

(Isère)

T h e Alps at Grenoble (Circle marks Meylan, home of Estelle)

" T h e c o u n t r y o f Berlioz [lies] in the same parallel with Verona, Virgil's Mantua, and Venice . . ." — CHARLES

MACLEAN

Time, Place, Persons

33

was occupied by the Austrians. There was a short resistance to their inroad by partisans of the exiled Emperor; then came the usual resentment against the foreign troops; and shortly Napoleon returned from Elba. The incredible revenant passed through Grenoble, where he proclaimed himself a revolutionary soldier —an echo of his first glorious return from Italy in 1797 — and on his journey north he drew near enough to La Côte so that his cannon were heard there. His defeat after one hundred days was like the fifth act of a tragedy. Everything after it was an anticlimax, and most of it proved sordid: a second Austrian occupation, followed by the appalling incidents of the White Terror. In Dauphiné an insurgent named Didier, whose chief crime was incompetence, was turned by popular hysteria into a formidable peril. He and twenty-four others were either slaughtered or guillotined, while the whole province quaked under false alarms. Dr. Berlioz, never a party man, kept as aloof as he could, though higher authorities looked to him (as chief citizen) to take the lead in a regime of repression. Against his will, he was made Mayor. From then on the events as Hector saw them turned to tragicomedy. His father discovered a falsification in the accounts of his predecessor, who was also a royalist. Notifying his political friends, Dr. Berlioz silently withdrew. He did not foresee the slanders and squabbles which broke out and divided his unhappy town. By a twist of circumstance, the leader of the other faction was a friend of the family's, the father of Hector's closest companion, Charbonnel. The doctor gained nothing but worries from his brief tenure of an office he had not sought, and his son registered one more reason for his contemptuous dislike of politics. T w o years before, Waterloo had seemed to settle some uncertainties, including the survival of Hector's uncle, Captain Marmion; but the Bourbon Restoration, begun in blood and fear like the century, still had the overwhelming past to sort out, to forget, and, if possible, to turn to creative uses.

2. Ce Qu'on Entend sur la Montagne I live not in myself, but I become Portion of that around me; and to me, High mountains are a feeling. . . . Circa 1808 to October

1821

Then stirs the feeling infinite, so felt In solitude, where we are least alone; A truth, which through our being then doth melt And purifies from self: it is a tone, The soul and source of music. . . . — BYRON,

Cbilde Harold's

Pilgrimage

of Berlioz' musical vocation was his discovery of an old flageolet in a bureau drawer. His father had played it in his own youth, and he taught Hector the fingering. Berlioz' inclination, it is clear, was marked even before he left for the seminary.1 Dr. Berlioz went on to teach his boy in a very lucid and logical way — as the pupil looked back on it — how to read notes and sing at sight. Soon the doctor bought Hector a flute, together with the standard method of Devienne. Then, wishing to provide more expert instruction, he arranged to have a local musician, one Imbert, give Hector two lessons a day. Imbert was a violinist from the Lyon orchestra who had been brought to La Côte in order to lead the players of the National Guard and teach the children of the well-to-do. The revolution had encouraged the use of music — the singing of secular hymns and marching with military bands — as aids to propaganda for republicanism and war.2 This interest had continued under the Empire and Imbert had been chosen by a committee—a common procedure in Dauphiné — because he was versatile. H e was guaranteed twelve pupils. Moreover his son had a gift for playing wind instruments and this would strengthen the chamber ensemble of amateurs. La Côte, without being a musical center, was at least not a tuneless dell. T H E BEGINNING

1 While there, Hector had found a musical friend in the son of a workman named Favre, with whom he played duets. (308, Jan. 10, 1904.) 2 See Cornwell Rogers: "Songs — Colorful Propaganda of the French Revolution." ( Í J 7 , 43A.R., 51-3. 29

96

Berlioz

as far as Grenoble and back; but though he acted his role with affability and showed the native humor and gaiety which, as he once said, "sweeps away all cobwebs," Hector's mind was elsewhere. T h e songs of Faust were in his mind's ear, and on September 14, while riding in a carriage not far from where Estelle used to live, he composed the haunting melody for Gretchen's song of the K i n g of Thüle. T w o days later he writes to Ferrand to come soon and bring with him a copy of Faust if he has one, so that together they can read Shakespeare and Goethe — those "mute confidants of m y life." 11 Except for tramping in the rain with his little sister, Hector felt alienated from the family and its concerns; it was the family, rather, w h o sought a rapprochement.

Like a magician ( n o w y o u

see it, now y o u don't) the doctor restored Hector's allowance — luckily, as it turned out, for the Minister of Fine Arts "did not see his w a y clear to, etc. . . Back in Paris b y early October 1828, Berlioz resumed the struggle to establish himself. This crucial prize-giving had denied him the reward he had earned b y seven years of hard work. According to any reasonable standard, his cantata should have won the prize — he had unquestionably learned all that the Conservatoire had to teach. W i t h his immense capacity for w o r k , to by-pass the prize and go his own w a y would at this stage have been of incalculable benefit to his health, morale, and artistic output. But the state of music in Paris made this impossible. Outside the subsidized musical theatres, there was no livelihood for a serious composer, and these monopolistic positions were hard to breach. Hence the Faust ballet was Berlioz' first care. Bohain's three-act scenario having been "accepted" b y the Opera and partly set by the composer, the latter requested the inevitable Sosthènes to commission the score: "If y o u wish to know m y qualifications, here they are: I have set to music the greater part of Goethe's poems [in Faust]. M y head is full of the theme and if nature has endowed me with any imagination, I doubt whether I can find a subject more congenial to it." 82 Faust being as much in vogue as Shakespeare and more so than Beethoven, its musical prospects were good. Indeed the Opera had accepted not one but three librettos. « L.I., 24. 82 A.R., 68-9. The modern reader, reared as a democratic man, may need to be reminded that these begging letters are de rigueur in a centralized state, and are no index to character; Berlioz wrote them as modern youth fills out application blanks for fellowship awards. But the whole system of statesupported art as we shall see it at work in Berlioz' life should give pause to advocates of its establishment in the United States.

Harriet Smithson in 1827, b y Deveria

" A celestial face, like Smithson's . . ." - S A I N T E - B E U V E t o VIGNY

(1828)

Faustian Man

97

The Théâtre des Nouveautés had successfully launched an opera based on the poem, and adaptations without music were numerous. Scribe, Boieldieu, and Meyerbeer all tackled the drama, but made no headway with it. Though Bohain's likewise never saw the light of day, what Berlioz had written to the Vicomte was the truth. While in his native mountains he had begun composing a sequence of eight scenes (comprising nine songs) ro the verse portions of Gérard de Nerval's translation of the drama. All other means failing, Berlioz would publish the score at his own expense, dedicating it, in memory of past favors, to the Superintendent of Fine Arts. Finished by February 1829, the work was issued two months later and despatched to Goethe with a modest but fervent letter on April 10. Goethe was charmed by the missive, which he deemed most gentlemanly, and also by the attention, which matched Delacroix's sending of his lithographs. These, Goethe felt, "shed a new light on his own poem." ** He might have found a similar enlightenment in Berlioz' music had he been able to hear it, but he consulted his old friend Zelter — Mendelssohn's teacher — who replied damning the work as a series of grunts, snorts, and expectorations.*4 This must rank as the first important instance of the unwisdom of judging Berlioz unheard, for whatever may be thought of the rest, Gretchen's two songs, the Concert of Sylphs, and Mephisto's serenade are melodies of the most lyrical character, treated with great simplicity." Berlioz sent out other copies of his work, which elicited considerable interest. Fétis termed the score highly original, too much so for his taste, but full of talent and ease. He then served notice on the theater managers that they must make use of the composer, who was "destined to the highest success" provided he received encouragement. As none of these calls brought down the walls of Jericho, Berlioz could only keep on trying all things. He had never been so busy: composing, attending the statutory number of classes at the Conservatoire; finding and teaching pupils —among them a Spanish heiress who paid regularly and well; and finally, for ends of his own which may be guessed, learning English. ("It takes a whole evening in a public course to learn 38

ιοηό, I, 187. " 194, 362. For the other documents, see 170. "Anyone who has access to recordings from The Damnation of Faust, into which all these songs were later embedded, can assure himself of Zelter's mistake. Berlioz soon learned that another German musician, Adolph Marx, had favorably reviewed the score, calling the author "a disciple of Beethoven." Marx then invited Berlioz to contribute to the Berlin Musikalische Zeitung. (See 3s9a.)

98

Berlioz

what a private tutor could tell you in fifteen minutes.") " Since the libretto of Les Francs-Juges had been definitely turned down, he was recasting parts of the music into a single scene entitled " T h e Warriors of the Breisgau." And fresh inspiration to compose came from reading translations by his friend Gounet from Thomas Moore's Irish Melodies Soon, Berlioz had nine new songs, of which one, the Elégie, in honor of the Irish patriot, Robert Emmet, was perhaps the first modern composition written to a prose text. Berlioz entitled the collection Mélodies Irlandaises, thus naturalizing in France the term mélodie to denote a song. Despite much activity, this second half of 1829 brought little change in Berlioz' state of mind. He was feverish and depressed by turns. A t one point he secured the post of musical director in a new theater, only to lose it when the backer-manager withdrew. His debts to several friends preyed on his mind, and he took on additional hack work, such as the proofreading of William Tell, for which he received two hundred francs. There was compensating pleasure in proofreading the Beethoven symphonies and preserving them from Fétis's numerous "corrections," at the cost of antagonizing the critic.58 Berlioz' Faust score meanwhile earned him very flattering comments by established composers, such as Onslow and Meyerbeer, but the publisher was postponing payment of the slim royalties. T o add to Berlioz' distress, his friend Ferrand was ill, and dilatory in his replies as always: more than once Berlioz had had to supply his own lines for the libretto of the Francs-Juges. N o w for divers reasons, Ferrand was being urged by his parents to drop Hector's acquaintance, and knowledge of this having got back to Berlioz hurt and disquieted him. In addition, he had perforce taken to regular journalism, as a source of income and a means to power. Although the pressure for copy was great and the pay nonexistent, he was Paris correspondent for Marx's Berlin paper, as well as frequent contributor to a new French weekly. Le Correspondant. Despite its strongly royalist and religious bias, this periodical accepted Berlioz' unorthodox views on music. In the issue for April h , 1829, for instance, he expounded his lifelong tenets regarding the proper treatment of fugai style and the compatibility of dramatic ideas with religious music.39 In the same place not long after. Berlioz began a 36

A.R., 60. Moore's poems represented a tendency with which Berlioz strongly sympathized, namely the attempt to restore folk ballads and folk tunes to favor. For some of the preliminary steps leading to Moore's publication, see the article on Beethoven and George Thomson (7$8). M 346-7 n" "Considérations sur la Musique Religieuse," reprinted in 595, 187 ff. 37

Faustian

Man

99

short serial biography of Beethoven, who had died two years before. It is a careful piece of work, giving details which Berlioz had in part gathered from living acquaintances of the master — Reicha, Fétis, Cherubini, and even the gruff Kreutzer.40 After a century of Beethoven scholarship, this sketch and these recollections have dwindled in value, but one passage has kept its significance about both Berlioz and Beethoven. The writer is speaking of a recent concert at which the C-sharp Minor Quartet was given by Baillot's ensemble: About two hundred persons were in the hall listening religiously. After a few minutes, the audience grew restless; people began to talk, each telling his neighbor of his increasing discomfort and boredom. Finally, unable to stand such weariness of spirit, nine tenths of the audience got up and left, complaining aloud that the music was unbearable, incomprehensible, ridiculous — the work of a madman defying common sense. Silence was at last restored at the request of a few, and the quartet was concluded. Thereupon the voice of condemnation broke out again. M. Baillot was accused of making fools of the public by presenting extravagant nonsense. A few Beethoven devotees apologized, pleading the composer's mental derangement. "What a pity that such a great man should have produced deformities after all his masterpieces!" Yet in one corner of the room there was a small group — and I must confess, whatever one may say, that I was among them — whose thoughts and feelings were altogether different. This tiny fraction of the audience, suspecting what was going to happen, had huadled together so as not to be bothered in their contemplation. After a few bars in the first movement, I did indeed fear I might be bored, though I kept listening. Shortly the chaos seemed to unwind, and just when the public's patience gave out mine revived, and I fell under the spell of the composer's genius. . . . Here is music, then, which repels almost all those who hear it and which, among a few, produces sensations wholly out of the ordinary. Whence this enormous discrepancy? 41 Berlioz is sure that musical ignorance is not the answer. He knew that the most distinguished theorist-composers in his entourage were against Beethoven, but while he derived from Freischütz and Opus 131 "new sensations," they only wondered what the world was coming to.4* Each generation, says Berlioz answering his own question, fears change; and the envious oppose what is new, knowing their own incapacity to create. 40 41 42

ιj77, Aug. 4 and 11, Oct. 8, 1829, 179 ff. '377> »$'-*· See also the letter written by Berlioz after the concert.

(A.R.,

Rossini, though himself a "modern," abused other innovators, saying that Freischütz gave him the colic. Because of this remark, when someone offered Berlioz an introduction to him, the younger man declined the favor. {LA., 40.)

ΙΟΟ

Berlioz

Berlioz' sketch of Beethoven, fortunately published after his third prize attempt, amounted in fact to a declaration of war upon his elders. In the last installment, he calmly asserted that the Ninth Symphony, which he had read but which no one in Paris had heard, so far from showing a great man struggling with dementia, was on the contrary a starting point for the music of the present T o this declaration the standard rebuttal, the eternal rejoinder, was that Beethoven's predecessors Haydn and Mozart had done all that could be done, and had thus left to Beethoven only the bizarre, the contorted, the "rocky w a y s " of music. Everyone forgot, everyone always forgets, that earlier still it was Mozart who was accused of treading the rocky ways. This historical view is here in point, for Berlioz was perfectly aware even then that he belonged in the sequence. Critics would in time come around to Beethoven, but only to say that he had accomplished all that music can do "along that line," which of course explains w h y Berlioz had to follow the rocky ways. 43

Between his return to Paris in October 1828 and the publication of his Beethoven biography in the summer following, Berlioz' imaginings of love had gone through several stages dimly discernible in the record. Having managed to communicate with Harriet Smithson early in 1829, Hector had been led to suppose, or had deceived himself into supposing, that the actress took note of his suit and would test its sincerity by a few months' delay. T w o months later, Berlioz, who by coincidence lodged in a house opposite that in which she came to live, discovered that she had left, this time not for the provinces but for Holland, perhaps never to return. For several weeks he put her out of his mind; then in June " O n Mozart in 1787: " H e carries his effort at originality too far. . . . What a gulf between a Mozart and a Boccherini! The former leads us over rugged rocks on to a waste sparsely strewn with flowers. . . . " (968, III, 3 and 6.) On Beethoven in 1811: "His two illustrious predecessors f Haydn and Mozart] had long since occupied all the main avenues, and had left him only a feu steep and rocky paths, in which good taste and the purity of tradition can easily come to grief. . . . Beethoven who is often bizarre and baroque, occasionally dazzles us with passages of extraordinary beauty. Sometimes he soars majestically like an eagle, sometimes he crawls along the rocky ways." (853, 121 and 61.) On Berlioz in 1875: " W e have been occupied with Berlioz; Rubinstein had to play us the Symphonie Fantastique. . . . There is a great wealth of ideas and melody in it, but they are like the good seed cast upon rocky ground. . . ." (Cosima Wagner: 94η, 6 j j . )

Faustian

Man

ιοί

the sight of English newspapers praising her dramatic genius rekindled his flame and made him a prey to new self-torture. AH the while, he had been revolving in his mind a large-scale symphonic work on the theme of Faust.** For during these eight months Berlioz had perfected himself in the art of living on two different planes. His personal existence, divided between love-longings and the struggle for position, had the breathless, incoherent, obsessive character which the usual accounts of his life like to stress. His artistic inner life, on the contrary, was as steady, coherent, and progressively successful as if he had been a recognized genius in mid-flight. The schemes, hopes, and disappointments suggest a desperate gambler, which is what, for the time being, Dr. Berlioz and the Institute made of him. But the music, the penmanship of letters and scores, the style of musical articles, the work at the Conservatoire — not to speak of the course in English — imply a very different being, whose characteristics are deliberate care, self-control, judgment, method, and an almost academic love of minutiae. This craftsman's delight in the thing well done was nothing new. When in the throes of adolescence at La Côte, Berlioz had managed to make his notebook of romances as neat and systematic as a legal document. Throughout life his manuscripts were clear and even handsome,4' for where music was concerned patience never deserted him, not even in the most trying circumstances of the battle still ahead of him. Hence in Berlioz it is more than usually misleading to read the outward event into the work of art. If the two are connected it is deep down, invisibly, and not in the direct wav of an offprint which the casual onlooker may read. Berlioz' love for his unattainable Harriet undoubtedly dwelt with him, influencing his musical inspiration just as Estelle earlier had moved his childish heart and spurred his melodic invention. But other children and other youths have had unhappy loves and composed nothing at all, hence the relation of life to art is not one of simple cause and effect. Again, Hector's love for Miss Smithson seems clearly theatrical in both senses of the word. It is as if Berlioz had wanted, rather than had been brought, to love her. In this he was following the very respectable French tradition of the amour de tête, which is a form of idealism or true Platonic striving after an imagined perfection. The composer's fancy lighted on a woman who was charming to behold, possessed of talent, praised by others, living the life of art, and intimately associated with the thought 44

L.Ì., 30 and 62; A.R., 87 See Moscheles's comment about scanning the "exquisitely penned score" of rhe Romeo and Juliet symphony on Berlioz* desk in 1839. ( 979, II, 54.) 45

I02

Berlioz

of Shakespeare. It is even possible to conjecture that Berlioz was spiting his family by choosing an actress — or again, that Mme. Berlioz had unwittingly given him a taste for tragic scenes.4® This heady passion, in a young man who had as yet had little or no personal attention from women, clearly drew on the emotional resources he had mentioned to his father the first time he spoke of his choice of career; so that far from ascribing the music of these years to the love affair, it would be more plausible to explain the love by artistic passion. At the moment their joint effect was only to stiffen his ambition and sharpen his sense of loneliness. Yet even while he believed that his infatuation would kill him, Berlioz recognized that contrary to all maxims he could apparently love without hope." He has not a shred of hope left, he says as he gets ready for his third try at the Rome Prize in July 1829, but all the same he is copying the orchestra parts of his Faust scenes and of his remodeled Francs-Juges. The words of this operatic scene are to be translated into German for a possible production by Spohr in Kassel. Berlioz may have already sensed that Germany rather than Paris was his proper battleground, and after Rome (where the prize would compel him to go) he would spend a year in the land of Weber and Beethoven. Meantime he is trying to assure a good reception for the Irish Melodies which are in the press, and there is the usual tension preparatory to going en loge. The subject for the 1829 competition was The Death of Cleopatra, the words being from the same Vieillard as the year before — feeble but malleable.48 From his knowledge of Shakespeare Berlioz could of course conjure up a greater Cleopatra, worthier of his music, but quite apart from the musical problem, the politics of the award was ticklish for both sides. It was impossible for the candidate to write a cantata more unlike himself than that of the previous year; it would be a parody. 49 On the judges' side it was understood that a Second Prize normally matured into a First, yet they resented their "pupil's" growing reputation as well as the divided counsels he brought into their midst. The worst of it was that Lesueur was too ill to attend, and at the meeting the performer once H e w r o t e to his family early in 1829, imparting his intention to marry the actress if she w o u l d have him; this did not seem to surprise them, chastened as they were b y his independent attitude and musical success. ( L . I . , 28.) " L.I., 40. 48 F o r the type of verses, see V.M., II, chs. 1 - 3 . T h e themes hardly change: in 1900 Florent Schmitt was still setting a Semiramis f o r his prize. 49 Ravel lost the prize b y making just that mistake, and earned only a severe rebuke: " M . Ravel may take us for stuffed shirts f p o m p i e r s ] but not for imbeciles." ( Í 7 7 , 346.)

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again failed to do Berlioz justice: this time it was the singer who was called to a rehearsal of William Tell and sent her neophyte sister. Without proper rehearsal, she freshly murdered Cleopatra, and despite the protests of Ingres and Pradier at this accidental unfairness to the candidate, the jury decided to give no awards, reserving the right to give two the following year. The music of Berlioz' Cleopatra is as interesting as that of his Orpheus, freer and still more assured than that of Herminie. Rich in melodies — some were too good to waste and Berlioz used them again — the three arias range from antique declamation in Gluck's style to the Shakespearean vision of Cleopatra dreaming that her shade greets those of all the Ptolemies. This section bears a motto from Romeo and Juliet, "How if, when I am laid into the tomb . . ." written in English — which probably strengthened the judges' belief that young Berlioz positively declined to be understood. The last section is a subtly scored death scene, here and there suggestive of the love-philter music in Tristan, thirty years ahead.®0 The day after the announcement of the blank result, Berlioz met Boieldieu, the amiable composer of the opera Dame Blanche, who had sided with the majority and now tried to explain himself: "My dear fellow, why did you do it? We wanted to give you the prize, thinking vou would be a better boy than last year. . . . I don't say your work isn't good. But how can I pass judgment on what I do not understand? There are so many things I've had to hear over and over again before I liked them. I couldn't help saying to my colleagues yesterday that with your way of writing you must despise us from the bottom of your heart. You refuse to write like everybody else. Even your rhythms are new. You would invent new modulations if such a thing were possible!" 51 As for Auber, who like Cherubini had voted for Berlioz, he warned Hector in a fatherly way that if he persisted "the public will not like it and the music sellers will not buy." Berlioz nodded sagely but discharged his retort into the friendly bosom of Ferrand: "If we are supposed to write music for pastrycooks and dressmakers, why do they give us a Note in passing that Berlioz' dramatic, or poetic, ideas are not single and specific but multiple and general: he is thinking not only of his text but also of Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra and Romeo and Juliet. Later, without changing a note, this same Meditation becomes the "Chorus of Shades" in Lélio, introduced by a reference to Hamlet's brooding. Compare the connections between the Sardanapalus (of 1830), the Romeo (of 1839) and the Dido of 1855. M A.R., 78-9; see also L.I., 4J-6 and Mem., 1, 142-3.

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text involving the passions of the Queen of Egypt and her solemn meditations upon death?" 82 For the fifth and last time Dr. Berlioz used financial pressure to draw Hector home. This meant three weeks wasted to rehash the old story, not to mention the expense and weariness of the trip: those idle hours in a stagecoach, with one's nerves in knots, and under compulsion to exchange small talk with passengers for whom the few miles of their journey is the most exciting event of the decade.53 In spite of everything, Berlioz' first symphony was taking shape, and with or without an allowance, he was sure he could last another year. He now had a steady job teaching guitar in an "orthopedic" institution for young ladies, and though not prosperous he was no longer an unknown. All the more reason to act. He could sense that the cultural movement of which he was a part was about to make its victorious assault on the academic Bastille. The theaters had already surrendered to the new playwrights — to Dumas's Henry III and to Victor Hugo's Hernani, scheduled for the following season. New names and new genres were gaining currency in pleasant profusion: among novelists, Balzac's Les Chouans, Vigny's Cinq Mars, and Merimée's Charles IX. Sainte-Beuve's Poetry of the 16th Century was out in book form. The political historians, Thiers, Guizot, Sismondi, Barante, and Thierry were crowding the market with readable and revolutionary works, Michelet was translating Vico and reinterpreting the whole of Europe's past as a struggle for freedom. And the Salon was being invaded by the colorful enormities of Decamps, Huet, and Delacroix. Nor did music lag behind: Rossini's new opera, Willia?n Tell, was a richer and more serious work than his usual "string of romances and cavatinas." Auber had just written his Muette de Portici, which would soon cause political riots, not by its form but by its subject — the struggle against tyrants.54 Outside the operatic stage and the virtuoso platform, Berlioz stood alone, preaching the modern art of Beethoven. But neither " L.I., 47.

"Soirées ( n t h ) Eves., 139-40. 54 Known in English as Masaniello, the opera is based on the seventcenthcentury uprising led by the fisherman, Tommaso Aniello, against Spanish rule in Naples. T h e music, much admired by Wagner, is indeed revolutionary for a member of the French school, especially in its instrumentation. Various conjectures have been advanced to account for this single burst of daring on the part of a delicate but tame composer, the best being that he caught the ambient fever.

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Beethoven nor his prophet would be heard unless Berlioz gave a second concert at his own risk. This time Cherubini gave the hall, the players readily accepted, and Habeneck conducted. T o his two overtures and the Resurrexit of the Mass (retouched again) Berlioz added the "Concert of Sylphs" from the Eight Scenes of Faust. He also induced his new friend Ferdinand Hiller, a young German who taught at the same girls' school, to play Beethoven's piano concerto in E flat — for the first time in Paris. As window dressing, an Italian coloratura and two virtuoso instrumentists were added to the program. Despite the dangerous proximity of Beethoven's masterpiece, the musicians once again acclaimed Berlioz' overtures, and what is more, the box ofHce netted a profit of one hundred and fifty francs. At this the government took notice and awarded Berlioz a bonus of one hundred francs, to offset the "nominal" charge made for the hall. But the next day Hector was ill and deep in depression. He gave all these news to his father, deploring the absence of any member of the family, and adding: "Since yesterday I am depressed unto death; I should like to weep forever; . . . I wish I could die . . . I cannot connect one idea with another . . . I think I ought to sleep a great deal." ™ The newspapers cordially acknowledged the success of the concert but scarcely analyzed the new music. Only Fétis in his austere Revue kept track of "the feverish young man, whose fever is not that of an ordinary being." In Berlioz' music, exclaimed the writer, "What accents from another world! What effects, varied in a thousand ways, sometimes felicitous, sometimes repellent, but almost always new and well found: they have shaken the souls of all the listeners." M One of the works, the Faustian "Concert of Sylphs," which was later rescored and transferred to the Damnation of Faust, had missed fire. In a passing reference to this fact, Berlioz who knew its worth, explains that he "had not had time to teach it to the performers nor to the public" " — a remark of greater significance to his subsequent career and posthumous fame than he could possibly surmise. " A.R.,

83. 1400, 1829, 348-J2. 57 L.I., 54. 68

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Berlioz tbe Melodist "I'll sing you something new." — Motto from Faust in one of Berlioz' Eight Scenes it has been called "the most astounding Opus I " in musical history, Berlioz' Faust of 1828 is entitled to this numbering only in the sense that it was the first work the author deemed fit to publish. He soon had qualms even about this, withdrew the score after a very few copies had been distributed, and made every effort to recall the rest.2 T h e impulse which he regretted was contrary to his habit of keeping works for revision after hearing. Still, the date of issue marks a phase in Berlioz' life: seven years of assiduous composing in Paris and more than a decade of melodic creation, now in full swing. For despite his present dissatisfaction with certain details, the Eight Scenes were rich enough to become the heart of his mature Damnation of Faust in 1845. ALTHOUGH 1

T h e years 1828 to 1830 were indeed for Berlioz a period of tremendous lyric effusion. Under the impact of his "love" for Miss Smithson and of his discoveries in the world of art, he produced not only the nine songs comprised in the Eight Scenes, but the nine others which he called Irish Melodies and soon published as Opus 2. Half a dozen more found different destinations, from the opera still in progress and the projected First Symphony to the pair of prize cantatas yet to come. T h e plainest fact about Berlioz is that melodies came to him unbidden, self-sustaining, and fitted to a mood rather than to a particular set of words. When he competed for the prize, the subject of the cantata might reawaken ideas he had already consigned to his notebooks; when a given project fell through he readapted his full-formed melodies to other occasions of a comparable kind. T h e successive transfers of some of these tunes from an early score to a cantata and then to a later work proves that Berlioz considered his melodies as things-in-themselves, 3 and that like most musicians he attached to them only a broad or generic significance. 1

Ernest Newman, 577. A sign of change in Berlioz scholarship may be seen in this contrast: twenty years ago, Berlioz' presentatiort copy of this score to his classmate Louis Schloesser was offered for sale in the United States. A distinguished librarian declined to purchase it, on the ground that it was neither rare nor important. (154 and 755.) Today, the Goethe collection at Yale University owns another of the few extant copies. |This note refers to 1948.] 3 Constant Lambert: " A melody . . . is a complete work of art in itself. . . . T o a composer gifted with melodic genius there may be problems of technique, but there can be no problem of style." (732, 98.) 2

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This is not incompatible with the fact that Berlioz was often inspired by what he read. As an educated man living in a great age of literature he had no reason to conceal his literary tastes, nor did he, like some moderns, feel it necessary to dwell on his technical knowledge. Rather, he said of his musical ideas that they were the product of an "inexplicable mechanism" operating within him, and that composing (as against writing words) was to him "a natural function." * Now a mechanism that is inexplicable is no mechanism at all, and it had better be called the Socratic daemon or the Freudian unconscious expressing itself in sound. But what Berlioz meant is clear: under favoring conditions, what he strongly felt or imagined came out as music." As Bach and Handel were moved by the contemporary literature of religion, so Berlioz was moved by that of his own secular day. Late in 1827 he was reading Goethe and the newly found Shakespeare. In 1828, he was rereading Moore's Irish Melodies (including the touching account of Robert Emmet's execution after an Irish revolt). Later, Berlioz was struck by the imaginative freedom of Jean-Paul and De Quincey, and by the colorfulness of Hugo's Orientales. From these last he composed a Pirate Song, and shortly his friend Du Boys translated a fragment from Herder which Berlioz set as a "Ballet of Shades." Finally, in the last days of 1829, Berlioz came upon Hoffmann's Tales which, being written by a composer and music critic as well as a poet-novelist, impressed him deeply. The new literature was in fact full of musical imagery. From Florian's Estelle, in which one of the characters comes from Berlioz' countryside and describes a shepherd singing the beauties of nature, to the works just enumerated, storytelling was married to music by authors who knew the art at first hand.6 Pre-eminent in this work of reuniting sister arts was Goethe. Not only the songs in Faust but the Walpurgisnacht (which includes the will o' the wisp later set by Berlioz) was conceived for music. And throughout the rest of the drama the music of nature or of man is brought in as commentary upon thought or action. In 1790 Goethe had appropriately published his first version of the work with two Singspiele, and when *Corresp., 240; Mem. I, 117. * Mozart: "When I feel well and in good humor . . . ideas come to me in droves and most easily. Whence and how do they come to me? I don't know and it's not my doing." (968, III, 423.) • Wagner was also aroused musically by Hoffmann's Tales, of which he says in his autobiography that they proved a better music teacher than his own instructor. (24s, 19, 38.) On Hoffmann in France down to Baudelaire and Offenbach, see i n s , 382-4

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after a study of ballads he expanded the fragment, he called the result a "rhapsodic drama." 7 All this, which Berlioz did not know in the way of scholarship but discerned by reading with an artist's eye, brought him into spiritual correspondence with his author; both men evidently understood music as "music-in-life." Berlioz was not simply composing isolated verses from a book but seeking to recreate a dramatic whole: what he fashioned was not "Nine Songs by Goethe," but "Eight Scenes" from Faust} The numerical discrepancy means simply that Berlioz made one dramatic scene out of two lyrical moments, adding the note: "Although in Goethe's Faust the soldiers' chorus occurs at quite a distance from Gretchen's song, I have joined the two, thinking that the contrast resulting from the opposition of two such different moods [caractères] might heighten the force of each." This is an important clue to the nature of Berlioz' melody: he started from or hit upon the characteristic, and hence felt free to take liberties with written texts. He ignored Goethe's hint that Gretchen spins while singing and he gave her instead a dramatic Lied which sums up her passion and forsaking. This turns the soldiers' roistering outside into a sharp commentary — the external world indifferent to our inner life. Farther on, defying plot, Berlioz gave Mephisto the final word, or rather the final exclamation, sung to a diabolic guitar. T o make clear the caractère of every scene, Berlioz sandwiched each song between pairs of poetic quotations — either from Goethe and Shakespeare, or from Goethe and Thomas Moore — with occasional bits of prose dialogue added from Faust. These were for the spectator-listener; for the singer and instrumentalists, he supplied brief subtitles in lieu of expression marks.® Thus "bitter raillery" characterizes the Song of the Flea, and "simple and ingenuous" the ballad of the King of Thüle. Each piece is thus enclosed as in a frame and likewise linked to its next neighbor. Berlioz the budding dramatist was fashioning his own Singspiel in 7

1250, xlviii and ff. Other poets and critics — Ludwig Tieck, Gérard de Nerval, Otto Runge, Wilhelm Wackenroder, Christian Körner — specified the nature of the new music as dramatic, popular, and independent of church and stage. These notions had a common origin in the rediscovery of folk art, specifically the ballad, which is at once poetry, music, and drama. 8 Berlioz had previously set Goethe's ballad Der Fischer (Le Pêcheur) and thus could have had ten "numbers" for a volume had he conceived the Faust lyrics as separate pieces. 9 Rousseau had done very much the same thing in his Devin de Village (1752) by writing in the character of his récitatifs obligés: "irony," "tender sorrow," and so on. Gluck was quick to praise the device of using the recitative for psychological differentiation, and Mozart learned it from Gluck.

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the ancestral manner of Aucassin et Nicolette: "ici on chante." Berlioz' way is extremely concise, his mottoes forming a sort of stage directions which evoke our knowledge of the drama and so establish the occasion for the music. One ought accordingly to invert the usual phrase and say of Berlioz that he does not provide music as a setting of the text but rather uses the text as a setting for his music. The fact that Shakespeare and Thomas Moore contribute lines for a score based on Faust proves how unliteral was the composer's view of musical speech. What Berlioz could not know with respect to the form of his score as a whole —since the evidence was first published some ten years after his death — was that he was closely paralleling Goethe's original plan. The Göchhausen manuscript of the Faust of 1775 is a Shakespearean mixture of prose and verse in which Act and Scene are replaced by headings indicating the situation, the whole comprising twenty discontinuous scenes, exactly like the Faust that Berlioz was to complete seventy years later. This relation of music to other arts remained absolutely fixed throughout Berlioz' creative life, and the reason why it should be kept in mind is that his melody occasionally presents musical difficulties, which the hasty critic ascribes to a literary intention. Nothing could be more mistaken or misleading. One may or may not like a given Berlioz tune, but its possible failure to please is not due to any programmatic desire on the composer's part. What is a melody? As Pascal remarked of poetry, "Nobody knows." It has been defined as something that can be easily remembered and whistled, and again — by Mr. Stravinsky — as "the musical chant of a cadenced phrase." 11 While theorists mumble, the public knows what it likes, and there have always been honest men who say that Berlioz is unmelodic, that his themes are but incoherent successions of notes or "effects" accumulated at random. Others point out that on the contrary it is because Berlioz' tunes are long, sinuous, and highly original that the detractors find them wanting: they simply do not hear them. The admirers can at least show that in every generation since Berlioz' time it 10 Compare the verses that Turner quoted or composed for the canvases of his middle period, and the remarks that G o y a inscribed on his war etchings. 11 889, 28. A survey of English opinion brought out the fact that the public's favorite tune was "Onward, Christian Soldiers," which is rather a rhythmical than a melodic idea. And various hypotheses with scientific pretensions (Schenker, Birkhoff) find melodies reducible to numerical formulas. T o all of which, one may say with Mr. Constant Lambert that "when melodic line has life dissection becomes impossible." ( 7 3 2 , 96.)

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is the highly accomplished musicians, usually the leading composers, who have praised his melody. If it takes but the judgment of twelve peers to decide when a man has committed a crime, it should take no more to prove whether a man has committed a melody, and in that case Berlioz is vindicated. 12 But it is scarcely helpful to leave the question unanalyzed, even though the majority vote now favors the composer. The experience that Felix Weingartner recounts of "discovering" Berlioz' melodic powers 1 3 is open equally to those who are not like him conductors and composers. The " T h e locus classicus for the collision of the two points of view is Felix Weingartner's autobiographical account of his "discovering" Berlioz: " T h e first of his scores that I got hold of was the Overture to Benvenuto Cellini, and I opened it with the usual prejudice. Yet the first phrase in G Major struck me as fresh and joyful. Well, thought 1, this much at least is a theme. On the third page I came to a pause followed by a change of time and tempo. Haha! said 1, he has reached the end of his tether; the orchestral effects will now begin. The first pizzicato of the basses did not look good to me: I could not see what could come out of it. Six more bars, then the woodwinds began a melodic statement, but this too failed to reassure me. The general opinion must be right, 1 concluded, invention is not his forte. "But what do I see? I can hardly believe my eyes. For immediately after these six bars a wonderful broad melody begins, played by all the strings; it rises and falls in the most songful phrasing. 1 read on to the end of this magnificent theme, fully twenty-three bars long. Going on, I discover also that the pizzicato of the basses, which at first had seemed unintelligible, was but the preparation for a new theme, given out by the clarinets and bassoons in their lower register — a complete melody of twelve bars, which one could use for splendid variations. Moreover, the melodic statement in the wood was a bridge which now recurred and led to the main part of the overture allegro deciso con impeto. "Though I had only covered the Introduction, 1 had already found three great and expressive themes, among them a melody of impeccably classic beauty. T h e man was not completely uninventive after all, thought I to myself, and I grew ashamed at having stupidly run him down instead of going straight to his works. "In the Allegro, I met again — though with a different accompaniment — the theme with which the Overture begins. Soon it combined with an entirely new figured motif, which again developed into a complete utterance of twenty-one bars. But even this was still not the second theme proper. W e meet it shortlv thereafter, in the quite regular key of D major — once more a new, enchanting, and richlv patterned melodv. "At this point I began to laugh aloud, half from joy at my new-found treasure, half from furv at the shortsightedness of human judgments. Five themes, each plastic, sharplv characterized, wonderfully chiselled, varied, developed, climaxed and concluded — there you have the composer who is 'uninventive' in the eyes of many critics and listeners. . . . Look at the rest of Berlioz' works and vou will have the same experience as with the Cellini Overture." (9//. 17·—3:> 13 Given in footnote immediately preceding.

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first step to take is implicit in what the Austrian musician points out: Berlioz' melodies are long and often asymmetrical: 16, 23, 12, 21 bars;" they are apt to be presented in combinations of two or more, and connecting passages are likely to anticipate the full-blown tune by presenting fragments. The ordinary "first listener" is all too likely to remain bewildered unless he takes pains to hear the movement several times at frequent intervals. Even the student of Berlioz when confronted with a new work is a first listener until he has mastered its melodic organization. For no one more than Berlioz, perhaps, has followed so closely the principle of artistic unity which states that decorative parts must be derived from structural. But in order to maintain variety as well, Berlioz makes these derived ornaments seem independent inventions. Hence the warning that one must be "saturated in the music" before one can fully understand and enjoy it." A typical example occurs in the first movement of the Symphonie Fantastique, where several melodies, seemingly distinct, are in reality variants of the same idea.16 Nor is it by intellectual note-spinning that this repeated budding comes about: Berlioz heard it, and the kinship is easily audible to others as soon as they are intimate with the parent melody. The impression of unmelodic piling up of effects is therefore a paradoxical result of melodic abundance. If the term "continuous melody," first popularized by Wagneriane, has any meaning left, it can never be better used than to describe Berlioz' musical thought. For he not only, as he said, "allowed himself the luxury of lavishness as regards melody," but he also made his fertility serve the ends of development and structure." Berlioz was the first to add: "Although one ought not to deny the u

Charles Maclean: " A s to his having no melody, each school makes its own definition of what that is . . . but what for instance is ' L e s pèlerins étant Venus' from The Infant Christ but a melody, and a beautiful one, forty-five bars long?" (394, 157.) Romain Rolland: " H o w beautiful . . . is the song-recitative of Berlioz, with its long sinuous lines. . . . With Berlioz phrases are most frequently twelve, sixteen, eighteen or twenty bars long. . . ." (504, 49 and n.) 15 T . S. Wotton: s 33, 10 ff. te S33> Ι Ο - ί · The need for this steeping in the music is borne out by the frequency with which concert analysts say "at this point Berlioz introduces fresh material." Almost invariably it can be shown that the new figure stems from what has been heard before: e.g., the otherwise excellent notes by Percy Pitt and A . Kalisch for the Centenary Concert (Queen's Hall, Dec. 11, 1903), p. 26, ex. 8. " 533> 35—7· G. Fink exaggerates only slighdy when he says: "His structure is wholly melodic. . . . Unlike Wagner he eschews appogiatura; every passing note carries its own harmony, whence passing notes cease to exist as such." (280, 39.)

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presence of these melodies, one is at liberty to dispute their worth." w Here one comes upon a critical occasion par excellence, namely a point of conflict over which the critic must help admirers and opponents alike to find justification for their respective views in the same features of the work of art: the competent judges who find Berlioz' themes harsh, tortuous, or cold must be given a reason.19 Obviously, in these critics' mental ear there exists a melodic beau idéal which Berlioz fails to meet, and he fails all the more often that as a dramatic musician he naturally aims at diversity of character, and so deviates in a dozen ways from the single standard which it is sought to impose upon him. This standard applies — or fails to apply — in two respects: form and quality. In form, Berlioz disappoints those who require regularity. Schumann was perhaps the first to draw attention upon Berlioz' easy mixing of even with uneven phrases, adding "I side with those who deny Berlioz melody, but only if it is understood that you mean Italian melody, which one knows before hearing it." 20 He might have included German melody as well, for that idiom is as traditionally foursquare as the Italian and the French. Since to many people music still means German music, the expectation of evenness makes Berlioz' tunes seem like blank verse to a lover of ballad meter. The truth is that after Beethoven Berlioz was the great liberator of melody and rhythm. His "line" seldom repeats within its span; its highly original rhythm acts like a spring imparting energy throughout the great length; while its uncommon intervals and strayings from tonality charge it with "character." He intends every step and does not merely pass from one harmonic implication to the next. It is these things that bewilder at first, and that account for the derogatory adjectives.21 But it is undeniable that in doing as he did, Berlioz was recapturing a tradition as well as foreshadowing the future. Just a hundred years after Berlioz' appearance as melodist sui generis, Alban Berg would accept the same challenge: "You probably miss in our [atonal] music 18

Mem., II, 361. It has even been said that the singing melody of the Pilgrims in the Harold symphony is unsatisfactory. ( /374, Apr. 1945.) Compare W . J. Turner: " T o create such a melody as . . . the theme of the Pilgrims' March in Harold is not given to every famous composer." (309, 190.) 20 508, 176. This asymmetry bothers professional score-readers even more than listeners. Looking at Berlioz' La Captive one finds two phrases of five bars set off by one of eight. Yet the tune was catchy enough for people to whistle it all over Rome in 1831. (See below, ch. 8.) 21 In the Irish Melodies, for example, one can find the frequent syncopations annoying or delightful according as one is or is not ready for a subtle irritation of the artistic nerve, for an apparent disorder which leads to equilibrium under greater tension. 19

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the two- and four-bar periodicity as we know it in the Viennese classicists and all the romantics, including Wagner. . . . But even in the Viennese classics, and especially in Mozart and Schubert, we observe again and again, efforts to break away from the restraints of this square symmetry." 22 Unaccustomed angles and turns in melody are bound to create difficulties in execution — difficulties that are not inherent in the written notes or the construction of musical throats and instruments, but rather in the routine habits of performers matching the routine habits of listeners.** The consequence is that even with faith in the account just given one cannot be sure of hearing a Berlioz melody aright. It can be subtly dismembered, as Mr. Ernest Newman has shown, whether by player or hearer. Alter the phrasing and the music is stricken dumb. The critic demonstrates this by taking five bars of the English horn theme from the Roman Carnival overture; 24 but he could generalize about the whole of that melody and say that when it sounds as if fashioned in dreariness for a hurdy-gurdy it is because the phrasing, timing, and mental projection of the notes by the player are false. The performer who does not forehear what Berlioz heard chops it up somehow and kills the tune's ideal motion. So much for form. Other tunes of Berlioz are not such obvious Cinderellas, whom we can restore to high estate by giving a second glance at their native merits. Some have "a nerve so purely Berliozian that they will always seem dull to people who have no ear for any but German or Italian tunes." " With regard to these, Schumann long ago made a practical suggestion: sing out the notes "mit voller Brust" and the melody's beauty will be borne in upon you together with its inner "character." 2e It is as if in the rhythms, pauses, leaps, or repeated notes lay hidden some bodily truth which Berlioz discovered and enshrined. The opening theme of the Benvenuto Cellini overture can serve as example: its pace, length, punctuation, and ornaments render almost unnecessary the expression mark: Allegro deciso con impeto. Translated, this means: joyful, decided, energetic; the theme does not describe, it is Benvenuto. Vienna Rundfunk, A p r . 23, 1930; quoted in 1360, 568. Ring Lardner, speaking of musical comedy singers: " A n d the tunes is generally always altered in just one or t w o spots where the original composer had slipped in a couple strains which the audience might not recognize." F r o m " W h y Authors?" 24 " E y e and E a r in M u s i c " —a remarkable essay which begins with a discussion of phrasing in Schubert and concludes with a philosophy of listening. (486.) 22 23

25 w

642.

S o 8 , 177.

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Characterization through melodic line brings us to the second aspect of Berlioz' melodic "difficulty" by reminding us that his ideas came to him "in situation," like chunks of drama — and the Eight Scenes show the manner of his reconstructing the whole by the contrast or independence of the parts. Each melody being a self-sufficient object, it follows that the listener must take in and think upon what he hears, rather than expect to be wooed into an indiscriminate reverie. Usually it is the reverie which induces the enjoyer to call a piece of music beautiful, but this will not hold for the true dramatic musician. His standard of beauty is fitness, or to use a more general term, expressiveness; which implies that a melody could be detached from a set of words and retain its character." The reader who has heard the Symphonie Fantastique will remember that its leitmotif or idée fixe came from an early work after having passed through the Herminie prize cantata: throughout, it has a somewhat haughty, almost warlike character, and hence has been found wanting as a love tune. The criticism has only an apparent relevance. We are not to compare the theme with what we should like as a melody for the Beloved, but to consider, in addition to its utility as a binding motif, whether it possesses a clear individual outline. It is unmistakably strong and insistent, like an idée fixe, and its "beauty" is so to speak functional. Nor must we expect that the non-beautiful will be ugly in an interesting manner: it may be simply trivial, like the witches' words in Macbeth, from which alone no one would infer that Shakespeare was a great poet. Similarly, if Berlioz had written only the main theme of the Corsair overture, it would be hard to classify his melodic genius, for the tune is trivial, even vulgar. What is remarkable about it is that its vulgarity is made significant, is commented on, by the surrounding material; it is not vulgar by accident, nor ordinary in its vulgarity; and it arouses our admiration when we recognize that while it properly belongs where it is, this sea chantey is fashioned from the material forming the preceding "nocturne," which is nothing less than lovely. Add the interest of the delayed cadence, the subtle orchestral harmonies, and the delicacy of the accidentals in the repeated scales for strings, and you have the vulgar tune set "dramatically," as are the witches' rimes in Macbeth. There is thus in Berlioz not one melodic idiom — whether harsh or sweet — but a collection of idioms covering a broad range of expression and deserving more careful classification than they have so far received. " Berlioz' "Estelle" melody, for instance, which fitted so closely the verses of Florian, conveys just as much when it recurs without words in the Intro-

duction of the Symphonie Fantastique.

Melodist

115

One can distinguish from the outset three types of utterance: the recitative, the song, and the intermediate form, known as chant-récitatif, which Berlioz made peculiarly his own. He uses it wherever declamation or "prose" — to speak by analogy — reaches an intensity which will soon burst into full-blown song, but which the transitional or preparatory situation must keep in check. Thus Mephisto evokes the gnomes and sylphs who will lull Faust in a chant-récitatif that introduces their lilting chorus; the theme is the same in both parts but treated in these distinct ways. The songs proper could be subdivided under many heads: lilt, cantilena, Lied, dirge, monotone, or simple "call." These are not merely suggestive attributes of a uniform element but separate species of melody. Any of them may have a verselike or a proselike quality, that is, tend more towards decoration than discursiveness, while expressing any imaginable mood. For in Berlioz dramatic variety resides as much in the contrast of forms as in the juxtaposition of atmospheres. Thus in the Eight Sce?ies of Faust, Mephisto's serenade is diabolical through no external means, but only because Berlioz has cast in the regular, obvious serenade form a hurtling, jagged, electrical melody such as only he could find. The singer need not add any sarcasm of voice: the notes do the work. Sometimes the means are even more simple and virtually defy analysis. For the March to the Scaffold of the Symphonie Fantastique Berlioz uses merely a descending scale in G . The variety he extracts from such themes has been remarked upon, for the device is frequent with him.2" In the Requiem (Kyrie), we have another example, very different in effect, and another, again different, in the Beatrice and Benedict overture, where he uses a chromatic scale to introduce a singing theme. This last instance, representing what might be called "melodic delay," is so typical of Berlioz that it calls for a word of comment. When one writer complains in Berlioz' music of a "half-stimulating, half-irritating restlessness, a kind of deliberate indecision," he is giving at least a recognizable description of what occasionally takes place.28 In the adagio of the Corsair overture just described, in one of the variations of the Benvenuto theme, and in many other places, Berlioz uses melodic matter in teasing fashion. He does this at times for expressive purposes — giving us a "psychological variation" through the melody's "going to pieces"; at other times, the interest is that of the play of mind with an idea. Berlioz trusts that the 28

Max Purtmann: 601, 646. -'* Martin Cooper: 5·65, 628.

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Berlioz

listener will find satisfaction in hearing a theme grow, or in recognizing the germ in the unfolded bloom.30 Absolutely at ease in uttering and handling melody, Berlioz undoubtedly puts the rigidly trained musician at a disadvantage: Weingartner himself could not foresee that the six bars of pizzicato would grow into a grand, even a pompous theme, yet it is from such errors that the legend has grown of a Berlioz who pads with instrumental effects. Others fail to follow when the Benvenuto melody, shorn of its triplets, is reduced at one point to five notes: the original was sixteen bars.31 Though it alienates certain hearers, this flexing of the melodic line has compensations. For one thing, it produces, of necessity, a unique texture, orchestral and harmonic. For another, as Professor Ballantine once said, the "music wears like iron"; 32 it charms less on first acquaintance, but holds pleasurable secrets for a long while. As for the artistic logic, it is that Berlioz' long and strongly characterized melodies would not bear exact repetition at short intervals. The refrain of a ballad may be repeated over and over again because it is short and because its meaning is vague and applies differently to each stanza. But no one could bear a refrain consisting of the entire fourteen lines of "The world is too much with us." Similarly, Berlioz' melodies are too particular and too complete for any treatment but that which he uses. He shows his awareness of this musical property in two ways: his development proceeds by restatement in altered form, and not by expansion from a short germ; 33 again, when he composes a protracted "monotony" 34 he employs a very short motif, tirelessly repeated against a constantly changing contrapuntal background. That he knew as well as Wagner or any other German technician how to develop a scene from a brief musical motto is shown by "Herod's Dream" from the Infa?it Christ. Berlioz' own manner, indeed his invention, Weingartner called "dra30 The. "play of mind" can also correspond to deep feeling. In the sublime tenor melody of the Te Dettm ("Therefore we beseech thee ') the hesitations and wanderings are so far from playful that after hearing it one can no longer doubt Berlioz' intimate knowledge of the religious experience. Sl Min. sc., p. 36 bars 4 and 5. 32 Remark made to the writer. 33 Brahms took the other road, cutting his long lyric lines into "thematic" lengths for ordinary development. 34 That is, the use of a single phrase repeated unchanged through the greater part of a movement. Examples of this form are: the Funeral March in the Romeo and Juliet symphony, the Offertory of the Requiem, the Judex Crederis

of the Te Deum, and the Hamlet Funeral March. Berlioz associated this device with the expression of grief or inevitability.

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85

matic-psychological variation." It rests on melody, and satisfies Berlioz' desire to make musical forms as compact as possible. He assumes that you can skip intermediaries as swiftly as himself, and in fact when he takes pains to insert connecting links, he tends to spoil his work." Conversely, the listeners who come to unfamiliar Berlioz without the power to follow wherever he leads tend to hear only the transitional passages — as it were the prepositions and conjunctions in his poetry — and to put him down as a technician who sought to dispense with melody altogether.*7 The opposite is the case. Berlioz always takes it for granted that music is a substance in which melodies live, grow, and combine. He thinks in lines — one result of his upbringing in an unsophisticated region and away from keyboard instruments. One could even say that his best melodies are essentially vocal, without denying the important fact that many of them are conceived for a given instrument; for each instrument is treated as a voice in more than the usual sense.88 Usually marked solo or canto in the score, the instrumental part is supposed to stand out like a singer; at times the line is unaccompanied, or accompanied very lightly, so that its minutest inflection will remain distinct. Thus a movement like the middle one of the Funeral and Triumphal symphony justifies its subtitle of oraison because the trombone solo delivers a melodic recitation which is phrased like speech or gesture, hesitant at first, then gradually building up an unmistakable lament of twenty-two bars.89 These numerous considerations bring us to the final problem. "One does not expect," said Bernard Van Dieren of Berlioz' melody, "that anyone should reveal the secret of its unique power." 40 But one has yet to account for the common and hopeful experience that Berlioz' melodies, "uninviting at first," ultimately reveal their "signal beauty." 41 Why should this be so? An astute answer is given by another compatriot of Van 38

7S4> 59 and 394, 1 0 ° · The unfavorable view of this mode of construction is expressed by Jean Marnold. (460, 205-20 and 362-78.) M E.g., the Dies trae in doppio movimento in the Symphonie Fantastique (last movement) or the repetition of the last bars of the theme in the King Lear overture, Min. sc., p. 16 bars 2-3. 87 The master who attempted this is not Berlioz but Mozart, the great melodist, in the overtures of his later operas. When Mozart was prodigal in his use of melody, Dittersdorf complained that it gave the hearer no time to breathe; yet another contemporary critic could say that there was only one real air in all of Don Giovanni. {968, II, 457 and III, 185.) 38 See below, Chapter 16. 89 See the piano score of the movement, edited by Roger Smith, Mercury Music Corporation, 1947, Andantino, pp. 3-4. 40 901, 232-3. 41 Dr. Percy Goetschius: 436, 297

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Dicren's: "The truth is that for many people they are too directly on the mark. If they had been aimed at sentimentality, just aside of the purity and richness of emotions, they would have had a much better chance of popular success." 42 At every point, therefore, some aspect of dramatic truth is our proper guide. The critic has merely restated for us the objective character of Berlioz' melody, which we grow to like in proportion as its astonishing vividness ceases to shock us. Whereas most people accept very general renderings — loveliness for love, brightness for joy, weightiness for pomp — Berlioz, like Mozart, means to discriminate further. He does so by instinct and it is after the creation that the melody is found to correspond to some psychological reality, independently of this or that musical detail.*3 When Berlioz took up the Eight Scenes again for his Damnation of Faust, he made the ballad of the King of Thüle begin on the second beat of the bar, docked a clarinet part, and suppressed some instructions to the singer. But the melodic character remained what it had been, "simple and ingenuous." It suits Gretchen as it would any other country lass: Goethe's drama was only the catalyst that brought the tune into being, the occasion for its use being a matter of later choice — a choice guided by the very simple idea that a Gretchen differs more from a Cleopatra or a Dido than do these two queens from each other. At the time of the Eight Scenes Berlioz, aged twenty-four, was master of his style and intention, but he was still seeking the larger genre which would make the fullest use of his power as dramatist in melody. "491, 339· Thus Berlioz looking back on his scores of Romeo and Faust points out differences in the spiritual quality of the two lovers — the first shows a more whole-souled love. (93, VIII.) 43

Ó. Revolution in July January / to July 29, 1830

Composed it on the spot — Mars by day, Apollo by night — bang the fieldpiece, twang the lyre. — Pickwick Papers

E I G H T E E N - T H I R T Y , the year of revolutions, brought as much inner as outer upheaval in Berlioz' existence. In the career of one who began life so young, this twelvemonth seems in retrospect like the last act of a Shakespearean history in many parts: triumphs and reversals, endings and fresh beginnings crowd the short period to an accompaniment of cannon and trumpets. Not guessing its perfect symmetry, Berlioz opened the vear with the musical subject that marked its close: "My working plans," he wrote to Humbert Ferrand on January 2, "are laid down for a good while ahead; I must compose for my concert a great instrumental work. . . . " 1 Berlioz therefore declined a poem dealing with Faust's last night on earth which Ferrand had apparently begun. "If I had it in my hands," the musician argued, "I could not resist composing it." His own ideas about Faust were taking another form — that of a grand symphony whose outlines had "long been worked out." 2

The concert would have to take place before the Prize Competition in July, Berlioz' purpose being, as before — as always — to force the judges' hands or the Opera's doors by conquering the public. This necessity was both individual and cultural. In The Red and the Black, "a chronicle of 1830," Stendhal says that life must begin with a duel, and in Balzac's projection of himself, Rastignac looks down from the hills on Paris, saying "It's between you and me." Fiction mercifully reduces to one decisive battle what in many artists' lives is a Thirty Years' War. And besides challenges and victories, war is made up of labors which are 1

L.I., 62. A.R., 87-8. Note that the nineteenth-century use of the word "Grand" preceding the title Symphony or Overture is a technical term denoting the length and instrumental richness of the work, and not a mere advertisement. Modern usage reverses the practice by drawing attention to smallness: sinfonietta, little overture for stringi 2

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120

often sordid: Berlioz was still plagued by money troubles. He was again in debt to several of his friends, and although his father sent him cash from time to time, remittance was usually followed by shopping orders, payable at once and likely to "disturb my whole economy." * T w o private pupils brought in forty-four francs a month in addition to the salary from Mme. Daubrée's school for young ladies. But the life of art, and particularly of music, is expensive. "I am as hard up as a painter," he reports, using the traditional comparison. Fortunately, as a musician and critic Berlioz had his entrees at all the theaters and he need not disburse for this essential pleasure. Fortunately also, he managed to go on doing his own work in the mysterious oases of a calmed spirit and doing the world's work at the feverish pace that the world exacts. Having enlisted the good will of the managers at the Nouveautés, the same theater where he had sung for a living not long before, Berlioz felt that his next concert had a fair chance of success. Though the chorus at his disposal was of only average quality, the orchestra was superior, and it was led by a devoted admirer named Bloc. With the addition of some of his other supporters in the Conservatoire and Opera orchestras, he would have a first-class instrument. A date toward the end of May would best fit in with the public's habits and with his own arrangements. Considering the amount of copying, correcting, and rehearsing to do for a work not yet written out, even this schedule would call for rapid composition. Hence the advantage of having ideas in one's head for a good while before committing them to paper. Berlioz was also occupied during these same months in securing the acceptance of a libretto at the Opera, not to mention keeping up his work as critic and as student at the Conservatoire. But these duties he could easily take in stride. Life was difficult rather on account of the unsatisfactory and unsatisfied state of his feelings. Harriet Smithson continued to come and go, and Berlioz' infatuation with her did likewise, though more fitfully. A promise she had apparently made through go-betweens, of putting her lover on probation, turned out to be an expedient on their part to get rid of him. When he discovered this, his ardor cooled. He enjoyed stretches of peace and freedom, whether she was in London or Paris. Then he suddenly fell' again into "the anguish of endless and inextinguishable passion, without motive, without object. . . ." His pain was "useless, terrible." 4 T o heartache was added a persistent toothache, which before the days of the dental drill Berlioz tried to cure by himself. As a student of medi%L.l.,

61.

* L.I., 64-j.

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cine he was almost as patiently experimental as when he composed music, and he finally found a specific, which he communicated to Ferrand suffering from the same cause. The sort of remedy suggested the proper treatment for his own heart: "It can only be cured by a specific against life." 5 He noticed that straining in so many directions paralyzed the will: "I was on the point of beginning my symphony . . . it was all in my head, but I cannot write a thing. W e must wait." β This mixture of philosophy and irony was the sign of an inner revolution, indeed a revulsion of feeling. It astonished and upset him that on returning one day from a long walk calculated to wear out his anguish and finding in Moore's poems the text of a Farewell Elegy to the Beloved, Berlioz had been able to compose the music on the spot. The experience shook him so that ever afterwards he declined to have the song performed, but as he himself noted, this was the only instance when he had been "able to render a feeling while still under its immediate and active influence." 7 One may wonder whether this was not the exception that proves to be the rule in disguise; one suspects that the feeling was dead or dying. Another letter, this time to Ferdinand Hiller, the friendly young German who taught piano at Mme. Daubrée's, and who was further distinguished as having visited Beethoven thrice at his deathbed,8 marks the change in Berlioz' attachment to his inaccessible Ophelia: "Can you tell me what this power to feel, this faculty for suffering is, which is killing me? Ask your angel, the seraph who has opened to you the gates of heaven. . . . Still, let us not repine. . . ." For when he is tempted to this weakness, Berlioz imagines that "Beethoven looks upon me with severity; Spontini, who is far above ills like mine, regards me with an air of indulgent pity; and Weber, speaking in my ear like a familiar spirit, awaits me in a blessed country to console me. . . . All this is crazy," he adds, "utterly crazy, from the point of view of a domino player at the Café de la Regence or a member of the Institute. No! I mean to live yet awhile. Music is a heavenly art; nothing is above it save true love. The one may make me as unhappy as the other, but I shall at any rate have lived. . . . "Jt is today exactly one year since I saw her for the last time. Unhappy woman, how I loved you! I write with a shudder that I do love you. . . . In fact, I am a very miserable man . . . an animal burdened with an exhausting imagination, eaten up with a boundless passion. . . . Yes! 5 β

L.I., 63. L.I., 64.

7 8

Mem., I, 99. Hiller's account of those visits is in 1021, III, 301-3.

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Berlioz

B u t I have k n o w n a f e w musical geniuses, I have been gladdened b y their visions, and I grind m y teeth o n l y f r o m unhappy memories." * Berlioz himself w i l l soon be telling us more about this v e r y

earthly

seraph o f Hiller's. T h e t u g of w a r in H e c t o r ' s heart was finally decided b y m i d - A p r i l 1830. A kind friend told Berlioz either gossip or fabrications casting doubts on the nature of Harriet's relations w i t h her manager. It was a b l o w in spite of the lover's natural return to reason. " M y vessel," he told Ferrand, "strained at e v e r y seam but finally righted itself." H e is on the w a y to a c o m p l e t e cure, or "as complete as m y natural tenacity will a l l o w . "

10

Berlioz' natural tenacity had at any rate allowed him to

finish

his

s y m p h o n y , of w h i c h he unfolded the dramatic plan to his friend. T h e title records the e n d i n g o f the emotional strain in Berlioz far more than it describes the music itself: " 'Episode in an Artist's L i f e ' (grand fantastic s y m p h o n y in five parts) First Movement: lowed b y Country

(adagio . . .)

music) Fourth Movement:

double, composed of a short adagio immediately fol-

a developed allegro . . . Second Movement:

Third

Movement:

Movement: A

Ball

Scenes in the

(brilliant,

headlong

M a r c h t o Execution (fierce, pomposo)

Fifth

D r e a m o f a W i t c h e s ' Sabbath. 1 1

" A n d n o w , dear friend, here is h o w I've fashioned m y novel, or rather m y s t o r y , w h o s e hero y o u will recognize . . ." T h e n f o l l o w s the first version of the famous " p r o g r a m " of the s y m p h o n y . It w a s as s e c o n d a r y in the composer's mind as the place it occupies in this letter, or as its ostensible cause — the hero's love for Miss Smithson. T h e musical plan, described in musical terms, came first. T h e letter closed w i t h t h o u g h t s of p e r f o r m a n c e and friendship: "I have just w r i t t e n the last note and I am afraid I shan't be able to have the parts c o p i e d in time [that is, b y M a y 30]. F o r the moment, I feel stupid; the f r i g h t f u l stretch of t h o u g h t to produce m y piece has tired m y imagination and I'd like to be able to sleep and rest continuously. ' Corresp., 67-8. T h e contents suggest March 1830 as the time of its writing, though the editor dates it a year earlier. W h a t is more, he does not accurately reproduce the arrangement of Berlioz' lines, which form a kind of modern "plastic poem" such as E. E. Cummings or Mallarmé might have composed. T h e original is in Hiller (352, J59). 10 L.I., 65. 1 1 Notice the order of the second and third movements, inverted in the final version: originally the waltz took the place of a minuet or scherzo third movement. Also, the "adagio" introduction of the first movement is now marked largo.

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But though my brain is drugged, my heart is awake and I feel most strongly that I miss you. When, dear friend, shall I see you?" " Humbert replied with such delicate sympathy to Hector's news about Harriet, and about the completion of the symphony, that the composer, who sometimes thought of himself as "almost isolated" and struggling amid universal indifference, was deeply moved. Berlioz replied in words that not only testify to his affectionate and remembering nature — his tenacity in feeling as well as in effort —but also confirm the impression that friendship in the Romantic period was a species of love affair: "It is so rare, my dear Humbert, to find a complete man, with a soul, a heart, and an imagination; so rare for characters as ardent and impatient as ours to meet and be matched together, that 1 hardly know how to tell you the happiness it gives me to know you." , s Berlioz values Humbert's "solicitude, anxiety, and advice" with regard to the Smithson "episode," and wishes it clearly understood that the symphony is not a deed of revenge. "It is certainly not in that spirit that I wrote the Witches' Sabbath. 1 pity and despise her. She is an ordinary woman, gifted with an instinctive genius for reproducing the wrackings of the human soul without ever having felt them, and incapable of conceiving a mighty and noble attachment such as that with which I honored her." " It is traditional for the unrequited lover to welcome like a reprieve the news that his idol is unworthy of him, so here again Berlioz is following tradition. Yet his judgment was not far from the truth in estimating the emotional make-up of the Shakespearean actress. Had he only been able to remember his own words when Harriet once more came within his ken, he might have spared himself much anguish. But she was now part of him and his "natural tenacity" would not let her memory go. The suffering and introspection undergone about her had certainly served him, for although his symphony was not in any literal sense about her, any more than his future works were about the accidents of his life, the power which creates music and the power which creates a beloved person are related if not identical.15 As Yeats says somewhere, "True love is a discipline. . . . Each divines the secret self of the other, and refusing to believe in the mere daily self, creates a mirror where the lover or the beloved sees an image to copy in daily life." Stendhal calls the process "crystallization," comparing the beloved to an ordinary twig 12 L.I., 66-9. "L./„ 69. » L.I., 70. 15 Berlioz was himself convinced of this (/_./., 82) and other artists have agreed with him. See below, Chapter 18.

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which one dips into a saline spring and which comes out sparkling with a thousand jewels. 18 It is begging the question to say that the lover's view is a deliberate illusion which worldly judgment should help to cure; one should rather note, in the lives of artists especially, the meaning and the successful results of "crystallization." 17 Whether Berlioz' next essay in loving has or has not artistic significance, it shows at any rate a pleasing variation from his first. At the institution where he and Hiller taught music to the crippled daughters of the rich, they had a third colleague, a pianist like Hiller, named Marie Moke, commonly called Camille. She was the daughter of an unpractical professor from Ghent, whose wife had left him in order to support herself and promote their child's musical career by keeping a linen shop in Paris.18 T h e shop had been given up when Camille — a pupil of Kalkbrenner's — had herself become a teacher. 18 She shone by virtue of natural abilities and acquired graces. She was small and of a lively beauty — an oval face, dark hair and blue eyes, a bewitching figure and a light step, which led Berlioz to nickname her Ariel. But though gay and teasing she passed for a proper young lady, ostensibly chaperoned by her mother or a suitable substitute. Gifted and self-assured, she was determined to succeed. She also liked masculine attentions, and as Hiller tells us in his longsubsequent memoirs, he and Camille found a way to exchange greetings first, then unsupervised visits, which were made possible by Mile. Moke's having pupils at various points in the city. For some reason Hiller came to use Berlioz as his messenger, with predictable results. Berlioz' reserved manner, the story of his hopeless love for the illustrious actress, his maturer mien — he was twenty-six and Hiller hardly nineteen — aroused Camille's curiosity and she set about to break down his defenses. As Hiller is the first to admit, she finally told Berlioz outright that she loved him and that his reticence was foolish.20 Hers was the gift that makes artfulness assist and not replace nature: she was a siren as well as an extraordinarily good musician and vivacious companion. It was not long before she achieved her new conquest. By the end of April, Berlioz had Yeats: (128s, 8 8 ) ; Stendhal: (1242, passim). This has of course been done in fiction, from Plato's Symposium to Hardy's The Well Beloved. 18 T h e father, Jean-Jacques Moke, a linguist of some note, was a friend of Fétis's. Camille's brother Henri made a name as lecturer and writer on racialist history. 18 H e r pianistic education was begun by Jacques Herz and Ignaz Moscheles; then she studied with Kalkbrenner and finally achieved her mature style with the aid of Thalberg. 10

17

nisi,

561-2.

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125

done with Harriet. By the middle of May, he was completing his arrangements for the concert on the thirtieth; he was in touch with Haitzinger, the leading tenor of the German theater in Paris, for a production of his Francs-Juges opera at Carlsruhe, and hoping to go there himself in a few months. He was also pushing the same opera in the lesser Paris houses. By the beginning of July 1830, that is to say before the time set for the Rome Prize competition, Berlioz and Camille were thoroughly in love. The letters which convey to Humbert Ferrand the progress of this affair doubtless sound foolish, like the earlier rhapsodies about Harriet, but the later ones display a superior brand of foolishness. "All that love offers that is most tender and delicate, I have from her. My enchanting sylph, my Ariel, my life, seems to love me more than ever. Her mother keeps saying that if she read about us in a novel, she would not credit it . . . I'm now locked up in the Institute for the last time; I must have that prize, on which our happiness so largely depends. Like Don Carlos in Hernani, I say: 7 will have it.' She is anxious about it too, and to reassure me in my prison, Mme. Moke sends me her maid every other day to give me news of them and take back news of me. God! How I shall reel when I see her again in ten or twelve days! We'll have many obstacles to overcome, perhaps, but we will. What do you think of all this? Is it conceivable? An angel like her, the finest talent in Europe . . . Oh, my dear fellow, if you heard her think aloud the sublime thoughts of Weber and Beethoven, you would lose your wits!" n This is love chatter of the sort that Molière approved when he said that the only reasonable way to love was to love madly. For the first time Berlioz' senses were awakened, and not merely his imagination primed by Shakespeare's art; he was actually loved and kissed and doted over by an intelligent and beautiful creature. Camille must have been equally caught by his great capacity for passionate expression. "Delicate and tender" denote soothing qualities that are too readily ascribed by men to women in general, but that the son of Mme. Berlioz would probably not mistake, even though Camille had been the aggressor. She was so obviously a woman with whom conversation was possible, the woman fated by talent and inclination to be Berlioz' partner, comforter, lover — and wife, for Mme. Moke's privity to these love passages meant that Berlioz had made honorable proposals. A M. de Noailles, a friend of the Moke family, had spoken in Hector's favor as a match worth risking from the practical point of view. But this was not decisive. The rival without whom no comedy is complete was a man of fifty-eight, M. Pleyel, successor to the 21

LL, 73-4.

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firm w h i c h Hector had approached about his first compositions when a b o y of sixteen. O f course M. Pleyel's solid advantages outweighed those of the impetuous and impecunious y o u n g artist, and Mme. Moke's consent to the engagement between Camille and H e c t o r may have been secretly provisional. A s for "Ariel," her coquetry and premeditation at the beginning, together with her greater experience of love-making, led to recurrences of that private double-intention which usually precedes faithlessness. T h e attentions of her devoted genius no doubt flattered her, his personal magnetism, w h i c h so many people were to feel and speak of, moved her, and his obvious innocence touched her. But his musical powers and artistic opinions made her feel an inferiority she sometimes rebelled against. T o tease her fiancé and reassert her mastery, she would play him some trivial air, or some Italian cavatina w i t h improvised embroideries that set his teeth on edge. W h e n she declared that those fireworks were at any rate "prettier" and "more amusing" than his favorite Beethoven adagios, Berlioz would storm and preach and remonstrate, unwilling to hide from himself or from her that such a preference cut them asunder. H e was head over heels in love, but music was his religion and just criticism a necessity of his nature. A n d at this she would laugh a shrill laugh. 22 N o t that she lacked a soulful side. She could play Beethoven magnificently and even feel or pretend that such playing sapped her strength, so that H e c t o r w o u l d beg her to refrain from such musical indulgence. Clearly Camille was a two-sided creature, half Ariel, half coquette, and Berlioz' efforts to keep her at spiritual concert pitch may have sown doubts into her mind whether this orphie lover should enlarge into a husband. T h e torments of the artist in love with a woman w h o by training and taste is conventional and worldly wise have given rise to the maxim that any man with w o r k to do should forego what is called romantic love. Compared with Berlioz, was not the good Hiller, w h o took his pleasures so placidly, the truly wise man? H e had enjoyed his flirtation while it lasted and escaped without scars. T o our k n o w i n g age, w h i c h has discovered that love is a w h o l l y endocrine event, and which believes that romantic passion is w h a t the movies portray, the question may seem settled. But w e are perhaps deceived b y both the scientific and the theatrical makebelieve. T h e Romanticists themselves k n e w better than to be either 22 A legitimate inference from her "portrait" in Soirées (12th) Eves., 137. See also the (25th) Eves., 256.

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clinical or "romantic" about love. If they had to be given a label, they would have to be called "comprehensive realists," men who instinctively knew that there is more than one layer to experience and many mysteries encountered in exploring it. They took this so much for granted that they seldom bothered to stress their own versatility. Hence we miss the point and value of their multiple perceptions when we tag them all with the one name "romantic." Consider for example that "romantic" drama and historic event, Victor Hugo's play, Hernani. Berlioz was one of the squad of Hugo's defenders who on February 25, 1830, helped make the first night a success, but neither he nor a number of other partisans mistook Hugo's drama for a report on their own view of life, love, or historical truth. Although the play dealt with love in relation to social class, the rallying of an artistic generation to its support is not to be explained by "romantic" interest in this ordinary sense. W h y the occasion should be remembered and cited is in fact anything but clear from the usual accounts, which overlook the host of implications that belong to the term Romantic when fully charged. In the first place, the point of the battle was not philosophic but strategic. The victory meant a public recognition of certain technical liberties which had already been wrested in print, and supporting the play meant the public affirmation of freedom for all the arts. This was something more than defiance and eccentricity, and in stressing the "revolt" we forget the high spirits. We hear of Théophile Gautier, aged eighteen, and of Gérard de Nerval — the translator of Faust — each leading his shock troops, whom Hugo had provided with a red card bearing the Spanish password Hierro (iron), but we must not miss the tone of self-mocking. We hear of Gautier's red waistcoat, which was in fact pink (on the reversed principle of the English hunting coat which is called pink and is in fact red), but we should recall his intense application as a student of poetry and painting. And at the same time we should think of the Gargantuan picnic held in the deserted theatre hours before the performance, the Rabelaisian traces being left, in the exuberance of youth, to discomfit later comers." Clearly the battle of Hernani was in part a collegiate "rag," in part a public demonstration of bright youth against bourgeois old age. The rebels wore their hair long and left their beards untrimmed in order to be conspicuous and because the academicians in the parterre were baldpates — whence their designation as perruques (wigs). There was a hint of flaunted sexual supe-3 As the biographer of Gautier has said: "Laughter, the laughter of common sense, was as truly romantic as suffering." (Quoted, in italics, 1182, 168.)

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riority in the manifestation, and its seriousness lay precisely in its refusal to be solemn. T o the playwright and his fellow romanticists, the virtue of this open cabal was that it was not bought support but testimony to principle. It was an artists' claque like the smaller one that Berlioz had himself organized for Gluck at the Opera. Hugo having passed the official barrier of the subsidized Comédie Française by getting Hernani accepted, it was essential for him and his friends to keep it from being hissed off the stage. But the perruques were as determined as the innovators; for them the encounter was not only a defense of taste and tradition but of cash royalties. If the new school won, the old clichés would no longer be marketable. T o preserve the sanctity of verse and dramatic seemliness, the perruques must shout down this "formless" work in which the scenes were laid in different places, in which the lines did not pause exactly in the middle, in which the meaning overran the riming edge of each verse, and in which such intolerable bluntness was reveled in as saying aloud 'It is midnight.' " Hugo's defenders won. The play ran on for an unusual stretch of forty-five nights, enriching its author though exhausting his friends, for each night a new batch of Parisian bourgeois had to be outfought with lung power. What was finally vindicated, however, was not a new school of drama. Had Hernani been too unlike the older plays it would never have been accepted and produced by a company of actors brought up in the old tradition. What was won was the freedom to make verse varied and flexible, and the right of the artist to create reality by using the concrete, particular detail, and even the commonplace. The one scene that hushed both friends and enemies, the love scene between the brigand Hernani and the patrician Doña Sol, implied another lesson based on a natural fact —that love does not consult the Almanach de Gotha; but of equal importance was that it reintroduced lyric utterance into tragedy. These liberties, snatched in public before the habit-ridden Parisians had, for all the arts, the value of a successful revolution. The new freedom did not of course commit every Romanticist to a complete acceptance of Hernani. Berlioz, in giving his sisters an account of the play, made reservations: "I find in it certain things, especially ideas, that are sublime, and other things and ideas that are ridiculous . . . as 21

To gauge the strength of the academic resistance one should read in Dumas' Memoirs (Vol. V ) the account of the rehearsals, in which Mile. Mars kept nagging Hugo about his lines, hoping to make him lose his temper and thus create a pretext for throwing up the part. The exchange of words has been excellendy translated by Mr. Biancolli in his Great Conversations, 315 fr.

Camille M o k e in 1830, b y Alophe

" T h e celestial p i a n o f o r t i s t . . . " — DE Q U I N C E Y

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for the verse, which I dislike anyway in the theatre, these run-over lines and broken half-lines which enrage the classicists leave me quite indifferent. When spoken it all sounds like prose and f o r that reason alone I could prefer it." But since Hernani was meant to be in verse and since Hugo knows how to write regular verse when he wants, it would have been simpler to follow the taste of the crowd — it would have saved the breath of all the jackdaws of the pit. T h e innovation is one that leads nowhere. Still, Hugo has destroyed the unities of time and place and for that I take an interest in him as a daredevil who risks death to set a mine under an old barrier." M With the knowledge of what Shakespearean form could do for his own work, Berlioz supported Hugo on the unities, but curiously failed to see w h y the poet attacked the rigid, foursquare line and the stopping of sense with rime. Yet it was the same Berlioz whose melody and rhythm broke with rigidity and squareness, and who had written a little earlier: "When I think of this realm of chords which scholastic prejudice has kept untouched to this day, and which since m y emancipation [from the Conservatoire] I regard as my own domain, I rush forward in a kind of frenzy to explore it." 2 7 In effect, Berlioz was accomplishing reforms parallel to Hugo's; and so were Balzac and Stendhal, who sat apart from the rest on the famous night and later voiced strong dissent from Hugo's supposed principles.28 Delacroix, also present, soon grew to hate the label Romantic, and while indulging his distrust of both H u g o and Berlioz, dissociated himself from the movement which he none the less incarnates in the art of painting.29 Thus in the aftermath of Hernani Berlioz and four of his peers, working in parallel ways for comparable ends, were kept by the fog of contemporariness from recognizing their intimate kinship. A t best they sensed the common resistance and conceded one another a certain esteem. For a time they used, or they redefined for special use, the term "Romanticist." Berlioz, in an article of this very year 1830, discussed "classic and 2r ' Berlioz, it will be remembered, liked the realism in free verse of Saurin's Beverley, or the Gambler. 29 A.R., 92. 27 A.R., 88. 28 Balzac's review (1235, Oeuvres Diverses, II, 115 ff.) attacked Hugo's construction and lack of plausibility; Stendhal disliked the "tirades" reminiscent of classical tragedy and shared Berlioz' preference for the use of prose. 29 Delacroix (Journal, passim) deemed Hugo and Berlioz violent in their effects and loose in their form, not seeing that they might be technicians as fully conscious as himself, against whom the same charge was leveled by the ignorant.

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romantic music," but he was not attached to the word, and generally the new artists found the name embarrassing. In truth, all historic names are unsatisfactory — Renaissance, Gothic, Baroque, and Puritan, no less than Romantic. If the historian heeded individual disclaimers, every movement would be entirely emptied of participants. The names remain, for convenience and as a reminder of the stylistic unity which is apparent to later comers and defines for them the time and tone of a period. Just as this definition calls for a careful sifting of doctrine and polemic in the light of the works themselves, so a knowledge of the Romantic temperament requires that we examine the lives of its representatives in the light of the facts and feelings we actually find. Enough of Berlioz' life has been shown so far to suggest that his "romantic nature" was very complex, and not to be defined as simply "wild" or "rebellious," or as a predominance of heart over intellect. In his first love affair the very opposite was true. His genuinely romantic love was precisely unlike what we think of as a storybook romance: it is the modern, fiction-fed public that boils down Romeo and Juliet to the balcony scene, whereas to render the fullness of his conception the Romantic-realist Shakespeare required the feud and the murders, the coarse chitchat of the Nurse, the union of spirits and bodies, and even the preparation of Romeo by an earlier unrequited love.80 Berlioz' love for Camille Moke, or Victor Hugo's for Juliette Drouet, each following an attachment (like Romeo's) to a cool or distant goddess, fulfills this condition of completeness, of versatility, of eager exchange of selves, at the price of possible tragedy. The difference between this sort of romance and the ordinary sort is that the first is properly a piece of work, an energetic fusion of mind, sense, and knowledge into passion truly so called. Most people are as incapable, or as unwilling, to make this effort as they are to write a poem or compose a quartet. Convention sustains them in their laziness and so "romance" becomes a byword for trifling. Critics of manners can only conclude that in society a great emotion is as rare as a great idea, and thus on every point the man of thought is bound to conflict with the man of common experience.31 To the artist, 30

O f t e n cut f r o m modern productions b y actor-managers w h o know how sentimental ( " r o m a n t i c " ! ) their'audience is. 81 A s Coleridge pointed out, this is w h a t makes Polonius seem so foolish in Hamlet's presence. But this in turn does not mean that the romantic lover must be highfalutin, on the contrary. T h e Romantic Chateaubriand, speaking of an eighteenth-century translation of Dante, quotes the climax of the Paolo and Francesca episode — " W e let fall the book through which was revealed to us the mystery of l o v e " —and d r y l y adds: "Perhaps this elegant turn of phrase does not quite render the simplicity of the line [in Italian] : ' W e read no more that d a y . ' " ( 1 2 4 3 , 1 , 336.)

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idea and emotion are one, and love and art have a common root in the dedication of the person to a self-justifying activity. Hence Berlioz says that great music is only inferior to great love, and conversely that a passion for music is as complete a dedication of one's whole being as love or religious vows." On one side stands flirting or sensual sport; on the other, marriage for convenience, social or personal; and beyond both, romantic love in the tradition of the troubadours, Dante, Heloïse, or Tristram. Being simply affectionate as well as romantically passionate, Berlioz felt great misery in being at odds with his family over the very reason for his existence as he saw it — art. Until now he was still in their eyes a wayward son. Happily, in the midst of his preparations for the concert of May 1830, Hector received from his father a letter which made the son reply at once: " M y excellent Father: How I thank you for your letter! What good it did me! So you are beginning to have a little confidence in me? I hope I may live to justify it. It is the first time you have written to me in this way, and I thank you a thousand times. It is such bliss to be able to bring honor and pleasure to those who are dear to us. Of course I should be delighted to have you hear me — of course. But for you to take a trip to Paris there must be more positive assurance of the concert, which in fact can be put off at the slightest whim of those in authority." ** This prudent thought proved correct. The concert had to be postponed, each of the several parties to the arrangements waiting upon the others' authorization — the manager of the hall and of the orchestra, the Prefect of Police ("whose subordinates try to make an affair of state out of a mere formality"), and the Superintendent, "who could stop everything if he wishes, for in this free country the musicians are numbered among the slaves." Other plans included a trip to Carlsruhe for launching the FrancsJuges and the winning of the prize — "If I can make myself small enough to pass through the gates of the kingdom of heaven." " These two objects would not be incompatible, provided the compulsory stay in Italy which went with the prize could be shortened, and the optional sojourn in Germany lengthened. Failing Carlsruhe, there was Kassel, where Berlioz heard that Spohr "unlike the Paris composers" was favorable to new music. About the same time a libretto based on Chateaubriand's novel Atala 82

Mem., II, 340; Soirées (nth) Eves., 118; L.I., 82. Compare Balzac's purpose, at the age of 33, to "consecrate himself to the happiness of a woman." (163, 56.) a A.R., 93 ft. "ÂJL, 96.

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had been unanimously accepted by the Opera and orally promised to Berlioz for setting. The management had been strongly pressed by the influential composer Onslow, w h o had read the score of Les Francs-Juges and become an enthusiastic supporter of Berlioz. But the inevitable twoparty system was developing around the newcomer. The opposition included some who had never heard his music (the Know-Nothings) but who had exercised a preventive caution by circulating the rumor that Berlioz was insane. The libretto moreover alarmed M. Lubbert, the Opera director. Atala was in a new genre — romantic, he thought — which "he did not want to introduce." H e felt that "Auber and Rossini were enough novelty" and that "even if Beethoven and Weber came back to life, he would have nothing to do with them." 85 T h e truth was that the director, being responsible to both the government and his financial backers, was looking for a sure draw. Rossini having broken the monopoly of the Gluckist school, the Opera had nothing left. Weber was too great a risk; Mozart always had to be patched up and failed anyhow. A new, adaptable, and money-making composer must be found; it was not likely that a revolutionary like Berlioz would turn into a darling of the public. Berlioz could see through the director's irrelevant excuses; and writing of the general situation, the composer gives us the mood of 1830 — the sense of a general apathy no longer bearable, especially after the victory of Hernani. There is a whiff of apprehension at the government's stubbornness and a hint of disaster, foreshadowing the barricades of July: " T h e Feydeau house is in the last stages of musical degradation . . . That odious monopoly must fall, and it will fall if the petition is presented to the Chamber of Deputies. Benjamin Constant [a famous liberal member] and two others would have sponsored it if the Chamber had not been dissolved. Would anyone believe that any foreign troupe can set up an opera in Paris, while the French alone must submit to being skinned alive at Fevdeau? . . . Apparently nothing must be done to give umbrage to that conservatory of routines and clichés; everything must be done to increase the prosperity of the rondo, the romance, and the duet. And despite the great power of these musical forms we must give subsidies out of the taxes (paid by provincials w h o never see a comic opera) in order to enable a new director to go bankrupt every other year." 36 Through the voice of the exasperated Berlioz speaks the Liberal of 1830: " W h y for heaven's sake not let them all play what they like — operas grand or little — give subsidies to none, and allow bankruptcy to take its course? It 35

A.R., 97.

mA.R.,

97S.

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will cost the taxpayer less in the end, and some theatres will find a w a y to thrive." Unrest was in the air and Berlioz was right to doubt whether his "instrumental drama would inspire sufficient interest to bring back to Paris" the public summering outside the capital. B y the end of May, his concert was definitely postponed until autumn. But he had heard his new symphony at the first two rehearsals and he was fully reassured. "I apparently did not fool myself when I was writing it. Everything is as 1 conceived it. Only the March to Execution is fifty times more terrifying than I expected." ST T h e rehearsals were trying, because the orchestra had to "blaze a trail through a virgin forest. Besides many things that are new to them, the greatest difficulty is that of expression, in the first movement especially. . . . It will take angelic patience on the part of the conductor to teach them all the nuances." ™ In spite of contretemps, then, Berlioz' score — a revolutionary work if only in this elaboration of expressive nuances ** —actually resounded in Parisian air before the Rome Award and before the political revolution.40 It came into being also before a new piece by Berlioz —an overturefantasia on Shakespeare's Tempest — whose public presentation happened to precede that of the symphony. The Tempest piece owes its double inspiration to Shakespeare and to Berlioz' feminine "Ariel," so it must have been taking shape in his mind in the late spring of 1830. These middle months of the year were in truth dramatically full. Berlioz' revulsion of feeling against Harriet Smithson coincided with her descent to a mute role in an inferior work, under the pressure of financial need.41 As the play opened, the Figaro, still counting on the performance of Berlioz' symphony, published the famous (or infamous) program which is supposed to retrace the development of the composer's love for the actress. T h e document attracted considerable attention in artistic circles at the time, though as is now clear its biographical worth is slight. Finally, during the early summer, Hector and Camille were making plans to be married as soon as he had won the prize. 37

A.R., 101. 94-5. Wm. Wallace: "Modern orchestration may be said to date from the 'Symphonie Fantastique' of Berlioz. In the sixty-three bars of the opening Largo there are more expression marks and indicated nuances than in a Mozart symphony. This shows that he attached the utmost importance to tone. . . ." ( ' ¡ I S , HI, 729.) 40 The work is thus Opus 4a in point of time, and 14a (as usually given) in order of publication. 41 234. Even in the mute role, however, she greatly impressed the spectators. (See above, Chapter 4.) 39

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He went en loge for the fourth time on July 15." Like other things, the cantata subject showed the influence of the stirrings of change: the poem on "The Death of Sardanapalus" was an almost prophetic choice. Harking back to Byron, it depicted a king refusing to abdicate and perishing in the fire set by his own hand — a drama which gained in vividness from the recollection of Delacroix's provocative masterpiece, exhibited at a previous Salon. Shut up in his little cell, Berlioz thought he had at last mastered the art of avoiding the evil consequences of his genius. He put all his skill into making a "regular" work, reserving his inspirations for a kind of appendix, which he would tack on afterwards, when the prize was safe in his pocket. For at the public performance in the autumn, he could not afford to appear in the artistic undress of a routine score. Things fell out as he had planned — or nearly. He won the First Prize by a unanimous vote, which was unheard of, and doubly remarkable because of the unusually large number of candidates. He was m o r e o v e r the "first first," for the Institute having a prize left over from the previous year, was obliged to choose two firsts. Finally, at the public audition, after Berlioz' Sardanapale, that of his running mate, Montfort, suffered the indignity of a polite hissing. As "appendix" Berlioz had composed a "conflagration" in which the king with his treasures, slaves, women, and horses, dies amid the flaming ruins of his palace. All the melodies heard earlier in the scene — from the song of the bayaderes to the declamation of the stubborn despot, return together in altered form to create an expressive confusion.45 At the public rehearsal of the entire piece on October 29, the audience was uncommonly large and the numerous musicians present gave Berlioz' piece an extremely warm reception. But the next day — Prize Day — Berlioz suffered a double disappointment. He had to attend alone, for Camille's mother had grown huffy at the failure of his parents to recognize the engagement and would not allow her daughter to appear with him at an official function; nor was Lesueur, ill in bed, able to applaud the public vindication of his pupil and of his own teaching. Worst of all, by accident or design, the performers missed their cue and the "conflagration" finale did not explode. The piece ended in a most /«expressive confusion. And Spontini had come on purpose! Friends assured Berlioz that his entire work had been "deeply 42

T h e caretaker Pingard was b y then one of his oldest friends: Berlioz, whose knowledge of geography was extensive and accurate, loved to make him talk about his seafaring adventures, and later retold a few. ( V.M., II, 1 7 - 2 8 . ) 43 T h e full score has never been found; a first draft exists in manuscript, from which a piano transcription was published in 1908. (22 and 20; see also 606.)

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felt and appreciated," but his sense of reality denied him any comfort — "one can't feel and appreciate what one has never heard." 44 Meanwhile The Death of Sardanapalus had not been Paris's only excitement. Just as Berlioz was finishing his score in camera, the bullets and cannon balls of the July insurrection were crashing into the doors of the Institute. On Thursday July 29, after two days of fighting outside, Berlioz left — the earliest of the contestants — and spent hours seeking arms and ammunition in order to take part in the battle for liberty. He had first run to the Moke household to make sure the two women were safe, then accosted a patrol of National Guards, who sent him to the City Hall — in vain. Finally, strangers supplied him with a musket, a knife, powder, and balls, but by then the fighting had died down, and all Hector could do was to lead a street-corner crowd in the singing of the "Marseillaise." The next day Berlioz went to St. Cloud with a great mob, then back to the gates of Paris at the Etoile. Nothing happened. The revolution was over. Even the guards posted in the Bois de Boulogne were returning to Paris. "The idea that so many good men have paid with their life for the conquest of our liberties," wrote Berlioz to his father, "and that meanwhile I have been useless, upsets me a great deal. It's another anguishing thought added to the rest." 45 Surprising as it is to hear the unpolitical Berlioz utter such feelings and speak to the doctor about "our liberties," the reasons for the anomaly are not hard to find. The thirst for liberation, and especially for free expression, had come to affect all ranks. The King's ordinances seeking to muzzle the press, the Chamber, and the electorate had set off the riots that destroyed the dynasty. Though violent, the outbreak deserved even an artist's admiration: "The splendid order that reigned during these magical three days," writes Berlioz, "is maintained and confirmed; no looting, no lawlessness of any kind. The people have been sublime." He regretted only "the dead who cannot be brought back to life . . . nor the poor trees on the boulevards, which are cut down too." *· By its revolution the nation settled a quarrel of thirteen years' standing. The events that had made so vivid an impression on the boy Berlioz when his father became mayor in 1817 had been part of the royalist reaction seeking to annul the revolution of '89 and bring back the old regime. For ten years the "Ultras" made headway, exercising repression on the press and the schools, on beliefs and manners, and on the arts. They split their own party and angered the country by preventing

**A.R.,us.

**Α.Κ. 104.

46

A.R., io4-5.

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Chateaubriand from carrying out a strong foreign policy. Then in 1827 the tide turned; Chateaubriand's group made common cause with liberals of every shade, their bond of union being the resolve to win individual and national self-expression. The young journalists — Guizot, Rémusat, Mignet, Carrel, Thiers — wanted intellectual scope and political careers. The artists wanted the perruques retired and the field opened to talent. During nine months of political imprisonment in 1828, Béranger wrote ballads that stirred the people, and when the moderate Journal des Débats attacked the Ministry and was prosecuted in August 1829, the alarm became general. Soon an organized refusal of taxes was under way, and too late Charles X planned a campaign in North Africa to secure prestige and divert men's minds. A liberal petition only roused him to issue the July Ordinances, and in three days all was over. More than most revolutions, that of 1830 concerned the intellect. Precisely what is now felt to be its weakness — the precarious union of extremes that brought it about, its management by bankers and prompt neglect of the masses —shows it to have been mainly permissive: every group wanted the Open Door, feeling that if only it were let alone it could do great things. It could, in Chateaubriand's words, "achieve reality by the path of dreams" — including the dream of high dividends. What the men of 1830 sought and accomplished was change under control, and the revolutionary leaders' appeal made much of their devotion to Order. But the more generous spirits among the young were moved by reforming zeal as well. The need for a more equitable society was preached by many (notably by the followers of Saint-Simon) and one of the most thoughtful among them, Charles Duveyrier, persuaded Berlioz that "the social question" was paramount. About the time that Carlyle and Mill across the Channel were feeling the same influence, we find Berlioz writing that after much reading and reflection, he is eager to add his effort to the rest: "Tell me what I can do and I shall give you my ideas on the ways in which I can be musically useful to the great work when I return to Paris." 47 For the nation at large, the issue had been Old regime versus New, and the new order should have meant, in Berlioz' words, "the betterment of the most numerous and poorest class, the natural ranking of talent, and the abolition of privileges of every kind." 48 The hope was to carry forward the early work of the Great Revolution, which implied, besides social justice, the individualism of the educated and the articulate. It was 47

128 (written from Rome). Liszt was even more deeply involved in SaintSimonian doctrine. See 210. «Iii.

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precisely this double goal that nullified the Three Days' work: the workmen who had held the barricades were cheated out of their claims by the businessmen and lawyers. While the aged Lafayette played to the gallery and a bourgeois king was handed a scepter in the shape of a green umbrella, the common people were hoodwinked. They showed that they knew it in the further outbreaks of 1831-1832 and succeeding years. But they were put down because the demand for "the natural ranking of talents" conflicted with ameliorating the lot of the poor. Those who had engineered the revolution knew what they wanted and they wanted it for themselves. Like the young artists, the young journalists and politicians had knowledge behind them and purposes ahead. They seized the facilities they needed with the least show of force because they knew that "perpetual revolution" can be an ideal only for people who have nothing to do. This is what imparts to this historic year the character of a skillful, conscious, and high emancipation, even though the postponement of the social question prepared the next revolution: to stay in power the statesmen of 1830 were driven to destroy the hopes they had aroused. And yet, for a brief time the workaday world seemed to welcome liberty and to emulate the artist in his love of ordered freedom. Great things might indeed be about to begin.

Berlioz' Training and Tradition If you really wish to hear . . . my cantata [Sardanapale], I must warn you that it is a very mediocre piece which by no means represents my inner musical thought. . . . The score is not in keeping with the state of modern music; it is full of commonplaces and of instrumental vulgarities, which I was forced to write in order to win the prize. Since you are good enough to take an interest in my work, I would rather that you came to hear . . . my overture to Shakespeare's Tempest at the Opera. At least there I shall be speaking my own tongue. — BERLIOZ to Adolphe Adam, Oct. 25,1830 The men of 1830 rightly felt that their tutelage under sleepy elders was over, but Berlioz' note to Adolphe Adam underlines the piquancy of the recent prize winner's part in that situation. Berlioz is inviting his colleague to a concert at the Opera which would include a mature

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Berliozían work, and at the same time answering the other's request for a ticket to what might be called Berlioz' graduation exercises. T h e young master was a pupil just finishing school; he was supposed to ripen in Rome, but he was already a composer with a symphony in rehearsal which was to prove a landmark in the history of art. This telescoping of chronology has misled many a reader of Berlioz' life. W e are used to the undergraduate poet who publishes a masterpiece while still at Oxford, and to the infant prodigy, like Mozart, who fulfills early promise. But Berlioz' is a different case, with f e w parallels; and because of the technicalities that surround music, the extent and solidity of Berlioz' powers at the age of twenty-six are easy to mistake. Had Berlioz in fact earned the right to "speak in his own tongue," as he intimated to Adam, or was the phrase mere brashness? Was Berlioz as a musician well- or ill-trained? Do his works after 1827 show the vagaries of a tyro, or do they boldly extend a tradition? These alternatives are often encountered, singly, in the Berlioz literature, the writer's choice depending largely on whether he likes Berlioz' music in general or approves the principles which he thinks it exemplifies. Some, for instance, have found the "explanation" that they wished in Lesueur's long-winded theories. Others blindly accept, as regards Berlioz' technical training, young Mendelssohn's hasty condemnation. In truth one is offered more solutions than there are difficulties to solve. T h e resulting contradictions put one in mind of Shelley, long considered gifted but brainless simply because his intellectual aims were comprehensive and his preparation remarkably broad. Certainly Berlioz' technique in 1830 was the product of extensive schooling and a wide tradition, modified by independent thought. A f t e r a year's private study with Lesueur, he worked for four years under this same master and his colleague Reicha within the walls of the best school in Europe, the Paris Conservatoire. Founded in 1795, under the leadership of Bernard Sarrette, and enlarged two years later with some of the best musicians of the National Guard, the institution meant to conserve the gains made by the art of music during the French Revolution. It established the first thorough and systematic curriculum for the study of all branches of secular music anywhere in Europe. B y 1810, its teaching body numbered 1 1 5 , and by 1820 it attracted students and instructors 1 It might have been numbered Opus 13 had Berlioz preserved all his early works, comprising one opera, t w o overtures, a symphony, a mass, several lyric scenes, the Faust suite and a book of melodies. F o r further details about the Tempest fantasia, see below, Chapter 7.

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from all countries; the textbooks written by its specialists were standard. By 1830 Cherubini's discipline made it inevitable that any student on its rolls should do at least two things: work extremely hard and master the system. Today this system may well seem antiquated and deficient but at least it enforced industry and imparted a technique. As for Berlioz' particular teachers, it is worth remembering that Reicha taught César Franck as well as Berlioz, and Lesueur taught Gounod as well as Berlioz. Indeed, of Lesueur's pupils, fourteen took the Rome Prize and became respected professionals. Are we to assume that the master's lessons "took" on them but not on the one whom Lesueur himself singled out as the most gifted and the most likely to honor his country as a composer? T w o academic tests prove the frivolity of such an assumption. One is that Cherubini, despite personal animus, passed Berlioz four times in Fugue as a preliminary to competing for the Rome Prize, and finally awarded him that prize in a unanimous vote of the Institute's music section. The other, more conclusive still, is that Berlioz' music criticism, which was technical to a degree no longer current in journalism, demonstrates his thorough knowledge of "the rules." The works that he heard followed these rules, and he judged them accordingly, in detail and by ear. He himself, though departing more and more from the scholasticism that was taught him, retained to the end a respect for the conventions wherever they aided expression instead of shackling it.2 So much for Berlioz' relation to the academy. His subsequent history tells us that he went far beyond any of his classmates, however high they rose in the professional world's esteem. Therefore he brought other things to bear on music than Conservatory rules. And here the fact that he began his formal studies at nineteen must be accounted an advantage. The myth that he was by then "too old to learn" rests on a total misconception of what art and teaching really are. For one thing, the parallel with the musical performer is false. T o play an instrument calls for a muscular co-ordination which is best acquired in infancy, but composing by no means requires precocious facility.* In the second place, it must not be forgotten that Berlioz arrived in Paris with a training which even 2

It is high comedy to read Berlioz' reservations about Wagner's harmony and Wagner's suggestion that Berlioz should have submitted his symphonies to Cherubini: each speaks of the other like a professor, doubdess for the same reason, that their esthetic purposes were incommensurable. The only common measure they could think of was pedagogic. 'Wagner, Albert Roussel, Duparc, Tchaikovsky, and most of the Russians began their studies later than Berlioz and under far less favorable conditions. The dour Fétis himself learned harmony on his own and by composing pieces until he satisfied his ear. (1398, Feb. 17, 1944.)

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our most enlightened modern schools seldom obtain from their students: competence on two instruments and the ability to sing at sight and realize chords mentally. In short, it was not Berlioz' musical education which began at the Conservatoire, but his academic apprenticeship — a very different thing. This circumstance was, again, most fortunate. Any good teacher would prefer his most gifted pupil to come to him possessed of a good grounding in the rudiments and nothing more — no premature "style" to unlearn before going on. The reason is that every real education differs from every other, and that the valid discipline of any art is not something that can be taught. On this point our modern faith in ubiquitous "education" is touching but mistaken. In art one can teach only those who already know — those who instinctively feel — how words or paint or sounds can be handled. What makes them pupils is clumsiness, not ignorance. By trial and error (called exercises) an artist teaches himself, though not necessarily by himself. Schooling provides useful but limited aid — textbook rules and teacher's tricks; contact with the work of the masters; criticism and encouragement. The true teachers give goals, not rules, and even these goals are but the intermediate steps between what the student can do and what his ultimate wholly individual intention is. Besides, if he is ever to "speak in his own tongue," it is important that he do not show too ready a hand at using his teacher's tricks. Better remain clumsy than turn slick. Berlioz at a later date could very justly speak of young SaintSaëns's "regrettable lack of inexperience." * Good teachers take these truths as self-evident and recognize that far from conveying the essentials of an art, the rules and problems set down for academic use are but a temporary scaffolding which every genuine creator must sooner or later discard. The reason is that any textbook or system based on past practice necessarily rests on a kind of average of that practice. 5 Fux's Gradus, drawn from Palestrina, may be excellent, but it forbids to others much that Palestrina allowed himself, and it destroys the context — musical, emotional and historical — from which Palestrina's art arose. Gédalge, long after Bach, informs you about the fugue, but no two of Bach's fugues are alike — and none bears any true likeness to those Gédalge himself has written. The public may like to

*5 730, 682.

Hamerton on a sister art: "No drawing-master could earn his living by teaching art seriously, and rhe chief anxiety of every drawing-master is to invent the prettiest and easiest substitute for real art that he can . . . But the worst of all such systems is that, once their fixed point reached, they arrest the education of the eye." ( 1 0 8 i j . )

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think of the "laws of music" as sacrosanct, but these laws are no more fixed than those of writing or painting. Indeed they are possibly less fixed. As Koechlin has pointed out: "There is no rule of harmony without exceptions. . . . The grammar of language is far more fixed, more general, less subject to exceptions than the so-called grammar of music. Most of the 'errors' and 'prohibitions' have never had currency outside the textbooks. Chords are always written first by the empirical instinct of creative musicians; but what musical instinct is remains a great mystery. . . . Besides, musicians can use not one, but several distinct vocabularies, idioms, or styles. . . . " * This does not mean "Burn the textbooks," but rather: "Bear in mind the difference between the world of art and the stuff of the handbook." The variety of art and the roughness of its actual texture are at the opposite pole from the artificial neatness of the manual. But only a lively historical sense will keep the busy teacher from equating his convenient sketch map with the reality. In the Paris Conservatoire this awareness was and has remained entirely lacking.7 Reicha enforced rules that he could not justify, though he sought mathematical "proofs"; Lesueur deemed Beethoven a dangerous model; Cherubini corrected Bach's "barbarisms." It is perhaps inevitable that instruction in the arts should be narrow and bigoted. Even the student who learns one kind of harmonic analysis from a master-composer finds that another calls it "inaccurate and incomplete"; and this does but express the artistic need to feel things in a definite, exclusive way. This being so, it follows that genuine talents will revolt against masters who cannot see that limited validity is the price of a teaching system. In Berlioz' day, musical dogma was deceptively "rational," resolutely consonant, foursquare, and timorous to the detriment of musical expression. Formulas took precedence over form, and custom (such as that of writing rapid vocal fugues on the word Amen) was the final answer to 6 729t 631-4 and 453, 176-7. As Shaw long ago pointed out, with only just enough exaggeration to be emphatic: "People would compose music skilfully enough if only there were no professors in the world. Literature is six times as difficult an art technically as composition: yet who ever dreams of going to a professor to learn how to write?" (Í75», II, 40.) 7 Looking back on his student days, Harold Bauer wrote in 1948: "I have often wondered what the net effects of the Conservatoire method of education were on French musical culture. It was very thorough. It was tremendously serious. It exacted from the students a terrific amount of application and industry. • · · But, says the captious critic, is this enough? Where is the aesthetic thrill, the life substance, the irresistible creative urge? Perhaps we have to look elsewhere for the reply." {92η, ii8.)

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all objections grounded on dramatic fitness. It was this body of rules, attitudes, and routines that Berlioz had to pretend to absorb in order to please his teachers and win the prize. T h e chief virtue of this subjection is that it enables the biographer to refute the charge of "scant schooling." T o o many people will judge a canvas only after they have been assured that the artist went to drawing school: well, Berlioz spent five years "learning to draw" and thus ranks among the longest-taught musicians in the history of the art. In addition to the Rome Prize, Berlioz undoubtedly derived from the Conservatoire further lessons in tenacity and self-discipline. For his success came only by repeated efforts, each of which was a new challenge to compose against the grain of his musical instinct. He thus had to formulate and decide for himself every stylistic question. Although by 1830 his own technique was not fully worked out, his style was set. Its most remarkable feature was balance: the narrowness of his teaching did not beget a compensating wildness, nor did the praise of routine make him seek the false originality which consists in doing everything by opposites. He worked hard for his results. Just as he had to study orchestration by himself because the Conservatoire had no course in this art, so he studied classic and contemporary scores to supply the lack of historical teaching. He "prepared" for every concert and opera he attended, and read Beethoven, down to the last mad, unplayed works. Beethoven was his link with the great traditions that the Conservatoire ignored: German, English, and Italian. From conversations with Reicha and Lesueur, and reading in the works of their youth, Berlioz was familiar with the conception of revolutionary music, that is to say, music for the public occasions of a sovereign people. A t the same time, he neglected neither the tragic style of Gluck and Spontini nor the light, expressive, transparent forms of eighteenth-century French comic opera. Both these schools were in decline, but they still held a message for the synthetic mind who could also assimilate the meaning of Weber's romantic works and remember the moving idiom of folk sonç and liturgy. In a word, Berlioz took all that the Conservatoire had to offer, and by an eager catholicity filled in most of the deficiencies with which we would now charge the curriculum. By sifting this broad heritage through a temperament that the academy could hardly weaken, Berlioz had no trouble avoiding the trap of eclecticism. Rather, he rediscovered, or recaptured, the living tradition. This is no mere figure of speech. One has only to compare the music of his teachers with his own early works to see that his kinship is not λνίΐΐι

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them but with great men whom he did not know — Bach, Purcell, or Scarlatti. "It is a miracle," says Koechlin, "that he should have rediscovered so many things virtually unaided. . . . He resuscitated Harmony; finding it feeble and monotonous, he had to re-create it altogether, through the use of significant (and subversive) chords, diminished sevenths with exceptional resolutions, and unexpected progressions of common chords." 8 Orchestration was in the same anemic condition. "Considering the feebleness of his models," says Emmanuel, "one can only wonder at the ease with which Berlioz found his way in the maze [of orchestral possibilities]." His grouping of timbres and their use for structural purposes was "a new conception of the orchestra, of which he was thoroughly conscious. . . . One can deduce from the Symphonie Fantastique all the lessons in instrumentation which his successors have followed with credit and glory." β In melody, as we saw, Berlioz took naturally to the ancient modes. Lesueur, who admired them in the abstract, thought them dead beyond recall, but Berlioz revived their use with the utmost naturalness, and — as Debussy was later to observe — prepared the way for a broadened conception of tonality.10 Once again a comparison between Berlioz' songs and the airs of the period shows the conscious creator at work. Finally, from this earliest period also, Berlioz' rhythm was varied, vigorous, and free, which was enough to cause his judges the deepest alarm.11 "Berlioz," says Hadow, "was one of the greatest masters of rhythm and modulation that the world has ever seen. Modulation is a lesser gift, for anyone can learn how to modulate, but only a genius of the highest order could have devised a metrical system of such variety and extent." 12 Rhythm, melody, harmony, sense of key, orchestration — these comprise the elements of music. What of Berlioz' power to combine them in intelligible forms, in the strict sense, to compose? The question must necessarily recur in connection with each of his major works. Here one can say categorically that form was his preoccupation from the beginning, spurred as he was (once again) by the inadequacies he felt in his teachers and by the stimulus he found in Beethoven. In his daring essay on the master, written at twenty-five, Berlioz declares the Ninth Symphony the starting point of any living music, and he analyzes the work 8

45 h «7398

Ibid. Ibid.

101398

(1837) 10.

('837) 16. (1837) 10. 12 E.g., Jannequin's Battle of Marignan (1529); Senfl's Kling-Klang (c. ijjo). 11139S

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Mozart's Don Giovarmi) and so on. In his Capriccio on his Brother's Departiere, Bach imitates the postboy's horn. In the Leonore overture Beethoven heralds the governor's approach with a flourish of trumpets. All opera is full of such "realism," and the practice can scarcely be objected to as "unmusical," since it is nothing more than the transfer, as it were within quotation marks, of music from life back into a work of musical art. Next comes the imitation of birds, and less frequently of what Artemus Ward aptly called "zoological animals." Beethoven put three distinct birds into the Pastoral;18 Haydn gave voice to roosters, lions, flies and others in The Seasons and The Creation. Here the rendering of life by music, being more approximative — more far-fetched — runs a great risk of artistic discomfiture. Success often depends on the particular performance, on the degree to which the effect is stylized when repeated or developed, and also on the predispositions of the listener. At a first hearing, provided one has not read the program, Strauss's Don Quixote can easily pass as a Theme and Variations for Cello and Orchestra; one hardly notices the brief "representative" passage of the battle with the sheep. After reading and looking for it, however, it is equally easy to be irritated by the composer's attempt to make one see. Still later, both experiences being forgotten, one may well recover the sense of a unified musical texture. When this occurs it yields a clue to much of the hard feeling about imitation. The true listener does not want to see images nor think in words; he wants to follow music and, as we say rather enigmatically, thinks in sounds. The intrusion of other symbols necessarily breaks the "suspension of disbelief," just as would the King in Hamlet if having nothing to say on the stage he engaged in an interim chat with a spectator: he would still be using words but out of relation to the context. It follows of course that "thinking in sounds" also precludes thinking in technical terms while the music is playing. The man who is counting full closes or changes of key is not thinking in sounds either; he may be doing his duty preparing a critical article but he is not listening, he is 13 T h e only performance in America of the work Beethoven used as a programmatic pattern — Knecht's Portrait Musical de la Nature (by the Philharmonic Chamber orchestra under Hans Lange, Feb. 3, 1936) showed the vast gulf that stretches between intention and execution: Knecht's imitations generally failed under Berlioz' third rule calling for simplicity and plainness. It is only fair to add that on the same principle Berlioz seems to question the merit of Beethoven's nightingale: the bird does not sing on pitch, nor yet in a fixed call. (1398 ( 1 8 3 7 ) 10.)

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construing. But this in turn does not mean that the musically trained may not record in their hinder brain the cadences and modulations as they pass. Just so in the favorable conditions enumerated by Berlioz, certain effects may be recognized as imitative without breaking the musical thread. In the foreground of consciousness is music pure and simple; in the background are faint associations, some originally ours — we cannot help it; others thrust in from outside — we cannot help that either: both legitimate. Indeed it may be that what we feel as the direct sway of music comes from the stirred up depths of this background. For one kind of association merges altogether naturally with musical sensation itself — the associations of rhythms —and it is not surprising that by far the greatest number of imitative effects in music depend solely on rhythm. The device is in fact the most powerful and the least imitative in the copycat sense. Listen to Wagner's "Forest Murmurs" in cold blood and you will find that what you hear is nothing like nature's noises, neither in pitch, timbre, nor design. The persistent rhythm achieves the effect, not through accuracy, since the seesawing on two notes is quite untrue to life, but rather in the way that medieval artists copied leaves in stone — wzfaithfully but with an eye to reproducing the character of the beauty they saw. Beethoven's brook is in the same case: running water does not sound like harmonically ordered sixteenth notes in the lower strings. Yet we are satisfied — as again in Berlioz* "Royal Hunt and Storm" from Les Troy ens —with a rhythmical design which has an affinity with nature. It is this affinity which explains Berlioz' second category of effects, termed by him Expressiveness. Its aim he defines as that of "arousing in us the idea of the various affections of the soul and awakening through the ear alone sensations which in nature human beings can perceive only through other senses."14 In making it clear that "tone-painting" and "descriptive music" are metaphorical terms, he adds that he doubts whether poetry and the art of drawing have anything like the same expressive power as music.15 In other words human behavior can show the same correspondence with rhythm as brooks or birds, while pitch, timbre, and other elements of music can add their precise vividness.18 This is all that Strauss meant when he said that music could express anything, even a soup spoon. This unlucky exaggeration has given rise to much needless "/jpi (1837) 16. 15

Ibid.

ieOne

is reminded of Locke's blind man restored to sight, f o r whom the color scarlet was like the sound of trumpets.

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groaning, as might be expected from the critics' bad habit of warning us against horrors that cannot in fact be committed and that no one is thinking of committing. N o one can say what the rhythm of a soup spoon ought to be, but Bach knew what the rhythm of rending the veil of the temple must be, and he has given it to us twice, in the Saint John and in the Saint Matthew Passions.17 Those beautiful arabesques are certainly not imitation in any vulgar sense. We are not meant to see anything, nor to "hear" the tearing of cloth, nor yet to feel any simple emotion. We are only meant to respond to an aptly placed rhythmical pattern which is expressive in and of itself. T o this function of music — most strongly shown in rhythm, but not limited to it — we shall shortly return and will then develop the meaning of "expressive in itself." Whatever program music may be, then, it is not merely music that is pock-marked with imitative effects. These — to sum up — are but touches, usually decorative, though sometimes rhythmically determining a whole section, which like all other decorations or patterns must be judged for their fitness. The best proof that the principle of these effects is genuinely musical is that the overwhelming majority of composers since the thirteenth century have used them or added to the traditional stock. It is not hard to guess why the same term is used to denote the occasional use of an imitative toot or rumble in a score and the large-scale works stigmatized as "program music." The common element is the elusive relation of sounds to things. But whereas the purist may be able to dismiss a simple imitative effect as an error of taste affecting but a small part, or may even overlook it altogether,18 the programmatic intention is supposed to infcct the entire work. Every bar is accused of pointing to something outside itself, and the whole is held to be "unintelligible" until the listener has memorized a tale. Program music is only to be enjoyed in guilt because in order to render life it violates in us the organ that thinks in sounds. N o one, to be sure, can prove that certain notes are in themselves more musical than other notes, but one can and does say that putting these and 17 It is worth remembering that for the Passion music many organs possessed a terremoto or earthquake stop. 18 One would of course expect that a given composer might strongly dislike another's mode of imitation — W e b e r , for example, condemning Beethoven as too literal (1314, I V , 395). A n d since there are also period styles in this regard, the mutual objections of actual creators can be readily understood without damage to the principle itself. But critics should be more judicial and not be seduced b y the quaintness of Jannequin's Battle of Marignan into an acceptance which they would refuse, on the ground of imitation, to Honegger's Pacific 231.

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these together fails to create musical coherence. "Why," we ask, "does the composer suddenly do this?" And we are not appeased when told in a program note that the scrambling harmonies depict the evils of capitalism. We resent being interrupted by extraneous, and what is worse, literal business. Up to that point communication was going on; at the break, it is as if the author abruptly dropped into an unknown tongue — perhaps unknowable, since music, as everybody has been repeating for a hundred vears with the air of imparting a great discovery, "cannot tell a storv." Yet in this use the phrase is really ambiguous. We should say rather that music cannot give out information. This is the real reason why incoherence in music is fatal, for it cannot be repaired by the experience we have of things and their connections: musical sounds do not call up particular objects and any program notes stand outside the work of art. From this truth, some people infer that any piece of music which bears a title, or about which the composer admits that it was inspired by the sea, or by pictures at an exhibition, or by a football game, must necessarily be a fact-giving piece, impure and unintelligible without — without what? Without the facts which the piece was accused of conveying. With this paradox goes the belief that any other work called Suite in G or Opus 51 is ipso facto intelligible, coherent, and free of factual inspiration. These inferences are fallacious. Pieces have to be distinguished from one another somehow, by a name or number or tag, and the degree of explicitness of the name — Academic Overture or Aus Meinem Leben, or Nuages — tells us nothing about the quality of the music. Conversely the chastity implied by "Movement for Strings" proves nothing, since that caption may be a fruit of fashion like any other. Hearing the music itself and analyzing its structure are essential to settling the musical question — though it may be rash to let the decision rest with those who boast of their strictness, for it often turns out that these musical prudes are actually men of loose critical habits, who have never been strict with their own thoughts and words. Such imperfect criticism has in the first place ruined the word Expression by making it a correlative term. "This music," we may be told, "expresses the proud consciousness of the Russian people." T o which the musical absolutist justly retorts: "Nonsense!" or less irritably, "How do you know?" If the first speaker then brings forward the composer's statement that this is so, the discussion once again goes round and round the old vicious circle. The proper question is to ask how it is that many intelligent persons allow themselves and others to associate music with stories, events, or abstract ideas. The answer is the one reached by a

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different route a moment ago, that music is expressive in itself. It is expressive apart from the objects of its imitation; and hence can be dramatic in itself apart from the subjects of storytelling. Without reading any tale of adventure into Bach's chaconne for violin, we perceive in the succession of sounds an involvement of parts, a plot, akin to that of a drama. Many of Bach's preludes and fugues, most of Mozart's piano concertos and late symphonies, all of Beethoven's quartets and sonatas, and much of Brahms' chamber music — none of it titled — possess this quality. Any attentive enjoyer could point to passages that are especially significant, that is, expressive. Of what? — of nothing, and at the same time of things which our minds tell us are momentous.1· Similarly, an expressive face, an expressive gesture is one which conveys meaning without detailing its cause: an angry face expresses the person and his anger, not the accident, nor the words searing his brain. Any given gesture may occur in different situations and add to each something enlightening; yet it cannot be exactly described or defined, for then the words could satisfactorily replace it. But we know what the orator's gestures add or amplify. We likewise follow pantomime with great immediacy though we do not know the names of the persons nor the cause of their agitation. Pantomime is built up of expressive elements we cannot name, but can inwardly reproduce. In this silent drama there is a blend of the general and the particular which approximates what is meant by the expressive character of music. T h e best single statement about the nature of music implies this very analogy: "There is, in any specific sense, neither love nor tragedy in the music. . . ." The music merely "reproduces for us certain gestures of the spirit." 20 In a context of its own kind a musical gesture is very exact, unmistakable for any other, hence so rich in significance that it is able to fit " W i t n e s s the vast literature about the "philosophic" and "ethical" significance of Bach's and Beethoven's great works, e.g., Dannreuther: " W h i l e listening . . . w e feel that w e are in the presence of something far wider and higher than the mere development of musical themes. . . . T h e mental and moral horizon of the music g r o w s upon us with each renewed hearing. T h e different movements . . . have as close a connexion . . . as the acts of a tragedy . . . each w o r k is in the full sense of the w o r d a revelation. . . . T h e warmth and depth of [Beethoven's] ethical sentiment is now felt the world over . . . he has . . . widened the sphere of men's emotions in the manner . . . of great philosophers and poets." Macmillaris, J u l y 1876, quoted in G r o v e , rev. ed., I, 309-10. 20 R o g e r Sessions: " T h e Message of the Composer" (878, 1 2 3 ) . Edmund G u r n e y , in his neglected classic The Power of Sound ( L . 1880), calls the same inner function of music Ideal Motion. See especially pp. 168-9 and 350-3 of his w o r k .

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or correspond to a great many moments in human experience.21 It has been said that the great argument against descriptive music was that almost any sample of it can be used for a ballet, and intelligent detractors of Berlioz have shrewdly dismissed his symphonic movements as "glorified ballet."22 Though adversely meant, these two remarks corroborate the reality and set the limits of musical expressiveness: first, music and drama bear to each other the kind of affinity we find in ballet between sound and gesture; but, second, a more literal point by point correspondence between life and sound is impossible.24 It follows that the crime of the program composer is nonexistent for the simple reason that it cannot be committed. His opponents are in the position of those who prove a man illiterate and then accuse him of forging a check. The noteworthy fact about Berlioz' view of musical expressiveness is that he dwelt upon its limitations in order that its rights might appear the more plainly. In this he was again amending the eighteenth century, whose theories on the subject he was very familiar with: "Lacépède24 states . . . that 'music having no means at its disposal but sounds can only act through sound. Therefore, in order to retrace the signs of our affections and perceptions, these signs must also be sounds.' But how," asks Berlioz, "can this be done when music would express that which produces neither sound nor commotion — such as the thickness of a woods, the coolness of a field, the appearance of the moon? Lacépède answers 21 The German psychologist of music, Ernst Jentsch, has demonstrated this in his study of "Music and Nerves": "If music since Berlioz has employed certain well-characterized tone structures for the special description of definite things, events, and objects and has done this to a higher degree than had been true before, it cannot mean that the structures in question are appropriate only to this office and otherwise have no significance. The overtures of many a master since Berlioz remain the very same works of art even when the hearer does not know the corresponding operatic tale, and it is possible to . . . find correspondences which fit more here and less there when matched with the events of the opera, but about which no explanation seems to be necessary." (819, 44.) 22 Massine's choreography for the Symphonie Fantastique (1937) showed how danceable the music was, and at the same time how little the physical motions added to the musical "gestures." 23 For a complete theory of expressiveness as the source of beauty in all the arts, see L. A. Reid's A Study in Aesthetics (inj), which is incidentally the best discussion of art yet produced in our century. "Bernard, Comte de Lacépède (1756-1825), was a famous naturalist whose original bent had been toward music and who did not cease to compose and write upon the art during his very industrious career. Gluck had welcomed him from the start and in the musical circles that he continued to frequent he was considered not only an important composer but an exact interpreter of the most advanced views upon the art of music. (See his Poétique de la Musique, 1781-5, 2 vols., and Michaud, art. Lacépède.)

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'by drawing the feelings these things inspire,' and our Italian critic, M. Carpani finds this kind of imitation noble, beautiful, and entrancing. He deems it the sublime in music. I am far from agreeing with him, for I think he has deceived himself like many others, by a play on words, or rather by lack of precision. . . . Do we in truth find ourselves affected in a uniform, invariable manner by the sight of woods, field or moon? Certainly not . . . [Persons and circumstances differ.] Therefore music may well express love, jealousy, careless gaiety, frightened modesty, strong threats, suffering, or fear, but that these emotions are caused by the sight of a forest or by any other cause music will never tell us. The pretension that would extend the prerogatives of musical expression beyond these already generous boundaries seems to me absolutely untenable. This is why few composers of any merit have ever wasted their time in the pursuit of this chimaera . . . which would be to abandon music for the sake of something that is neither music nor painting." 25 Within its natural limits, says Berlioz, music achieves expressive results through the use of parallels (images ou comparaisons). Here again he is arguing against a tradition which took musical painting for granted and assumed that Handel had actually rendered the falling of snow.20 "Admitting that there are indeed admirable examples of musical painting which we must take account of, at least as exceptions, we shall find on examination that they do not actually go beyond the vast circle circumscribed by the nature of the art. These imitations are in the first place not presented as portraits of objects, but . . . merely serve to awaken by sensations that are musical the analogues of the original; and even so the hearer must be indirectly notified of the composer's intent. . . . Thus Rossini is held to have painted in William Tell the motion of oars, whereas all he has done is to put in his orchestra a rinforzando accented at regular intervals: this is but an image of the rowers' straining in cadence; their arrival has to be announced by the other characters. "Again, Weber is said to have depicted moonlight in the accompaniment to Agatha's air in the second act of Freischütz. This is because the veiled color of his harmonies, which are calm and melancholy, taken together with the chiaroscuro effect of the instrumental timbres, are a 2S

i398 ( 1837)16. 1398 ( 1 8 3 7 ) 17. Körner was writing about the same time: " N o t passion but character is the object of musical imitation; that is to say, music represents the inner world, the expression of the soul." W h a t he called Character Representation is equivalent to M r . Sessions' "gesture of the spirit," and he specified the w a y s in w h i c h rhythm and melody supply respectively constancy and change in a simultaneous equivalence to the flow of life. (/097, 100.) 26

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faithful image of pale light, and moreover express admirably the reverie of lovers beneath the moon which Agatha at that moment invokes. It can be said of other compositions that they represent a broad prospect, the illimitable, and so on because the composer has known how to suggest by broad melodic forms, by the grandeur and lucidity of the harmony and the majesty of a rhythm suitably contrasted with its opposite, the aspect of immensity. . . . But here again, the truth of the parallel will be recognized only by those who know ahead of time the subject treated by the composer." " In short, the critic must once for all separate in his mind information from meaning, denotation from connotation, or to use Berlioz' terms, image from expression. Critics who assert that music has no meaning may ponder the excellent anecdote which they misuse, of the pianist who was asked the meaning of the piece he had just played: he sat down to play it over again. He did not say, "This piece has no meaning"; he implied, rather, "The meaning is in the piece." It is in fact extremely difficult for music to be undramatic and wholly decorative. Music expresses because it is made by and for humans who, being alive, are necessarily alive to whatever impresses. All marked changes —of tempo, register, timbre, loudness, or tonality; all interruptions, and returns to former ideas; all climaxes, falls and silences, yield expression; and it follows that if these expressions are suitably ordered they will create dramatic meaning. In art, the opposite of "expressive" is not "absolute" or "pure" but "perfunctory." To sum up, we are played upon first by rhythm, then by combinations of all other musical elements in their given form, and from the whole we derive, if we like, a generalized drama. But precision within music can go one step further, owing to the natural or acquired power of melody. The least attentive ear manages to differentiate a dead march from a lilt or a lullaby. The more exercised the organ of inner hearing the more highly characterized does a tune become. We speak confidently of melodies as vulgar or noble, majestic or gay; we compare them to statements, answers, perorations, and dirges; and we logically end by referring to a composer's idiom: melody is a species of utterance. The musician who deliberately shapes his work to accompany or express a given drama will consequently attend particularly to melodic expression, using it as a means to psychological truth. He can disregard this opportunity only at his peril. His audience will not be made up of technicians, but whatever he proposes to the ear as the "speech" of Faust or Romeo will stamp him as a subtle, commonplace, sublime or "1398 (1837) .7.

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merely ingenious mind. Mozart is called a great psychologist in music because he gives us melodies that fit equally the situation, the dramatis personae, and the chosen musical form.28 What is more, he endows his characters with melodic thoughts that bear a family likeness each to each, just as the playwright makes his people speak each consistently and all unlike one another. This is genius, dramatic genius, and it is genius-inmusic. In Mozart's day, and down into Berlioz' time, the term "characteristic" was in fact commonly used to denote music of dramatic import, which had the advantage of preventing the ambiguity connected with the term "dramatic music." For this may mean music composed for an opera, or instrumental music standing by itself, the "characteristic overture" being the link between the two and leading to the genre instrumental expressif which Berlioz found in Beethoven." The disciple bears witness to the transition from opera to purely musical drama: "In Beethoven's predecessors the feeling for expression seemed to lie dormant and to comc to life only when they composed to words. . . . Beethoven began by copying the model of the Mozartian symphony. Then in his second symphony (in D) the style broadens without changing the form; one can already see the emergence of the expressive instrumental style, passionate, chequered [accidenté], and dramatic. Next comes the Eroica and the Pastoral, where the musician imposes a subject on his composition; finally, the great Choral Symphony. There the old mold is broken entirely, which allows the symphony, proud to enlist the aid of voices, to go forth freely and encompass all of time and space." 80 28 W h a t Leporello sings in the opening scene of Don Giovanni has been criticized as banal. So it is, hence perfectly in keeping, which establishes Mozart's high artistry no less than does "Il mio tesoro." 29 E.g., Beethoven calls his Sixth Symphony a " S i n f o n i a característica, or Recollections of Country Life." Berlioz' Roman Carnival overture has the subtitle, " O u v e r t u r e caractéristique pour grand orchestre.'''' 30 M.M., 226, 229. Beethoven's own views are unmistakable, though they lack explicitness and seem on the surface illogical. He believed the Pastoral intelligible without program notes or headings, yet he provided these. Nottebohm adds with regret: " T h a t is all he tells us." Again, Beethoven told Schindler hopefully that "any competent musician" could understand the character of a piece, yet he annotated his own scores, especially the later ones. Beethoven, in short, sensed the truth that though the music needs no explanation the public needs it — a paradox which can be resolved by distinguishing between the first hearing of complex works and later hearings after years of public commentary. Much like Beethoven, Weber uttered a detailed "story" explaining his Concertstück to his pupil Benedict, but was reluctant to have it printed. Berlioz wrote his own commentary on The Tempest and the Fantastique, but almost immediately discarded everything but the tides for the five movements of the symphony.

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These last words show that Berlioz includes voices in the genre instrumental and that he finds the distinguishing marks of the genre in its independence from stage action and its kinship with the symphony. This brings us to the last and most contentious matters in dispute. For there is a respectable body of musicians who are willing to admit the inherent expressiveness of music, to take imitative effects in their stride, and even to recognize opera as an art, but who balk at following drama entirely with their ears instead of half and half — half an eye, half an ear. It is they who stigmatize "program music" as a hybrid, an indefensible mixing of music with the written word and the pictorial imagination; and it is they who deplore this modern development as Berlioz' handiwork, indeed as his specialty. We have already seen how different were his views from those attributed to him; it remains to see how muddled and inaccurate is the conventional account of so-called program music in the history of art. What is confusing is that within the same two hundred years, 17501950, the instrumental form known as the symphony was established, and no sooner established than "emancipated," expanded, and crossed with other forms. At the same time, expressive means were enlarged through harmonic and orchestral invention, while the social uses of music were radically altered by the change from courtly to democratic patronage. On top of this a great age of literature and painting poured its treasures in a cataract of associative and suggestive ideas upon contemporary composers. Music ostensibly became multiform, dramatic, pictorial, philosophic, even political — if we count Mozart's Freemasonry and Wagner's Utopias as relevant. In the welter of ideas and suggestions, the one thing that public and critic managed to hang on to was the thing handed them at the door by the usher — the program. At the opera, the printed words and comments lost importance under the impact of things seen. But in the concert hall the scrap of paper retained its treacherous significance — as Berlioz' mistaken reputation demonstrates. When any new work was difficult to follow and it carried a title or a program, the path of least resistance was to say "literary music." 81 In concertgoers' talk, whatever is not protected by its century (Haydn, Mozart) or by an austere reputation (Brahms) is loosely referred to as 31

Ernest Newman long ago pointed out that one cause of prejudice against so-called program music was that it compels the listener to follow instead of daydreaming to the sounds. (314, 105-6.) But following does not imply feeling or seeing; rather it implies understanding, conceiving, imagining. One need not be angry in order to understand another man's anger, nor does one need to visualize him in order to imagine his passion.

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programmatic and probably felt as inferior. But in spite of its professed disdain, the new post-Wagnerian audience for concerts, which was formed in large part by attendance at the opera, remained addicted to explanatory notes in lieu of libretto, and expected them from the critic when the composer failed to supply them. The upshot is that what the public generally knows about the instrumental genre is a mass of biographical scraps interlarded with "explanations" of a poetic or philosophic cast. In réaction against this superficial education, twentieth-century listeners tend to demand absolute music from composers and relative silence from commentators: they fail to see that if they can now follow a late Beethoven quartet without the "story" that Wagner felt obliged to concoct, it is because a century of dramatic music —the forms and sounds, not the printed leaflet — has taught them. Tradition has achieved what Beethoven himself could not hope to effect without the aid of words. His symphonies having become familiar, the programmatic taint has rubbed off altogether.82 This has likewise happened for a good many later works in the repertoire, so that there is actually a discrepancy between what is conventionally said about —or against — program music, and what is actually felt while hearing the notes. In these circumstances, a composer as inadequately known as Berlioz was bound to be made a convenient scapegoat: he was the progenitor of every new title-bearing piece, but when this or that one had been assimilated he was left in isolation as the great and sole enemy of "pure music." The repertory being at no time very extensive, the earlier composers who had written music to subjects were ignored, and critics confidently asserted that the genre Berlioz had "created" was a kind of deviation from the straight path of art. This massive illusion is in fact wilder than any Witches' Sabbath, for even busy men like newspaper critics can, by picking up any serious treatment of the genre,33 assure themselves that music implying or using a program had existed long before 1830. N o need to read, even: laying a ruler across the thickness of the book would show that five eighths of an inch of the history elapses before one gets to Berlioz. He was working in an ancient, perhaps in the central tradition of music, not in a bypath, nor —as is often absurdly said —in a characteristically French fashion 32

For Sir George Grove in the sixties and seventies Beethoven was a composer of "program symphonies," of which the Eroica was the most obscure and the Pastoral the most obvious. In the revision of Sir George's great Dictionary, this aspect of the music is considered negligible, ( / j / j , I, 309, n. 5.) 33 E.g., Frederick Niecks's Four Centuries of Program Music, N . Y., 1907.

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which amounts to a national failing." Among the older musicians of all nations we find the names of such program composers as Matthias Werrekoren, Josquin des Prés, Nicolas Gombert, Tommaso Cimelli, John Munday, William Byrd, Andrea Gabrieli, Froberger, Vivaldi, Kuhnau, Buxtehude, Dittersdorf, and many others. Their "subjects" range from battle pieces to renderings of city noises, depictions of character ( U u m o r e grave, gentile, sincero, etc.), genealogies of Jesus, portraits of kings or gods, and meteorological fantasias (Faire weather, Lightning, Thunder, A Cleare Day). It is accordingly impossible to escape the conclusion that program music in some form or other has been as congenial to composers of all periods and climes as the use of imitative effects. In Berlioz' time, Spohr, Mendelssohn, Schumann and many of the virtuosos on single instruments composed tons of program pieces; after Berlioz, Liszt, Wagner, Tchaikovsky, Strauss, Mahler, César Franck, Delius, Ravel, Dvorák, Debussy, and d'Indy produced vast quantities too; and in our century, despite many verbal disclaimers the practice continues: Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Elgar, Milhaud, Alban Berg, Honegger, Hoist, Ruggles, Shostakovitch, Varèse, Prokoviev and others too numerous to mention have followed suit. It seems therefore a little late in the day to cry "Fie!" and attempt to load all the mischief upon the "revolutionary school of Berlioz, Liszt, and Wagner." s s If anything sets them apart from the rest, it is rather their steady soberness in choosing subjects and titles. Berlioz would certainly not have called any piece of music Clouds, Footsteps on the Snow or Enigma Variations; he would scarcely have composed portraits or pictures at an exhibition, domestic symphonies or memories of a child's Sunday. On the sufficient ground of linguistic fitness it would have seemed to him inartistic to entitle "seven symphonic expressions" Pauses of Silence, or 34

Read Sir Hubert Parry's fantasies about Celtic and Teutonic ideas of music in the article "Symphony" in Grove's Dictionary, rev. ed., as well as Hadow and Wallace, ibid., I, 358-60. Again in the same work, the article "Program Music" by Mr. Percy Buck is more moderate but quite unphilosophic in thought and expression. 35 A German student of the history of free orchestral forms states: " T h e r e have been periods in which Program-music reached much sharper expression, in which composers were much more consciously program-composers, and in which the coloristic element was much more widely used than is true of these three masters." (700, 196.) Corroboration may be found in most of the German reference works that deal with the subject, e.g., Paul Frank's Tonkünstler Lexicon. i:rh ed.: "Berlioz is not the inventor of program music, which is as old as independent instrumental music itself." (P. 37.)

Berlioz even to be as specific as Beethoven in his Op. 81a, Les Adieux, Γ absence, et le retour, which has aptly been called "the round-trip sonata." As for going back to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century "classical" practice and either pretending to describe in music a surgical operation or the attributes of the planets, or seeking to arouse vague reveries by "impressionist" titles such as Barricades Mystérieuses, the Romanticists were far too reasonable to favor such a confusion of genres and possibilities.38 The devotee of the old masters may reply that whereas these ancients and our moderns content themselves with attaching fanciful names to works in regular form, this "school of Berlioz" tampered with form itself and destroyed it. This is pure assumption, contrary to fact and likely to obscure the real problem of establishing a difference between Beethoven or Berlioz and their predecessors. As to form, judgment must be exact and comparative, that is, based on more than exceptions and accidents. Hence it is wise to consult an historian of music such as Otto Klauwell, who declares himself an opponent of programs, and who has examined the literature of the genre and classified it with regard to form. He distinguishes three varieties: ι. Music in which the program is without influence on the established forms. 2. Music in which the program leads to new forms, not to be measured by old ones, yet intelligible apart from the program. 3. Music which is an insoluble riddle without a program. And he adds the very important observation that the number of works in the third category is relatively small as compared to the total quantity spoken of as program music." The very possibility of this classification shows that something is wrong with our common division of music into absolute and programmatic, and it strongly suggests a truer one which, if adhered to, might put an end to the tedious wrangle about the whole subject. The suggestion is that we speak of Klauwell's first two varieties as dramatic music, and enlarge the term "scene music" to include the third. We should altogether drop "program music" as tainted with bad emotions, and likewise the adjectives "absolute" and "pure" as equally invidious and false.38 Instead of M

These works are, respectively, by Marais ( 1 7 1 7 ) , Buxtehude, and Couperin. " η28, vi-vii. 88 W . H . Meilers: "There never was a more imbecile notion than the twentieth-century cult of Pure Music, for the simple reason that although in one sense all music must be program music, since it is concerned with human emotions, in another sense music, insofar as it is music, can never be anything but pure." (838, 480.)

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these, we might say decorative or "pattern music." The main contrast would then be between "pattern music" and "dramatic music," as the twin heights of musical art, while "scene music" would properly designate all discontinuous musical effects, whether in the concert room, the opera, the movie house, or the broadcasting studio. Disagreements would continue as to which particular works belonged to each category, but there would be an end of the old-maidish sniffing at works of unexceptionable musical form which happen to bear a title or be linked with a story. Klauwell goes on to make other comments worth pondering: "In general it is not among the most inventive musicians, but among the great technicians that the representatives of program music are found."39 Hence even the program is not a crutch to the incompetent. As for literary habits in composers, Klauwell ascribes to Schumann the first use of poetical mottoes in musical scores for the guidance of interpreters; and he calls Berlioz the father of modern program (preferably dramatic) music, pointing out how his use of the leitmotif in "pure instrumental music" strengthened the form.40 For the symphonic movements by Berlioz which he analyzes — the adagio of the Fantastique; the march from Harold in Italy; the adagio and scherzo of Romeo and Juliet — Klauwell has only superlatives." If an opponent of program riddles can say this of Berlioz even when the form is unorthodox, perhaps it will be granted that the dramatic genre possesses independent life — independent both of the story printed in the program and of the goings-on of the opera stage. Far from being a destroyer of form, dramatic purpose has been an aid to its development; indeed its effect is identical in every art: by seeking lifelikeness at the expense of symmetry and smoothness of surface, drama increases tension and makes the artist more fastidious. A dramatic poet, for example, makes his characters speak not invariably in the most exquisite but in the most appropriate words: every speech must fulfill a double purpose — poetic and dramatic. We might therefore say that in the stage play we have a "program literature" in exactly the same sense as we have so-called "program music." Still in this sense, dramatic purpose has steadily influenced painting, sculpture and architecture, especially in 39

JD y s o n : " I n the earlier s y m p h o n i c p o e m s [Strauss] o b e y e d , like Berlioz a n d L i s z t , the normal outlines of s y m p h o n i c architecture. H i s themes w e r e b r o a d generalizations of s y m p h o n i c states and he used them b r o a d l y . " (7p^, 1 3 9 . ) 41 " A masterpiece . . . as n e w as it is great . . . a w o r k of genius . . . f u l l of melodic invention. . . . H e . . . b r o u g h t fresh n e w blood to the pure i n strumental f o r m . " ( 7 2 8 , i o j . ) 40

Berlioz their religious uses. The artist chooses to obey two sets of limitations which are close enough together so that he can conquer both, yet far enough apart so that the task of shaping his material spurs his invention. In a successful work of this sort there is no weak compromise or low cunning, but a product equally satisfying to the musical and to the dramatic sense. As Berlioz wrote to a friend while composing one section of his music drama Les Troy ens: "I am at this moment seeking for the musical form, without which music does not exist, or else remains only the humbled slave of words." 42 Whether for the listener or the composer, the points at which drama impinges on a piece of music may be few or many, close or remote. For example, in his first overture, Waverley, Berlioz chose a simple contrast, suggested by two lines of verse early in the novel: . . . dreams of love and lady's charms Give place to honour and to arms.43 In form the overture is absolutely regular, and its drama consists in the opposition of a martial theme and a gentler one, each developed in a traditional manner. The work therefore hangs by the very thinnest thread to its "literary" origin. Other pieces show a more influential connection. It is said that in the Magic Flute overture Mozart opens with three solemn chords in the brass in order to suggest the Masonic symbolism of the number three. But the dramatic force of that opening does not depend on familiarity with a ritual which most hearers know nothing about. Again, in the King Lear overture, Berlioz begins with three repetitions of a theme in the basses, joined to three "answers," a plan which may have been suggested by the King's questions to his daughters; although for the sake of form the third "answer" comes ahead of any "question," and thereafter the substance of the play is untraceable except in the general character of the headlong allegro.44 The demands of "drama" in these two overtures, as we can see, were slight, or rather, were general. The role of three's is, in any case, well-established in all forms of art: it makes 42

S . W . , 30. End of "Mirkwood Mere," in Chapter 5. 44 T h e belief that the triplets toward the end represent a "demented character" rests on a mistranslation of Berlioz' words to Liszt: " l e caractère échevelé" refers to the "headlong nature" of the passage; the French word for "character" in the sense alleged would be personnage. This mistake shows at once how Berlioz understood the embodiment of drama, and how easy it is to misinterpret an artist when some fixed idea of his method has taken root. 43

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repetition emphatic without tediousness. W e can hardly imagine Lear with nine daughters, and we may be sure that no composer would have stood for it, even if Shakespeare had failed to purge the clan for art's sake. In short, musical and dramatic form show parallelisms that permit a perfectly intelligible double game. Consider finally an example which at first sight seems to present the most damning traces of the programmatic heresy — Berlioz' treatment of Shakespeare's Tempest. Here is a well-known play which the composer thinks capable of translation into music; he is bound to give us imitative effects; and he moreover feels compelled to send the newspaper an explanatory notice, which if he had not discarded it would have become a program: literature fore and aft. Let us read it: "This overture," wrote Berlioz, "is divided into four parts, yet so connected as to form but one piece: the Prologue, the Storm, the Action, and the Denouement." 45 In short, it is an episodic or fantasia overture, reducible to four general terms.44 The word Prologue, it may be added, is used solely in order to keep to the nomenclature of the playwright: the manuscript score bears instead the musical term Introduction. The first section is precisely that: an atmospheric piece which sets the mood of the enchanted isle by the delicate orchestration and development of fragments of a forthcoming melody.47 This melody then becomes a song for high voices which tells in a few words the situation of Ferdinand and Miranda. The delightful spell is broken by figures in the graver strings, reinforced by the horns, trombones, timpani, and shrill flutes in rhythmic counterpoint. Scale passages and a chromatic progression rising to a mighty crescendo simultaneously suggest and conclude the "storm." There is a return to the opening mood of fairyland, interrupted a second time by a heavy rhythmical stomping, given out by the bassoons and violas. The graceful song theme suffers mangling and distortion while the cellos intone an anxious plaint — a double contrast quite independent of any program, and yet truly an "action." The next and last episode ("denouement") gives us the restored "Miranda" theme, followed by a 45

Courrier des Théâtres, Nov. 6, 1830; Revue Musicale (1830) 367-9; and

elsewhere. 46

The title of the printed score is: Grande fantaisie dramatique sur "La

Tempête" drame de Shakespeare (Ger. ed., XIII, 64). 47

The "delicate orchestration" (first and second violins divided into four groups led by two sets of four soli) is famous through Wagner's borrowing of it for his Lohengrin Prelude. The effect, says Wagner in his program, represents the soul floating through the ether. (241, V , 180.)

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return to the musical serenity of the island charm, and it concludes with a march-like tutti expressive of gaiety. W e rect>gnize Berlioz' characteristic conception of music-drama: from Shakespeare's play he has taken just four things — the mood of enchantment, the storm, the threatening monster, and the happy ending. By means of appropriate musical ideas — "expressive" through melody, rhythm, timbre, and harmony — he establishes the first mood and sketches the second and third in the most general way. 48 His commentary on the score, written for publicity, names Miranda, Prospero, the King of Naples, and so on, as a reminder of the salient points of the plot. But the music makes no more pretense to show Caliban than it pretends to discuss Italian government. In fact, this verbal program is not in any true sense the same as the inherent dramatic program which the composer followed and which we have retraced; for one could conceivably rename the piece "Robinson Crusoe" making the episode labeled "Action" suggest Crusoe's encounter with the cannibals instead of Caliban: the written program would then be different while the music and its intrinsic drama would remain unchanged.49 If dramatic and musical patterns are so easily congruent and adjustable, w h y —it may be asked —bring in Shakespeare? W h y not write simply a fantasia overture for chorus and orchestra? One answer is that the play, however distantly followed, helps the composer to plot his tonal and thematic course. For with all due respect to the familiar esthetic pose, music does not write itself from its own inner necessity. The art of sounds, like every other, requires a set of specifications to follow. The composer may spontaneously think of a four-bar theme, but if he merely sets it down it will not rise overnight like a bowl of dough and shape itself into a fugue or sonata. The melodic contour or implicit harmonies may suggest the fugue or sonata as the best form in which to develop the inherent properties of the theme, but these properties are many and their exploitation by no means inevitable. The composer deliberately 48 Forty-three years later Tchaikovsky's Fantaisie pour orchestre, La Tempête, followed much the same plan, which the composer expanded into a little prose poem prefixed to the Hamburg edition of the piano score (n.d., pp. 2-3). His friend Stassov wrote a still longer program, reprinted in 744, 431-3. 49 Is it necessary to point out that The Tempest, with a large or a small T , has been a traditional subject for musicians from Purcell to Honegger? In fact, various kinds of notable events are associated with the theme, from Filippo Ruggi's "Storm followed by Calm" (1757) to Beethoven's D Minor Piano Sonata about which he said: "Read Shakespeare's Tempest." The half dozen English musicians who had to do with the many revisions of this play are discussed by W . B. Squire in 886.

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builds, like the architect, to a partie, that is, a set of demands limiting his fancy.50 One is therefore entitled to turn the table on the purists and say — using a word just outlawed — that all music without exception requires a program, a "pure" form like the fugue being ruled by the most tyrannical program of all. The composer has learned the outlines of fugue form and knows at what point such and such features are expected, and at what other points he may be free and episodic. It is these conventional limits which many musicians call musical, as if they were ingrained in music like gravity in matter — whence the false contrast between "musical reasons" and "literary reasons" when both are simply artistic reasons to be weighed, at any given point, solely in relation to Form in the broadest sense.51 The only quarrel then between "pattern" composers and dramatic musicians is whether the latter may apply two programs of different origin, but both formal, to the raw materials of music. The composers who, like Purcell, Mozart, Beethoven, and Berlioz, live in a great age of literature, may also be tempted to become psychologists and moralists. They are then working at the focus of three converging purposes, three programs: the overture or rondo or sonata or any other form is the musical (or better, tonal and thematic) program; the few wellchosen features of any plot supply the dramatic program; while insight and experience dictate psychological truths affecting the choice of "expressive" or "characteristic" melodies. It might seem as if every corner of this intellectual thicket had now been probed, yet two tangles remain. One is the supposed difference in intellectual quality between dramatic music and pattern music; the other the real difference between dramatic music in modern and in former times. It has been argued that "the whole character of program music was misconceived by the masters of the first half of the eighteenth century, including the great Sebastian."52 They failed, it is said, because in 50 A t both extremes of its history, musical forms arose in obedience to external demands, the earliest being those of dancing and religion. In his last and freest period, Beethoven went so far as to say: " I always have a picture in my mind when composing and follow its lines." ( T o Neate in 1815, 928, 24.) 51 In music this broad sense coincides with the basic form of oratory: Exposition, Development, and Recapitulation. This is also to some extent a dramatic pattern, though the distinctions between a speech, a play and a sonata remain important and obvious. See below, Supplement 6. 52 W . J. Henderson in "Schumann and the Programme Symphony." ( 8 1 4 , 215.)

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their music the "emotional states" did not correspond to their titles. According to this view the program supplies "an emotional schedule" which is as a key to the musical treasure; without this key "the hearer is as helpless as he would be in the presence of a Bayreuth leitmotif divorced from its text." 5 3 T h e critic, writing seventy years ago, clinches his point b y asking: " W h o has solved the riddles of Beethoven's last Quartets and Sonatas?" 5 1 W e have b y now the advantage of him, as was said earlier, and have solved these riddles without the aid of any emotional schedule couched in words, simply by becoming steeped in the music of the whole period. This in turn explains the difference we feel between Couperin's elaborate Fastes de la Ménestrandise in five detailed acts, and the Beethoven sonatas: in the nineteenth century the expressive means of every instrument, except possibly the human voice, were greatly increased. Consequently, drama, which depends on nuance and contrast, was facilitated, at the very same time as the hopes of being literal and descriptive were decreased. Dramatic music therefore reached a degree of precision hitherto unattainable, expressiveness could now be premeditated and carried out, while form achieved organic instead of mechanical validity. This is the merit of the post-Beethovenian school to which Berlioz gave so much impetus in both theory and practice; f o r the first time "dramatic and musical imagery stood in equipoise." 55 This true amalgam of age-old tendencies takes us into the second issue just mentioned, whether the intellectual perfection of which music is capable is not in effect marred b y the addition of drama, our interest being divided and the double purpose being equivalent to duplicity. U p to a point, this is a matter for personal choice, or for an alternation of choices. N o one need be exclusive on principle and it is a fact that after a great sweep of dramatic works it is a pleasure — even a relief — to hear music that is free of second intentions and that presents its symmetries in single strictness. But if the question means that the arguments of the absolutists have any validity, the candid critic must differ; music does not present us with "pure forms"; the art of music has no essential connection with mathematics; and the Hegelian definition of absolute music 53

814,

216.

" 8 1 4 , 217. 55 746, 24-5. For a concrete example of what this means, take the close of Berlioz' adagio in the Fantastique: the English horn melody of the opening returns, but instead of the expected answer on the oboe, we hear soft chords on the kettledrums. This is indeed a dramatic suggestion of storm, but it is just as much a musical inspiration — a harmonic variation implicit in a part previously heard.

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as that "which would survive the destruction of the world" is simply hokum. These and other intimations of a disinfected, disembodied art belong to the unhappy Puritanism and snobbery of our time.5* They have never had much currency among creative artists and they are disproved not only by the merest analysis of words but also by a mass of evidence regarding the actual response to music. The classic summary of this evidence is that of Mr. P. E. Vernon, himself a musician, who studied under carefully controlled conditions what happened at concerts in a variously representative group such as inhabits Cambridge University. He sorted out persons according to training and exposed them to performances of every kind, genuine and supposititious, named and unnamed, and concluded that "the extraneous and irrelevant factors [in musical appreciation] are many, and so important that music without them is an impossibility. . . . Completely abstract (that is, purely auditory), music is unattainable." " Anyone who professes to speak about the nature of music would profit from reading the details of Mr. Vernon's results, which incidentally confirm the pioneer work of C. S. Myers." But the most casual observation of what most concertgoers do with music and take for granted about it would lead toward the same conclusions. In the first place, all but a very few listeners, trained or untrained, pure or impure, try to programmatize on their own account. This is a disease: Brahms wrote four untitled symphonies: what do reputable critics tell us the day after a performance? Why, that this or that beautiful passage is the first flush of dawn on their native hills, or the gates of heaven opening, or the feelings of convalescence, or the thrill of reunion with the beloved. Berlioz wrote a characteristic overture which he named King Lear. But the late Sir Donald Tovey — professedly an absolutist — insists that the work would be better called Othello.59 In one of the Bach fugues, that eminent purist, Sir Hubert Parry, discovered the river Lethe.80 Give these same purists the caption "Tragic Overture" and they vie with one another to guess which tragedy Brahms had in mind."1 It is a game of won't-you?-then-I-will, and M

The absolutists who pride themselves on the classic origins of their theories should turn to Aristotle who in the Politici says that music gives us omoiomata of the feelings of love, hatred, and so on, and that these act as a moral force whenever men take pleasure in the mimeseis or expressions of these feelings. (Bk. VIII, Ch. 5.) 58 89 67 90s, 123 and 227. 840. S90, 84. 80 Quoted in 892, 216. 61 See Mr. John Burk's comment on the commentators, 129$.

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most inspiring to research. Paul Bekker, studying Beethoven's so-called "Ghost T r i o " — "because of its mystical, dark-hued second movement" — finds it no mere chance that sketches for this piece occur on the same page as the notes for a projected opera on Macbeth.** T h e lesson is, first, that music is not in itself programmatic or absolute, but rather what the listener makes of it; and second, that people will talk, even if music is hard to talk about. In baffled excitement they grope for analogies which, silly as they are, do not contradict one another so much as they seem to. T h e gates of heaven and the sight of the beloved and the convalescent's joy doubtless refer to a single perception for which there is no name. Things are alike in this world and music strikes where the likeness dwells. A t the same time, artistic experience is quicksilverish, and comparisons are proportional rather than exact: Othello is apparently to T o v e y as King Lear was to Berlioz; but later T o v e y changed his mind to say that the overture is simply tragic — "the tragedy of the basses" which speak out the opening theme. In short it is language and imagery that are at sixes and sevens, and not music that is flying in all directions. 63 N o doubt this programmatizing is often degrading to the music, for some of the similitudes are "poetic" and "emotional" in a bad sense. Critics lacking in literary gifts borrow from the nineteenth-century tradition, which happened to be poetical, and fall into bathos. In the hands of the makers — Hoffmann, Weber, Schumann or Berlioz — the poeticizing is tolerable, for these men were themselves poets and bred on the poets. In later comers, who do not even read Schumann or Berlioz but their imitators, the style becomes unendurable, and one understands why it has led to the other extreme of dryness and pedantry. Yet there is a sound reason for the habit of discussing music in the vocabulary of action and emotion. T h e two are in fact one thing — an overt manifestation of our own bodies linked to a motion or gesture of the human spirit. Technical terminology itself records that relation. Music, we say, is walking (andante) or at ease (adagio) or dying (morendo) or growing

(crescendo) or trembling (tremolo) or joyful (allegro) or peaceable

929t 3 02 · Hence the experiments which professors occasionally make to test the dramatic or emotional contents of music are beside the point. The diversity they find is in the associations and verbal powers of the listeners and perhaps also in the quality of their ear. For good listeners the music is probably as clearly one and the same as would be any speech or poem or story read aloud. If the discrepant answers about the music were reflected upon instead of just tabulated, it would be seen how little difference exists between one student's "sweep of overwhelming love" and another's "vision of glory." 82

63

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(placabile) or loving (amoroso) or joking (giocoso) or fleeing (fugato), and so on ad infinitum. Any musical rehearsal calls forth still other physical-emotional terms improvised by the leader to convey what he hears mentally and wants executed. However calm before the public, a Kleiber or Toscanini drilling his men goes through a virtual pantomime and exhausts his stock of metaphors. This is true whether the work played is labeled dramatic or not. A Haydn symphony or Bach concerto calls for it as much as a modern tone poem, possibly more, for lack of expression marks in the text. Since common use makes these expressive words lose their literal meaning without robbing them of their truth, we have here another hint of the right attitude to take toward the fuller poetic or emotional descriptions—toward all programs whatever. There is never any need to track down a series of events or feelings from bar to bar, no need for anxious listening with the memory clutching at wisps of program. The faculty of thinking in sounds is the only one called on for activity during listening, and what it does is to grasp the contours of a mass of sounds. The title or commentary acts there not as a spur but as a brake upon the listener's imagination. Hence the passage that is "dying," the melody that is moaning (lamento) may evoke death or sorrow but without the factuality of an obituary. The wailing and extinction of the musical pulse are facts in themselves. Only respond, and it will not seem arbitrary for Beethoven to have marked in the score of Egmont: "This [tutti of strings] is to represent the death of Egmont"; and elsewhere, above the trumpet part, "Liberty reconquered for the fatherland." 64 As for the critic who has to guide listeners, he will avoid equating music and life even while relating them by analogy." He will say, "the 94 Mozart also wrote comments upon instrumental parts; Schumann and Brahms inserted poetic tags and Debussy psychological injunctions — Classics, Romantics, and Impressionists do not differ in this; they differ in their choice of words, which is a matter of temperament and time. " T h e belief that there are "correspondences" in man's experience is supported not only by the scientific proof that energy is convertible — for example that sound may be transformed into an image, as in the phonodeik — but also by the tendencies of man's sensory apparatus. Persons with hypersensitive hearing simultaneously experience sensations of color when their auditory nerves are stimulated. This so-called "acoustic-optical synesthesia" is abnormal — i.e., unusual — but not degenerate; Scriabin was a synesthetic for whom odors as well as colors accompanied sounds. The older psychology which postulated a common sense, that is, a single receiver and converter of the data brought in by the five separate senses, dealt with something that is valid at least For purposes of criticism in the arts. See below the question of Time- and Space-arts, Subchapter 16.

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movement suggests," "this passage is like," "one may imagine," and he will thereby keep clear of absurdity." The allegro of the Fifth Symphony is not a record of Fate going about her business; even in literature her knock is only figurative: all the more reason why in music it should remain so. In Berlioz* essays on Beethoven's Nine Symphonies, this distinction is preserved. He does not say the scherzo of the Eroica depicts funeral games but that its role and placing suggest this Homeric idea, which fits a work of epic intention: don't go looking for javelins, Beethoven never thought of them. He had other fancies and more pressing cares. His artistic reason for making a "light" movement follow a somber adagio was dramatic variety; his musical reason was that he liked to write scherzos rather than minuets; his psychological reason was that he was celebrating the memory of a hero. It is the psychological reason, of course, which leads a Beethoven to name his hero, for convenience, Egmont or Bonaparte. But this linking of music and life also establishes the power of the music to comment on the text; 97 we can invert the composing process and reason backward from music to life.®8 From almost all of Mozart's operatic music, for example, we can learn unnamable things about virtue, vice, and love. Listen, in Leporello's enumeration of Don Juan's conquests, for the contrast between the seductive softness of the strings playing thirds, the mocking arpeggios of the bassoons, and the punctuation of the recital by solitary chords in the horns and other woodwinds — all this beneath the coarse bonhomie of the servant's voice. One dare not say that this ensemble constitutes a treatise on morals, but it adds to treatises on morals a concreteness which they conspicuously lack. This addition, for him who takes it in, is music's wisdom, not to say a species of precise reasoning. 86

It is a characteristic of meaning that it does not bear paraphrase or explanation: the point of a joke, an honorable deed, or a work of art is partly destroyed in the act of being expounded to the slow-witted. 67 See Jules Combarieu, Les rapports de la musique et de la poésie considérées au point de vue de l'expression ( 7 7 9 ) , especially his analysis of the opening movement of Berlioz' Damnation de Faust, pp. 283-305. 68 That is w h y w e can criticize performance and say " T h e tempo was too fast, which turned a desolate plaint into a dance tune"; or " T h e choir takes every chorale as if it were a fortified place." T h e more we know about and around a piece of music, the more faithfully we can perform it and judge its minutest details: this is what sense of style means: e.g., Mr. Noel Straus on Brahms's C minor quartet: "Those who have maligned the work have failed to grasp its extraordinary tragic implications, and more especially in its corner movements. These . . . though played with great finesse, were not delivered with sufficient tragic emphasis to make their intentions clear. . . ." N. Y. Times, Jan. 7, 1946

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Hence it is by no means an invariable sign of the composer's failure to have to ask "Why does he do this?" The critic who cannot answer often condemns the piece, as he thinks, on musical grounds; yet it may be he is in reality trying to impose a dramatic or psychological program of his own. This has happened more than once to works by Berlioz that have overstimulated the creative urge in others. Thus Otto Jahn objected to the Roman Carnival overture because it did not remind him of the carnival he had attended; Griepenkerl conceived, for Berlioz' Faust, a different Gretchen; Hugo Wolf did not think the Corsair overture fitting for Byron's poem — which is not surprising since the overture has no connection with a given poem or story." Whatever the merits of any particular instance, the musical-dramatic tension spoken of earlier as a spur to invention in the composer is also a spur to reflection in the listener. When the listener is competent, cultivated, and curious instead of willful, when he does not yield to literalism (which is a form of laziness) he can derive from the contemplation of music a pleasure which is in the highest degree intellectual. And in doing so he justifies the conviction of the great musicians from Bach to Beethoven and Berlioz that through their combining of sounds they were not merely tickling the ear or the wits but speaking their minds. The discussion of what is implied by their faith has carried us far from the childishness of imitative effects and the vulgarity of programs. T o those who would persist in using these opprobrious terms, it can be said: "If the names mean what you suppose, then the thing doesn't exist; if it means something else, then its character being different must be spoken of differently. As a genre, program music is more dinned against than dinning; as an intellectual monster, it's a unicorn." Nothing could better summarize the steps leading to this conclusion than Berlioz' comment on his only program, in the revised handbill of the concert at which he first presented the Symphonie Fantastique, on December 5, 1830: The following program should be taken as the spoken text of an opera, designed to introduce certain pieces of music, of which it motivates the character and expressiveness. The purpose of the program is not, as some have affected to believe, to give a detailed account of what the composer has tried to do by means of the orchestra. It is precisely the opposite: the program is to fill the gaps inevitably left in the development of the dramatic plan by the limili9

See below, Chapter 21. vol. II, pp. 49-JO·

Berlioz tatíons of musical utterance. This is the only reason the composer has for resorting to written prose in explaining and justifying the plan of his symphony. T h e composer knows quite well that music is a substitute neither for speech nor for the art of drawing. He has never had the absurd pretension of reproducing abstract ideas or moral qualities, but only passions and impressions; nor has he ever entertained the even stranger notion of depicting mountains: he has only wished to reproduce the melodic style and forms of singing common among certain mountain populations, while at the same time imparting the emotion felt b y the soul in certain circumstances at the sight of those imposing heights. If the f e w lines of this program had been suitable for reciting or singing between the successive movements of the symphony, like the choruses in Greek tragedy, no one could have mistaken their intention. A s it is, instead of being heard they must be read; and the objectors to the practice here defended should remember that if the composer held the ridiculous and exaggerated views about the expressive powers of music which are imputed to him, he would certainly not have supplied a program; for on those views he would necessarily consider the program a useless duplication of the music. A s for the imitation of natural sounds, Beethoven, Gluck, Meyerbeer, Rossini, and W e b e r have shown by famous examples that it falls within the realm of musical art. Nevertheless, being convinced that the abuse of this device is very dangerous, that its applicability is very limited, and that its happiest effects are always close to parody, the composer of this symphony has never considered this branch of his art as an end but as a means. When, for example, in the scene "In the Country," he has tried to render the rolling of distant thunder in the midst of calm, it was not for the childish pleasure of aping the majestic natural sound, but rather to make silence more notable, and thus enhance the impression of anxious sadness and isolation which he wished to create at the close of that movement.™ 70

308, July 3, 1904.

8. Roman Holiday: Lelio December 1830 to October 28, 1832

T h e perfection of life is to carry out in maturity the dreams of one's youth. -VIGNY

29, 1830, Berlioz had written to the author of the "Marseillaise," "I am leaving Paris in a few hours" (to comply with the rules of the Institute) "at a time when my presence here would be most advantageous." 1 An acclaimed musician at twenty-seven, a leader, as we should say now, of the avant-garde, Berlioz was reluctant to leave the Parisian battlefield. Being moreover betrothed to a volatile pianist, Hector could hardly act the gay prize winner eager for freedom and adventure. On his way to Rome he stopped at La Côte, where his parents gave him an affectionate welcome intended to wipe out the memory of ten years' misunderstanding. He responded but was not distracted from his anxiety over a separation of eighteen months from Camille. His sisters were sympathetic, young Prosper, aged ten, was entertaining, and the neighbors were full of compliments for the doctor's son who was making a name in the capital; still, to Hector the little village now charged with grim memories was oppressive. Reduced to inactivity, his will fed riotous visions to his mind. Current political news encouraged the thought of a European struggle between the liberal revolution and its enemies. From this uninviting prospect Hector could only hope to snatch the bliss of dying with her in his arms.2 But music held an equal place with love: "Is there still no music in Paris? Have you finished your trios, and is Meyerbeer's new opera in rehearsal? Please greet him for me when you see him." 3 O N DECEMBER

1 A.R., 111. Berlioz had requested the Ministry to waive the rule and let him make a longer visit to Germany later on. H e had submitted in support a medical certificate stating that his nervous temperament was unsuited to hot climates, and his musical argument had been backed b y Fétis, Lesueur, Spontini, and Meyerbeer. (76p, 1 3 1 - 2 . ) 2 Corresp., 70. " W e are going to have war! W r e c k a g e everywhere. Men ivho think they are free will hurl themselves against men w h o are certainly slaves; maybe the free will be exterminated and the slaves will be masters." ' Corresp., 70. Meyerbeer's new opera was Robert le Diable.

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Meanrime, though Berlioz reproved himself ("a truce to this gnashing teeth"), he was alarmed at receiving no word from his fiancée. Instead, he received malicious hints from Hiller, Berlioz' predecessor in Camille's favor. Hiller had taken his superseding in good part knowing perfectly well who had engineered the change. Now Ferdinand enjoyed a mild revenge by intimating that Camille did not miss her lover in the least, and that the absent one ought to find consolation wherever he was: "No one was in despair on his account, nor felt any gratitude for his despair." 4 Hiller described the physical charms of some other nymph, to which Hector replied testily that he wanted no Epicurean counsels. In an energetic play on words, he repudiated the proffered means for reaching a minor happiness [arriver au petit bonheur — "getting there somehow"], and declared for major happiness or death. He was in fact ill. The weather was extremely cold, he had been taken on visits that reminded him of his Estelle, and he felt he was deceiving himself about Camille.5 He had to take to his bed, while his sister Nanci wrote to Camille and privately pitied her for being involved with a man of persistent ideas and so moody besides. When Camille's reply came Hector had left and his sister's sympathies shifted: in Camille's letter "not a word was written from the heart."4 Hector had also had to give up hope of seeing Humbert Ferrand, who was incapable of acting or writing promptly, and he had pushed on to Marseille. There he found several friends from the Conservatoire, went with them to the theater, and was treated by other musicians as a man of rising fame. "The town is superb, and were it not for the turmoil in my thoughts I would have enjoyed it." 7 More important than the town was Berlioz' first sight of the sea. The one available vessel for Leghorn would sail when the skipper chose, so Hector went out for a trial trip in a fishing smack. "Your sea is a sublime monster," he wrote Adèle, "I liked to see it swishing around my feet on the beach, covering them with foam and roaring like an angry beast. It should be magnificent out in the open sea." 8 He finally embarked for the five-day crossing, which took eleven. While becalmed, one of the old sea dogs related tales from the time when he was skipper to Lord Byron. Then contrary winds came up. Near the Gulf of Genoa the ship struck a gale, which besides being icy *Corresp., 71-2.

'Spontini, it will be recalled, had tried to dissuade Berlioz from engaging himself to marry. 8 From Nanci's diary, 26η, 483. 7 8 A.R., i27. A.R., 127.

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cold threatened to capsize them. The captain would not or could not shorten sail and for two days tacked and wore in stormy waters. A young Venetian corsair on board predicted disaster. The waves broke on the pitching deck, the passengers staggered about in agonies of fear and seasickness, even the sailors were losing hope, when the corsair, encouraged by some of the passengers, undertook to give orders and take in reefs. The pumps meanwhile had to be manned and a fire, set by the vessel's rolling, had to be put out: activity helped to curb the growing panic. Berlioz, though not seasick, had gone through all the stages of apprehension from the fear of drowning to the fear of not drowning fast enough. To keep himself from swimming he planned to pinion his arms in his own greatcoat, ready to welcome "the white spumed waves . . . that would rock him to sleep without pain." β On land, other troubles awaited him. Although the new French government had decided on peace, revolution was still active on Italian soil, and so were the police. Two of Berlioz' shipmates were arrested while the rest fled to join "the brave and unfortunate Menotti." 10 Berlioz' baggage was repeatedly searched; all foreigners were suspect. "There are fifty formalities to go through before one can stop in a city." Berlioz might have thought himself in the blissful twentieth century except that the inefficient police were more of a nuisance than a threat. Still the Papal Nuncio would not grant him a visa to Rome. At Florence, Berlioz received his first remittance from the Director of the Academy toward which he was bound, and at the same time heard the news that revolution was driving the foreign residents from Rome. "And I must go into that hornet's nest because forty old dotards, high priests of Routine, have decided that I shall be competent only after a stay in that musical sink." 1 1 Berlioz' obviously bad mood was not soothed by Italian music. He went to the first night of Bellini's Romeo and Juliet and exploded to his father: "Disgusting, ridiculous, impotent. That little fool has apparently not been afraid that Shakespeare's shade might come and haunt him in his sleep. . . . I ran here into a young Danish architect whom I knew in Paris. Danish! That also brings up Shakespeare. We spoke of Elsinore and Hamlet. . . . I may be in Italy but my sky is overcast. My life is in Paris and what I suffer cannot be put into words. . . . No letter from Camille.... I regret the watery grave." 12 It was mid-March, almost three months after the arrival of his fellowpensioners, when Berlioz reached Rome. As a visible presence, the "musi9

A.R., 1 2 8 - 1 3 1 . Gino .Menotti led an unsuccessful movement to free Italv from the A u s 11 12 trians and was executed in March 1831. A.R., 132. A.R., 133.

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cal sink" made a great impression on him: its situation in the flat Romagna, its austerity, the majesty of the Piazza del Popolo, aroused in him a host of esthetic feelings whose roots went back to the words of Virgil and Chateaubriand. T h e spacious elegance of the Villa Medici — the seat of the French Academy in Rome — completed his conversion. H e entered the place just in time for drama. T h e French, being suspected of revolutionary leanings, were attacked on the streets bv partisans of the Pope. T h e v broke into the Academy grounds at night and sent threatening letters by day. Horace Vernet, the director, having made futile representations to the Vatican, decided to arm his young artists. He himself put to flight an Italian whom Mme. Vernet found "armed with a knife and hiding in the shrubbery."

13

If these fanatics, scoffed Berlioz, "had only set

fire to the Academy, w h o knows? — I might have helped them!" 1 4 Apart from the risk of murder, the atmosphere of the Villa was anything but solemn. Horace Vernet, then aged forty-two, an historical painter descended from a long line of painters, 15 was a charming, sociable, lighthearted character, for w h o m noise, masquerades, and parties of all kinds were a tonic rather than an interference. T h e small, thin, grayhaired artist had come to Rome in 1828 after a rise to eminence packed with incidents: decorated for his early w o r k b y Napoleon himself, he had fought on the barricades in 1814 for the Emperor's return, side b y side with Géricault; five years later the t w o had come out in the same Salon, which included Géricault's epoch-making " R a f t of the Medusa" and the "Odalisque" of Ingres. Befriended b y Guizot and the Duke of Orleans, Vernet had striven for liberty in a Bonapartist spirit and hailed the victory of July 1830. " N o w , " he had said, "I can paint anything . . . any part of our glory, in any color, without fear of censorship. . . . " 1 6 N o r did he harden into an administrator: though he had to act as ambassador to the Vatican during the French interregnum, he remained boyish and buoyant, unafraid to give Thiers or the Paris Academy a piece of his mind when they tried to dictate. 17 A n d for all his ebullience, visible in the disorder of his studio, which was a litter of books, guns, musical instruments, dogs, and official dispatches, he was a great worker. It was both good and bad luck that Berlioz came into such a household, 13

Corresp., 79; confirmed by Mendelssohn (216, 115). L.I., 93. 15 And, according to Conan Doyle, putative ancestor of Sherlock Holmes. 19 238, 81. "Ibid., 88-93. Among other things, Vernet refused to have an "arrangement" painted of Michelangelo's "Last Judgment" — an auspicious point of similarity with Berlioz. 14

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where everyone was or acted young — the director, his charges, his young wife and daughter, and his father also, Carle Vemet, who was mad about music and went dancing in spite of his eighty years. It was unfortunate because Berlioz' black mood of lovesickness was intensified by the attention it received. Whether laughed at or taken to heart, his Werther-like sorrows tended for a time to become institutionalized, as they would not have been in a more sober or preoccupied milieu. The instant camaraderie and general Bohemianism of the place only heightened Berlioz' sense of isolation. Yet it was a piece of good luck that Vernet was a bon vivant who had married for love, thrown away his chance of a Rome Prize, and made his way by being jovially unbusinesslike. Another man, more impressed with his own official dignity, might have made Hector suffer in the days of his folly just at hand. Since leaving France two months before, Berlioz had not heard from Camille or her entourage. Waiting was intolerable, uncertainty was a torture.18 Being a man of strong and explicit feelings, he could not stoop to assuage his pain with cynicism or foolish hope. He had not left Paris with vague promises: Mme. Moke had publicly acknowledged him as "my son-in-law" and Camille had not withdrawn her plighted word.18 Hence some plot must be brewing. Vernet had to hold him back from making a flying trip to Paris in order to learn the true state of his marital prospects: if he left the Villa Medici, he would lose the very status upon which his engagement to Camille had been ratified by her mother. After a week of conflict, on April 1, Berlioz left none the less. He went as far as Florence, where fever and sore throat held him in bed. He wrote to a friend in Paris asking for news, and in a few days recovered, but the internal debate continued. The countryside being tempting, he tramped into the hills and there read King Lear for the first time. Artistic excitement acted as a safety valve for overwrought feelings as he seized on the proper expression of his troubles: "As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport."20 Having brought his manuscripts with him, Berlioz resumed work. He corrected the score of the Symphonie Fantastique, and jotted down ideas 18

A trait he shared with his father: A.R., 32 Hiller, who believed that the girl and her mother were playing a double game, testifies to the fact that they kept up their deliberate deception until Berlioz had left. (23a, II, 204.) 20 Zeitgeist: It has never been noted how unerringly Berlioz picked out, with no knowledge of English tradition or scholarship, the passages from Shakespeare which the English romantic critics had popularized a decade or so earlier. 19

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for several new works, including in all probability the King Lear overture. But there were also long idle hours waiting for an answer from Paris. Going one night to the cathedral, he witnessed the services for a young woman dead in childbirth, with her infant in her arms. The sight of death aroused his sense of life and even reawakened dormant medical knowledge. For lack of anything better to do, he followed the funeral procession and at the cemetery, seeing the corpse nearer to, hazarded a diagnosis, while revolving morbid thoughts.21 Still waiting, twelve days after leaving Rome, Berlioz could not help seeing and brooding over another funeral. Young Napoleon-Louis Bonaparte, son of the great Napoleon's brother Louis, was dead at twentysix. Though succumbing ingloriously to measles, the heir to the name had been leading insurrection in the Romagna; his death left at the head of the clan his younger brother, Louis-Napoleon, with whom Berlioz was later to have dealings. Already in 1831 Berlioz noted with bitterness rhe music chosen to celebrate these great and unhappy memories: " T h e organist pulled the piccolo stop and disported himself in the treble, playing gay little tunes akin to the warbling of wrens. . . . " 2 2 Staying in Florence was a compromise between giving up his stipend and wearing out his patience under the eyes of the whole Academy, but the protracted silence of the Moke family and of his Paris friends was daily increasing his helpless indignation. His thoughts swung from the desire to join the Calabrian banditti to the planning of an oratorio on the Day of Judgment. 23 Since music was life transmuted, and he was unable to lay violent hands on the Moke family in the style of Gil Bias or Rob Roy, he could at least blow up the world musically in the name of Jehovah. For a start, there was the Resurrexit of the Mass of 1825, not to speak of local inspiration from the hand of a kindred world-builder and worlddestroyer, Michelangelo. Finally, on the fourteenth day, the Paris letter came. Camille, said Mme. Moke, was about to marry M. Pleyel, the piano manufacturer. Hector's blood instantly reached the boiling point. A t last he could act, 21 Corresp., 81-2. The thesis put forward by Mr. J. A. H. Ogdon (491, 323-66) that Berlioz was another Edgar Allan Poe whose imagination was stimulated only by death is contrary to fact — about both artists. Death, like love or nature, was but one starting point for Berlioz' art, as it may be in others for philosophy or religion. 22 Corresp., 83. =3 In talking to the sailors who brought him from Marseille and sympathizing with their hard life, he was told that brigandage was the only alternative open to them in Italy.

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but his passion was modified as always by amazing (in this case ludicrous) forethought. Mme. Moke's letter was "a model of impudence," in which she "strongly urged me not to kill myself — the good soul! " 24 He decided to exterminate the two faithless women first. But reflecting that if he turned up in Paris the old lady would not receive him, he bought. chambermaid's outfit as a disguise. In addition to loaded pistols, he took vials of laudanum and strychnine for his own quietus, and in a final act of foresight he dispatched his clothes to his father and his scores to Habeneck with directions for carrying out changes recently made in the Symphony. On the first leg of the trip home, the suitcase containing the disguise was lost. Berlioz bought duplicates at Genoa, but failed to obtain a visa for Turin. His impulse momentarily deflected, it turned on himself and he clumsily attempted suicide by jumping into the sea. Rescued, he returned to his original idea and headed for Nice. On the long road which unrolls the superb panorama of the Riviera, Berlioz came to his senses and in the dusk gave up the whole plan. The sea to his left and mountains to his right dwarfed the importance of the unworthy pair who had injured him. With a sigh of relief he turned his mind to the question of reinstating himself at the Academy. 25 He gave Vernet a straightforward account: " A shameful misdeed, an abuse of confidence of which I have been the victim, has put me in a delirium of rage ever since I left Florence, I was flying back to France to exact a just and dreadful revenge when at Genoa, in a moment of giddiness I gave in to childish despair. An inconceivable weakness got the better of my will. But my sole punishment was to swallow a lot of salt water and be yanked out like a fish . . . People thought I had fallen in by accident while walking along the ramparts . . . N o w I'm alive; I must live — for my two sisters whose lives would have been broken by my death, and also for my art . . . I am therefore returning to pledge on my honor not to leave Italy. . . ." n Berlioz came to regard this series of events as "an offprint of a Byronic tale," which is only to say that Byron's tales of love, jealousy, and re21

Corresp., 84. In his first volume, M . Boschot both sneers at this episode and calls the story of the attempted suicide false. Later in his book, he accepts the suicide but without drawing attention to the fact that he has retracted his charge. (268, 320). In other essays, he says again: "Berlioz nearly committed suicide." (270, IJ9 and 769, 1 1 5 . ) G o i n g over the evidence thirty years later, M . G u y de Pourtalès rebukes the earlier biographer: " N o one must make fun of Berlioz, for the original, the naïve Berlioz was really dead." (298, 109.) 2 ® A.R., 13 j . N i c e being then part of Sardinia, Berlioz had technically not left Italy. 25

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venge so popular in Berlioz' day, furnished words and attitudes to fit the eternal flux of human passions. Berlioz would have agreed with Henry James that "art is our flounderings shown," and that "passion can mean only one thing — the enemy to behavior." 27 Having purged his soul in verbal outbursts and calmed his body by exertion while Vernet was taking thought, Hector enjoyed three weeks of springtime convalescence at Nice. As he looked back on them they were the "twenty happiest days of my existence" 28 — in part because pleasure unanticipated is doubled, in part because it was a relief to accept the truth about Camille and her mercenary mother. He wrote very fully to his family, who responded with affectionate consolations, and he told the tale to his Paris friends, asking for musical news in return.29 He also composed. The King Lear overture was all but orchestrated, and the other overture, "The Tower of Nice" — so called from the ruins of an old tower in which Berlioz sat and worked facing the sea — was well under way. Hearing, moreover, that his old collaborator Victor Bohain was adapting Scott's Rob Roy for the stage, Berlioz sketched a third overture, to be named after the novel. In between bouts of composition, he soaked in the myriad impressions of the sounding sea (still a novelty to the mountaineer) under its sky of immeasurable blue. At last a letter came from "M. Horace" as Vernet was familiarly known, saying that no official notice had been taken of Berlioz' escapade. Hector was still on the list of state pensioners and could return to the Academy without further apologia. The whole Vernet family sent sympathy, and Berlioz himself felt that he was "being born again, a better man than before." 30 He might well have said that the Sappho who cast herself into the sea and the Sappho who wrote poems were not the same person. On the slow journey to Rome he was full of musical ideas and he plotted a sequence of "occasions" which might unite earlier pieces that he wanted to work over. A note in Thomas Moore's poems gave him the idea of a 27

" T h e Story in It." Mem., I, 194. 29 One of these friends, or else a classmate at the Villa, must have reported the episode to Stendhal, for in the margin of his author's copv of The Red avd the Black, which he annotated soon after, he wrote a substantially correct account of the events. The novelist's feelings being at one with those of his young compatriot, Stendhal puts as a caption: "Support for me" — these last two words being in English — and he adds "The notion of killing Mme. . . ." This obviously refers in the novel to his hero's attempt on the life of his mistress, the entire marginalia being opposite the final paragraphs of Chapter 6j, which tell of Julien's purchase of the pistols. (169, 140.) 30 Corresp., 75. 28

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"melologue" which he christened The Return to Life, and thought of as a sequel to the Symphonie Fantastique.31 "I hardly know what it's worth," he wrote to Gounet, the translator of Moore, "but I'll tell you this anyhow: m y run to Nice cost me a thousand and fifty francs. I'm so glad not to have carried out my original plan that I don't regret the money." 3 2 T h e Villa Medici was no longer besieged but its atmosphere was rather stifling nevertheless — like the narrow, ill-furnished rooms upstairs, or the contents of the library, which had scarcely any new books. T h e twentyt w o pensioners representing five of the fine arts were for the most part "good students" with an assured future in official art. " T w o or three," thought Hector, "are mildly exceptional, but no more." 33 It is true, they made up in boisterousness for what they lacked in genius, and for all their frequently low spirits, a good many would sing and play music. After a dinner in town they would make the climb back to the Monte Pincio while singing in chorus as many different tunes in as many different keys as possible. All the dogs of Rome joined in this "English concert," as the band called it, knowing that the tradesmen on their doorsills were sure it was musica francese.3* Among this inner group — Montfort the musician, Dantan and Etex the sculptors, Garrez and Due the architects — the last-named alone formed a real friendship with Berlioz: he had both music and sensibility in him. Fortunately for Berlioz, Felix Mendelssohn was at this time in Rome, and despite angularities of character in both the young musicians, their talents and common love of music brought them together. Mendelssohn was prim, pious, and a former infant prodigy to boot. Berlioz, as he was the first to admit, was often intolerant and intolerable. He teased the German about his devout Lutheranism, he played the trick of putting an Italian aria of Gluck's on the piano, so that Mendelssohn ridiculed it before discovering it was by a master they both admired. In short, Berlioz worked off a good deal of ill humor on the person he had most affection for, all the while expressing an unmixed admiration which lasted through life. Writing to Paris in May 1831, Berlioz says of his new friend: "He is a wonderful fellow. His performing talent is as great as his musical genius, which is saying a great deal. Everything I have heard by him has always delighted me. I am convinced he is one of the highest musical talents of the age. He has been my cicerone. Every morning I would go to his house. He would play me a Beethoven sonata; we would 11 32

For the meaning of Mélologue, its source and form, see below, pp. 220 ff. 33 A.R., 83, 13; A.R., 142. 143. M V.M., II, 103.

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sing from Gluck's Armide; then he would take me to see all the famous ruins which, I confess, did not move me very much." 35 Toward the end of the year, Berlioz tells Hiller by way of introduction: "He has an enormous talent, extraordinary, superb, prodigious. And I can't be suspected of comradely partiality in speaking like this, since he has frankly told me that he understood nothing of my music." 38 On his side, Mendelssohn was just as confident in writing to his mother about Berlioz: "Without a spark of talent, he gropes in the dark while he thinks he is the creator of a new world. He writes detestable things and thinks only of Beethoven, Goethe and Schiller . . . Full of vanity besides, he lords it over Mozart and Haydn, so that his enthusiasm seems to me suspect . . ." 37 Mendelssohn's mother apparently tried to moderate her son's judgment of Berlioz, for Felix having written that he would "be only too glad to strangle Berlioz — until he chances to praise Gluck," he goes on to concede that his two French friends are "most agreeable and charming . . ." but . . . "you say, dear Mother, that Berlioz must have some real artistic purpose and there I don't agree with you. I think what he wants is to get married, and I think him the most affected of the lot, because I cannot stand this wholly external enthusiasm, this affectation of despair . . . and genius; and if they were not French, that is, people with whom one always has pleasant relations, and who always have something interesting to say, it would be unbearable." 38 Poor Felix, in short, did not know what to think: the relationship was pleasant, but if it hadn't been it would have been unbearable. Cultural differences account in part for his dislike: it is a conventional vanity that he takes for affectation, for he found it again in Mickiewicz and again imputed it to character.38 The tradition of boasting which one finds in the real Anglo-Saxons of Beowulf has somehow passed to the intellectual classes of the Continent, and only a provincial mind would have taken 35

Corresp., 79-80. Corresp., 88. 37 21;, 120. Mendelssohn esteemed Montfort, who "has been working for three months at a little rondo on a Portuguese theme. He puts things together with much care, brilliancy, and correctness. He would then like to compose half a dozen waltzes." (Ibid.) 12 1. It seems to have escaped notice that Mendelssohn entered into this friendship with a certain prejudice against Berlioz the musician, a prejudice inspired perhaps by his own teacher Zelter. The evidence for this is that in August of the previous year, Mendelssohn's father had met Berlioz in Paris and had written home that "the composer of Faust" seemed "agreeable, interesting, and far more reasonable than his music." (962, I, 291.) Neither of the Mendelssohns, any more than Zelter, had heard the works they condemned. 36

™2>5, ι*5·

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its occasional manifestations seriously. Reared in a different musical tradition, Mendelssohn never lived to see what Berlioz' scores signified. He did like some of his friend's melodies, but could not understand his dramatic structure or unpianistic orchestration. History supplies few such instances, of the mutual liking of two geniuses, of whom the narrower cannot take in the broader, but who despite this sufficient cause for misunderstanding remain actively devoted friends. Apart from Mendelssohn, Rome afforded little or nothing satisfying to Berlioz' musical passion. Gounet had asked if Berlioz had found some new beloved, he himself having broken off an irksome liaison. Berlioz replied " N o . . . but what is worse is that I cannot live without music. I cannot get used to it, it's impossible." 40 During the winter months the Café Greco was the meeting place of foreign artists. There Berlioz met Michael Glinka, later to become "the father of Russian music," and now studying under Basili. Despite this connection with the Italian opera, he and Berlioz quickly established sympathetic relations. But it was all talk, not music. At the same café Berlioz met two French poets, followers of the English "Lake" school, Auguste Barbier and Auguste Brizeux, and a Paris acquaintance, the singer Duprez, all of whom were to have important dealings with Berlioz in the sequel. Italian antiquities, Italian religion, Italian music — none of these things fed Berlioz' spirit. He was impressed by the scale of Saint Peter's and the Coliseum, but the best use he could find for the amphitheater was to read Byron there. Church processions, unlike the rural ones he knew, struck him as cheap and mesquin, and the Carnival as gross without gaiety. As for music, " M y hatred for what they have the impudence to adorn with that name in Italy is stronger than ever. Their music is a whore: from a distance its appearance spells shamelessness: from nearby, its dull speech proves it a silly fool." 41 But one prejudice that he had brought with him he quickly overcame: "I find the Italians just as good fellows as anybody else, especially those in the mountains whom I know best of all." 42 This remark alludes to a use of his pensioned time which supplied Berlioz with the most vivid as well as fruitful impressions of his Italian journey — his excursions into the countryside. Here was his real reward for ten years of arduous careerbuilding, the real holiday during which the two halves of the youth's character joined to make the balanced man. In communings with nature, with simple souls, and with himself, Berlioz experienced his "Italian Journey" in the Goethean sense. During the twelvemonth from May 1831 to 40

A.R., 177.

41

A.R., 178.

*2 A.R., 178.

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May 1832, he stored up impressions or felt renewed inspiration from sources congenial to his temper and lasting in their effect. One thinks not only of Goethe but of Scott's great tour of Scotland at the age of twentythree. Without premeditation he was living out the maxims of Schiller, Wordsworth, and Vigny about dreaming dreams in youth for the mature man to turn into realities. Berlioz of course thought of himself as idle, waiting and wasting his time. T o o often he suffered from the malady then known as spleen — boredom — and it was this which drove him to the mountains. "As soon as I find myself more tormented than usual, I put on my hunting coat, I take my gun, and I make tracks for Subiaco, no matter what the weather. A week ago I went from Tivoli to Subiaco under a driving rain which lasted all day. Last month I made my way from Naples on foot, through hills and woods and high pastures, having to take a guide only once. You have no idea how delightful such a trip can be. Fatigue, discomfort, the possibilities of danger — I was enchanted with everything. I spent nine days that I shall long remember. As for my innumerable impressions, 1 have no room to detail them — only, I still think nothing equals the sea." 43 While there were rumors of a fresh revolution in France and Horace Vernet rushed to Paris to gauge the political situation, Berlioz was making friends with the peasants and bandits of the Abruzzi. If he took his gun he shot indifferently at a few wildfowl — a bloodless pastime he soon abandoned altogether." When he came to know the villagers he left the gun at home and took his guitar. At nightfall the girls would come out and dance to Berlioz' improvised accompaniments while the old folks watched. Having been content with a meager tambourine, they gave the welcome of a virtuoso (which he was) to the player of the chitarra francese. From them, in return, he received hospitality, warmth of feeling, and the delight of real folk music. He jotted down a few of their tunes but remembered even more vividly their mood and pathos, which he would recapture in his own works-to-be. Listening one night to a lover's serenade he found himself transported out of his self-preoccupation. But the singer stopped abruptly; "It then seemed to me that all of a sudden I was deprived of something essential . . . I spent the rest of the night without sleep, without dreams, without thoughts." 45 Sometimes Berlioz set out with a companion from the academy, usually 44

A.R., 178. " T o Liszt in 1839: "Take your gun, but it is only a pretext. . . ." (A.R., 398). 45 V.M., II, 143.

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a painter in search of scenery. Hector would sing in his natural tenor voice appropriate woodland songs — Lesueur's "Bardic Hunt" or his own "Irish" melody "Hélène." ** Antoine Etex, now known for his bas-reliefs of the Arc de Triomphe, was one of the walking companions who long remembered these expeditions. "Berlioz . . . , who was as sad and discouraged as I, went with me to the Dominican Fathers with a view to a retreat, but a thousand circumstances plunged us back into our low spirits. One day . . . after walking in the hot sun to Tivoli, and ordering our dinner at the inn, . . . we could not resist the temptation of swimming in the limpid blue waters of the lake. This we did, and as we swam we sang the famous duet from William Tell, Ό Mathilda whom my soul adores.' But in those icy waters we suddenly turned blue, our teeth chattering and our gaiety all spent. We got out as quickly as we could . . . and went to our dinner. An hour later we were both asleep. The next day at five, we set out for the mountains in hopes of meeting brigands and taking up our abode with them, but we had no luck." 47 The intoxication of the senses by nature, the absence of social restraints, and the thronging reminiscences of the historic past repeatedly brought Berlioz in touch with his true inner self. He felt the tragic commingle with a furious joie de vivre, and as he tells us, the bout might end in a flood of tears. The thought of death was no longer morbid or sought after as in Florence: when his Italian friends' boy Tonio languished and died, Berlioz was shaken. Another time, having drunk more than usual and lost his way, he found that a canto of the Aeneid, forgotten since childhood, came back entire to his memory. This led him to improvise "a wild recitative to still wilder harmonies, on the death of Pallas, the despair of good Evander, the youth's funeral — at which his own horse wept — the dread of King Latinus, the siege of Latium — whose soil I was treading —the sad death of Amata and the cruel death of Lavinia's betrothed. Under the combined influence of memory, poetry and music I reached the highest pitch of exaltation . . . ending in convulsive sobs. What is most singular is that I could pass judgment on my own weeping."" In contrast with natural life, there was the duty of attending some of 164, Λ.Κ., 162, 164, 167, 176, 184; Corresp., 87, 92. Though Berlioz was no professional singer, his Caruso-like range apparently enabled him to sing bass parts in choruses, and even to substitute for a missing cello in an emergency: see Mem., II, 32. 47 190, 120-1. 48 Mem., I, 218. Saint Augustine: "I wept for Dido's Death . . ." ( Confessions, Bk. I, Sec. 13.)

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Mme. Vernet's weekly soirees. "It's always the same story: there is dancing, talking about nothing, looking at engravings . . . you drink weak tea and saunter to the balcony overlooking Rome. In the moonlight you can make some well-worn remarks, quite academic and stupid. You refer to cholera morbus, the Paris riots, the Poles' defeat, the defeat of the French in Algiers, the illumination of St. Peter's and the way Mile. Horace dances. . . ." " At one of these evenings, however, he saw Countess Guiccioli, Byron's great love, with her sad face and rich golden hair.50 Nor could he get used to the abundance of clerics in the Church's capital: "These abbes, monks, priests are everywhere, right and left, above, below, within, without, with the poor and the rich in church, at dances and cafes, in the theatres, with the ladies in cabriolets, on foot with the men, at M. Horace's evenings, in his studio, in our gardens — Everywhere." 51 This anticlericalism was not antireligious; on the contrary, Hector's mind was full of musical ideas for sacred subjects. He sketched or composed half a dozen first drafts and finished a "Religious Meditation" on a text from Moore, "This world is all a fleeting show." In the untended gardens of the Villa Borghese not far from the Academy (where Goethe had worked at Faust forty years before) Berlioz hid away to revise the pastoral movement of the Fantastique. He also added to the first movement the twenty-four bars of the present religioso ending; and being obliged to send the Institute a sample of work done at Rome, he dispatched a Chorus and Quartet of Magi, based on an earlier (Paris) draft, and joined to it the Resurrexit of his early Mass, once again revised. The artist was more than ever a worshiper, but on seeing a peasant kiss the toe of a statue of Saint Peter, Berlioz envied the "happy biped" who had "faith and hope," for to the educated mind historical criticism stood in the way of literal belief: "This bronze that you worship and whose right hand holds the keys of heaven was once a Jupiter tonms holding lightning. But you know it not, lucky biped!" 52 News from Paris was not encouraging. Plots and riots succeeded each other rapidly. The European cholera (of which Hegel had just died) was carrying off its hundreds, among them the ablest statesman of the ** A.R., 167. Mile. Vernet set the pace by dancing the energetic Saltarello of the Romans with her father or grandfather. (238, 93.) 50 V.M., II, 107 n. The modern edition of the Memoirs (I, 209 «.) says "white hair," which is an absurd misreading of Berlioz' original text (p. 135 τι.). The Countess remained a Titian blond until quite late in life. See Belgravia, Feb. 51 52 1869, 491. A . R . , 167. A.R., 184; V.M., II, 108; Mem., I, 210.

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new regime as well as a compatriot of Berlioz, Casimir-Périer. And Berlioz' circle of musical friends — Hiller, Richard, Du Boys, Prévost, Turbry, De Pons, Girard, Desmarest, and Stephen de la Madelaine — were dilatory correspondents." Only Gönnet, to whom Berlioz felt very close, took pains to keep him posted. Everyone, it seemed, was getting married: Humbert Ferrand, in his province, had obtained the hand of his great love, but in his usual indolence had not written. Berlioz' cousin Auguste was planning to marry, and so was Hector's sister Nanci: Berlioz knew that he would find marked changes in the world of his contemporaries. This made him all the more impatient to leave his "barracks," possibly extending by some months his third statutory year in Germany. Trouble was still brewing there, as well as in England, where the struggle to pass a Reform Bill brought the realm to the verge of revolution. Sir Walter Scott, dying and in despair, was by doctor's advice taking a Mediterranean cruise. He did not know how near it brought him to his admiring fellow artists, Stendhal and Berlioz — the one in Rome, the other Acting Consul in Civita Vecchia. Stendhal came to Rome and the Villa from time to time, but we do not know whether he and Berlioz met. W e know only that during the carnival of 1832 Berlioz caught a glimpse of the elder Dauphinois driving through the streets with "a mischievous look that he vainly sought to render solemn." 44 Hector knew that the novelist had also written about music, in particular an admiring and provocative Life of Rossini. This would not endear him to Berlioz, although in reality the two shared many opinions about the state and the purpose of the arts, felt the same way about the average culture of their own country, and even expressed themselves in the same tone of intelligent mockery. But as often happens, none of this was evident to them as it is to us. The musician was irritated by a manner and dismissed the other as a littérateur,53 and there is no reason to believe that Stendhal would 99

Hiller, Du Boys and De Pons are already identified; some of the others we shall meet again: Girard became an orchestra leader who conducted Berlioz' early works. Desmarest, a virtuoso cellist, remained a devoted admirer, as did Stephen de la Madelaine, a member of Choron's Choir School, who later became a theater manager, music critic, and office holder in the Ministry of Fine Arts. Richard was poet, musician and linguist, a translator of Hoffmann and of the Ode to Joy in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. Prévost was a fellow pupil of Lesueur's class, who made his career in New Orleans; and Turbry, perhaps the most gifted of all, was a composer whose will power did not equal his musical talents. He also wrote a Symphonie Fantastique, but did not persevere and ultimately died destitute. 54 V.M., II, 114. 55 Mem., I, 215 n. Imagine Berlioz being told by Stendhal that if Beethoven with his science had had Rossini's ideas he would have been a colossus!

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have enjoyed Berlioz' music had he heard any. And yet they stand to each other as prophet and messiah, for Stendhal long before 1830 had predicted, or rather demanded, the Romanticist revolution in music, painting, and drama.9" Toward the end of 1831, it seemed as if the cultural renovation desired by Stendhal had been carried to a point far beyond Rossini: the newspapers were full of a great new work which was said to combine music, painting, and drama, and to express to perfection the modern spirit through its Faust-YiVt subject matter. Impressive scenic effects employing new machinery, a fresh style of directing and dramatic composition, and above all an expanded use of the orchestra, made Meyerbeer's Robert le Diable the model of a new genre — French grand opera." Berlioz read the comments and could hardly sleep. T o "rot in Rome" while a renovated dramatic art was making headway in Paris against the old Italian monopoly; to miss the first performance of Beethoven's Ninth — even though given in two halves — was maddening. The critics' references to Weber, Beethoven, and modern instrumentation might mean that the mood of Paris was changing; the title of Houssaye's new periodical, L'Artiste, was significant: it implied that the political revolution had vindicated the earlier, cultural reform — in a word, that Berlioz being no longer alone might find his hour about to strike. He asked Hiller to present his sincere compliments to Meyerbeer, who had always shown kindly interest in him and his works.58 Having meantime read Victor Hugo's extraordinary new book, Notre Dame de Paris, Berlioz indited a rhapsodic letter to relieve his feelings and cheat impatience by taking a sideswipe at Rossini: "It is said that you have made a libretto out of your Notre Dame and that the 'gay fat man' is doing the music. He is such a gay fat man — naturally, Weber being dead. . . . There, my broadside is discharged. I feel better. . . . Viva Fingenio tuo!" 5β Sensing progress in the French capital Berlioz, whose last published article had dealt with a possible revitalizing of lyric 59 Respectively in his Vie de Rossini (1824), Histoire de la Peinture en Italie (1817), and Racine et Shakespeare (1823-1825). 57 See W. L. Crösten's able monograph, 782. 58 Corresp., 89. It is more than likely that Meyerbeer's orchestration in Robert owed much to Berlioz' inventions; competent judges of the period believed it, and the contrary argument by Niecks (488) rests on the erroneous premise that the Fantastique was not played until December 1830, Robert being virtually finished in July. But the rehearsals of the Symphony took place in May, and the opera was not produced till the next year. w "Long live your genius." A.R., 180-1. The letter seems not to have been sent.

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drama by means of the Beethovenian orchestra, was now moved to write a "Letter on Italian music, by an Enthusiast" — an ironic name for himself. In it he points out that the belief in Italy's supremacy in every art is no longer justified. The orchestras are beneath notice; people do not listen but talk,®0 the overtures are strings of platitudes which the organ grinders themselves disdain, and church services consist of operatic airs badly played on the organ or poorly sung by minuscule choirs. In substance, Italian music aims only at "sensory effect and external form," it is "perpetually laughing" — hence Berlioz' nickname for Rossini — and its undeniable melodic exuberance is rendered monotonous by habitual garnishing with fioriture Real music exists only among the folk — the serenade of a mountaineer to his ragazza, or the plaints of the pifferari to the Madonna. Berlioz admits that being out of Rome he did not hear the special music of Holy Week, but he wonders with what musicians, hidden for the remainder of the year, it could have been adequately performed. Saint Peter's was a challenge and an opportunity: "It is huge, sublime, overwhelming . . . These paintings, statues, and columns, this grand architecture are the body of the monument; music is its soul, but where is it? Where is the organ?" On searching, Berlioz found a harmonium on wheels, "a kind of accordion behind a pillar." As for the choristers, who should number thousands in order to sound in scale, they were eighteen on ordinary days and thirty-two on special occasions.*2 "Rome," concludes Berlioz, "is no longer in Rome. It is in Paris, Berlin, Vienna, London even . . . , so that the Institute is quite right, its aim being to make young composers waste time, to halt the first steps of their career, and extinguish their fire by keeping them from the great centers of art . . . Theirs is the motto of Molière's doctors — though the patient die, 'we shall not depart one iota from the prescription of the ancients.' " ™ Berlioz screwed up his courage and asked Vernet for permission to 60 Respectful silence during music was a recent innovation even in Germany, where Spohr and Weber took the lead in enforcing the demand, at the cost of personal unpopularity. 61 V.M., 11, 218. 62 Mem., I, 232. Boschot adds a self-incriminating footnote: "Before seeing the Vatican myself, I thought Berlioz had exaggerated. But I must confess that going in on a Sunday during the singing of the Mass, I could only hear a vague, almost indistinct murmur of music . . . I found an inadequate organ and a choir of fifteen to twenty." (268, 80.) 83 >399i 53· The "Letter," reproduced in Berlioz' Voyage Musical and Memoirs, appeared originally in March 1832 in the Revue Européenne, which was the conservative Correspondant under a new tide.

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Berlioz

leave early. With a view to giving a concert as soon as possible, he copied out parts of the revised Fantastique, of its sequel, The Return to Life, of the two new overtures, and of the Religious Meditation. Reading Hugo's Orientales had moreover put into his head a new song which, yielding to the demands of sociability, he arranged for Mile. Vernet. La Captive was a catchy melody, and soon the whole Villa was humming it. It spread throughout artistic circles in Rome and was whistled wherever Berlioz went. "They want to make me rue it." He deemed it a trifle, but happily the trifle proved to be the germ of one of his finest orchestral songs, which he himself grew fond of.®4 On Palm Sunday of 1832, Berlioz climbed for the last time the sugarloaf hill around which spreads Subiaco. He went to church with the village population, sang with them, and on leaving felt a pang of homesickness. Vernet had consented to Berlioz' leaving on May first, thus reducing the required two years in Italy to fourteen months. Berlioz spent the remainder of April at the Villa, making himself agreeable to the ladies, his fellows, and their guests. When he put his mind to it he could be most entertaining, and though only twenty-eight could act the accomplished man of the world.65 He told stories and historical anecdotes, he made up musical extravaganzas or sang Gluck in the moonlit gardens so that old Carle Vernet, who had known both Gluck and Piccinni, wept with emotion.8® Nor did Berlioz unbend only to show off: he asked others to play and sing, and he would inconvenience himself in order to facilitate the amours of a comrade.®7 Near the time of leaving, Berlioz had to sit for his portrait. His housemate Signol did the half-caricature which is reproduced above and which may still be seen in the Director's office at the Villa. One sees, in the becoming costume of a Jeune-France (tight coat, high pointed collar and neckband) a pale face under a glowing mass of hair and deep-sunken eyes of a soft blue, which look out with the candor and inward thoughtfulness of a child.68 64

For its highly original form, see below, Chapter 24. It was not long after that Ernest Legouvé arrived in Rome and heard Berlioz' name for the first time, hearing also from Vernet and the ladies what a charming conversationalist Berlioz could be. (j6j, 103.) 66 07 A.R., 147; 2}8, 48. M.E., 210. 68 T h i s is most likely the first portrait w e have of Hector. T h a t which is labeled Berlioz at the Conservatoire and which was done by the fashionable Dubufe in 1830, seems, despite circumstantial evidence, to be apocrvphal. It may be a likeness of a Berlioz cousin, but coloring, shape of face, and expression have nothing in common with Hector's. Moreover, in the busy year 1830 he hardly had time for sittings. W e hear nothing of them in any case; nor, since he would not take his o w n portrait to Italy, do w e hear of his 65

Roman Holiday

217

As if reluctant despite his eagerness, Berlioz took the whole month of May for the trip home. He drove by way of Spoleto, Foligno, Perugia, and Lake Trasimene — the scene of Hannibal's victory — reaching Florence for his fourth stay, each time "with a more loving love." He read Dante and Shakespeare and filled notebooks; then pushed on to Milan by way of Lodi which, acting on childhood memories, made him dream of Napoleon's glory, "fled like a mirage." " It was already more than a year since young Napoleon-Louis had died on this same spot. Music had not improved. He heard Bellini's La Sonnambula which he found pitiful, and in Milan tried to overhear Donizetti's L'Elisir d'amore but could make out nothing: "The people talk, gamble, sup, and manage to drown out the orchestra. It's impossible to follow anything but the bass drum." 70 From Milan to Turin the impressions gathered on the Bridge of Lodi began to take shape as music, and he sketched the plan of a choral symphony, for which he thought that a Napoleonic Ode of Victor Hugo's might furnish the text. But having recently worked on the words of his "melologue," and knowing that the meters of French verse are ill-suited to melody, he began jotting down words of his own — cadenced prose would do as well as rime. The "occasions" for two movements of this symphony suggested themselves as Berlioz followed the conqueror's footsteps: "Farewell to the Fallen Heroes from the Crest of the Alps" and "Entrance of the Victorious Army into Paris." Never composed in this form, the work quite naturally evolved into the Funeral and Triumphal Symphony of 1840. Coming down into Iiis valley by the Mont Cenis pass and the Isère, Hector felt the shock of familiar beauty and reawakened emotions. He gazed at the St. Eynard and went up it to Meylan for a visit to his maternal grandfather, old Marmion. Here was Hector's chief link with prerevolutionary France; here was Estelle's home; here too, by a contrast suddenly felt, the imagined roar of Paris.71 The thought was like a stab of pain, quickly forgotten in festivities: Nanci had just been married to a Grenoble judge, Camille Pal, and the family reunion was full of excitement.72 At La Côte, the house seemed empty without her. Nanci had had leaving it with Camille among the other keepsakes which he recovered. ( C o r resp., 87.) 88 Corresp., 97; A.R., 199-200; L.I., 116. 70 71 V.M., II, 216-7. V.M., II, 225. 72 Berlioz had thoughtfully brought the ladies Italian straw hats, which at every customs barrier cost him additional cash; the musical notebook gives us Berlioz' itinerary by its listing of these places and adding "Straw hats — 30 baiocchi; Milan: straw hats — 1 francs . . ." A.R., 198.

2I8

Berlioz

a soothing effect on her mother whose ill temper, now chronic, was aggravated by the behavior of young Prosper. The boy, it is clear, was also endowed with unusual musical talent. Though never taught, he could remember and reproduce on the piano anything he heard. But he had other traits which we can easily recognize as the result of his unhappy upbringing. Besides tantrums and obstinacy, he had compulsions to arrange his clothes in a certain order, only to pretend the next day that he had forgotten how to dress himself. Hector was much concerned. He could relax only with Adèle and with his kindly father who, under the pressure of domestic and political turmoil, was becoming philosophical to the point of solipsism. T h e doctor nonetheless took pains to bring his son up to date on what was actually happening in France, for in Rome the newspapers ignored French affairs as seditious, and the police, as Stendhal loved to prove, would censor the most trifling remarks in letters as politically sinister." Hector heard for the first time of the riots in Lyon and Grenoble and the dubious colonial enterprises in North Africa. But his readiness to fight tyranny as in the July days did not make him believe in the "principles" of subsequent French politics. His indifferentism returned when he noticed that there were in fact no principles. He had written to Gounet from Rome: "What are you up to in the midst of all these plots, conspiracies, and factions, which are the desolation of common sense, of the arts, and of peaceable folk? . . . I wish for the sake of your peace of mind that you were no more concerned with them than I." 74 N o w he could see how "the traitors of yesterday become the heroes of tomorrow" and how force "blurs right and wrong under the name of legality." 75 He did not want in any case to argue politics with the neighbors, nor with his new brother-in-law, Judge Pal, whose loquacity thereupon switched to matters of high art in a fashion that "wrecked" Berlioz.76 Even less did he want people to discuss music. He was willing enough to talk of his travels and to learn of local marriages and deaths,77 but he 73

Berlioz had himself experienced this when they examined the words of his Chorus of Shades and read treason in the mysterious tongue invented bv the composer. 74 A.R., i88. " L . / . , 107. A causeless riot at Grenoble during the carnival of 1832 only strengthened Berlioz* conviction that people in crowds were little better than foolish children. ( A . R . , 197.) 79 H e began to regret the life at the Villa Medici, as he told Mme. Vernet in a charming letter of gratitude for her hospitable care. (Corresp., 99-103.) 77 It was at this time that Mme. Berlioz plaved a malicious trick on her son,

Roman

Holiday

zig

found the old circle of acquaintances more bourgeois than ever. So many of his friends were now leading the dull existence of married provincials: Charbonnel, Edouard Rocher, Albert Du Boys, Auguste Berlioz, as well as the timid and ill-favored Humbert Ferrand, whom Berlioz went to visit after an absence of more than six years. A certain constraint at first spoiled the reunion, even though Mme. Ferrand was away, because Ferrand had quite sunk his youthful ideals in domestic comfort and routine. Poetry, heroism, and love seemed far away, but Hector managed to galvanize him a last time. Giving Humbert a glimpse of his own freedom on the Italian hills, Berlioz urged him to write the verses for his projected oratorio on the Day of Judgment. He sketched an outline, a "carcass," on which his friend was to put "muscles." He begged him to follow inspiration freely, "to do without rime whenever it seems needless — which is often the case" and to drop whatever "dusty conventions" belong to "the infancy of art." 78 Ferrand promised to do his best. Later at Aix les Bains, Hector met his friend's wife, whom he found charming, though he still could not conceive how she had weaned Ferrand from artistic ambition. In the end, Ferrand did no writing. When fall came, the return visit to La Côte which they had planned did not take place. Meanwhile Berlioz was marking time. That is, he corrected scores and copied parts. In his father's library he also reread his old medical books, studied Gall and Cabanis and found them philosophically empty, for they furnish "technical details, terminology, and minor facts of experience," but "refuse to draw the consequences of their principles, from fear of public opinion." r* sending him to deliver a note to a Mme. Fornier, w h o turned out to be his first love, Estelle. T h e mother doubtless thought that t w o subsequent loves had effaced the memory of the first, a mistake which shows h o w litde she knew her son. (Mem., I, 12.) 78 L.Ì., n o . These remarks which may be thought characteristic of the "romantic revolt" were but the shorthand f o r m of ripe considerations. These Berlioz expounded to Ferrand t w o months later (L.I., 1 1 3 ) , giving the musical and literary reasons f o r using blank verse or rhythmical prose in song, and arguing f r o m the traditions of Latin, German, and English poetry. ™Corresp., ioy; the conclusion would have been to deny a personal G o d . Georges Cabanis, the founder of the late cighteenth-century school of Idéologues, was a physician and philosopher w h o did pioneer w o r k in abnormal psychology and was suspected of materialism. T h e Revolution and E m pire obscured his efforts b y their censorship, which led to the caution that Berlioz deplores. Stendhal, however, was a close student of Idéologue teachings and based his novelistic style and psychological method upon their principles. (See 1208.)

Berlioz

220

In the round of dinners and politesses, where, to please him, acquaintances broached musical subjects "as if they were talking of wine, women, riots, or other filthiness," Hector found time to make friends with young Prosper. They went on walks, played bowls, or hunted birds' eggs; Hector gave the child the understanding and companionship of an affectionate equal. But Berlioz must think of Paris. If he was to catch up with the current of artistic life and give a concert before his trip to Germany (scheduled for the beginning of the New Year), he dare not linger at La Côte. With ripened mind and heart, he felt his mission more clearly than ever. "You see how patient I am," he wrote at this juncture·, "one needs patience not solely in order to bear evils with doggedness, but in order to act." 80 Accordingly, on October 28, 1832, aged not quite twentynine, Berlioz set out for his second conquest of Paris.

Melologue No Madness The presence of music is justified in mine [the Melologue], and I have treated its subject in dramatic form. — B E R U O Z to Gounet, June 1831 The Return to Life, which Berlioz had put together in Rome and copied out at La Côte for a Paris concert, is the work that established him — much more than his first symphony — with the novelty-seeking public of the capital. Berlioz was now by official title an accredited composer,. and the score that he brought back from Italy was cast in a form that seemed at once original, entertaining, and easily understood. None of the music was new, it had merely been revised; but virtually no one had heard it in its earlier forms. Of the six parts, the ballad on Goethe's "Fisherman" dated from 1827, the next three numbers came from the prize cantatas of 1827 and 1829, and the Brigand's Song had probably been composed in 1828.1 As for the finale, it was none other than the Tempest fantasia which had been played to a scattering of courageous operagoers during the political and other storms of November 1830. Here was music too good to discard, and inventions too new to rely 80

Corresp., 105.

1 If, as seems likely, it was originally the Pirate Song after Victor Hugo. See above Chapter 4.

Lélio

2 21

on without testing by ear through rehearsal and good performance: Berlioz' musical motives were clear enough. But also having notions about dramatic form, he was loath to present six disconnected numbers. The plan of his Faust scenes as well as the setting into which he had inserted the Symphonie Fantastique suggested one more step along the road to the dramatic symphony. What he called a "melologue," borrowing the term from Thomas Moore, was a prose scenario to be spoken by an actor, each of whose soliloquies would bring about — would occasion — the playing of the successive pieces.2 Today the result seems quite unsatisfactory; the discontinuity of mood is too frequent and the device by which the author tried to palliate it too roundabout. In short, The Return to Lije is far less "one work" than either the Faust scenes or the symphony, and it is the only score of Berlioz' which is improved by excerpting. At the same time its would-be dramatic form has historical interest and historical precedent, and only a flustered critic could say that it shows the composer in a state bordering on madness.3 In the first place the music, composed from two to five years earlier, is obviously sane, and much of it still sounds fresh and vigorous even to our jaded ears. In the second place, the audience that first heard the work produced accepted it as perfectly rational. Lastly, the best minds in Paris found the significance that the composer attached to his "sequel" so much in keeping with the needs of the day that it established him as a leader in thought and action as well as in music. "The name of Hector Berlioz became famous." 4 So far from having to posit Berlioz' near madness, the historian must record here the single instance in which Berlioz' aim happened to coincide with the contemporary taste. He was understood and the work was enjoyed without effort, partly 2

For a benefit at the Dublin Theatre, Moore wrote a Melologue Upon National Music consisting of verses interspersed with music representing the folk lirs of several countries. In a note to the published work he added the remarks that furnished Berlioz with his hint: "With respect to the title which I have invented for this poem, I feel even more than the scruples of the Emperor Tiberius when . . . using the outlandish term 'monopoly.' But the truth is, . . I thought an unintelligible word would not be without its attraction for the multitude. . . . T o some of my readers, however, it may not be superfluius to say that by 'Melologue' I mean that mixture of recitation and music, which is frequently adopted in the performance of Collins' Ode on the Pasáons. . . ." (1269, 536.) One may add, in answer to the common French complaint of Berlioz' dependence upon foreign ideas, that Moore had found the 'most striking example" of Melologue he could think of in Racine's Athalie. 3 Mr. J. H. Elliot (278, 140). He is not the only one who has been put off by reading the words and imputed his bewilderment to the composer of the notes. * 185, 296.

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Berlioz

because of the sentiments that "The Artist" expresses in the monologues,6 partly because the "dramatic" arrangement employing the wings, curtain, and stage were in line with the custom of hearing concerts in the theater. Berlioz knew exactly what he was about and it is perhaps because he made his scheme fit current usage that it seems awkward now.· Written some three weeks after the break with Camille, the text carries forward the sequence of episodes in an imaginary musician's life. In the Fantastique the love obsession ends at a Witches' Sabbath. Now Berlioz brings his hero out of his opium dream and gives him a voice: he recites and acts in front of the curtain, behind which are concealed an orchestra, chorus, and soloists. From the wings, at the opening, one hears the hero's friend, Horatio, playing at the piano a song that Lélio had composed for him earlier, on the words of Goethe's Ballad, "The Fisherman." The pleasant barcarolle — interrupted between two of the stanzas by a return of the idée fixe — is followed by a soliloquy on religion and art, on Hamlet's doubts about death, and on the possibility of finding a musical subject in the Ghost's revelation of the murder. This is the cue for chorus and orchestra to play the second number, "Chorus of Shades." The piece is a striking, indeed a "modern" tone poem, remarkable for its use of divided strings, the beat of the bass drum covered with a cloth, and the clarinet tied up in a sack. Its bold rhythms and harmonies, plus a characteristic melody too good to lose, justify Berlioz' salvaging the piece from the 1829 cantata on the death of Cleopatra. The process of its readaptation shows how Berlioz produced Lélio: to replace the cantata words by Vieillard, Berlioz made up mysterious syllables which he ascribed to the "unknown tongue" that Swedenborg speaks of as that of the damned;7 in the music he made but few alterations. Then in Lélio's soliloquy, while the orchestra plays the opening chords, 5 T h e artist hero was shortly to be given a name, Lélio, and in the revised edition the whole work is so called. (See below.) ® Until nearly the end of the nineteenth century music of every kind was usually performed in theaters. Hence the frequent placing of players in the wings, behind the curtain, etc. Wagner's design of the Bayreuth orchestra pit is related to this habit of using effects of distance and muting, which the modern concert hall cannot reproduce: e.g., at Carnegie Hall in N e w York it is almost impossible to give Berlioz' Romeo and Juliet symphony as he intended, for there is no suitable place from which the small chorus of Capulets can be heard lontano. [The new Philharmonic Hall is no better.] 7 In the later version of the melologue, Berlioz substituted French verses of his own in order to keep for the Damnation of Faust the tongue he had invented. Hasty readers have thought that these vocables were given in Swedenborg's works but this is not so, nor does Berlioz imply it. (690 and see below, Subchapter 17.)

Lélio

223

he describes the character of the piece: it embodies the mood of the ghost in Hamlet — "a muffled instrumentation, broad sinister harmonies, a lugubrious melody, a chorus in unisons and octaves." In Cleopatra he had called the piece "Chorus of Angry Shades" and the details of Vieillard's verses came from Egypt's classical period; here, with the same music, we are to associate medieval and Danish legend — which really means that we are free to associate any appropriate occasion that will not jar with the music.8 And so it goes: the transparent device of Lélio's being a musician who reads and reflects on life brings us a Brigand Scene for baritone and chorus, which was first a Pirate Song, and of which a modern listener can say that "the leading theme, with its drop of a fourth on the strings and wind, answered immediately a semitone lower by the brass, has an innate savagery . . . which removes the music far from the conventional stage chorus." 9 The point is: "innate savagery," regardless of text. After the scene of violence, we hear a Song of Bliss, derived from the Orpheus cantata, then The Aeolian Harp — an impressionist reminiscence of the previous song —and to conclude, the Fantasia on Shakespeare's Tempest. In the spoken interludes, Berlioz' mind ranges over the questions that preoccupied him in Italy: the delights of a life of freedom, the evanescence of happiness, the magical effect of the sounds of Nature, the genius of Shakespeare, and the sins of critics who damn or who rearrange masterpieces. In a later version Berlioz added a paraphrase of Hamlet's address to the players, giving technical advice about musicianship such as Lélio, who is about to conduct the Tempest, might well utter to his players at such a moment. Although these ideas are in themselves acceptable, the prose is overemphatic and it dates in the sense of using images that have lost their force, e.g., the brigand as free man. This is what gives to the whole a tinge of absurdity which is heightened by the peculiar style of translation used in polyglot scores.10 The feelings uttered are, moreover, such as to tax the powers of the greatest dramatists. For Berlioz' identification of his artist with Hamlet is just: Lélio is also an attempt to mingle violence and self-pity with lyricism and protest. We find the mood again in a far greater monodrama of similar pattern, Tennyson's Maud, and it may indeed have been from this that Berlioz, being then in England, drew 8 It will be remembered that the "Meditation" in Cleopatra had led Berlioz to attach a motto from Shakespeare's Juliet. 8 W . G. Whittaker: 639, 815. 10 E.g., the English in the Ger. ed.

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Berlioz

for his second version the tide "monodrama" to replace melologue.11 Tennyson combines in one work the elements that Berlioz divided between the two parts of his Episode in an Artist's Life: the Symphonie Fantastique dwelt on the tortures of early passion, Lélio expresses personal, social, and religious doubts. But whereas in the Symphonie Fantastique the plot was thoroughly objectified with the aid of allusions to current fiction, in Lélio Berlioz speaks to us himself of his fears, hopes, and dislikes. It is in the music that both parts are "objective" — as is proved by its frequent readaptation from earlier uses. In other words, the music reveals its author in the legitimate way of art, by giving us a self-sustaining object; the scenario fails by falling short of this crystallization. This is not to say that Berlioz failed in designing the structure of the melologue, nor was it intrinsically ill-chosen for his purpose. He meant the two parts of the "Episode," symphonic and vocal, to be performed at one concert and he adroitly contrasted his effects. After the macabre close of the instrumental first part, the second explores different realms: the opening ballad brings us back to earth and introduces voice and piano, whose sounds we shall hear again in the final number.12 W e next go, via the choral "Shades," to an underworld which is no longer heathen and diabolical but Christian and outraged. The Brigand's Song provides a second solo, in a different register from the opening ballad; after which the Song of Bliss and its echo on the harp lift us to spheres where music is native and where the ethereal atmosphere of the Tempest fantasy strikes us as a natural continuation. The progression in scale and in dynamics is steady from the first number to the last, and the gay finale is a happy ending which leaves us in no doubt that the brooding Lélio, who has been twice through the dark regions, has indeed effected a Return to Life. By the standards of 1830, then, Berlioz' melologue was a complete concert, uniting every usual kind of music.13 But it was also in a dramatic 11 T e n n y s o n : Maud is " a little Hamlet; a hero raised b y love, degraded b y loss . . . and purified into devotion to mankind." Substitute: devotion to art.

{1220, 1,396.) 12

W e may have heard the piano in the W i t c h e s ' Sabbath if it is used instead of bells. C o m p a r e W a g n e r ' s Parsifal, for the bells of which a special pianolike instrument was built. 13 Berlioz is almost always traditional in the constructive sense: he extracts the principle of a convention and retains it under a new guise to introduce his new contents. W e can guess that having studied Beethoven's Ninth and proved to himself that he could compose a purely instrumental work of magnitude, Berlioz was eager to try out the vocal-symphonic combination. A d d i n g the

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225

tradition which has by no means died out. Interspersing speech and action with music was so little a piece of Berliozian eccentricity that it may on the contrary be said to be the aboriginal dramatic form: Greek tragedy, the ancient carol,1* the Singspiel, and the Roman liturgy itself. Berlioz' audience did not even need to go back to origins. Méhul's Joseph and Weber's Der erste Ton 15 were contemporary examples of the form which a little earlier had so greatly excited Mozart under the name of duodrama: "I have always wished to write a drama of this kind . . . the music is like an obbligato recitative. Speaking is sometimes introduced with striking effect . . . One should have mostly recitatives of this kind in opera and only occasionally, when the words are suitable for musical expression, have the recitatives sung." 18 In the note by Thomas Moore which gave Berlioz his hint, he was reminded that Racine's Athalie and Collins's Odes employed the same combination of song and speech, and another of his favorite authors, Molière, had adapted the same form to the needs of comedy. What was still more to the point, the second act of Beethoven's Fidelio enshrined a small "melodrama," and his Egmont was an extended essay in the genre." These numerous models, though differing in particulars, reinforced Berlioz' desire to create a form that would employ all the resources of voice and instruments upon a dramatic theme, and achieve greater variety than oratorio without falling into the rut of opera. Lélio is therefore a variant of one consistent purpose, but the genre could not long satisfy a composer who thought that music should predominate over words, and Berlioz went on to invent other, tighter patterns. T h e mixed form none the less continued to attract composers after

giano to the ensemble was, he thought, an innovation for he did not know

eethoven's Fantasia for chorus, orchestra, and piano. (Op. 80.) The scoring in Lélio (two pianos, four hands) was in any case different, for Berlioz wanted not only the crystalline and silvery sonorities of the instrument for the Tempest fairyland, but also the percussive quality; and these not in contrast with orchestral tone as in a piano concerto, but in combination. 14 In French "carole," or dance in ring formation with singing intermingled; later the lyric based on this "form." See Chaucer, pàssim. 15 Respectively, a sacred opera without action, and a cantata with declamation describing, through the verses of Rochlitz, the origin of music. Weber counted on producing a great effect with it at Munich, but the actor-declaimer spoiled it. (/0/7, 88.) 18 1026, 288-9. Before Mozart, Rousseau and Benda had produced duodramas — also called monodramas, according as one thought of the actor as being alone or of speech and music as forming a pair. "Others of Beethoven's works, notably the Victory Symphony, were "dramatized" in the same way. In London, veterans of Waterloo were hired to take part in such a staging.

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Berlioz

Berlioz. M o d e m critics w h o have never seen nor hoped to see a melologue are w r o n g in supposing that cock-and-bull recitations interrupted b y g o o d music belong exclusively to the 1830's. Beginning w i t h Mendelssohn's posthumous Athalie,

w h i c h was cast and performed

in the

same fashion, as the composer wished, an impressive list of similar works could be drawn up. 18 T h e sober Englishman Sterndale Bennett f o l l o w e d suit in his version of the Paradise and the Peri, as another musician w h o admired Lélio — Sidney Lanier — long ago reminded the critics. 19 In our o w n day Janacek has composed a song c y c l e The Vanished

Diary

of One

Who

in the same "original" form, 20 and in fact twentieth-century

composers seem u n c o m m o n l y drawn to the form and its Hamlct-like Weltschmerz:

Stravinsky's Histoire

du Soldat

matically and as valid musically as Lélio, dramas, Erwartung

and Die

glückliche

is surely as strange dra-

and Schoenberg's t w o monoHand,

directly meet

Berlioz'

problem and reproduce part of his effect. T h e first of these Schoenberg scores is "an original attempt [again! ] to make one person bear the burden of the w h o l e dramatic development . . . and to represent dramatically what m a y happen to a man in a moment of the highest tension and intensity of feeling."

21

H o n e g g e r in Nicolas

de Flue treats with the same device a more real-

istic story, but the clinching instance w h i c h proves that Berlioz' unsuccessful attempt was none the less aimed in the right direction is that of Stravinsky's opera-oratorio Oedipus,

w h i c h also mingles recitation, sing-

ing, t w o languages, and the functions of action and comment. 2 2 T h i s of 18 F o r Atbalie, the singer Eduard Devrient w r o t e and recited lines to link the scenes. Mendelssohn's brother Paul approved, k n o w i n g h o w Felix dramatized the score at the piano. See Moscheles: 980, 353. 19 In Bennett's w o r k " w o r d s are recited along with o r b e t w e e n detachcd passages of the instrumental music." (1100, 8.) 20 " A psychological drama unfolded in t w e n t y - t w o lyrics f o r tenor voice interrupted b y a duet f o r the lovers, a f e w phrases f o r female trio offstage representing the voice of conscience, and a pianoforte interlude." ( 1 3 1 s , II, 758·) 21 1036, 126. T h e commentator is "certain that nothing approaching this f o r daring and n o v e l t y has ever been written f o r the stage." A s for Die glückliche Hand, the man " w h o sustains the w h o l e of the action . . . is involved in e v e i v a r y i n g circumstances and events, the action being reduced to the most c o m pact f o r m . " T h e drama is "fantastic," the sequences purposely anti-logical and incomprehensible — " A highly personal f o r m of expression through the means of the drama." (1036, 130 and 139.) 22 T h e reciter, speaking in the vernacular, says toward the end that w e are about t o hear "the famous monologue." In his Persephone the composer likewise f o l l o w s Berlioz in the use of the orchestral players as members of the cast, and in the ballet Petrouschka the orchestral use of the piano.

Lélio

227

course creates difficulties of production, though they are less in Oedipus than in Lélio, where the actor (or his double) must also be an orchestra conductor." In any case, the persistence of the monodramatic idea — notably in Browning 24 — tells us something about the galling inflexibility of theatrical and operatic conventions in the last century and in ours. As will appear, the whole Berlioz-Wagner debate arises from the need to remedy this state of things. Music being Berlioz' raison d'être, both before and after his ill-starred engagement to Camille Moke, one may feel surprised that an experience as upheaving as his return to life yielded only the Melologue, that is to say old material cast in a transitory form. Berlioz could, it is true, point to three new overtures in various stages of completion, the song La Captive, a few religious pieces, and the revision of the Symphonie Fantastique, but as he himself said, in Italy he could not compose; he was taking in too much to be able to give out. Knowing the future as the artist could not know it, the reader, eager to imagine a steady progress for his hero and seeking relief from having to groan over the artist's vicissitudes, will find himself wishing that great accomplishments might take place outside the conditions of life. He wishes that Beethoven had not been a rude man burdened with disease and a scapegrace nephew; that Swift had not been dependent on ministerial favors or died insane; that Lincoln had not appointed incompetent drunkards to the Federal bench and been on poor terms with his wife; that Berlioz had trod his way from one musical work to another in the peace of some impossible mountain Eden. This is the naive, pedestal view of history, though the wish is indirectly a measure of the accomplishments themselves. For the merit of great works lies not merely in their conception but in the power to grip and fix disparate experiences. It is because the work of art has hemmed in and overcome the chaos of existence that it lives and is called great. "Art is our flounderings shown." T h e raging flux of life need not even mean the visible storms of Berlioz' early years. T h e monk in his cell can undergo cataclysms of the soul and master feelings akin to those that wreck the world. Only, he must really experience them and not merely play with their abstract names. This difference is no doubt the one which divided Berlioz from the little band of enthusiasts, soon turned into bourgeois, whom he had gathered around him in Paris. There was but 24

See Sternfeld, "Ist der Lélio aufführbar?" (478, 372 ff.) In a Berlin performance at the turn of the century, the actor wore a mask. {34}, 8 n.) 2 *Pippa Passes is the best example of this discontinuous dramatic form.

228

Berlioz

one Berlioz among the two dozen residents of the Villa Medici —only one master of reality who used the same common experience, in spite of his own distaste for the time and place, as artistic material. What Berlioz acquired in these fourteen months of idleness abroad was incalculably great. If childhood at La Côte and youth in Paris supplied two sources of vision and power, manhood in Italy furnished the third and last set of formative impressions. The unimaginable sea and the clear landscape made perhaps the most durable mark, and their musical equivalent recurs in the later works from the Corsair overture, begun at Nice, to the septet on the Carthaginian shore in Les Troy ens. In fact, the atmosphere of five great works comes out of Berlioz' Italian journey: Harold in Italy, Benvenuto Celimi, Romeo and Juliet,2* Les Troy ens, and Beatrice and Benedict. Berlioz "did not know w h y " Rome failed to inspire him. Writing to Wagner twenty years later, and without thinking of Italy, he remarked that he could never create while enjoying the spectacle of nature. But he could conceive, and before he crossed Mont Cenis homeward bound, he had noted down these several dramatic subjects. Bellini's version of Romeo had spurred him to think of it again as a musical problem: he even gave away to Mendelssohn the idea of writing a "Queen Mab" scherzo. Geographical and historical associations had recalled memories of Virgil to whose verses Berlioz improvised recitatives on the very spot. In the Coliseum he had read Byron, and more important still for the future Harold in Italy, the composer had steeped himself in the folk tunes and rural litanies of the Abruzzi. He had not yet, it is true, come across the memoirs of Benvenuto Cellini, but popular dances and songs of Florence and the Campagna stayed in his mind in preparation for the Roman Carnival and other parts of Cellini. In addition, Dante and Michelangelo's Florence combined with the insufficiency of music in Saint Peter's to stimulate his imagination about religious works in scale with great architecture (the later Requiem), while the Napoleonic saga (symbolized by a funeral, the Bridge of Lodi and the Alps) brought forth the several plans that finally produced the Funeral Symphony, the Te Deum, and two other choral works. Finally, the Religious Meditation and the negligible Christmas songs (including a Chorus of Magi) look forward to the mature oratorio, The Infant Christ. This summary review leads to the astonishing conclusion that bv the 25

T h e first idea came in 1828, when he saw the play and discussed it with Deschamps, whose manuscript translation circulated among the Romantic group (1248, V , 6 ) ; but something v e r y like the plan of the symphony w a s embodied in Berlioz' "Letter on Italian Music." (¡399, Mar.-May 1832, p. 48.)

Lelio

229

time Berlioz returned to Paris in the fall of 1832 he had sketched or conceived or been drawn to the subject of everyone of his major works.2® T o be sure, he had by then little more than glimpses of their form and contents. The raw substance he had stored up was still to be shifted and pulled about several times according to his free way with dramatic material; but his daemon, if not he himself, knew where he was going. Berlioz' mature output was thus the fulfillment of youthful thoughts. When he had written the last note of his last music drama, Beatrice and Benedict, he stopped; he had finished what first dawned on his imagination thirty years before. 27 The catch phrase which seeks to describe Berlioz as "a monument of incompleteness"28 is therefore so inapplicable that we should absolutely invert it and call him a veritable "monument of completeness." This entails no approval of the work he did; it does entail recognition of a steadily unfolding purpose through the series of herculean obstacles that later chapters will relate. From the "Estelle" melodies of his twelfth year to the nocturne-duet of Hero and Ursula in his sixtieth, Berlioz unweariedly kept recording, embodying, revising and uniting his musical inspirations, until he had put the best of himself in twelve major scores. All of them had roots in fundamental experiences undergone before his thirtieth year; all of them still occupy the most serious attention one hundred years after the composer's death. If this does not exemplify the very essence of artistic fulfillment through self-discipline, then words have no meaning. Doubtless the taste for gossipy biography has obscured the undeviating continuity of Berlioz' work. Our minds seem to stray even more than Hector's toward Harriet Smithson and Camille Moke, while the diverse origins of the Melologue make us forget that it played a historic role in the development of the dramatic symphony and opera-oratorio. All the same, the opinion that Lélio is "the craziest work ever sketched out by a composer not actually insane" ** must be set aside as exemplifying the truly alarming madness that weak conventional minds love to harbor, and in its stead we must put the fact of Berlioz' relentless sanity of purpose. After Lélio (whose music does not even belong to the Roman period) 2e

The Damnation of Faust of course had its inception earlier in the Eight Scenes of 1828. 27 Quickly planned in 1833, then laid aside until i860, Beatrice and Benedict certainly harks back for its Sicilian inspiration to Berlioz' sight of Naples in .83.. m 136$, art. "Berlioz." 2 · 2η8, 140.

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Berlioz

it took two years of meditation for a work bearing the name of Italy to come from Berlioz' pen. Had he really been a "scene painter in sounds," he would certainly have been eager and able to work more immediately from life. The Italian notebook bears only eight and sixteen measures respectively of two themes used in the as yet unnamed work next in order. Berlioz had hardly begun to distill his experience, and he was far from thinking of Byron's hero in connection with his Second Symphony. He was intent on testing the Paris public by offering them the madness of Lélio.

9. Recollected in Tranquillity: Harold in Italy November 1832 to June 22, 1834

. . . and thus subdue Imperious passion in a heart set free. — W O R D S W O R T H , Tour m Italy ( 1 8 3 1 — 1837)

"I

HAVE BEEN

in Paris only since yesterday," wrote Berlioz to his sister

on November 8, 1832, "and already m y musical affairs are under w a y . . . Everyone here received me with the warmest affection. I dined with M. Lesueur. I am going to see Alphonse, 1 but it's quite a trip because I lodge miles away from him, at N o . 1 rue Neuve-St.-Marc." 2 This address, and in fact the rooms that Berlioz occupied, were those formerly inhabited b y Harriet Smithson. T h e r e is no evidence to show that anything but convenience — with a dash of curiosity — dictated the choice. H e was in his old quarter — near the Opera and the Café

Feydeau,

near Lesueur and his o w n publisher — a central position from which to carry on his work. Berlioz' first object was his concert. His strategy, the same as before, the same for the rest of his life, was dictated b y the facts of Parisian life: concerts created a public, public pressure would force one of the official houses to commission an opera, and if it succeeded an opera brought income and further commissions. N o other career was open to a musician except as a virtuoso. Pending this single salvation, the composer had to support himself b y journalism and pay his w a y . So it was and so it remained until the end of the century, after which things did not improve but grew worse. 3 Fortunately, in December 1832 Berlioz could not foresee his long life of quasi-unrewarded artistic work. His energy was at its peak; he had g r o w n in self-assurance in the t w o years since the Fantastique, and he meant to win a place for himself in spite of the competition of the prolific Auber, the adroit and complacent Adolphe Adam, Berlioz' cousin, the physician. A.R., 209. 3 In an essay written in 1920, M. Boschot shows that Berlioz' making himself heard and living comfortably after clearing off his early debts would be a wholly impossible tour de force in the twentieth century. (770, 267.) 1

2

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Berlioz

and the man who was skillfully adapting to the stage a secondhand romanticism together with the showy side of symphonic music — Giacomo Meyerbeer. T h e Opera was run by a new director, a Dr. Veron, whose wealth came from patent medicine and the periodical press, and w h o therefore had an instinct for what the public wanted. He dabbled in the arts with a master hand, founding reviews and attaching to himself the purchasable talents of a certain kind. His reign of five years at the Opera was the only profitable one in its history since Lully's. 4 It goes without saying that Berlioz' proposal of an opera on the Day of Judgment met with no favor. T h e last months of 1832 were disturbed by political violence — the arrest of the Duchess of Berry in connection with plots against Louis Philippe, and universal recrimination about these events. T h e D a y of Judgment seemed near enough without paying for a preview at the Opera. None the less, Berlioz prepared his concert. He obtained the hall at the Conservatoire (seating twelve hundred) for the afternoon of December 9, and secured the aid of the popular actor, Bocage, as "melologuist." Then he started rehearsing his orchestra. T h e cohorts of Romanticism were with him, ardent, curious, sympathetic, and outspoken. For despite dark omens, it still seemed possible to accomplish the great things to which July 1830 had been a prelude. A t the concert and also before, at rehearsals, could be found Liszt, Chopin and Hiller; H u g o and the brothers Deschamps, Heine (who had recently settled as an exile in Paris), Eugène Sue, George Sand, Legouvé, V i g n y , Dumas, Gautier, and scores of journalists headed by Jules Janin and Joseph d'Ortigue. T h e y prepared the wider public who thronged the hall on the day of performance. T h e program handed to them consisted of a revised text for the Symphonie Fantastique, together with the new libretto of the melologue. Rumor had it that the second part of the musical drama contained things both touching and satirical, and that the satire was aimed at the well-known music critic, F. J. Fétis, representing the clan w h o "improve" masterpieces and who, "like the vulgar birds that people our public gardens . . . , when they have stained the brow of Jupiter or the breast of Venus, preen themselves as if they had laid a golden egg." 8 4 Altogether, 20 years out of 166. Lully ruled the house like a private monopo l y f r o m 1672 to his death in 1687. In 1830, the establishment had outstanding debts amounting to 1,200,000 francs. (7¡8, ch. 2 fï.) 5 Ger. ed., V o l . XII, and Tiersot, 308, N o v . 13 to Dec. 25, 1904. Boschot implies that Fétis as a friend of the Moke family had had a hand in breaking up Berlioz' engagement, and that this was Berlioz' revenge, but there is no evidence that Berlioz knew of Fétis's interference: the artistic grounds were enough.

Recollected

in Tranquillity

233

Fétis, who was in the hall, heard his manner of speech being mimicked by the actor, and naturally wrote an unforgiving review, but Paris had relished on that day one of the many "artistic manifestations" (as they are traditionally called) which enliven its history. "A charming epoch!" exclaims M. Boschot, but he adds: "These swaggerings were far less wounding than the contemptuous knifing in the back of our moderns." * True: aristocratic honor was still in vogue and blows were dealt in front of witnesses. The survival of the fittest, which requires the "dirty fighting" taught in the democratic army, had not been invented. Nor was the declamation purely an aggressive act. Like Hugo's Hernani, Dumas's Antony (playing at that very time), or Vigny's Chatterton, the melologue of Berlioz was in part didactic. The Romantic artist had to explain himself or, as De Quincey put it about Wordsworth, had to create the taste by which he is to be appreciated. We, having learned the lesson, are inclined to be impatient with the textbook, but in 1832 it was by no means pointless for Berlioz to expound the quality of his emotion, the character of his successive pieces, and the attitude he took towards his art. That he was right is shown by the delight of his fellow artists and the public's response. There was a spontaneous demand for a repeat performance of the whole Episode from an Artist's Life. At the première of Lélio one undesigned dramatic scene had been witnessed and, thanks to gossip, understood by the public: in a box, not ten feet from Berlioz, sat Harriet Smithson, the other supposed protagonist in the "plot" that occupied the stage. Berlioz had certainly not invited her, but the next day he was introduced and they spoke face to face for the first time. No record exists of their conversation; in his letter home after the concert, Berlioz speaks only of its success, of the congratulations of Paganini, Victor Hugo, and Adolphe Nourrit, as well as of the snobbish curiosity of Tout-Paris. Newspaper reviews bore out this report. In the Journal des Débats, more than ever powerful owing to its association with the reigning house of Orleans, Janin wrote: "This young man has from this day forward an audience at his feet." 7 Since Berlioz had to leave for Germany by January first, he planned to consolidate his position — and possibly recoup his expenses — at a second performance on December 30. It netted no profit but spread his name still farther: he and Liszt were the twin wonders of the season. The musically reliable d'Ortigue pointed out that Berlioz was the first French composer to "produce in the symphonic genre those picturesque effects, "769, 1 1 7 .

7

1 3 8 6 , Dec. 15, 1832.

2 34

Berlioz

those lively and strong colors, that elegiac and mystical utterance which the great works of Weber and Beethoven first made known to us. W h a t distinguishes Berlioz is vigor, brilliance, daring, and an almost exuberant power of dramatic expression." 8 T h e critic warned the authorities: "Do not let this burning gift cool down. . . . Spare him the disgust and mortification which arrest talents on the verge of creation. Take him in his vigorous youth, in the strength of his noble self-confidence." ' This advice might well have been heeded by others than musical officials — by Harriet Smithson, for instance. For Berlioz' interview with her had had its sequel too. The actress was in difficult circumstances: the vogue of English plays was declining; her manager was in America, and she lacked business ability. Whether this predicament rekindled warmth of feeling in Berlioz, whether she made an appeal to him in her distress, mistaking one sentiment for another, the fact remains that by midDecember the pair were deeply involved. She had declared herself to Berlioz, who was soon writing to Franz Liszt: "Yes, 1 love her. I love her and am loved in return." 10 And to another friend: " W h a t an improbable romance life is!" 1 1 He and Harriet corresponded, each in his own language, and Berlioz, always able to observe himself, could but be amused by the pace of the affair: " W h a t love, . . . what idolatry, quanti palpiti!" 12 Complications soon arose. Harriet having a mother and sister to support was beset by money worries, and the sister, being a jealous and censorious cripple, made as much trouble as she could. It would have been difficult enough without this for both the lovers to overcome their previous qualms about each other. Harriet had been represented to Hector as a woman of easy virtue and he to her as irresponsible and even epileptic. Berlioz, moreover, was a man of quick decision, whom others' delay and shifting thoughts rendered impatient. Insight did not lessen his torture: "She has a true and deep sensibility which I did not suspect. I love her as upon the first day and I think I am sure of being loved by her. But she is timid, hesitant and cannot come to a resolve: how will it all end?" 13 H e naturally gave up all thought of going to Germany. Leaving a second beloved a prey to alien influences would have been idiocy. The success of Lélio taught a similar lesson. A year's absence abroad would require still another effort to reproduce the present favorable conditions. B

1399, Dec. 1832. »139s, Jan. 4, 1833. 10 A.R., 215.

ll

A.R., 217. " A.R., 218. 13 104, 218.

Recollected in Tranquillity

235

To entrench himself with the new authorities and help put Romanticism in power, he must stay active and on the spot. In the midst of a bad moment with Harriet, the Italian Theater asked him for a comic opera. Berlioz chose Much Ado about Nothing and sketched the libretto with a speed which argues previous thought. But musical politics are treacherous: thirty years elapsed before he was enabled to carry out this project.11 By the next month, February 1833, Hector had decided to end Harriet's vacillations and risk alienating his family by offering her immediate marriage. She accepted his reckless proposal; given her plight and his situation, his offer could only mean absolute devotion. His "tenacity" — loyalty to an idea, rather —was his undoing, for he was conscious of the nature of his passion: "It is no love of the senses; the heart alone and the head are impregnated with this sublime sentiment." 18 Still it was not resignation but fated choice; as before towards music, now towards her he was voluntarily driven: "I shall never leave her; she is my star; she understood me. If this be error, I must be left in the grip of it." 1β And again: "I am immensely happy —until further notice."" This refers to the "persecutions" which both their families had begun in order to break the engagement. Dr. Berlioz had uttered an uncompromising "No," but Hector was sure of his own fortitude and "she promises that she will be courageous and firm . . . we shall soon, I hope, overcome these difficulties." " "Soon" turned out to be eight months, during which impediments were aggravated by catastrophes and led to misery in common. By refusing his consent, Dr. Berlioz forced Hector to take laborious legal steps —the so-called sommations respectueuses — by which under the Code a son enjoins his father not to cut him off despite the action he is about to take. On Harriet's side, the preparations for two benefit performances were nipped in the bud by her breaking her leg as she stepped from a cab. Financial preoccupations would be enough to explain her misstep, but it is clear that her anxiety was increased by a sense of inadequacy. Under the badgering of her family she grew apathetic, and then distraught by her lover's demands for certitude and action: "A trifle frightens her; she 14

15

See below, Chapter 2 j on Beatrice and

A.R., 218.

Benedict.

ie A.R., 2 iy. This Nietzschean love of fate by no means implies an abdication of the will, nor an acceptance of determinism; it springs rather from the tragic sense of life and expresses a self-reliance which our modern "progressive" liberal minds have no inkling of.

17 15

A.R., 116. A.R., 226.

236

Berlioz

is afraid of my exasperation . . . we mutually torment each other. . . . But the worse her position becomes, the more devoted I shall be. . . . " 1 1 In the interstices of this deplorable drama, there were articles to write and musical proofs to correct. Schlesinger was bringing out three pieces from the Melologue and Berlioz saw to it that they were circulated. By the end of May, Harriet was beginning to walk on crutches, but her sister still hoped to discourage the devoted Hector. The "devilish little hunchback" told him to his face that if she were strong enough she would pitch him out of the window. He kept his temper but agonized over the effect of this nagging on Harriet. His own family, except the faithful Adèle, "treated him like a pariah," and he had to inquire of Paris friends in order to find out how Nanci had fared through her first childbirth. By mid-June the strain had nearly worn him down. He was anesthetized by the effort toward a seemingly unattainable object. He broke with Harriet, which had the effect of rousing her, but he withstood her entreaties. He ended by giving in: had she not done as much earlier for him? Still his practical sense was revolted. Refusing to accept money from him, she had struggled to obtain from the Ministry of Fine Arts a "gratuity" of a thousand francs, whereas she should have been ready to marry him and help him start rebuilding their finances. But she was still "timid, irresolute, incapable of making a decision." 20 He finally persuaded her to take the step. Her sister tore up the preliminary license. Caught between two strong wills, Harriet reproached Hector with not loving her. Whereupon by way of enraged testimony he swallowed in front of her an overdose of laudanum. Her tears and supplications induced him to take an emetic — a second return to life. Even then the tragic farce was not over. She wanted to "wait a few months." Berlioz determined to leave her, to leave the country and settle in Germany — if need be with a waif of eighteen, whom some friends had rescued from bondage to an exploiter and were trying to distract him with. He no longer cared about his own happiness, and was ready to accept anything as part of his "absurd story." 21 Four days later, Harriet came to plead with him again, and in return for an ultimate change of his plans, consented to have their banns put up. The waif was taken care of by a collection among friends, and Janin 19 20 21

239.

L.I., 125-6. L.I., 131. L.I., 134. His father meanwhile had written him a "dreadful letter." A.R.,

Recollected in Tranquillity

237

undertook to see her out of harm's way." On October 3, 1833, the marriage of Harriet and Hector was solemnized at the British Embassy with Franz Liszt as principal witness." Aided by Liszt, d'Ortigue, Berlioz, and other musical friends, the Romantics in the several arts had meanwhile joined hands to promote their views and fulfill designs long matured. They enlisted the aid of men high in government places and founded a magazine, VEurope Littéraire, which was to publish their views and, by a foreign as well as native catholicity, help modern art to overcome the usual obstacles of ignorance, Philistinism, and national prejudice. "Art," said the prospectus, "has always been a social and general concern . . . This concern is reflected and made visible through journalism. But hitherto . . . this mirror of the times has only cast back the image of past epochs, and contemporaries have perforce ignored one another." The new organ meant to "focus the rays of all living genius" and raise a "temple to the universality of all the arts." Under Victor Bohain's editorship, men of letters formed the majority of the contributors, but the magazine undertook to sponsor concerts, and this naturally meant featuring the work of the outstanding modern musician, Hector Berlioz. At the first of these concerts, on May 2, 1833, six of the eight works were by Berlioz — two overtures, three movements from the Symphonie Fantastique, and the fisherman's song from Lélio. It was a successful as well as fashionable occasion. One could count peers of the realm, great ladies, artists, and critics. Berlioz* friend Girard led the orchestra, even though at another conceit two months before he had made a hash of the Francs-Juges overture. Habeneck and the Conservatoire Society likewise vied in willingness to tackle the unfamiliar difficulties of Berlioz' scores. On April 14, 1833 they gave his new overture Rob Roy, but the work had no success, for the sufficient reason, Berlioz felt, that it was "long and 22

Boschot thinks, with some plausibility, that "the waif" was a hoax engineered by Janin and others, to turn the current of Berlioz' thoughts. He was certainly in no condition to verify the facts represented to him. (268, 195.) 2S In the printed versions of the official marriage record (502, 406; A.R., 237), the signature of another witness shown as "Jacques Henry" should appear as "Jacques Herz," the Anglo-French pianist and impresario (1794-1880). It should be added that Liszt's presence had the double motive of expressing friendship and wiping out the evil gossip about Harriet which he had helped to spread. Berlioz' later word to him about his bride's innocence corroborates what the British press had always said about the purity of her morals and the circumspection of her behavior. It was in fact this habit of prudence which had made Hector's first advances seem to her so suspect.

238

Berlioz

diffuse." He destroyed it, though keeping in mind some of its melodic material." Although the Conservatoire was soon to turn against Berlioz by a natural conspiracy which made use of this lack of success,25 other official bodies seemed at this time fairly well disposed toward the new generation. The Institute, according to its custom, publicly reported on the works sent by its Rome pensioners. Montfort's little pieces received vague compliments but Berlioz was assured with some warmth that he had greatly improved. He had profited from experience and was now "original without eccentricity." This opinion unknowingly bore on music that Berlioz had written before winning the prize, and he enjoyed the irony while noting the Institute's kindly frame of mind. At the same time, the Ministry refused his request for a grant-in-aid and reminded him of his obligation to go to Germany. Subsequently this requirement was waived and Berlioz received fitfully but in full the stipend to which the award entitled him. The sincere patrons of American art who have been trying to obtain governmental support for it might well ponder this and future items in Berlioz* history: State involvement in art means politics, it works by favor and exception, and responds only to the pull of power. This being known to all Parisian artists — Delacroix was at that moment being pushed by Thiers who fancied himself as a connoisseur, and Rude had finally made his mark with his "Neopolitan Fisher-Boy" — Berlioz could "arrive" and be given the leisure to write music only if he forced his way by an alliance with some faction or other. He must also acquire a public personality and become one of those whom the government dare not turn down. In short, he must coerce and cajole like any skillful politician, whatever the risk to the artist in this struggle for power. This compulsion was the inevitable counterpart of the process by which art had become public and social instead of private and domestic — a change which gives the clue to understanding the fate that overtook Berlioz and his generation: it was the first to struggle under the modern system. So far from being "divorced from society" they were violently thrown into society to sink or swim in competition with other manufacturers and promoters. As individuals, their sole defense was the power of the press. N o w the newspaper closest to the government in the 30's was the Journal des Débats, where Jules Janin — the Lousteau of Balzac's Illusions Perdues — favored Berlioz, originally because the musician was "good 24

Berlioz destroyed the parts, as he states, but the full score, which he had sent as a Rome Essay, survived and is reproduced in Ger. ed., I V , 143 ff. 25 T h e deliberate exclusion of Berlioz as a competitive threat is attested by the historian of the Society. (Deldevez, quoted in 386, 10-1.)

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copy." In a column of literary gossip he could be represented as an uncommon specimen. Soon Janin put him forward as the only living composer likely to bring world renown to the French School. This was sound prophecy, but the need persisted to turn Berlioz' life and character into reading matter, and from this grew the Berlioz legend, itself part of the Romanticist legend. Because Berlioz himself contributed to this publicity — giving notes to d'Ortigue or Gautier — it has been inferred that he was unusually avid of newspaper notice. In reality he had but little choice. If experts in public relations had been available in 1833, and if he had been able to pay them, he would undoubtedly have hired someone to relieve him of the job. Meyerbeer was soon to assemble a corps of secretaries for just this purpose. But Berlioz, like Weber before him and Hugo and others in his own time, had to create his legend singlehanded. Unlike Hugo, however, he did not play up to it in private life: he was never the maestro, and was in fact repelled by the poet's pose.2" Of Berlioz' ways among friends at this time, we have an account by d'Ortigue: "His conversation is . . . uneven, abrupt, interrupted . . . sometimes also expansive, but more often reserved and formal, always frank and worthy of respect." 27 "Sometimes expansive, but more often reserved" is the real Berlioz, and one regrets that the legend had to exhibit a creature always flamboyant, volcanic, and indifferent to privacy. Propaganda has to fit the minds of the recipients, and the artist's new patron — at once snob and mob — required its heroes to be patently demonic and self-assertive. In the smaller Paris of those days, of course, legends found their own corrective; they were reinterpreted in the light of common knowledge. Looking back in the 1860's, Sainte-Beuve tells us how incredible it seemed that thirty years before one used to carry on one's life through the columns of the newspapers: " A sheet with five thousand subscribers was practically a family of intimates." 18 Style in these matters changes quickly, and the biographical "puffs" which an adept journalist like Gautier produced in quantity would scarcely seem to him reliable sources to consult in future. In Berlioz' own reviews and autobiographical fragments one can follow the shifts in tone and substance which each decade brought about from 1830 to 29 27

'7/ trône trop." (L.I., 152.)

1 8 ¡ , 323. Confirmed by Liszt: 202, 289. 1212, III, 21. A little later —rather too late —Dickens made ill-advised revelations of his private affairs in the pages of his magazine; which does not prevent Shaw —still another example of the genuinely reserved self-exhibitor — from calling Dickens a deeply reserved man. ( 1 1 2 6 , 29.) 28

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1870; the series amounts to a miniature history of journalism and of class emancipation through widened literacy. In these middle thirties the music criticism he was publishing shows his clear intention of establishing himself as a Personality. Around a musical subject — sometimes with the addition of a short-story plot — he wove fantasies based on his Italian experiences. He had the storyteller's gift and could imbue, for example, an account of the way the Rome Prizes are awarded, with a humorous lifelikeness which secured for him and for music criticism readers hitherto untouched.2® But here again power created resistance. T o take the public as witnesses of musical affairs was to declare war on the Institute and bring on reprisals. In a solemn sitting on October 12, 1833 the secretary read a report in which Berlioz was admonished like a schoolboy. His views on modern music were indirectly assailed and a malicious reference was made to the unapplauded Rob Roy overture. Reversing themselves like a supreme court, the judges discovered that Montfort's work was "clear, lively, spirited throughout," in fact remarkable for "elegant melodies and brilliant orchestration." Except for these skirmishes, his marriage to Harriet, and the concerts previously mentioned, the second half of 1833 brought Berlioz nothing but dull disappointment. He continued to be on distant terms with his family — all but the loving Adèle, to whom he poured out his hopes and his gratitude. With Harriet's debts weighing on him, he had little time or strength to compose. Instead, he struggled to arrange for November a benefit recital for her and himself together. By midsummer he had worked himself to exhaustion in the preliminaries, meanwhile revising and rehearsing his "Heroic Scene" for another ceremony. Napoleon's statue was to be put back on the column, Place Vendôme, and Berlioz' choral work, though first associated with the Greek Revolution, was perfectly suitable. For the first time since the July Days a popular celebration was to include music on the large scale. Huge stands were built opposite the Tuileries for the three hundred singers and two hundred and fifty instrumentists who were to follow the solemn beating of three or four hundred drums. The official program comprised Rossini's William Tell and Gazza Ladra overtures, Auber's Masaniello overture, a battle piece by the choral composer and conductor Schneitzhöffer, and four other choruses. It was only at the last minute that Berlioz had managed to have his own work 29 These particular articles appeared in L'Europe Littéraire, I, 123-4, «82—3, and 246; reprinted in V.M., II, 5 - 1 3 . Shaw in 1935, harking back to 1888: "I believed I could make musical criticism readable even by the deaf." (880, 6.)

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added, certainly the most fitting item on the program. The rehearsals (indoors) under Habeneck created a stir. That hardened conductor wept at the mere richness of sound, and Berlioz, alert to his opportunity, was able for the first time to study the properties of large ensembles.·0 But by the appointed day, Berlioz' piece had been surreptitiously worked off the program. Then the musical part of the festival was drowned out by incessant political demonstrations. The troops were armed and the mob angry. They did not return their King's greeting but shouted vivas when the Emperor's statue was raised. The Opera announced that the concert would be given again on its stage. More work for Berlioz to reinstate his "Scene": the concert was canceled. As for the joint "benefit" for Hector and his wife, it was a fiasco of another sort. It began late and Marie Dorval (Vigny's great love) stole the show. Coming after her, Harriet Smithson found little favor with her pantomime from the fourth act of Hamlet. Berlioz and his music did not get under way until 11:30 in front of a politically excited audience. They listened to Liszt, who played superbly; but in conducting his Sardanapalus cantata Berlioz miscued his orchestra and the crowd began to demand the Symphonie Fantastique. At this point the orchestra had had enough and started to leave. Berlioz had to make a speech of apology to the audience, despite the fact that it was long past midnight and they kept demanding the March from the Fantastique. The humiliation of Berlioz and his wife was complete. This failure, however, netted two thousand francs, which were swallowed up by Harriet's debts and the support of her family. No help was forthcoming from his; so he accepted the post of music critic on Le Rénovateur — an offshoot of the Correspondant, that is to say ultra-royalist, ultra-religious in tone. But as Berlioz wrote to Adèle: "Since I have no use for politics, their shade of opinion does not bother me in the least." 31 In short order, Berlioz wrote two excellent articles — a diplomatic one on the dancer Taglioni and the new Opera management (Dr. Veron and Ciceri) which featured her work, and a delicate and penetrating study of Chopin as pianist and composer. Berlioz did not consider this enough to fill the remainder of the year. A whole month was left in which to turn the defeat of his last concert into a victory. Aware that he lacked experience as a conductor, he did 30 His conclusion was: "Music is not made for the street nor for the open air." (L.I., 131.) Berlioz' friend, Georges Kastner, records the same conclusion in his manual on military bands published some years later. (82?, 317-8.) 31 AR., ijo.

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not dare risk a fresh disaster. Only one man in Paris could really give Berlioz' music properly, François Habeneck, but he brusquely refused. Girard was once again called on, the lesser of two risks. Liszt readily agreed to play some Weber, and Paganini's protégé, Haumann, offered a piece of his own composition. The rest was all by Berlioz: two new songs — "La Romance de Mary Tudor" and "Le Jeune Pâtre Breton," the King Lear overture, and the Symphonie Fantastique. The effort was worth it; expenses were met, and both public and critical acclaim were considerable. Only Fétis's Revue Musicale complained that M. Berlioz did not produce many new works. Berlioz was by now just turned thirty. He was married, had beguh to pay off some fifteen thousand francs on his wife's account, was supplying money to her mother, and was about to become a father. His sole means of support being his pen (plus the uncertain remainder of his prize) he could not afford the time to compose, even though he had a new symphony in his head. T w o occurrences came to his aid. His publisher and friend, Maurice Schlesinger, sensing that the new young men would turn out to be the great men of tomorrow, founded a periodical, La Gazette Musicale, which was to unite French and German musical thought against the frivolity of the Italians. Since the Paris Schlesinger was the brother and partner of the Berlin Schlesinger, and their firms published music on both sides of the Rhine, the new periodical would aid their business as well as promote the works of a very productive group of performers and composers. Berlioz was at once among the leaders of this enterprise, to which he contributed articles, editorial advice and practical toil.32 The second piece of luck was a request from Paganini for a composition in which he might play his newly acquired Stradivarius viola —a concerto for viola and orchestra. T o utilize the publicity, the Gazette announced a new work by Berlioz for viola, chorus, and orchestra, with the improvised title, The Last Moments of Mary Stuart,33 Within the next 32 Owing to the vagaries of copyright practice, Schlesinger's arrangement gave him the German rights to any piece of music he bought in France, provided he issued it also in Germany. Hence he stood to gain large sums for an indefinite period, the sale of these works being outright and not on a royalty basis. A t the same time he could say in his own defense that without the potential German market he could not have afforded to publish work as "advanced" as that of Berlioz. " T h e English and Scottish Marys were enjoying a run, due to Hugo's play Mary Tudor ( 1 8 3 3 ) and to Béranger's poem " M a r y Stuart's Farewell, 011 which W a g n e r composed a song as late as 1840. T h e form " T h e Last Day of — " was much in vogue.

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six months Berlioz finished the work —not a concerto, not for voices, and never again called "Mary Stuart," but during its gestation simply called "the symphony" or "my symphony with viola." It grew from two movements to three, then to four, until on May 31, he wrote to d'Ortigue: "It is nearly finished and will soon be born and baptized."84 The nameless symphony was associated by the author with some of the musical experiences he had brought back from Italy, so that after casting about for the proper allusive tag he finally hit upon Harold in Italy.36 The speed and joy with which he composed this sizable score show how ripe it was in Berlioz mind. His "inexplicable mechanism" worked just as soon as he could enjoy a little of the "time and tranquillity" which he said were his sole requirements.®* Though there were still duns, and some apprehension, both medical and financial, at the forthcoming addition to the family, Hector was in love and happy with Harriet. His need to give and receive affection was satisfied for the first time in his adult life. As Harriet's time approached, the pair moved to a quiet cottage and garden on the hill Montmartre, overlooking a plain as yet free of all industry, whose greenery reminded Berlioz of home and Italy.37 His good friends Liszt, Chopin, Hiller and others came out to the countrified suburb for the day. At other times there were quartets and piano sonatas at Schlesinger^, readings at Victor Hugo's, dinners where one met other young celebrities such as the ardent Liberal Catholic Lamennais ("What a man! Genius burns him, eats him away, dessicates him. He made me tingle with admiration.") " Lamennais was an excellent pianist, he held congenial views about the social role of art, and in fact Berlioz' two closest friends, Liszt and d'Ortigue, were the Abbé's disciples. Of the salons, that of Marie, Comtesse d'Agoult, was at once the least showy and the most lively. It was intellectual and cosmopolitan. Sainte-Beuve, Heine, Mickiewicz, the Princess Belgiojoso, Balzac, George Sand and Berlioz could be found there. Berlioz took Liszt, with the famous result 34

Corresp., 112. The viola, he felt, sounded throughout the piece "like a kind of melancholy dreamer in the manner of Byron's Chtlde Harold." {Mem., I, 302.) Not long before this date, J. M. W. Turner had similarly turned his Italian experiences to use. His "Piiferari" and "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage" (1832) are not so much visual records as summaries of diversified impressions. 38 A.R., 245. 37 Berlioz' cottage at Montmartre has been sketched and painted several times, once — it is said — by Van Gogh, though confirmation or this fact has eluded research; and in our century, on several occasions, by Utrillo, who seems to have lived in it. See Bibliography, sec. 2D: Iconography. 38 A.R., 257. 35

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that the pianist and the countess fell in love and eloped. But until this event, there was music, brilliant talk, and friendship among men who could love and admire one another without envy or reserve. Unfortunately, there was also "an avalanche, a cataract of concerts" to be reviewed. Between Le Rénovateur, and La Gazette Musicale, Berlioz had to sweat out copy on all conceivable subjects, good and bad, real and imaginary. And the most real were by no means those which induced him to put himself in the limelight as artist-hero of significant adventures. For he had taken on the mission of enlightener to the French in musical matters — an enterprise requiring equal parts of knowledge, tact, firmness, and ability to entertain. Berlioz preached Beethoven, analyzed his symphonies (beginning with the Third, Sixth and Ninth) and dissected the prejudices of those who, in any age, use famous names to damn the moderns without caring about the works of either. By dramatic parallels and allusions designed to rouse the imagination of his readers, and technical arguments designed to quiet their scruples, Berlioz acted as mediator between the academic or fashionable conservatism and the boldness of the late symphonies and quartets. "Art being always a social and general concern," as the romanticists had said, these halftechnical, half-poetic sermons wound up with a broadside against the impercipience of the public. "The Greeks made of Homer a god. So long as Beethoven has not a temple in our midst we shall deserve the name of barbarian." 39 Berlioz also took the opportunity offered by a feeble revival of Mozart's Don Giovanni to demonstrate the difference between musical drama and commonplace opera. T o the poet Deschamps he wrote in confidence: "I'd like to talk to you about Mozart. We must absolutely lather up the masterpiece in such a way as to bring a fever on the lovers of the big bass drum," 40 i.e., the Italians. In a society which freely admitted that musicales were held in order to start conversation, and which required tunes (as Berlioz put it) "so written that the ladies and gentlemen who sell ribbon can remember them easily the next morning," the standards that Berlioz tried to establish were exacting but would not seem to us impossibly high. Since it was agreed that "music-desk music" is boring and always too long, Berlioz affirms without mincing words that a nation which is sunk in such Philistinism cannot lay claim to high culture. By witty asides, calculated effrontery, or adroit storytelling he compels the reader to go on and be indoctrinated against his will; he communicates his contempt, his enthusi-A.R.,

254.

40

L.I., 142 and 28j, 8872.

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asm, and even his subtlety. Of course, no mere writing makes a musical out of a sow's ear, but something always sticks, which explains why after thirty-five years of Berlioz' propaganda the French public — though possibly still Philistine at heart — could laud Beethoven by rote.41 This effort, however, took its toll. In a man of artistic faith, the continual dissent of mankind engenders at last a spiritual weariness. Though not strengthened, faith is made at least cheerful by agreement. In early May 1834, within a month of completing his symphony, Berlioz shared some of his spleen with Liszt, urging him to come out, with Chopin and others, to Montmartre: I cannot tell you how much this springtime scene moves and saddens me. Besides, yesterday I suffered several wounds in my artistic affections, which make me miserable to the point of tears, and which all my reason (for I have a good deal more reason than you might think) or that of my poor Harriet 42 cannot make me forget or overcome. Is Vigny coming with you? There is something gentle and affectionate about his mind which always charms me and which today I find I almost need. Why aren't you both here now? Perhaps tomorrow I shall feel differently. Are we really playthings of the air? . . . And is Moore right when he says: "And false the light on glory's plume, As fading hues of even; . . . There's nothing bright but Heaven!" 48 But I do not believe in heaven. It is horrible to confess it. My heaven is the poetic world and there is a slug on each blossom. Look here, come and bring Vigny with you. I need you both. W h y can I not keep myself from admiring with tenacious passion certain works which are, after all, so fragile — like ourselves, like everything that is? Berlioz then quotes from memory (that is, with some inaccuracy) fourteen bars from Spontini evocative of anxious longing.44 The visitors did come and Berlioz could report to Adèle: " W e discussed art, poetry, philosophy, music and drama — in a word all that constitutes life — in the presence of this beauty of nature and Italian sunshine which has favored us these few days past." Then in an upsurge of anguish: " M y father is well, I gather from the Rocher ladies. Is everyone else well? They tell me you are losing weight. Why? What is wrong? You are so alone, so sad. W e shall meet again, I tell you, sooner or later. It is impossible otherwise. Farewell, these thoughts sadden me. Farewell, 41

From 1835 to 1839, Berlioz' efforts on behalf of Beethoven were seconded by Liszt (see 210). 42 To Berlioz always "Henriette" but restored to its original form in this text. 43 These words are from the second of Moore's Sacred Songs, the one Berlioz had set in Rome as a Méditation Religieuse 44 A.R., 160-1.

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I embrace you with my whole affection and that which my good and sweet Harriet bears you." 4 5 By the middle of May 1834, three parts of Harold in Italy were finished and the composer was offering his old friend Humbert Ferrand the dedication of the work. Practical affairs were once more crowding the desk where only score paper should have been seen. "I am dead tired and bored from scribbling at so much a column for those rascally papers. My opera plans are in the hands of the Bertin family" — owners of the Journal des Débats and influential at court. The scheme — most appropriate to Berlioz — was to offer him "a superior libretto" on Hamlet. "Meantime," he adds — for he was inured to delays and never waited for a hare to be caught before starting another — "I have chosen as subject for a two-act comic opera, Benvenuto Cellini." This was equally apt, as will appear. By May 31, Berlioz, working day and night, was in sight of the end as regards the symphony: it was soon finished, and "baptized" not long after. The autograph bears the date June 22, 1834.

The Second Symphony and Its

"Orgy"

I ask only for time and tranquillity. — BERLIOZ to Adèle, November, 1833

In the work that he finally christened Harold in Italy, Berlioz composed a score which, apart from its power to move us, shows his power to work under the discipline of diverse requirements. He had in the first place to write for viola and orchestra, and being unwilling to produce a mere seesawing of effects between these two instruments, he had to solve the problems of sustained form as well as of contrast and balance in sonority. Dramatizing this problem, he gave to the viola the role of a lyric declaimer, in the mood of melancholy. As he said later, the viola "sticks to its sentimental garrulousness . . . and is present during the action but not mixed up in it." 1 This is but a figurative way of stating what amounts technically to the canto fermo or fixed song around which other musical ideas are to group themselves. In the second place Berlioz wished to use a number of melodies which he had already jotted down 45

1

A.R.,

263-4.

M.C., 8.

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and even worked out, notably in the discarded overture to Rob Roy. Thirdly, he meant to pursue the goal he had set himself in the Symphonie Fantastique, to make "one work." It seems likely that he also thought of carrying forward his attempt to combine musical means by adjoining voices to the solo instrument and orchestra, as he had begun to do in Lilio and the Tempest fantasia. This intention he gave up, the only trace of it in Harold in Italy being the device of "reminiscences" in the finale — clearly a borrowing from Beethoven's Choral Symphony. Berlioz translated his vocal plan into instrumental expression throughout, very likely because of the nature of his material, which amounted to a series of cantos: in the first movement the viola sings its melancholy; when we hear it in the second, the pilgrims are singing their evening hymn; in the third the viola returns while a mountaineer sings a serenade to his love; and in the fourth, all these lyrics are re-presented against a bacchanalian background. The return in each movement of the viola voice in its original form is both a fresh use of the leitmotif principle and a lavish opportunity for free contrapuntal writing.2 The whole work is thus more completely pulled together than the Symphonie Fantastique, at the same time as the vocal role of the viola and other instrumental groups represents a further step towards the fulfillment of Berlioz' persistent aim: the dramatic symphony. As for the source and purport of the musical inspiration, the facts are equally plain: Berlioz was re-embodying some of the musical and natural impressions he had received in Italy. Two movements of the symphony were composed very rapidly, then a third and fourth, which is enough to show that he did not work from any scenario based on Byron but simply delved deeper and deeper into emotions which time had caused to settle. In all these aspects of the symphony, Beethoven was obviously very much in Berlioz' mind. The first movement of Harold begins with a fugato in the basses, the somberness of which spells Berlioz but the design of which is Beethovenian; in the third movement one hears fleeting echoes of the Pastoral; and in the fourth occur the "reminiscences." Apart from this, Berlioz was treading new ground. T o make the symphonic form "compact and meaningful throughout," and yet allow the viola to stand out with just enough floweriness of speech, was no mean task. Yet the composer kept the elements so much in equipoise, esthetically as well as audibly, that when Paganini saw the score, he told Berlioz he would not 2

See the quotation of a passage from the Allegretto in Mr. Walter Piston's brilliant book on Counterpoint (1347, 80).

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care to play the work: "I am not given enough to do." * Here was one "program," namely the virtuoso's demand for a chance to show off fingerwork, that Berlioz declined to follow. T h e two musicians continued to be friends none the less, and it is probable that Paganini gave Berlioz the benefit of his knowledge of viola technique. Certainly the scoring as a whole is what one authority calls it, "a veritable tour de force of concertizing between the soloist and orchestra . . . A n y monotony that might result from the viola sound is avoided by adding to it unisons of horns, clarinets, bassoons, or cellos." 4 T h e conception of the whole, then, is musically sound, the only evidence needed to prove it being a good performance with a violist possessed of a good tone and willing to play the dynamics as marked. W h e n Lionel Tertis last played the work in London, 5 the critics were astonished at the magical effect of the chords (sul ponticello) in the middle section of the March: they had never "come off" under other hands. It is a generality about Berlioz that you have not heard the work until it is played right. This is of course true of all music, but it applies with peculiar force to Berlioz because his limpid scoring never covers up defects of performance. A t the same time his genuinely melodic counterpoint requires that each line be given the weight inversely proportional to the strength of the playing instrument. Harold in Italy calls for the playing style of the chamber orchestra (notice how many passages use a small though ever-varied ensemble), Berlioz having perfected its adaptation to this work by repeated hearings: six years elapsed before he let the score be published. T h e work opens with a melancholy but majestic adagio above which w e shortly hear (in the minor) a foretaste of the "Harold" theme for woodwinds, then full orchestra, which ushers in its restatement on the viola above arpeggios on the harp. This was the melody, rescued from Rob Roy, which Berlioz had temporarily associated with the Last Moments of Mary Stuart. It undoubtedly dates from the time Berlioz spent in Nice after his break with Camille Moke, and it is simply a tuneful plaint which he was loath to discard. A melody, being a pearl fished up from mysterious depths, must not be thrown back but set and reset until it finds its perfect place. In the overture it was contrasted with a more energetic figure which is here used again as second subject, and which Mem., I, 302. * Pierné: /503, 2546. 6 Under Sir Hamilton Harty, Apr. 8, 1935 3

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distantly evokes the mood of the final movement. The title of this first one is "Harold in the Mountains: scenes of melancholy, happiness and joy," but the music written before the description develops quite classically and concludes with the characteristic Berliozian device of a simultaneous treatment of the opening and closing themes." Dramatically the movement contrasts three moods; melancholy prevails in the introduction and adagio, happiness and joy dominate the allegro. It is worth noticing the distinction Berlioz always makes between happiness and joy: the latter is always a more turbulent, more physical emotion. As for "the mountains" they are of course nowhere to be seen. Music, like poetry, moves against an invisible décor, and although the atmosphere of this first "scene" in the saga of Harold the Wanderer is as vivid as Liszt says, its setting remains distinct from its essence: we end by associating the two, but echoes in later composers show us how easily they can be dissociated.7 The second movement is a march which Berlioz tells us he composed while sitting quietly by his fireside with his bride. He rightly predicted that it would "soon have a reputation." 8 It is built on a pattern which has since become familiar through its use by Wagner in his preludes, and which consists of a phrase brought by development to a high point of intensity and then gradually diminished to its first elements — in a word, crescendo-decrescendo. Berlioz seems to have been the first to use and denote the structure by the symbol: < >.· The descriptive title of this second movement is "March of Pilgrims Singing the Evening Hymn," and its germ is the musical sensation of a juxtaposed Β and C, as of two bells sounding together. Berlioz gives the two notes to woodwinds and strings respectively, after the choral phrase which provides the march theme has run through each "stanza" and before a contrasting rhythm has served as a refrain or litany. Thus the march is at once "sung" and 6 Liszt remarks in his study of the symphony that "this Allegro builds against a magnificent background of nature a complex of repressed despair and exuberant joy, and the broken rhythms and harmonies of the polyphonic figures — which no one knows how to organize and unify . . . better than Berlioz — serve here to express . . . the alternation of fancy, splendor, and sadness."

($8η, 390.) 7

Compare Siegfried's "Rhine Journey," Charpentier's Impressions

and Strauss's Aus Italien. 8 L.I., 148.

d'Italie,

9 A Trav., 309. In his review, precisely, of the Lohengrin prelude which he thought a masterpiece, Berlioz defined his own innovation, though without laying claim to it nor even mentioning himself. Liszt's Orpheus and Glazunow's The Sea and the Woods are other examples of the form.

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"walked" and punctuated by the bell-like harmony. T h e litany resembles those Berlioz heard in his Italian excursions, so that the whole forms an evocative pattern without being at any point an imitation. T h e choral phrase is repeated in rich variation, "like a luxuriant vine," says Liszt. 10 Soon the viola theme joins the canto in a passage of breathtaking counterpoint. A n ordinary composer might well have been content with these three elements. But Berlioz wanted an additional contrast, for which he had a further musical idea, also of Italian origin — the quiet psalmody in sustained chords accompanied below by a pizzicato sketching the march, and above by eery viola arpeggios played near the bridge. 11 A f t e r this, the choral begins again in lessened volume and dies away as the two notes of the bells, divided among flutes, horns, and harp repeat the "seemingly dissonant but remarkably harmonised seventh, C - B . . . and dwindle away to a final pianissimo." 12 T h e manuscript of the score shows, incidentally, with what untiring care Berlioz worked over the composition of his chords and the instrumentation of all the delicate moments. T h e effect of this search is what made Emmanuel say that in Berlioz "melodic line and balance of forms — whose purity is essential — have as auxiliaries and may even use as substitutes pure motionless sounds considered as a rare and precious substance . . . Listen to Harold in Italy, an unequaled treasury of 'durations' and 'accents,' which . . . entitle one to call Berlioz the first of the Impressionists." 1 3 A f t e r the march and occupying the place of minuet or scherzo is a short "Serenade of an Abbruzzi Mountaineer to his Mistress." It opens with a lively refrain in country style, such as was played b y the Italian pifferari whom Berlioz heard at Subiaco." This piece of musical folklore is given interest b y its instrumentation and unexpected rhythmic turns. 10

5*7, 39'· Some performers make these arpeggios sound like a vaudeville performer on the "musical saw," and give the impression that Berlioz so intended it. In the Victor recording ( 1436) and in the flesh, Mr. Primrose plays this passage admirably well. [Note of 1948 upon the first recording.] 12 5*7, 392· Fétis complained that the two notes did not belong to the harmony and to this day musicians who approve the effect (having heard it again in Strauss's Also Sprach Zarathustra) carelessly refer to the presence of "the wrong note." 13 427, 25J. Those to whom these sensations that have no "motion" — but only recall motion — give no pleasure are bound to find whole stretches of the work "monumentally dull." (Cecil Forsyth: 1310, 396.) 14 T h e piffero is a rustic oboe. Berlioz suggested that it might be the instrument mentioned by Virgil: ite per alta Dindyma, ubi assuetis B I K O R E M dat tibia 11

cantum. (j3, 7.)

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Then comes the serenade on the English horn, which the viola theme (in augmentation) soon joins and raises to passionate intensity. The brief variations on these intertwined melodies are a good example of the way in which Berlioz swiftly passes from the picturesque to the sublime. If one lends an inattentive ear, or rather if one judges the piovement merely from a general impression of its simple material, it stays in the mind as ordinary folk-pipings, as Romantic local color. But in Berlioz' dramatic style, the sublime arises unexpectedly from the ordinary and the simple, the perpetual sublime being a contradiction in terms. To seek it is to fail, or else to cloy by substituting the pretty. Berlioz accordingly closes his serenade with the pifferi again, followed by the briefest echo of the serenade, this time on the viola.15 The finale, it is interesting to note on the manuscript, is written in a firm clear hand, like the rest of the score; it shows few corrections and no false starts. Labeled "Orgy of Brigands" it is, as a famous theorist has said, "an orgy, but a genuinely musical one, set forth in perfectly clear form." 19 Still, many think this the least satisfactory of the four movements.17 The rhythmical interest of the piece no one can deny, any more than the art with which the fragments of earlier melodies are introduced and as it were vanquished by the irrepressible "orgy" theme. This finale may well be less enticing because less "beautiful," less soothing than the earlier movements. But the symphony is conceived as a drama, where, as in life, we must not expect sweetness throughout; and the composer has taken pains to prepare us, at the close of the first movement and in moments of the third, for a descent from the elegiac. But this is not all. The musical form of the orgy involves a conflict between Berlioz and tradition. His natural pace is rapid, his musical mood readily changes into its opposite, but symmetry and expediency alike dictated an elaborate repeat of over a hundred bars in the middle section. 15

Technically, as Liszt points out, "the crossing rhythms and entwined melodies are balanced with extraordinary ingenuity and finesse and tenderness of feeling — an artistry which is still more evident on reading than on hearing, because in reading one is not too absorbed b y the shimmering color and lulling sounds of this morendo." {58η, 394.) 19 Dr. Percy Goetschius, known as the teacher of several American composers. (436,299.) 17 For quite a while, despite Liszt's stressing "the greatness of its musical conception," I agreed with its detractors. It was not until a Toscanini performance that I saw its true proportions and lost the feeling that it was episodic. I should add that I was helped to understand by the enthusiasm and Insight of the late Robert Pitney, w h o , before the existence of the recorded version, tirelessly illustrated his views with the aid of Liszt's piano transcription: Berlioz takes study, even and especially when he seems to hold no particular secret.

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The dramatic truth is that we should hear this bacchanal, with its superb brass fanfare, only once; the very shape of the component phrases forbids reiteration. And yet, as Berlioz knew, on a single hearing the very vividness would work against proper appreciation. How many listeners would notice the Mozartian passages when the "orgy" theme seems lightly parodied? How many would enjoy the subtle, fragmentary re-entries of the earlier themes? Rather, most listeners would be left thinking of the menacing phrases for trombones, the brusque pauses, and the mad whirl of the concluding bars — "a stretta of incomparable power and color," though it "goes against certain habitual tastes." 18 Berlioz therefore tries to unstiffen our taste by giving us a second hearing soon after the first. This suggests a convenient procedure for the modern student: play this finale two or three times in succession on the gramophone, and each time more melodies, more light and shade, more art will emerge from a movement which at first seemed all brass and noise. With familiarity the central repeat will no longer affect one as a stumbling over rocky ground. All elements being in proper place, the work as a whole will seem "strong and great"; " and the finale itself will give the irresistible sense of "freedom under the discipline of a powerful will." 20 When familiar to ear and mind, Berlioz* Second Symphony resolves itself into the sufficiently explicit series: ι. 2. 3. 4.

Adagio and Allegro {Malinconico e giocoso) Allegretto (March) Scherzo (Serenade) Finale (Giocoso e furioso)

And its biographical or poetic reference can be summed up — if we insist on a verbal link with Byron's Childe Harold — in the lines For I have been accustomed to entwine My thoughts with Nature rather in the fields Than Art in galleries.21 Such was the spirit of Berlioz' Italian journey, and such the mood indicated earlier by the phrase "Harold the Wanderer." After the "awakening to passion" that informs the Symphonie Fantastique, the Italian symphony enshrines the more concentrated, self-propelling emotion of a Wanderjähr. The theme for the viola (the French name, alto, fits better its grave masculine tone) sustains its character (person or psychological 18 19

587, 397· 289, 145.

20 21

421, 255· Canto IV, stanza lxi.

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state) in the twilit region between introspection and self-pity. More "objective" drama keeps sentimentality in check, just as it did in the persons of the poets here associated, Byron and Berlioz.22 It only remains to ask why Berlioz winds up his wanderings, like his dreams of love, to the tune of a lawless revelry — in a Witches' Sabbath and in a Brigands' Orgy. The latter especially seems to bother certain critics, who find the very notion of brigands and orgies ridiculous and — comic opera excepted — beyond the pale of music. The reason for the musical impulse is obvious: Berlioz felt within himself all the fury and excitement of both those finales and he enjoyed giving them a musical shape, just as Beethoven did in the riotous last movement of the Seventh. 11 This is what art is for. The complete dramatist, whether in music, poetry, or painting, sees life whole and steadies his vision through art by discovering the means for transfixing his aroused emotions: we saw with what a cool hand Berlioz organized both his bacchanals. The one in Harold he liked especially to conduct "in my fashion," that is to say, as a great rhythmic display, by turns tender and violent, singing and percussive." It is the names Berlioz attached to these musical routs that are outmoded, and this simply because they are historical. If age dignifies, then the tradition of witchcraft is surely respectable — what more elemental and productive of music than a ronde de sabbat? The notion of brigandage is, if one may say so, no less a part of the European tradition. In Berlioz' Italy, it was of course contemporary history. The sailors on his ship were only sailors because they were not brigands; Berlioz attended the wedding of one such outlaw; the population among whom he lived during his long rambles were subject to the raids of banditti, and the countryside was dotted with graves of brigands or their victims.28 A brigand, in short, was a gangster — Berlioz did not invent the profession nor learn about it from comic opera: it reached the opera stage because it first 22 Compare, as to the quality of intentional sentiment, a work patterned after Berlioz' Harold, Strauss's Don Quixote for cello and orchestra. 23 " T h e great combination," as Arthur Machen says of literature, "is the combination of murder with mirth . . . the gross vulgarities of the Drunken Porter and the Gravediggers . . . in the tragedies of Hamlet and Macbeth." (Foreword to Edwin Greenwood's Skin and Bone, London, 1934.) 21 Mem., II, 81-2. Looking back on those two finales and one or two later ones from the same hand shows how much subsequent musicians derived technically from Berlioz for their own saturnalias. Even the surrealist ballet music of the 1920's, in seeking to render the neglected elements of the vulgar and cruel, did not go much beyond Berlioz' rhythms and instrumentation of a hundred years before. 25 A.R.; 168.

2

54

Berlioz

existed in daily life, and although the term brigand now sounds ludicrous, the reality of the racketeer is not yet to be gainsaid. For "orgy" — also a piece of period vocabulary — substitute "wild party" and quaintness disappears. The label is indicative merely, as in the titles of twentiethcentury works such as "Bagarre" and "£/ Salón Mexico."26 The point would not be worth laboring, if certain critics were not so easily diverted from music by what they read in print.27 Being themselves deeply programmatic, as was shown earlier, they sincerely believe that Berlioz was busy copying scenes in sounds, and are no less sinccrely upset when musical material treated for Rob Roy is recast as evocative of Mary Stuart and finally of Childe Harold. 28 N o doubt the unimaginative fail to grasp how associations cluster. T o them the very word association has no plural. T o the artist, on the contrary, the task of creation is in part the discovery of symbols at once sharp and ambiguous enough for infinite reference. Berlioz' first sea voyage had brought him into contact with a young Venetian corsair — i.e., a pirate or sea brigand — and with an old sailor who had shipped with Lord Byron. Afterwards in the Coliseum Berlioz read Byron as modern youth might read T. S. Eliot in Canterbury Cathedral; he read Rob Roy as one might read the Saga of Billy the Kid.29 The transition from literature to life could not have been easier than in the Abruzzi mountains where Salvator Rosa loved to sketch amid an earlier generation of banditti, and where under cover of great beech and chestnut forests, semisavage primitivism continued until the very end of the nineteenth century. 30 In short, Berlioz was drawing 28

B y Bohuslav Martinu and Aaron Copland, respectively. In a useful book on The Concerto, it is said — with no awareness of selfstultification: "While Weber, Berlioz, Liszt, and Tschaikowsky protested that their music was intended to make sense as music, they were relieved, nevertheless, to have a program on hand, a set of ordered and unambiguous ideas on which to hang their sense of musical coherence." (904, 171.) 28 "It is a wasted effort, trying to find in Childe Harold anything that corresponds to Berlioz' program." (Sic: 904, 178.) See also Sir Donald T o v e y (490 ), who concludes his analysis of "gloriously nonsensical facts" about the score with two misstatements — one, that Paganini played the viola at its première; the other, that Byron's line "there let him lay" is a grammatical solecism: it is good eighteenth-century usage, such as Byron heard in his childhood, aid the lesson of Sir Donald's mistimed reproof is that critics should first be tolerable historians. 29 Rob Roy MacGregor was a distinguished agrarian gangster who "gjaranteed the future security of herds against, not his own followers merely, but all freebooters whatever," and who at an advanced age died highly respected by the community. (Sir Walter Scott: 1196, I, 182 and /27p, 455.) 30 George Meredith who was war correspondent to the Morning Post in 1866 frequently speaks of brigandage; and forty years later Benedetto Croce lodged 27

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on contemporary art and contemporary life regardless of place, costuming, or terminology. The justification for ascribing the orgy to brigands has a further cause. It was in Berlioz' day a common wish to withdraw from society and join a bandit gang. This expressed the period's immense longing for individual liberties. It is no accident that the first Italian emancipators called themselves carbonari and at times actually merged with lawless bands.31 Here again we meet an ancestral custom of preindustrial society: to join the freebooter was to enact revenge against social injustice, real or fancied — the Robin Hood motif. Shakespeare records it in Two Gentlemen of Verona, when Valentine, crossed in love, exclaims: This shadowy desert, unfrequented woods I better brook than flourishing peopled towns. Similarly, Molière's Alceste vows to leave the city for "the rocks." We thus return, via banditry, to the love of nature as healing the wounds of social man. Berlioz had already given vent to the feeling in one of the extravagant soliloquies of Lélio, that which introduces the brigands' song and chorus. In Harold he purged himself more thoroughly in an instrumental allegro whose therapeutic value may be greater than we think, the release of violence and vulgarity acting as a needful antidote to the repressions of conventional life. In any event, flirting with the idea of brigandage hinted of the nascent democracy already undermining the bourgeois monarchy of Louis Philippe. By 1834, the King's green cotton umbrella had figuratively extinguished the first high hopes of the culture-makers. What in England would later be known as the Victorian Compromise was beginning to solidify in France. Moralism invaded daily life; masculine clothes lost their superfluities and grew darker until they reached the uniform "decent black" of the mid-century. With moralism came its twin, literalism: at the new "nautical theater" where Harriet Smithson had hoped to be engaged, the great lure was an actual, positive lake, made of water, on which genuine boats could be seen to float. The so-called practical intellect was in the ascendant. Among the newly emancipated men of affairs, the men of art were looked at askance and forced into the opposition; when King Louis Philippe's son-in-law a complaint with the University of Naples because "a brigand" had obtained a doctor's degree from it " b y blackmail" — obviously an early form of correspondence course. S1 Byron's forces in Greece were of course outlaws on two counts. See also A.R., 165 and 168.

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tried to gather around him a salon of the best talents in France, his efforts were vetoed by "Papa." In order to survive, genius could only pursue a relentlessly anti-bourgeois policy. In a year when young Gautier was being prosecuted for the boldness of Mademoiselle de Maupin and was retorting in a pyrotechnic preface; when Rabelais and Villon were denounced in the public prints as being "in exceedingly bad taste," when Berlioz was attacking the Institute and defending Chopin, 32 he privately cheered himself by reading the newly translated Memoirs of Benvenuto Cellini, discovering in this "bandit of genius" a perfect subject for another dramatic parable on genius itself. Being, as artist, dedicated to order; and as creator, to freedom, Berlioz' banditry had to be vicarious and, so to speak, reasoned. But society resists reason, and the Romanticists were to find that they could impose their thought but not their will on a commercial and more than ever massive society. 32 '39$ ('834) 35—8 and 229-39. The second article, in the form of a tale entitled "A Suicide from Artistic Zeal," was reproduced in the Soirées( 12th) Eves., 128-45. The story depicts a situation akin to his own during the crisis at Genoa, which tends to confirm its historicity.

Berlioz' Requiem, by Fantin-Latour "Your overwhelming music . . ." — S PONTINI

10. The Gothic Tradition: Requiem Mass

June 23, 1834 to December f , 183η

With all his faults, and with all the irregularity of his drama, one may look upon his works as upon an ancient majestic piece of Gothic architecture, compared with a neat modern building. The latter is more elegant and glaring, but the former is more strong and more solemn. — POPE on Shakespeare, 1728

THE Harold symphony once finished, it had to be played — if only because Berlioz wanted to hear and revise it. He must accordingly give one or more concerts at his own risk in the coming winter season. The preparation went on amid expected chores and fresh difficulties. On August 14, 1834, Harriet Berlioz gave birth, after a painful labor of forty hours, to a son, Louis.1 A few days later, the Opera-Comique turned down the libretto that Berlioz and Auguste Barbier (the well-known poet met in Italy) had fashioned around the figure of Benvenuto Cellini. Meanwhile, Paganini had found the viola part in Berlioz' new work too slight for him, and Urhan, a classmate of Berlioz' at the Conservatoire and a pious Beethovenian, was entrusted with it. As Harriet slowly recovered, Berlioz breathed easier — on two counts: relief about Harriet and the fact that his family relented, sending congratulations and gifts. Possessed of strong family feeling, the young husband felt as if reunited after a gnawing separation. By further good fortune, the Journal des Débats, seeking a new music critic, tried out Berlioz on its readers by reprinting one of his feuilletons.2 Early in November a first concert, still lacking the symphony, brought forth two new choral works — both slight but charming idylls —that Berlioz had somehow found the tranquillity to compose: La Belle Voyageuse and Sara la Baigneuse. Even this modest program had cost much effort. For a musician without power 1

Within a month, Berlioz wrote to his sister: "Do not worry; the boy is baptized. He is not named Hercules, John-Baptist, Caesar, Alexander, or Martial [Magloire] but quite simply Louis." A.R., 267. 2 1386, Oct. 10, 1834.

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in the regular theaters "nothing is scarcer than passable singers. I cannot find any for my concerts, and twice I have had to postpone a trio to which I attach some importance, for lack of a moderately deceit bass. The managers refuse to lend their people." 3 On the twenty-second, Harriet made her debut at the Théâtre Nautique in an appalling pantomime entitled "The Last Hour of the Condemned." She acted well enough but the piece failed, together with the rcanager. The theater shut its doors without paying its debts. But the next day, Harold in Italy was played with resounding success before a picked audience. Fashion, journalism, and art were represented by Jules Janin, Liszt, d'Ortigue, Heine, Eugène Sue, Legouvé, Barbier, Léon de Wailly, Victor Hugo, Gounet, Sainte-Beuve, Lesueur, Chopin, the brothers Deschamps, Vigny, Gérard de Nerval, Dumas, plus the publishers and patrons of art, Schlesinger and Renduel. Berlioz' prediction came true: the second movement (Pilgrims' March) was wildly applauded and called for twice, but Girard mixed up his cues and ruined the encore. From this moment Berlioz determined to master the art of conducting and lead his own works. A second performance three weeks later, with Chopin playing one movement of his new concerto in F Minor, brought little into the box office, but the third performance on December 28 netted Berlioz two thousand francs. The toil, the excitement, and the indecisiveness of such artistic victories left Berlioz exhausted. T o his previous obligations and the expenses for the newborn child, he found he must add the cost of moving the family back within city limits; his goings and comings were otherwise too tiring. So the year 1835 opened in an atmosphere of worry and strain. He cautioned d'Ortigue: "Please don't stress in your articles my position in regard to money. It's useless to dwell on it." T h e band of Berlioz* admirers was bent on rousing the nineteenth-century goddess Public Opinion so as to "force the doors of the Opera." T h e y wanted a great public success not only for him but for the satisfaction of their faith. Berlioz must naturally live up to the view they entertained of him as a potential master in the opera, and on the strength of the esteem shown him by the brothers Bertin and the staff of the Débats, Berlioz made new overtures to Dr. Véron. Perhaps a revision of the Cellini libretto into a grand opera might suit. Nothing came of it. Instead, for its customary N e w Year's masked ball, the Opera produced on January 10 a skit parodying Berlioz and his friends. 3

A.R., 272. T h e trio was undoubtedly the first piece completed of the Benvenuto Cellini score.

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It was a sign of celebrity and the parody (greatly enjoyed by the audience) testified to the impact made by the composer's works and ideas upon the public. Berlioz' colleague and rather envious rival, Adolphe Adam, had had a hand in the skit, and the actor Arnal — who later apologized very contritely — played the speaking role. This aped both Berlioz and his projection of himself, Lélio.4 The mimic told his audience: "You will hear a grand Symphony . . . 'An Episode in a Gambler's Life.' T o make my dramatic thoughts understood I have no need of words, singers, or scenery. All this, gentlemen, is in my orchestra. You will hear my hero speak. You will see him portrayed from head to foot, and at the second reprise of the first allegro, I will show you how he puts on his necktie. Ah, the wonders of instrumental music!" 6 Berlioz was present and laughed good-naturedly. "I sincerely hope," he wrote, "that before next year I can write and perform another similar composition to add to the gaiety of the Opera's buffooneries." 4 A touch of bitterness may be supposed to enter here, for on second thoughts, what would be the effect on the unthinking public of the ridicule heaped upon a new and serious esthetic creed — that of drama through music alone? And was it not a bitter thought in itself that the Opera should be 4 T h e name Lélio, assigned in place of "the artist" w h o first figured in his melologue, was explicitly given in the revision of the score in i8$j, but it probably dates f r o m 1832 or 1833, f o r w e find the association of ideas mentioned b y d'Ortigue in these years (18 f , 304), and much of what he says can only have come f r o m Berlioz himself. D'Ortigue compares "the artist's" feeling for his beloved to "the singular passion of the Marquise of R . . . f o r the actor Lélio which has lately been recounted with so much skill b y a gifted writer . . ." T h e writer was G e o r g e Sand, whose tale La Marquise describes her artist-hero as a transcendent genius w h o was grudgingly admired b y everyone but the loving Marquise. " H e never achieved reputation, whether at court or in the city . . . But later on, his fiery genius and artistic striving w e r e taken into account. . . . In art he was not a man of his century." (¡278, 196.) It may incidentally be noted that a common source for the name Lelio in Berlioz and G e o r g e Sand may have been Hoffmann's tale of " T h e E m p t y House" (Nachtstücke, II, 1817) in w h i c h the especially intuitive character is so named. A French scholar of our century insists that " T h i s name Lelio . . . was probably b o r r o w e d b y Berlioz f r o m G e o r g e Sand's Lélia and turned into a masculine. . . . It seems to us unquestionable that Berlioz read the novel and drew from it this name Lélio, so well adapted to his symphony." (298, nçn.) T h e trouble with this notion is that the novel Lélia came out nearly a year after d'Ortigue's remark establishing the parallel with the earlier tale, La Marquise. It was G e o r g e Sand w h o borrowed the name from her o w n w o r k and turned it into a feminine. T h e r e is moreover no parallel between the heroine of the novel and Berlioz' artist. 5 268, 288. Β

IJÇ8,

Jan.

17,

1835.

2ÓO

Berlioz

so easy of access for "buffoons" and so rightly shut against serious composers? What Berlioz and his friends did not take into account was that to ingratiate himself with the Opera management he would have had to be not merely a different kind of artist but a different kind of man. Under Véron, the house was more than ever a fashionable resort for those bent on self-indulgence: part night club, part house of assignation.7 The pageantry which Meyerbeer knew how to provide, and which he reinforced with substantial favors and flattery, made that composer persona grata on the business side, while setting at rest the susceptibilities of the lubricious Doctor and his ostentatious protégé Loève-Veimars." A man of aristocratic reserve and probity like Berlioz was on the contrary a living reproach to their ways and outlook on life. He was, to be sure, courteously treated by Véron, who would even "lend" him Mademoiselle Falcon for a concert appearance, but he would have been more popular with that crowd had he wished to borrow a ballerina for another purpose. The Duke of Orleans, with his flair for men of artistic integrity, aided the Bertins to decide on retaining Berlioz for the Débats. The latter began his well-paid duties on January 25, 1835, and left the paper only on his resignation twenty-eight years later. Were it not for debts and concerts, his financial situation was now assured." But the expense of furnishing his apartment in town, and providing servants for Harriet and the baby, was aggravated by her want of management and kept him financially harassed. In his student days he had acquired the habit of keeping accounts, preferring to live within his means. His debts then were only for musical purposes — playing or publishing his works — and he could feel personally solvent while using credit as a capital investment in his career. N o w the steadily increasing arrears added to the strain of journalism and noncomposition. Though he complained merely of excess of work, Hector's letters to Ferrand and Adèle show that his mind spent itself in writing several reviews a month for each of three papers, expanding earlier articles 7

1142, 29 and 49 if. François-Adolphe Loève-Veimars ( 1 8 0 1 - 5 4 ) , ° f mixed French and German parentage, was one of the translators of Hoffmann as well as the author of the history of the Vebmgericht on which Berlioz had based his first opera, Les Francs-Juges. (ιιρ6α and 1264.) 9 Boschot computes that for the year 1835 a t least, by combining work on two newspapers with the remainder of the government stipend, Berlioz must have had an income of 7000 francs. This would probably equal 7000 dollars todav [1948], free of any but poll taxes. 8

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for serial republication, and keeping in touch with the authorities in hopes of some musical commission — state festival or grand opera.10 Family life, it is true, had its rewards. He was passionately devoted to his wife and child. "Our little boy," he confided to Adèle, "continues charming; you have no idea how beautiful he is. He never cries but laughs aloud as soon as one is willing to play with him. Harriet grows prouder of him every day. . . . Incidentally, you miscalculated the size of the kid's head: your bonnet just fits, but a little more width wouldn't have hurt." Then in the margin: "Important note: it's not the bonnet, it's the tape that isn't long enough. You are vindicated and I am an ignoramus." 1 1 Being concert critic for the most influential newspaper in Paris, Berlioz could choose what to review, which usually meant the programs of the Société des Concerts du Conservatoire. This gave him the chance to expound the principles of modern instrumental music to a wider public. The fifteen to twenty thousand subscribers of the Journal des Débats were treated to a virtual course, an orthodoxy, in the principles of Gluck, Weber, and Beethoven. 12 Berlioz repeatedly analyzed the nine symphonies, which he regarded as the fountainhead of the expressive genre. It was his own stake in creation that Berlioz was one-sidedly defending, sometimes at the expense of the eighteenth-century masters —just as Shaw later defended Ibsen at the expense of Shakespeare. The Parisians, then brought up on the early works of Haydn and Mozart, were still one step behind: they could not even keep Don Giovanni in the operatic repertoire. Berlioz' defense of that score shows perhaps the exact line separating the eighteenth from the nineteenth century in music, as well as that marking off the public taste of 1835 from "modern" art.13 What the paying public meant by dramatic music was opera, and opera meant 10

Jan. to Dec. 1835: A.R., 275-302; L.I., 156-68. One of the periodicals for which Berlioz wrote at this time was Gérard de Nerval's new Monde Dramatique (1835-7). Berlioz contributed four articles the first year. 11 A.R., 276-7. 12 The music reviews of those days were sizable affairs, six to nine columns long, of a format resembling that of the London Times. 13 L.I., 162. By all accounts the classics were performed in an exceedingly dull manner and with a poorly balanced orchestra. (On this point read Berlioz himself: L.Ì., 142.) At the Opera, Mozart was ruined by frigidity and other forms of bad musicianship, due to the idea that his music was wholly "formal" and "elegant." It is only within the memory of the present generation that his passionate and tragic grandeur has been recognized in performance; and yet a New York critic had to say in 1945: "Although Mozart's Magic Flute is one of the greatest of German operas, the performance granted it yesterday afternoon at the Metropolitan made a dull affair of it." (Noel Straus, N.Y. Times, Dec. 2, 1945.)

2Ó2

Berlioz

Rossini, Adam, Auber, and Meyerbeer. Beethoven was still caviar, except to a small band of intellectuals." A curious record of Berlioz' impact on one avid reader is found in Balzac's short story "Gambara." Written in all probability between January and June 1837, it could not carry so much musical freight unless written by a man quite conversant with Berlioz' life and mind. For example, almost the first reference to music alludes to "the stupendous requiem" of the fictional composer: Berlioz was completing his own just as Balzac wrote these words. The novelist then ascribes some advanced artistic doctrine to the two main characters — Gambara the composer and his quasi-patron, the Count. The latter's harangue on Beethoven and against the Italians is pure Berlioz; Gambara's description of his new opera — a sequel to one that failed — expounds the leitmotif, the new flexible melody patterned on "the voices of nature," the philosophy of tone color, and the joining of symphonic and vocal resources in musical drama." Finally, the discussion of Meyerbeer's Robert le Diable echoes or parallels the feeling of Berlioz about eclecticism, which no other critic yet shared. The tale ends tragically, with the last word given to an aristocrat in praise of the artist "faithful to the ideal which we have killed." This view of the social forces shaping the artist's fate had in turn been dramatized a little earlier by another member of the vanguard, Alfred de Vigny, in his play Chatterton. As he sent off the work to press, he defined in a preface the situation of the nineteenth-century artist. His words are as it were a transcript of the conversations held at Berlioz' Montmartre cottage or elsewhere, in which Vigny, Liszt, Chopin, d'Ortigue, Gautier, Balzac, Deschamps and others would agree that the "cause" for which they Strove was to secure for art a recognized status and function. "That is the question," wrote Vigny, "the perpetual martyrdom and immolation of the poet. Our concern is the right he is entitled to, of staying alive . . . the bread that is denied him, the suicide he is compelled to commit." 18 " T h e r e was the usual diversity of temperamental likes and dislikes even among the artist group. A s late as the 1850's, Delacroix, w h o adored Mozart and Chopin, thought Beethoven lengthy and too violent. ( 1 8 2 , III, ιό and 449.) 15 It is conceivable that the " p r o g r a m " of the imaginary opera was worked out with Berlioz' help in a spirit of comic hoaxing, for Balzac's tale is partly satirical. But w e m a y be sure that the subject of the opera — Mohammed — was not Berlioz' choice, f o r he thought religious fanaticism and politics unsuited to music. M o r e o v e r Berlioz alluded later on to Balzac's pitiable attempts at technical analysis in this very story. (Grot., 19.) 18 Chatterton, Preface, 1 (written June 1834). In parallel see Liszt's essay on " T h e Condition of the Artist and his Place in Society," which appeared in the

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So far the complaint is familiar, though Vigny was above the need to make it on his own behalf. The unusual part is the description of what results from a general neglect of art: Three kinds of men, who must not be mistaken one for the other, act on society through the workings of their minds . . . The man with an aptitude for savoir faire, and who is therefore much valued, is everywhere to be seen. Void of real emotions, he writes of business as if it were literature and of literature as if it were business . . . He is a Man of Letters. Above him is a man of stronger and finer nature. His genius consists of attention brought to its highest pitch. He seeks especially order and clarity, having always in his eye the people whom he addresses. He is the true Great Writer. He is fought, but with courteous weapons. He needs no compassion. But there is another kind of being, more passionate, purer and rarer. He who belongs to that kind is incompetent for whatever is not the work of divinity. Emotion with him is so deep, so intimate that it has plunged him from childhood in involuntary ecstasies, in endless reveries, in infinite discoveries. Imagination possesses him exclusively. His powerful soul judges and retains everything with a sure instinct and a strong memory. Disgust, vexations and the resistance of human society throw him into deep depression and black indignation. Still, on the day when he bursts forth one would say that he observes as a stranger what takes place within him. He should do nothing useful or workaday so that he may have the time to listen to the chords slowing shaping in his soul. He is the Poet. . . . It is in his first youth that he feels his strength and foresees the future of his genius, that with love he embraces life and nature, that he arouses mistrust and suffers rebuff. He cries to the people: "It is to you that I speak" and the multitude answer justly enough: " W e do not understand." He cries to the state: "Heed me and help me live." But the state replies that it is set up to protect positive interests. "Of what use are you?" Everybody against him is in the right. Is he then in the wrong? What can he do? If he has bodily strength, he can become a soldier . . . Physical activity will deaden the spiritual. He can become a Man of Letters or even a Great Writer . . . Judgment will kill Imagination . . . but in any case he will kill a part of himself . . . as Chatterton killed himself altogether.17 Though the language is strained, the psychological and sociological report is accurate; and though the biography of Chatterton may not supGazette Musicale f r o m M a y 3 to Oct. 1 1 , 1835. (Reprinted in 210, 1 - 8 3 . ) Some of Liszt's ideas reflect his earlier attachment to the socialism of SaintSimon and the more recent religious liberalism of Lamennais and d'Ortigue, but the main arguments are those independendy found in Balzac, V i g n y and Berlioz. 17 1283, 2 - 7 (condensed and reparagraphed ).

2 64

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port V i g n y ' s case, the interpretation will still serve to explain what happens to our V a n G o g h s and Hart Cranes, as well as to understand what stronger natures —like V i g n y and Berlioz —felt they were up against. V i g n y ' s bitterness was partly congenital, but in this document it fits a contemporary mood. T h e observant now knew that the honeymoon between Liberty and the Orleans regime was over. This was the trough of the first wave of disillusion after the liberal revolution. T h e buoyant and irresistible H u g o himself underwent a period of black depression; he spoke of Darkness advancing, and entitled the poems of this period Chants du Crépuscule (Songs at Twilight). Meanwhile social critics brooded upon the seemingly unquenchable unrest. T h e merciless shooting of strikers at Lyon in April 1834 was the bloodiest yet of Louis Philippe's efforts to establish himself.18 Repression was failing, and its opposite no one dared conceive. In a word, 1830 had not closed the era of revolutions, and by 1835 it was evident that the compromise had created no order: from the culture-makers to the textile workers every interest must not merely plead but fight for the recognition of what seemed to each its elementary rights. For Berlioz, w e gather from a note, the première of Vigny's play on February 12, 1835 was a doubly poignant spectacle: " M y wife did for a moment think of accepting your gracious offer [of a box] but all things considered, the thought of the eclipse in which her talents stand for the time being is too painful to permit her to attend a notable occasion such as that to which y o u have kindly invited us. I shall therefore go alone to applaud Chatterton with all the warmth of affection and enthusiasm which I feel for its author, and for the cause he pleads so well." 19 On her side Harriet, w h o had become passionately devoted to her husband, was full of self-reproach at seeing him carrying his heavy burden alone. She, w h o had supported her whole family since her adolescence, was now helpless. She wanted to act again, but her imperfect knowledge of French prevented. H u g o was approached for a play in which this drawback could fit, but all the plots involving mutes and foreigners seemed to have been used up. H e none the less promised to try. 20 18 Apropos of the riots which had recurred in this industrial center since 1832, Berlioz had written that "the only difference between the fighting there and in Paris is that between a greater and a lesser power . . . L y o n cannot withstand Paris, and is therefore wrong to rouse it to anger." (L.l., 108.) T h e outbreak of 1834, he called a "wasteful mess" [gâchis]. {L.l., 143.) 1B A.R., 278. 20 A.R., 281.

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Not stopping to consider whether he was a musical Poet or merely a Great Artist, Berlioz had begun composing Benvenuto Cellini. Obviously, he still believed in the power of example and the force of integrity. If the Opera would once let him in, he could make its frivolous, overfed, finical and convention-ridden habitués swallow serious music. "I may have to compose for a few years more outside the theatre before I can step on the neck of these stupid manufacturers . . . What wretchedness to see the best years of my life lost for dramatic music simply because three rascals have the misfortune of being idiots as well. Veron, for example, whom Meyerbeer had to compel by law to produce Robert le Diable and thus to make his fortune in spite of himself, has since then staged only platitudes of which La Juive is the culmination . . . Patience is in order. Everything will come in its time." 21 Ideas for scores kept bubbling up, although Berlioz' conception of dramatic music, which required the musical personnel of the Opera, actually went beyond stage work. As he had written to Ferrand when Benvenuto first came into being, he was dreaming of other and greater things than operas: "Music has wings that the walls of a theatre will not allow to unfold." 22 Dramatic music was a generic term under which opera was but a subclass, so in January 1835 he writes again: "If I had time, I would be making progress on the work I am mulling over . . ." — a symphony — "on a new and enlarged plan." 23 Outwardly Berlioz seemed to prosper. In April, Liszt played a Fantasia on two themes by Berlioz ("The Fisherman" and "Brigand's Song" from Lélio), and added to the pianistic program "The Pilgrims' March" from Harold in Italy. The press hailed the "Paganini of the piano," and Berlioz, writing very discreetly of his own share in the concert, was happy to declare that "our views on music, [Liszt's] and mine, are exactly the same . . ." that is to say in accord "with the exigencies of the times." 24 The next month, Berlioz gave another concert, consisting of the Fantastique and Lélio, no doubt as a reply to the N e w Year parody. Though the box-office receipts were fair and the royal family were present, Berlioz regretted the "detestable performance": for economy's sake, he had scheduled only one rehearsal. Moreover, on that bright day of May the fountains of Versailles were also playing, which somewhat 21

A.R., 282-3. Veron had put on Don Giovanni and Spontini's La Vestale, both of which had failed. He therefore sought works which would be sure to entertain. 22 L.I., .53. 23 L.I., 159 and 172. 24

1386,

Apr. 2 j , 1835.

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reduced attendance at the concert. Shortly thereafter, on May 28, 1835, the Gymnase Musical opened its doors and offered Berlioz another chance to draw the crowd. Unfortunately its musical resources were feeble, and when the Berlioz program took place on June 4 (the King Lear overture, Harold in Italy, and songs by Gluck and Berlioz), the playing and acoustics were a disgrace. T o indemnify Berlioz the management weeded out the poorest performers and a second concert was announced. But the fact that it was to take place at night put it under the jurisdiction of the prefect of police.25 This official, acting from political prudence and also to safeguard the monopoly of the Opera-Comique, forbade singing. So the program was whittled down to overtures and solos on violin and piano — no vocal numbers "which the public must have." Berlioz wondered how a motet by Palestrina would "compete" with the ariettas enjoyed by "our clever French" at the Opera-Comique. But a rule was a rule, especially when politics and money interests backed it against a mere artist. The summer did not see the writing of the projected third symphony. There was little time and less tranquillity. The plan nevertheless haunted Berlioz. First conceived in Italy, this Heroic and Funeral Symphony would celebrate the great men of France (in contrast, one supposes, with the "clever French") and it would consist of seven movements. Popular in character, like the finale of Beethoven's Ninth, it would be scored for a large body of players and singers, like the festivals of the revolution. The idea did not die; its elements found a place in several later works, notably the Te Deum, Les Troy em, and especially the Funeral and Triumphal symphony of 1840.26 Meantime, with an obsessed spirit bent on not giving up its obsession, Berlioz finished the setting of Béranger's mediocre Ode on the Death of Napoleon, "The Fifth of May." 27 Berlioz' score is not a great work, though genius and craft are visible on every page. The something lacking might be called by a scientific metaphor the "heat of fusion of art," and its absence suggests that in classifying the works of any artist we should perhaps distinguish three kinds — the successes, the failures and the characteristic failures. That is, we find in Berlioz: good Berlioz, bad Berlioz, and bad music; just as there is good Beethoven, bad Beethoven and bad 25

Symphonic concerts began usually at 2 P.M. Criticizing the critics, M . Henri Peyrc says: "Berlioz might have created more works like his Symphonie Funèbre et Triomphale if he had not been forced to fight jealousy and inertia." ( / / / / , 143.) 27 T h e score was in due course dedicated to Horace Vernet, the Bonapartist painter and kindly patron of Roman days. 26

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music which happens to have been written by Beethoven. Only from the first two categories can one learn anything about the spontaneous intentions that fail or succeed in an artist's mind. From the evidence of Le Cinq Mai, Berlioz' technique at thirty-two had reached the fullness of a "second manner," but the inner fire was temporarily banked, smothered under too much irrelevant work. Those who have been hacks as well as conscious craftsmen will here salute a brother in sorrow. Berlioz' next preoccupation had to do with influencing the choice of a new director of the Opera. For after five years of prevailing success Véron judged that his luck could not last and withdrew before it was too late. The Bertin brothers, the politicians, and Berlioz' friends now engaged in the usual intrigues and parleys. Veron wanted his friend Loève-Veimars, to succeed him. His scheme failed, and the unedifying architect Duponchel, who was already in league with Meyerbeer and who had dabbled in several trades, was chosen as a compromise candidate.28 He would be committed to the Débats party, which meant his accepting not only the works of Berlioz, but also those of Mile. Louise Bertin (the crippled sister of Edouard), whose moderately successful Faust gave color to her pretensions as a composer.29 For his disappointed hopes and wounded feelings, Loève-Veimars received 100,000 francs, besides the Legion of Honor, a baronetcy, and a mission to Russia: in Vigny's classification he should rank as the Man of Letters par excellence. All was settled when, on the anniversary of the July Days, as the King was reviewing troops, a barrage laid down by one Fieschi felled forty persons. Louis-Philippe miraculously escaped, but Duponchel's appointment was delayed a month. This enabled him to shift alliances and once in office he tried to repudiate his campaign pledges. Further battle led to an agreement that Mile. Bertin's Esmeralda (based on Victor Hugo's own adaptation of Notre Dame) " would be accepted and that Benvenuto Cellini would be "submitted to a committee." Matters stood thus by the fall of 1835. T o keep public interest in him alive, Berlioz gave a concert on November 22, in which he presented Le Cinq Mai together with a 2H

Charles-Edmond Duponchel ( i 7 9 j ? - i 8 Ó 3 ) , w h o m Berlioz was later to sariri/.e as "the celebrated inventor of the canopy, the man w h o introduced the canopy into opera as the chief ingredient of success; the author of the canopy in La Juive, La Reine de Chypre, and Le Prophète, the creator of the floating canopy, the wondrous canopy, the canopy of canopies." (Soirées, 4th.) 29 On her w o r k and career, see 7S7. 30 H u g o wrote several poems of friendship which are inscribed to her in Les Voix Intérieures and Les Rayons et les Ombres.

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song by Meyerbeer — the great power behind the scenes. At a second concert on December 13, Berlioz conducted, not indeed for the first time, but for the first time by deliberate preference: he was adding a weapon to his armory of defenses. Throughout this period Berlioz could hardly feel that his family, immediate or remote, was giving him much comfort. Since their son's birth, Harriet had insensibly grown restless, vaguely resentful, unhappy at the ending of her career. It was slight comfort, or none at all, to read in the papers that Hector's former fiancée, Camille Moke, had just been repudiated by her husband Pleyel, on grounds of repeated adultery and disorderly conduct. As for Berlioz' relations with La Côte, carried on mainly through Adèle, one senses that the father and mother were again waiting for their son to make a success that they could understand — after the Rome Prize, an opera at the Opera. They had recognized their daughterin-law and sent gifts for the baby, but they had not supplied what every young couple needs — money. When Adèle, with kind intent, tried to explain the local "prejudices that time would efface" Hector had had to keep the letter from his wife to forestall one of her long bouts of weeping. The elder sister Nanci and her husband were still holding aloof, Berlioz ironically sending his compliments through Adèle to "Their Royal Highnesses." At the same time he was worried about his father's health, about which he was not given enough news. His own constitution was just then suffering from the strain he put upon it. Nervous tension brought on sore throats and headaches. He felt that he wanted to sleep, sleep long restorative hours, as in youth, when he had passed a crisis or a concert; now the very need made for insomnia. The beginning of 1836 brought reconciliation with Nanci, one word from her being enough to elicit from Hector a quick and warm response. But the N e w Year also brought the news that the Ministry had canceled Duponchel's private agreement, and that Berlioz' opera was as uncommissioned as on the first day of negotiations. The composer determined to finish it nevertheless. He was in love with the subject and his inner mind worked at it regardless of his will. Besides, the chatter of the press over the whole affair had led someone to announce another "Benvenuto" for one of the lesser theaters. T o keep his priority Berlioz made a counterannouncement that he was "just completing the score." This exaggeration (psychological warfare) was soon dangerously tested by the merger of Le Rénovateur with another periodical. This cut into Berlioz' income and all other posts being occupied, his situation was extremely difficult. If he tried to make up his loss by free-lance writing, what would hap-

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pen to the score of Benvenuto? In this quandary Berlioz applied to his friend Legouvé who readily advanced two thousand francs.®1 Meantime Berlioz had a debt of another kind to pay. Mile. Bertin's Esmeralda needed revising and it was as natural that she should apply to him as that he should show his gratitude to her family by giving help. Being half-paralyzed from birth, she also needed a trusted deputy to run the errands incidental to rehearsing an opera in manuscript. Berlioz was this deputy and three quarters of each day for more than a month went into La Esmeralda — as many hours taken away from Benvenuto. Nevertheless, by sheer application, the writing of his own score was progressing: "I have done about half. It's a long job to write out, but I must say that compared with the problems of symphonic composition it's relatively easy." 32 The success of La Esmeralda would have been of considerable indirect advantage to Berlioz: it could not seriously compete with his work, it would have set a perceptible value on his help — for this fact was generally known — and it would have further heightened the prestige of the Bertin family or at least neutralized the opposition. As it was, the opera reached the stage on November 14 and was hissed off it without reprieve. During the rehearsals Berlioz had written to his sister: "There are charming choruses which rumor does me the honor of attributing to me, though I have had no hand in them. Unfortunately, the single roles are by no means so good, not by a long shot, and the actors make some awful faces." 33 At the first performance, political feeling burst in a rhythmic chant of "Down with the Bertins, down with the Débats!" and the curtain had to be lowered to enable the actors to regain composure. When Quasimodo's aria on the bells of Notre Dame rang out and won applause, Alexandre Dumas, who disliked the Bertins, shouted in his stevedore's voice: "That's Berlioz . . . that's Berlioz!" It was not by Berlioz: "If I had anything to do with its success," he wrote to Adèle, "it's in a trifling way. The air is really by Mile. Bertin, but (between ourselves) it ended lamely. . . . My help was limited to suggesting a peroration more worthy of the exordium. That's all. . . . As for my own opera, here is how it stands. I have finished it. I have only to write out the denouement and orchestrate the score. According to my arrangement with Duponchel, I am fourth on the list . . . They are now putting on Niedermeyer's Stradella . . . Then 31

33

It is worth recalling here how Loève-Veimars "earned" his ιοο,οοο.

4· A.R., j.4.

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Berlioz

I should go on next, if nothing else is ready; but Halévy . . . is straining every nerve and writing his new score at a gallop so as not to lose his turn . . . Anyhow, I'm ready to go into rehearsal, and I'd have been ready with all the music long before if, like my hero Cellini, I had had the metal with which to cast my statue." 34 Just lately, "metal" had not been wanting. Besides Legouvé's loan of two thousand francs, Berlioz had received increased honorariums from the Bertins — a tactful acknowledgment of his services to Aille. Louise — and he had had the pleasant surprise of a gift from his father. He was deeply moved: "I am afraid my excellent father inconvenienced himself to send me this sum, which I was far from expecting, and this thought bothers me more than I can say. Kiss him and Mamma for me." 38 Moreover, in a cabinet reorganization of September 1836, a new Minister of Fine Arts had taken office whose influence was altogether favorable to Berlioz. Devotees of music should keep a place in their memory for the Comte de Gasparin, who besides becoming Minister became the efficient cause of Berlioz' great Requiem. The political basis of this double merit is again quite clear: M. de Gasparin had been prefect in Berlioz' county and doubtless knew the excellent standing of the composer's family. In addition, Gasparin's son acted as his private secretary and had a close friend in common with Berlioz. Politically allied with the Débats and personally interested in music, the count was an ideal patron for one in Berlioz' position. His utility was shortly to be seen. Berlioz' reputation was in fact just on the point of passing from a fighting opinion to an accepted truth.38 Throughout 1836 he received requests from abroad for copies of his scores — Vienna, Milan, and New Orleans wanted to play him; Schumann had him performed in Leipzig. Local societies at Douai and Dijon gave him a try — all, of course, without royalties. The idea of a trip to the United States even crossed Berlioz' mind, for the artistic exodus in search of American dollars had begun, and the new world seemed to offer opportunities for Harriet's comeback. "All the English actors fly to America. Politics, Puritanism [Méthodisme], and the senility of our civilization have killed the 34 A.R., 323-4. T h e allusion is to the last scene of the opera, in which Benvenuto runs short of metal in the casting of his masterpiece, the bronze Perseus. 35 A.R., 312. 30 George Sand had dubbed him a "Promethean genius" in the musically

conservative Revue des Deux Mondes. (June ij, 1835, 723; and later, Nov. 15,

1836, 462. ι¡88, II, 33 and passim.) A n amateur herself, she sometimes sang Berlioz' songs and spoke admiringly of his energy and pride.

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37

drama." London, too, had tried Berlioz, but the performers had been unable to get through a rehearsal of the Francs-Juges. That same overture had been "arranged" for piano in Germany and published as wholly his own work, but it was so "monstrously mutilated" that Berlioz wrote a protest and decided never to let copies out of his hands nor to sanction any performances until he had gone to Germany and established his tradition in person.38 This resolve shows to what extent music was still considered in 1836 a commodity to be sliced and sold at will. Copyright did not protect the author, only the publisher, and musical customs outside a few centers — as Berlioz' long letter of thanks to Schumann shows — were extremely primitive. On a similar occasion, he summed up the state of things: "Music . . . is now flooding in everywhere; but it is like the fury of a child, who lunges at everything that shines, without any idea of its use." ** In six or seven years, he thought, there might be a public in France for serious instrumental music. This was too sanguine. Had there been such a public, Berlioz would certainly have been its singlehanded creator, for even when his friends showed their enthusiasm for his works, they always thought of him as a champion who would be crowned by acceptance at the Opera. The post-Beethovenian symphony did not exist.10 "It is at the theatre," exclaimed d'Ortigue, "that we must give Berlioz a rendez-vous." Liszt publicly railed at the Opera directors for excluding Berlioz.41 And the circumspect Guéroult in Le Temps in reproaching officialdom made the same assumption: "No one gives promise of a more brilliant future than Berlioz. It would be at once cruel and ridiculous to affect any further hesitation about him." 42 The seal of celebrity was put on him by Dantan the younger — the Max Beerbohm of the period — whose series of caricatured busts formed a representative hall of fame: Paganini, Balzac, Victor Hugo, Alexandre 37

A.R., 290. B y "Puritanism" Berlioz means the moralistic tone, later known as Victorian, which was gaining ground even before the Queen's accession, and gripping the Continent as well as England. 38 ιj. Berlioz' protest is in Corresp. 1 1 3 . " I am threatened also," he tells Liszt, " w i t h an arrangement f o r four hands of m y first s y m p h o n y , to be done f r o m your piano version." ( A . R . , 310.) W i t h Chopin's help, Berlioz had just done the piano version of the Francs-Juges for four hands. 30 T h i s partly explains the diehards' resistance. T h e y stood up f o r the Italians' vocal style and were still fighting W e b e r as overloaded with instruments. (1397, Jan.-Feb. 1836, 678 ff.) Neither Liszt nor Schumann was yet planning symphonic works. Schubert was dead, and W a g n e r only twenty-three vears old. 41 210, 26 ff. 42 300, 94.

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Dumas, Adolphe Adam, and Berlioz among the modems were adjoined to Horace Vernet and others of the older generation. Reproduced in lithograph, Berlioz with his mop of hair was described as a "musical O'Connell," 43 a pioneer who would reform and galvanize French opera. But Duponchel, with his haughty manners and his monocle, was still dissembling about Benvenuto Cellini, for operas are a heavy investment, and like all managerial powers he could form no judgment of his own. "He fancies he likes my music, though he knows as much about it as did M. Veron." 44 Still, in October 1836, he had given Berlioz a written understanding. Since August Berlioz had been editing the Gazette Musicale as temporary substitute.45 T w o concerts, one with Urhan, the other with Liszt, both directed by Berlioz, closed a busy year. Besides his Fantasia on themes by Berlioz, Liszt played his own transcription of the Waltz and the March from the Symphonie Fantastique: the effect was extraordinary, pyrotechnic. N o one could approach such dexterity and force, and the lady who later complained that it was a shame to put such a fine-looking man at a keyboard would have been answered." As for Berlioz' conducting, it gave him increasing satisfaction: "Apropos of artistic success, I have never had one to equal it, by reason of the superior performance due to my conducting the orchestra." 47 The net return of the two concerts was sixteen hundred francs. During December also, Harriet Smithson appeared on the boards for the last time. She gave her Ophelia scene, in the midst of a benefit for the great comedian, Frédérick Lemaitre, and the conjunction of genres was disastrous. N o one wanted to see the mad scene sandwiched in between farcical skits. Berlioz' friend and colleague Janin counseled her, for Shakespeare's sake, not to appear in anything but a full-length play enabling her to create a distinct atmosphere. The turn of the New Year was marked by three important events: Niedermeyer's opera failed, Benvenuto Cellini was officially announced, and the new Minister of Fine Arts definitely commissioned from Berlioz a Requiem Mass. The intention was to celebrate on its seventh anni43

T h e Irish revolutionist. A.R., 292. 45 Berlioz' editorship lasted from August 1836 to M a y 1837. (A.R., 318 and 340.) T h e previous year, seeing him at work, Liszt had described Berlioz in print as a "tireless athlete." (1398, J u l y 26, 1835.) 44

" L a d y Blessington in 1840 (203, 4 3 3 ) . " A.R., 3 2 1 . " T h e tempi used to be invariably w r o n g . " ( A . R . , 305.)

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versary the death of the heroes of July 28, 1830. This project was of course hedged in by bureaucratic rules: the commission must go to a prize winner of the Institute who had not yet written for the official theaters. Could Berlioz, with his Benvenuto Cellini accepted but not staged, be considered eligible? Such a plum could not be handed to anyone without a struggle, several struggles, part of the great struggle for power. The Minister must wrangle for an appropriation, underlings must assert their authority, rival composers must fight for their prestige. Cherubini held office and must be reckoned with. He disliked Berlioz intensely though with less cause than Berlioz had to dislike him in return;44 and more important, Cherubini had a new Requiem of his own just asking to be played. Delaying tactics would be to everyone's interest except Berlioz', for Ministries fall, and in statecraft delay is always the simplest thing to achieve. The comings and goings of all the actors in this veritable Florentine history form an inextricable melee, in which certitude as to the order of events is illusory. What seems clear is that by the end of March 1837, Berlioz had in his pocket the signed ministerial decree. The sum allotted was fourteen thousand francs and the time a little over three months. In accepting these terms Berlioz was taking a great risk — his position was exactly that of Michelangelo when forced by his enemies to undertake the Sistine Ceiling —but his was a philosophy of risk and unlike Michelangelo, Berlioz had in fact long been preparing for precisely this chance. From his Mass of 1825 he had saved and worked over the Resurrexit; in Italy, under the impact of Saint Peter's, he had gathered ideas for a Judgment Day oratorio; more recently, the ceremonies for the victims of Fieschi's attempt on the King's life had reawakened these same thoughts and had inwardly advanced the project of a Funeral Symphony. For the great crowd scene of the Cellini opera he had adapted another section from his early mass. Although all but one of these ideas were pre-empted and therefore useless for the Requiem, they had a spiritual kinship which was a stimulant. He felt in the mood for "architectural" constructions and mass effects. So much so that when the signed commission came Berlioz felt no qualms. The sublimity of the subject intoxicated him. "At first my brains boiled over," he writes to Adèle,49 "I was dizzy. Today the eruption has been regulated. The lava has made its bed and God willing everything 48 Berlioz' reviews of the master's works were invariably courteous, appreciative, and even occasionally enthusiastic.

49

A.R., 339.

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will go well." It went so well that he had to devise a musical shorthand for fear of losing the thronging ideas. Once before, in composing the Harold symphony, he had had to capture fleeting inspiration in a kind of shorthand still visible in the manuscript. He then worked up the bare datum by expansion and embellishment.50 For the Requiem all this had to be done at breakneck speed, since in the twelve weeks at his disposal time must also be found for reviewing concerts and writing an encyclopedia article he had contracted to do.51 This is the definition of music which now heads A Travers Chants, and although the statement was not a new one with him, its reassertion at a time when his oldest musical project —the Mass of 1825 —was being similarly reworked is a symbol of his consistency: "Music is at once a science and a sentiment . . . It must not solely satisfy the ear by correct and artistic combinations of sounds, but must also speak to the heart and the imagination . . . Many persons are not made for music and consequently music is not made for them . . . T h e musical sense can be trained and exercised, but the motions of the spirit, which are very active in certain people are but slight in others. . . . As for the perceptions that the writer himself owes to the hearing of music, nothing can convey their exact character to one who has never experienced them." 52 This sense of being apart yet in the melee was not Berlioz* portion alone. An incident with a tragic sequel occurred just then which discloses as in a fictional plot the emotional temperature of musical Paris in the spring of 1837. A new tenor named Gilbert Duprez made his debut in grand opera on April 17. Berlioz knew him since the days of Choron's concerts of sacred music; they met later in Rome; and now the critic praised the newcomer, with only a few reservations: Duprez had a magnificent voice but was a poor actor. He gesticulated too much and overused the notes sombrées (veiled tones) for which he had a knack. But the Paris public went wild and with no reservations worshiped a new idol. The immediate result was that Adolphe Nourrit, after fifteen years of superior craftsmanship, felt cast out overnight.53 Being short and stout, he was not a theatrically commanding figure, but he was a greater and 50

$88, 269. For the Dictionnaire de Conversation, ed. W . Ducken, P. 1833-51, 68 vols. This brought the total of his writing commitments to nine, though he drew on earlier essays for parts of the encyclopedia article. (See 1377, iioff.; 1398, 4 0 5-9·) 1398, 405; A Trav., 3. 53 It is worth noting that whereas Duprez was one of the twenty-two children of a perfumer, Nourrit was the son of a musician and had been trained by Garcia. 51

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finer artist, both as singer and composer. It was he who in his very first role had moved the young Berlioz at his first hearing of Gluck; it was he who had roused the Belgians to revolt with his Masaniello in 1830; it was he who had fashioned the librettos of La Sylphide and other ballets danced by the airy Romantic dancers, Taglioni and Fanny Elssler. It may even be conjectured that it was Nourrit's uncommon gifts that inspired Berlioz when he wrote the role of the actor-singer in Lélio Nourrit was a musical institution, suddenly overthrown by Duprez' powerful organ. Very soon after the letter's debut, being momentarily voiceless, Nourrit had what we should now call a nervous breakdown. It was not artistic egotism but artistic sensibility that was wounded. He felt not only dethroned but outraged. Berlioz could readily sympathize, and with his friend the Irishman George Osborne they walked Nourrit up and down the boulevards until a late hour, reassuring him and dispelling a hundred rash resolutions.58 Nourrit gave up his first violent projects, but felt he could not stay in Paris nor continue in opera.54 He applied to Berlioz' other friend, the dramatic poet Legouvé, for a "monodrama" precisely of the type that Berlioz had produced in Lélio. When Legouvé had cast in this form the woes of the Italian liberal Silvio Pellico, Lesueur's last pupil, Ambroise Thomas, set the text, and with this work Nourrit toured Italy successfully for two years. But his self-confidence was irreparably shattered, and after an admirable concert at Naples in 1839, he ended the struggle by leaping out of a window, aged thirty-seven.5' By the end of May 1837, portions of Berlioz' Requiem were in the copyist's hands, but the Ministry, which had not scrupled to delay for its own red tape, was now worried about rehearsals and begging for speed. By dint of exertion, Berlioz finished the last page on June 29." This 54

Berlioz always believed in composing f o r particular singers as a dramatist writes f o r actors. See 7 Y . , 243. 55 1 0 1 6 , 68. Osborne was one of many foreign musicians making their names in Paris, and one of the vanguard. N o t long since he had given a piano recital with Julius Benedict, W e b e r ' s pupil and biographer, w h i c h Berlioz had praised. 58 H e was w e a r y of intrigues, as Liszt's letter to him about Berlioz' struggle implies. (993, III, 384.) 57 F o r an exhaustive biography of the artist b y his son-in-law, see and in G r o v e another account b y Gustave Chuquet, also a contemporary. 58 A month before, Harriet had made her last stage appearance, semiprivately, in the last act of jane Shore. (28;, 87 n.) Meanwhile, H e c t o r ' s maternal grandfather had died, and the harried composer felt guilty at not having written to various members of the family.

276

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left him less than a month in which to have the parts completed and proofread, and to rehearse a chorus and orchestra of four hundred. The voices were going smoothly when without warning and indeed without notifying Berlioz, the "bureaus" countermanded the entire ceremony. "Ten thousand plagues on their heads! " he wrote to his intimates. "The devil must be in it . . . The scoundrels choose to stop me now. It's outrageous! " " Still, as he himself remarked, the work was there. "The Requiem exists and I swear to you, Father, that it is a piece which will count; sooner or later I'll get it performed." 60 And to his friend, the Librarian of the Conservatoire, Bottée de Toulmon: "I defy them to wear me down." ("Je les défie à la patience.")81 The musical injury was bad enough; there was, besides, the question of who would pay, not the piper merely, but the copyist, singers, and so on — some five thousand francs Berlioz had already spent, exclusive of his own fee. The government not being a person, its morality is often dubious and its memory frail. "M. de Montalivet, Minister of the Interior, asked me how I could be indemnified for this contretemps, which he says has been caused by politics alone; I replied that no indemnity was possible except the performance of the work." 42 The affair was not calculated to make Berlioz take a more lenient view of politics; rather it reminded him of the very different treatment which Lesueur spoke of receiving from a responsible "tyrant." Berlioz drew hasty inferences. "Oh these representative governments — and cheap ones at that — what a stupid farce! . . . Under the Empire a minister would not have dared act in this manner . . . Napoleon would have attended to him; for I say again, the thing is a swindle. . . . " 83 The minister hinted that Berlioz would at the next opportunity be given the Legion of Honor — that emergency coinage for settling bad debts. He might even be appointed Inspector General of Music for primary schools — an anticipation of Matthew Arnold. In response to all this Berlioz deliberately acted the monomaniac. He had one idea in mind — performance — and he dinned it into the head of every bureaucrat he could reach in the offices of three ministries — Fine Arts, Interior, and War. It was war, actual war, that finally brought him victory after three 59 A.R., 345, 346. But compare the cool letter to his choral conductor Dietsch (A.R., 345-6). All this was only six days before the ceremony.

*°A.R., 35'· «A.R., 345. 02 A.R., 349. 03

A.R.,

350-1.

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months of relentless hounding. On October 23, 1837 the news of the taking of Constantine, in Algeria, was relayed by (visual) telegraph from the south of France, and with it the intelligence that General Damrémont, commanding, had been killed in the assault. The government would specially honor his memory, since the feat of arms lent needful prestige to the regime. At once the unpolitical but not impolitic Berlioz asked Dumas to put in a word in his favor with the Duke of Orleans, to whom Dumas was secretary. The ceremony was soon set for December; a few more letters were exchanged, Berlioz had a cordial interview with General Bernard, the Minister of War, and he finally received the second commission for his one Requiem. The terms again provided 14,000 francs for all expenses, plus a bonus of 1500" Berlioz was moreover accorded a sort of public accolade by the Comte de Montalivet who spoke at the Conservatoire graduation on November 19: "Music is the handmaiden of all national ceremonies. Without it there can be neither pomp nor grandeur. . . . It is music we look to for uttering the grief of France on the day when the church of the Invalides . . . will receive the body of an illustrious general. On that occasion the students of the Conservatoire will perform music composed by a former student of the Conservatoire." On December 4, the day of the dress rehearsal, all of artistic Paris was present at the Invalides. The impression was overwhelming. Vigny wrote in his Journal: "The music was beautiful and strange, wild, convulsed, and dolorous. . . The next day at noon the service took place before the royal family, the diplomatic corps, and all the fashion, power, and frivolity of Paris. Habeneck, who had been forced on Berlioz by the opposition, conducted more than three hundred musicians grouped left and right in the transept. During the first number, Requiem and Kyrie, things went well in spite of the usual mistakes by nervous performers. Hebeneck thereupon relaxed so fully that he nearly spoiled the effect of the fanfare in the ensuing Tuba mirum by failing to cue the small brass ensembles at the four corners of the orchestra. According to his habit, after setting the tempo, he laid down his baton preparatory to taking a 64 Berlioz, w h o had not yet been paid f o r his previous outlay, was dunning the ministries on behalf of copyists and singers w h o were dunning him. On November 28, the official in charge of Public Monuments writes to the Director of Fine Arts that the appropriation has been otherwise spent. ( 1 0 6 , 428.) 65 268, 384. ββ 1284, 1 1 2 . V i g n y was a competent amateur musician. H e attended Berlioz' concerts f r o m interest as well as friendship, and on this occasion he had the additional reason of being a former A r m y officer w h o had known and esteemed General Damrémont. (Ibid., 1 1 3 . )

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pinch of snuff — as Berlioz tells in his Memoirs

— and the composer him-

self had to give the signal.87 T h e rest proceeded without a hitch. W h e t h e r the audience was moved or bored or bewildered by Berlioz' music it is impossible to say, since there could be no applause, but the critics were with f e w exceptions favorable. Nothing like the

Requiem

had ever been heard b y human ears, and the impression of sustained power could not be gainsaid. It suggested to Heine the famous hyperbole to the effect that as a maker of music Berlioz was like "an antediluvian bird, a colossal nightingale or a lark the size of an eagle."

98

General

Bernard sent Berlioz a well-turned note of congratulation which the 87 Mem., I, 312. T h e truth of this incident was first disputed by Hippeau, and later b y Boschot, on the ground that Berlioz' letters after the event (to his mother and to Ferrand) do not mention it. Boschot also argues that Berlioz being a fighter and the holder of a critical post would have denounced Habeneck at once. These contentions rest on a negative, on the absence of evidence, and they overlook t w o facts: ι. In 1856 a short life of Berlioz appeared, by Eugène de Mirecourt, in which the incident is related (292). N o n e of the friends of Habeneck, who was but recently dead, protested. N o one in any case disputes the fact of Habeneck's old-fashioned habit of conducting. Mirecourt's book likewise disposes of Mr. N e w m a n ' s suggestion that in old age Berlioz confused imaginings with reality (62, 21 on.) f o r the biography of 1856 is too full of small errors to have been written with Berlioz' help, and he himself cautioned a friend against its inaccuracies. (95, 242.) T h e inference is inescapable that others knew of the Habeneck incident before Berlioz wrote it down. 2. In a letter of A p r i l 28, 1859 to Ferrand, Berlioz refers to Habeneck's "crime . . . on the occasion of the first performance of the Requiem." (L.I., 219.) T h e r e f o r e Ferrand must have been told earlier, even though no letter remains to show when. One can imagine many reasons w h y immediately after the performance Berlioz did not want to include in his account a fact which might, by its nature, spoil the impression of complete success. George Osborne's report that Berlioz himself denied the story (1016, 69) is hardly credible, whereas the description of the incident bv Charles Hallé ( L i f e and Letters Of, L . 1896, 67), is that of an eyewitness: " T o mv amazement I suddenly saw B e r l i o z . . . . " A s f o r the audience on the dav f»f the performance itself, its place in the dim-lit church would prevent it from noticing what was going on in the midst of so large a group of musicians. Lastly, the expectation of seeing Berlioz assail Habeneck in print after the concert goes against the composer's lifelong habit of not replying or attacking on his own behalf, but always in the name of general principles. T h e upshot is that the account in the Memoirs can be neither proved nor disproved, though the balance of probabilities favors its being true. 1261, V I , 440. Despite his critical genius and his regard f o r Berlioz, Heine sometimes let his f a n c y bolt when he wrote of painters and musicians. His Paris news letters are filled with loose verbalism amounting often to error and always to exaggeration, witness the passage on Beethoven in Lutezia, Apr. 10, 1841,

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papers reprinted, and Schlesinger, scenting a first paying success for one of his authors, opened a public subscription for the immediate engraving of the score. Unhappily, Berlioz* devoted sponsor, Lesueur, was not there to rejoice: he had died on October 6. For Berlioz at thirty-four, it had taken only seven years from the Rome Prize to the nation's highest artistic trust — but what an obstacle race it had been!

Requiem, Realism, and Revolution It was a prey I had long stood in ambush for. — B E R L I O Z on the subject of a Requiem Mass In composing his Requiem or Grand Mass for the Dead, Berlioz had other things to take into account than his need to release the music within him. He faced a very definite practical problem. The Chapel of Saint Louis at the Invalides is a vast domed building which on the day of the funeral would be filled by many hundreds of people. The windows were blocked, the walls draped in black. Around the coffin flickered six hundred candles and incense boats. Four thousand other pinpoints of light dotted the gloomy shell. Major Lehoux headed the cortege with twenty-four muffled drums beating in the name of the twelve Paris legions, and Sé jean played the organ for the service. When all this had been seen and felt and heard would come the Requiem music, not consecutively but with interruptions for intonings and responses.1 Now Berlioz had heard Mozart's Requiem at the Madeleine and one of Cherubini's at the Invalides. Comparing their effect in those large churches with that in the acoustic hall of the Conservatoire, he could see that the volume of sound must be brought into scale with the place, and that sharp contrasts must be established between successive numbers to sustain attention during the rites. For his purposes Berlioz found he needed 190 instruments and 210 voices, with additional timpani and brass choirs to be used in the Tuba mirum. This enumeration is striking, but it is not the chief point of interest in Berlioz' Requiem. Even the full deploy-

Berlioz

28ο

ment of these forces in the Vision — or rather audition — of Judgment is not characteristic of the work as a whole. In dealing with Berlioz it is always a mistake to remain under the spell of the immediately obvious facts and to suppose his mind moving on a single plane or aiming at a single effect. True, he wished to use again in perfected form his Resurrexit of 1825 with its admirable fanfare and timpani chords. But he also paid heed to the liturgy, the religious habits of his compatriots, and the special occasion. Through lus teachers, Lesueur and Reicha, Berlioz was in touch with the revolutionary tradition of music for mass gatherings. He knew in detail how under the Empire Marshal Lannes had been buried, and as far back as 1825 he had asked the use of the Pantheon for his music.2 Thus one national tradition made him take for granted the union of religion with daily life; another, more recent, used music to suit the needs of a people assembled. The original assembly, it will be recalled, was to celebrate the revolution of 1830, the prevailing mood being sad, solemn, and martial. Hence this Requiem must combine massiveness, dramatic intensity, and religious awe; it must be vivid and contemporary as well as lead the spirit to serenity — a work of Gothic art. The Latin words before him gave Berlioz his dramatic impetus. T h e y express terror, hope, resignation, gratitude, pity, joy, and faith. T h e y speak of lakes of fire and gnashing of teeth, awful judgment and humble pleas. In the main prose or Dies irae, their staccato rhythm and overrich rimes, in a language no longer understood even by the educated, make them unsuitable for mere setting. Berlioz therefore extracted from each couplet or quatrain a mood or a contrast of moods, upon which he then built one of his ten movements. As he had done in his scenes from Faust, he freely joined distinct parts of his text when these answered to the same musical feeling. Music with Berlioz always takes precedence over words, and he carries into the sacred precincts his consistent view of music's function: to reproduce spiritual gestures. The first gesture — Requiem and Kyrie — opens with a brief orchestral introduction, a repeated rising scale in the strings, which admirers of the prelude to Parsifal will recognize at once as having engendered the "Eucharist" theme with which that work begins. This is followed by the main six-bar theme for basses on the words Requiem aeternam, soon taken up by the other voices and varied through chromatic and modal effects derived from the initial scale. In the midst of the agonized, sweeping movement of despair, the episodes of the Te decet hymnus and Lux 2106,

428 and 2}$, 160

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281

perpetua contrast hopeful calm with an anxiety which returns in the awesome Kyrie on repeated notes. The voices end on a quiet dissonance and the graver strings close with a recall of the solemn opening.® The second part is the renowned Dies irae employing the four brass choirs and timpani, which made Leopold Damrosch's musicians stand up and cheer when they first played it, and about which Edouard Colonne silenced a persistent audience by shouting " N o encores of the Day of Judgment! " 4 The movement is built on three phrases of liturgical cast which cross and recross, surge and develop three times in three tonalities, each time with more fervor, thrice punctuated by rising tremolo scales on the strings. At the climax of the third scale, the fanfare bursts forth in melancholy grandeur, overlapping successively from the four corners of the orchestra, where the additional brass (trombone, cornet, tuba, and trumpet) have been placed.5 Saint-Saëns, who heard the work under Berlioz in 1855, says: "I had read the score and was dying to hear the effect. The Tuba Mirum surpassed my expectations. . . . It seemed as if each separate slim column of each pillar in the church became an organ pipe and the whole edifice a vast organ. Yet even more I admired the poignant feeling of this marvelous work, the constant and incredible elevation of style — far more perceptible by ear than on reading, as is true of all the works of this composer." 8 From a technical point of view, beyond the economy with which this mass of instruments is here used, great interest attaches to the role of the kettledrums, of which Berlioz wanted sixteen, played by eight per3 Owing to his preconceived idea of what a "literary" composer is, Boschot takes a page to blame Berlioz for producing a "luminous clearing" when the words lux perpetua appear in his text. But who is it that sees luminosity when he hears major chords and phrases for upper strings and flutes? It so happens that Mozart, whom Boschot rightly idolizes, uses the lux perpetua in his Requiem to do precisely what Berlioz does — change the mood by taking advantage, as would any dramatic musician, of the two "programs" at hand. Boschot understands this well enough when he is not dealing with Berlioz: "Never did Mozart, that impeccable master, write music more closely linked to the meaning of the words [than in the Magic Flute] never did words or dramatic scenes receive from music a more faithful expression or an extension that goes deeper . . . Whatever belongs to man is here expressed. . . ." (769,

•49·) 4

942, 33 and 616, 27. Admirers of Verdi's great Requiem will recognize the passage, for it occurs there in the same key — though Berlioz begins in the major — in the same rhythm, with the same triplets and the same dominant 7th chord. Verdi (like Félicien David) rightly felt that it must be taken, not adapted, though he used the considerably harsher sonority of trumpets alone. 5

*44',

6l

7-

282

Berlioz

formers, so as to insure the correct intonation of the chords. Here was the realization of the musical effect (suggested by an attempt of Reicha's), which he had tried out in the Francs-Juges overture and the Symphonie Fantastique, and had now expanded: a sequence of timpani chords important enough to rank as a "line" under the ringing melancholy and doom of the fanfare. 7 After such a climax which, musically speaking, is prepared from the beginning of the first movement and not merely from that of the second, the danger was to fall into bathos. Berlioz entrusted the actual words Tuba mirum spargens soman to the basses in unison, seconded only later by the other voices in canonic imitation, and so preparing a soft close on Mors stupebit et natura. It is not alone the meaning of the prophecy, "Death and Nature will shrink in stupor" that determines the gentle ending, but fully as much the need of a fit musical transition to the Quid sum miser, a pre-impressionist tone poem which is also the first of those pages of the Requiem that Berlioz said were too often overlooked among the tremendous because "it requires a very fine musical sensibility to enjoy their style." 8 In this third portion, the plaintive melody is interwoven with the first phrase of the previous Dies irae in a short but moving confession of man's weakness and humility. In the following number, the Rex tremendae majestatis, a solemn invocation interrupted by some unfortunate passages in quick tempo turns gradually into a renewal of anxious supplication. T h e full orchestra again gives intimations of destruction, after which calm reigns once more and leads to the touching six-part a cappella prayer Quaerens me. The sixth and longest movement, the Lacrymosa, contrasts within itself the previous moods of a fated end and an unquenchable hope, and it does this in a manner which is not equally pleasing to every listener. T h e six-bar tenor melody, underlined by a strongly rhythmic figure in the orchestra, suggests awareness that "the day of weeping when man shall be judged" is an inescapable reality. (At a rehearsal of the work in 1941, 7 One of the f e w good points of the 1947 movie depicting Berlioz' life was the demonstration of h o w solemn and almost sweet the drumming of 16 timpani sounds in this passage, scored for sponge-headed sticks throughout. " I t was not until the time of Berlioz," says an authority, "that the modern timpani tone began to be realized and demanded. . . . H e definitely asked f o r a musical tone . . . and it is safe to say that his suggestion revolutionized timpani-playing. . . . T h e whole section of the later Treatise on Orchestration . . . is full of deep insight as well as common sense, and a feeling f o r the player rarely found among composers." K i r b v : 8s5, 11 and 17.

*M.C., 36.

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the American composer Roger Sessions likened the atmosphere to that of the London blitz.) But the tenor phrase soon generates a variant in a more lulling rhythm that some critics find too reminiscent of an Italian aria in waltz time. There can be no doubt that Berlioz intended precisely that impression. In a letter to Ferrand written when he desired to have from him words for an oratorio on the D a y of Judgment, he had said: "Avoid scenes of conflict as well as those which would call the brass into play. I want it to sound only at the end [no doubt his fanfare, which was all written]. But give me contrasts — religious choruses mixed with dancing carols. . . ." [Italics added.] β This is in effect the plan of the Lacrymosa of 1837; and if we go back to the Mass of 1825 we find in the Resurrexit a passage which resembles nothing so much as Rossini. W e may, if we like, fancy that Berlioz was using God's artillery to vanquish his musical enemies, or w e may make the Italianate melody stand for mankind's pathetic trifling in the face of extinction: either notion is a harmless irrelevance, provided we do not judge the music by imposing an unconscious "program" at variance with the simple contrast which Berlioz so persistently desired. A f t e r the duple Lacrymosa comes the high point of the work in its meditative aspect. T h e Offertory, which Schumann said "surpassed everything" is one of Berlioz' great inspirations. O n t w o notes, A and Β flat, Berlioz fashioned a figure that the chorus of souls in Purgatory repeat unchanged throughout, while the orchestral accompaniment, treated in fugai style, weaves noble arabesques around the chiaroscuro plaint. A t once a tour de force and a model of economy, this number must, like many of Berlioz' happiest productions, be quite familiar by ear before all its qualities emerge. T o balance the deliberate iteration of the Offertory, Berlioz then gives us a brief and sharply etched Hostias, which contains another musical "find" — the harmonic-orchestral idea of flute-and-trombone chords. Using the lowest (so-called 'pedal') notes on the trombone and continuing them with treble flute tones that seem like upper resonances of the original sound, Berlioz punctuates the short liturgical phrases for male voices in a manner at once striking and apt.10 T h e sense of space derived from the range of pitch and the isolation, as it were, of the human voice ·/,./., .04. 10 Berlioz may have been meditating this musical idea for ten years or more, for w e find at the end of the Mort d'Orphée "Bacchanale" a G for flute above a C on the cellos two octaves below. Verdi was struck b y the Requiem version and adapted it twice — in Otello, A c t IV and Falstaff, A c t III.

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Berlioz

seeking to placate God, are felt even if they do not come to mind through words.11 Again to avoid monotony, the Sanctus (No. 9) introduces a tenor solo, which is a good example of Berlioz' original melodic gift. Its soaring line over enharmonic modulations has a quality of "golden sweetness" unlike that of any other idiom in music.12 The melody is interrupted by a vigorous Hosanna fugue of sizable dimensions, after which the Sanctus proper is resumed, to be followed by a reprise of the fugue in free form. The final number, Agnus Dei, brings us material we have already heard in the first movement and in the Hostias. Having taken his usual pains to make the Requiem "one work" by smooth transitions and frequent thematic recalls, Berlioz evidently designed for the end a recapitulation that would further clinch unity. But hounded by the Ministry and by his copyists, he had no time to fashion this conclusion otherwise than adroitly. He did introduce interesting variants of the flute-trombone chords and of the orchestration in the Te decet hymnus, but one can imagine the richer and more complex finale in his own polyphonic style which he might have written, given time." By a further chance, the score of the Requiem is the only one that Berlioz did not hold back for revision before engraving, since Schlesinger offered it for subscription immediately after the performance. When a second edition became possible, years later, Berlioz wisely did not touch the substance, cast in an irrecoverable style, but simply improved the Latin prosody. "In that unknown land of boundless extent," says Mr. Cecil Gray, "which girds about the narrow beaten path of musical tradition . . . Berlioz has reared up gigantic pyramids of sound which will endure as long as music itself." 14 The Requiem is certainly one of these pyramids, 11

This unusual combination must be heard in a hall without excessive echo. Like every delicate effect it can be muffed, especially by an unsure trombone. Some of the original players did not know that these notes were possible on their instruments. (Tr., 202.) " P a u l Rosenfeld, ¡¡of, 9. Kaikhosru Sorabji, the learned contrapuntist, dwells on the "melodic power" of "this glorious movement" comparing it with the Agnus Dei of the Β Minor Mass, and using both to show that "atmospheric vocal noises are no substitute for line drawing in terms of tone." (884, 39.) 1S The coda of the movement, using the sixteen kettledrums in a decrescendo from piano to pianissimo, is nevertheless a new and breath-taking inspiration. "719, 214.

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yet its size, which is one aspect of its greatness, is not quite what certain critics take it to be. Call the work "colossal" and visions of ungainly giantism are engendered which imply crudity of technique or intention. But if the Requiem proves anything about its author, it proves the opposite. Throughout we find premeditation, balance, unity, and minute care as to the smallest details of composition. The four brass choirs — not just trumpets, precisely in order that their sound may be smooth — must not hypnotize us. Out of possibly fourteen hundred measures in the whole score they play in about eighty. Out of ten numbers, only one whole and a half of two others bear any character that can be called violent. Criticism is nothing if it does not observe the proportions of the thing which it pretends, in the name of Proportion, to criticize. The Requiem possesses in fact what Baudelaire thought the supreme form of grace — energy. And this energy is not merely let loose; it speaks to us intelligibly: "Listening to the Mass, we find ourselves feeling as though some vates of a Mediterranean folk were come in a rapt and lofty mood to offer sacrifice, to pacify the living, to celebrate with fitting rites the unnumbered multitudes of the heroic dead." 15 In speaking of the Requiem as colossal, we must also remember that music has several dimensions, and that the number of performers is not the sole measure of size. T o begin with, the total number brought together do not by any means play throughout. In the second place, the work is relatively short — roughly one and a half hours' playing time. If we call it overgrown, what word shall we apply to Bach's Saint Matthew Passion (also scored for colossal forces relatively to its period) and to Wagner's five-hour stretches of music drama? Why is it, moreover, that mention of the sixteen kettledrums in the Requiem suggests "barbaric strength" whereas the eighteen anvils of Rheingold do not? 18 The fact is that, as Birrell said of Cardinal Newman, the hearers of Berlioz' Requiem "believe themselves to be revelling and rioting, whilst in reality they are being steadily driven along." 1T Massiveness is of course aimed at and achieved in the Requiem, but it does not derive exclusively or even mainly from simple piling up. The 15 16

S05, 99·

T o object to the number of drums is really to object to the number of tones in the musical scale. 17 Another student points out that "the level of dynamic intensity in eight of the movements is comparatively low throughout," and he suggests that this may cause an ordinary audience to feel that "they are not getting their money's

worth." (719, ιι$·)

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Berlioz

score does not in fact resemble a pyramid but rather a cathedral, whose grandeur comes from differences of size subtly contrasted.1" After the hair-raising Dies irae comes the quiet Quid sum miser, to cause a different sort of shudder, in a style as noble and with contours as definite though small. One thinks again of the Gothic builders: "Chartres Cathedral is built of stones from Berchère, calcareous, hard and rough in appearance, but of a hardness to withstand any test. T h e blocks employed are of enormous size . . . ," 18 yet there is no disproportion between their bulk and the Virgin's head, nor conflict between the gray stone and the rose window, the thickness of the pillars and the flight of the flèche. This comparison suggests another moot point: the presence or absence of religious feeling in Berlioz' mass. Romantic, even theatrical, significance is readily granted it, but not "true" religious faith. Apparently the Dies irae continues to ring in critics' ears and the mild prayers and contrite invocations do not. O r rather, the objectors have never really defined for themselves what they mean by religious. For some it is a uniform mood of pious submission which naturally excludes violent emotion. This should perhaps be called religious meditation, and Berlioz' Quid, sum miser and Quaerens me reflect it.20 In our day, Fauré built an entire Requiem in that mood, as he had every right to do, whereupon a critic blamed him for going counter to the intentions of the Church. N o w no one but the Pope can say what the intentions of the Church are, and in 1903, Pius X condemned as contrary to these intentions the often-used masses of Cherubini, Giorza, and Ohnewald, together with Rossini's Stabat Mater, all of which had been considered mainly or wholly religious in the sense denied to Berlioz. This seems to leave the religious spirit something distinct from the orthodoxy ascertainable only through official decisions, and everyone is thus free to interpret true religious expression to the best of his understanding. This is what Berlioz did, taking for granted — once more — the medieval tradition. If he thought of hell-fire and the Archangel Gabriel, so did the sculptors of Autun and so did the authors of the Latin words Berlioz was setting. If he put side by side terror and pomp, and humility and foolish hope, 18 T h e true objectors to the style of the Requiem say more correctly that it is "chamber music suffering from elephantiasis" — that is, they perceive the fine work and would reduce its proportions, as one might want the Chartres "Queens of Juda" in statuette form.

19

Viollet-le-Duc, Dictionnaire des Beaux Arts, II, 3 i j n. Compare Liszt on

Berlioz: "Those masses of sounds are blocks of granite with which he builds his Pyramids." (58η, 400.) 20 A t least one priest expressed a presumably religious appreciation of Berlioz' Requiem on its first appearance. (L.I., 179.)

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so did the designers of the north porch of Chartres and so did the religious John Donne, who also begins with a fanfare: At the round earth's imagined corners, blow Your trumpets, Angels, and arise, arise From death, you numberless infinities Of souls . . . Of course, those who assume that the Muses curl their little fingers are bound to imagine that at the crack of doom the angels will lisp their summons into individual ear trumpets. Donne and Berlioz forecast the reality in stronger colors, with a result that is shocking indeed, "realistic" and on that account entitled to the epithets here employed: Shakespearean and Gothic. 21 And these adjectives, like the work itself, also justify the description of "popular" and "democratic" in the Christian and modern sense. For in placing and using his vocal and instrumental groups so as to play virtually a dramatic role, Berlioz was simply extending the practice of the older antiphony which had influenced the French revolutionary composers. Coming only a generation after Gossec and Méhul, he assumed as they did that civic ceremonies must by their scale give an idea of the whole nation assembled; several times in referring to the performers of his three "monumental" works he spoke of them as "a people singing" [ce peuple chantant].22 One can therefore liken his impatience with the few choristers of Saint Peter's,23 or the single trombone and voice of Mozart's Requiem,2* to the impatience of the French nation of 1789 with its unrepresentative court and sovereign. 21 Henry Adams: "The Gothic artist saw his work as a whole, a mass, and its details were his amusement. . . . Chartres expressed, whatever else it meant, an emotion — the deepest man ever felt — the struggle of his own littleness to grasp the infinite." (1041, 141 and 106.) " S e e also Mem., II, 363; L.I., 251. Méhul's Chant National du 14 Juillet was scored for soloists, three choruses and two orchestras, the six groups being kept distinct. Gossec, whose popular Tuba mirum was played thirteen times during the revolution, asked, for his second Te Deum, fifty serpents and "an army" of snare drums. In contrast with this, the moderation and economy that Berlioz displays while still fulfilling a kindred intent can be measured to a decimal. As for the linking of popular and religious forms with revolutionary celebrations, it is shown in the use of old folk songs fitted with new words and of religious services and scriptural phrases adapted so as to dramatize patriotism and liberty. (12p.) 23 See above, Chapter 8. 24 Berlioz supposed that Mozart had merely sketched the instrumentation of his Tuba mirum after the "sublime phrase" with which it begins. (139S, Sept.

7, 1834 and 1386, A u g . 9, 183J.)

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Berlioz' connection with the past is unmistakable. Only, the connection is freer and the past broader than is convenient for easy classification. T h e tendency of critics is to make tradition a man-to-man relationship, an evolution of Russian dolls. Hence it breaks down at the appearance of the original mind, and critics swing to the opposite extreme: " A work like the Requiem has no antecedents." 25 This is true only in the sense that applies to every masterpiece. Berlioz was original against a background of aims and intentions half realized by his musical predecessors, fully realized by his remote ancestors, the artists of medieval France. He had over Gossec and Méhul the advantage of superior means and a sensibility shaped by a new epoch. As a musician, his genius for finding appropriate ideas (Saint-Saëns's "incredible elevation of style") was joined to a capacity for organizing an infinity of details into a work whose size is not the result of formulas f o r note-spinning but of fused material and spiritual force. One result of such a fusion is that critics a century later can point to contemporaries who are still drawing on the original inspiration: Stravinsky and Sibelius can be, and have been, instanced.28 Since any art can boast of but f e w works of this sort — at once seminal and traditional and original — it is then fair to say of Berlioz' Requiem that "it stands alone: there is nothing with which we can fitly compare it." 27 25

j o j , 88. See Musical Opinion for Apr. 1936, p. 358. The critic could have added William Walton (Beishazzar's Feast) and Gustav Holst (The Planets). ϊ·5· 28

11.

The Hero as Artist: Benvenuto Cellini

January to September 1838

Come, cheer me up with an account of the Roman Carnival! — SCOTT, on the news of his financial disaster

THE Requiem had been an artistic success. No one in Paris who was capable of exercising judgment could doubt that this new music was something to reckon with. The leaders of the Romantic generation never forgot it, and thirty-five years later, after Berlioz' death, Liszt was still pondering the powerful, inscrutable score.1 No less important was the composer's own opinion of the work, for like the playwright, the musician can never be entirely certain that he has hit his mark. And Berlioz, who had canceled an edition of his Opus 1, and destroyed a good many other works, was hard to please. For the Requiem he always felt a special regard, in spite of the fact that he had never submitted it to painstaking revision. It enshrined some of his earliest musical trouvailles, and its subject had enabled him to express at once his humility and his pride. Two years before his death he declared that if all his works were ordered to be burned, he would ask a reprieve for the Requiem.2 But in February, 1838, he was thinking of the present, not of the past or future, and the present signified another large work, virtually finished. Benvenuto Cellini "existed" also, its orchestration all but complete. Yet unlike the Requiem it would have to be produced soon if the publicity it had already received were not to spoil its chances by becoming an old story. Now the Opera in March 1838 had on the boards a reasonably good commercial success, also on an Italian theme — Halévy's Guido and Ginevra, or the Florentine Plague. Nevertheless the agreement with Berlioz and the Bertins was fulfilled and Benvenuto went into 1 " T h i s prodigious and indeed sublime w o r k . " Letters of Jan. 26, 1868 and A p r . 21 and M a y 9, 1872. (Briefe, II, 115 and I V , 341, 345.) Compare other "discoveries" of it, b y Bruckner (926, 3 7 1 ) , Busoni (944, 4 1 ) 1 Peter W a r l o c k (958, 48-9), and Hans von Bülow (/η 4, ¡n). [And again, Ν. Y. Times, Feb. 14, 1969.] 2

L.I.,

302-3.

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rehearsal, though not in a way to make the composer's life easier. All Berlioz knew of "the house" was from outside — the political intrigues and chicanery of its managers and its relations with press and public. He now entered its arcana and discovered how it functions as a curb market of artistic personalities: the lion will sooner lie down with the the lamb than the prima donna with the bass — though exceptions have been known; each singer believes that the other's bark is far worse than his bite, for they all know how to bite; and while every department acts as if the rest were a superfluous nuisance, all agree that the most needless and nettlesome is the author. Throughout the personnel, actor's vanity perpetuates a hundred treasured jealousies and teamwork is not a habit but a concession; as in politics, self-seeking cannot be distinguished from devotion to the cause; while beneath everything the hum of petty gossip plays a discordant counterpoint to the genuinely hard work done under pressure and fraught with risk. Nor is the institution self-contained. The ballet draws into the wings a host of interfering gentry from the world of finance, politics, and letters; and in a state-run opera the bureaucracy, the trades, and the blackmailing press are grafted on to the main trunk, and live on it like parasites. How happy must a nation be which has no official theaters! Some maddening plant grows in the very heart of opera, and to this day history records no instance of an operatic house of peace and harmony.3 A century ago in France, Berlioz could only keep his courage bright: "Intrigues have been weaving around me since the first two rehearsals, so that my head swims. But one must go on, keep an eye on everything and be afraid of nothing." 4 What made his position worse was that he was at the same time embarked on a complex enterprise designed to make him Director of the Italian Theater. The building itself had recently been destroyed by fire, the manager had been killed while trying to escape the flames, and Berlioz was being put forward for the vacant post. The inducement was purely monetary, for according to the instructions drawn up by the Ministry only Italian works could be performed. We know Berlioz' feelings about that repertory, with a few exceptions. He himself would not be allowed to compose for his own theater and he would have no chance to run a choir school such as he wanted to develop in the tradition of Choron's. "The late Giulio Gatti-Casazza, onetime manager of the Metropolitan Opera Company in New York, left instructions that no music should be heard at his funeral. Requiescat . . . M.R., 370.

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But the income would mean affluence; it would release time and remove journalistic pressure: he could compose. Perhaps too, if he became one of the potentates of the inner theatrical ring he could enforce an opendoor policy in other musical establishments: in short, having favors to dispense, he would have power. The ups and downs of this project, in which the Bertins and members of the cabinet were concerned, lasted three months. Part of the delay and difficulty was due to the fact that the concessionaires, whoever they might be, would be responsible for rebuilding the gutted theater. At last the bill naming Berlioz Director and enacting the conditions of tenure was reported unfavorably by the parliamentary committee, and the Chamber turned it down 196 to 32. Before and after this blessing in disguise — for it spared Berlioz endless worries of an alien kind 5 — the press argued the case with its usual knowingness and concluded that Berlioz had been turned down because the Bertins were behind him. They were theoretically 'in power," but the opposition was just strong enough to beat them on secondary issues, and as an avant-garde artist, Berlioz constituted their vulnerable side. He was the buffer state which is the first to be overrun in the war of big powers. Unfortunately this defeat in the national legislature and the press would probably encourage a cabal against Benvenuto, for its success would give too much comfort to its backers. The dilemma for a composer without private means was complete: no possibility of succeeding without pull, no possibility of succeeding with it. Berlioz was too far involved to withdraw, even had he been willing to condemn his family to penury, and he felt within him dramatic and organizing talents that should not be buried. Even when he was fully within his rights, the situation was still one of catch-as-catch can: he had had to make a scene in "the bureaus" in order to obtain full payment for his Reqtäem.* N o w he was gambling his time, effort, and reputation on the most chancy of political platforms — the stage of the Paris Grand Opera. 1 • 5

·

·

H e knew how foreign to him the enterprise was, and he was a party to it solely on the principle of leaving no stone unturned: " I am not made to juggle with finances and the task of building the theatre which [the government] stubbornly foists upon the director-to-be, is an extremely complicated business." ( T o Adèle, A.R., 372.) 8 T h e documents examined and reproduced b y Tiersot (308, Jan. 1 7 - F e b . 2, 1904) show that the account in the Memoirs is substantially correct, despite errors of date. 7 Mozart in 1778: " W h e n the opera is finished, it is rehearsed, and if these stupid Frenchmen do not like it, it is not performed — and the composer has

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In his private life, Berlioz received equally mixed blessings during this first half of 1838. In January he experienced considerable alarm at reports of his mother's ill health, which made him hope to get away for a visit to La Côte. "I long for you tenderly." 8 She died the next month, aged fifty-three. A little earlier, the deaths of a good friend and of a near relative, both young, had already cast gloom over Berlioz' ceaseless activity. All his unhappy beginnings as a musician came back to him at the thought of his mother. More cheerful news came from Liszt, successful at Milan and joyfully sojourning on the Italian lakes with Marie d'Agoult. Reliving in his mind the pleasures of his own Wanderjahr, Berlioz sought to express his affection and sympathy with his fortunate friends by composing some trifle for Liszt's beloved. But nothing came to his pen. H e had verses on hand that Brizeux had written at his request, and he sketched portions of a setting for the Erigone of Ballanche,9 but neither composition seemed to take shape. "If I can find the time to work . . ." 10 A t least the fact of Adèle's engagement to Marc Suat, a solicitor from Vienne, near La Côte, was wholly good. Berlioz knew him well and esteemed him highly: "Your letter," Berlioz writes to his future brotherin-law, "made me very happy, and if I haven't answered sooner it's because my present work makes me lose both sleep and sense of reality. I snatch a moment to tell you how enchanted I am to hear of the lively affection you bear my sister. She is an excellent child, who will make you most happy, I know. As for you, I know the goodness of your disposition and my sister's future strikes me as secure — I may have misread your notes but are you thinking of coming with Adèle to Paris . . . can you? will you? It would be such happiness for me. . . . " 1 1 His chief worry was now Doctor Berlioz' solitude and ill health. Hector wrote to his father: "Adèle tells me of testamentary dispositions which our dear mother made in her special favor, and she seems to fear had all his trouble for nothing. If they think it good, it is produced and paid for in proportion to its success with the public. There is no certainty whatever." ( T o his father, Sept. 11, 1778; 219, 910.) S

A.R., 361.

'Pierre Ballanche ( 1 7 7 6 - 1 8 4 7 ) was a philosopher from Lyon, attached to the circle of Chateaubriand and Mme. Récamier. W h e n Gounet first sent Berlioz one of Ballanche's works, its vaporous quality struck the composer as too mystical for him ( A . R . , 257) but he was finally caught by the poetphilosopher's fervor for the antique and began work on a setting of the prose poem Erigone. T h e musical fragments for this are in existence (8). For a modern account of Ballanche see 122p. 10 A.R., 365. 11 A.R., 366-7.

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the effect of this on the mind of her brothers and sisters. And now it is you who tell me of your own intentions . . . which suggest the deep depression with which you face the future. . . . We'll talk later, much later, of all these money matters that you propose to me in such cold blood. In any case, as regards me, whatever you do will always be right. . . . Farewell, dear Father, don't worry about my future and think more about yourself. The best proof you can give of your affection for your children is to take care of your health and peace of mind . . ." 1 2 In his own home, Harriet and the child continued to thrive (Louis, in his fourth year, is growing fast but cannot yet read) but the arduous repayment of debts kept the exchequer drained. At last the combination of business, intrigues, rehearsals, and journalism wore Berlioz down. He took to his bed with his ordinary symptoms — sore throat, fever, and headaches — getting up only to supervise the Opera rehearsals. He was later to describe this ordeal with humor, and sympathy for a fellow composer: "I could imagine the cruel slowness of these 'studies' in which everyone wastes time on trifles . . . , the witticisms of the tenor and prima donna, at which the unhappy author thinks he is obliged to laugh heartily. . . . I could hear the voice of the Director treating him with condescension mixed with blame in order to remind him of the great honor being done to his work by such sustained attention. . . . Then someone would come in to announce that the mezzo-soprano was going on vacation and the bass on sick-leave, whereupon it was proposed to replace the singer by an apprentice and give the leading part to a chorister. And so the composer felt himself being assassinated, yet took great care not to cry out." 13 By the end of June, the voice parts had been pretty well learned, except that of Cellini — assigned to his old acquaintance Duprez who was vacationing. There remained the orchestra, some of whom were inclined to make trouble. The old-timers who took their cue from Habeneck declared they had never seen such difficult music. Yet at the same moment Habeneck himself was conducting five hundred musicians at Lille in the Lacrymosa of Berlioz' Requiem, and receiving great applause for it. In Paris, in the pit where Benvenuto was struggling to come to life, there were "millions of wrong notes, wrong tempi, and especially wrong rhythms. . . . This causes me so much irritation, so much torture of the nerves" (Berlioz confided to Legouvé) "that it is the sole cause of my present indisposition. I am not yet over it. But patience! We'll be ready for the first night by August 21st or 25 th. . . . The overture, by the 12

A.R., 368-9.

13

Soirées (7th) Eves., 8y.

294

Berlioz

way, I think you'll be pleased with. I don't want to count my chickens before they're hatched, but if my score is published, you'll give me the pleasure of accepting the dedication, won't you? For after all it's you who gave the metal for casting the Perseus and it is to you that poor Benvenuto owes his work of art, such as it is." 14 Though Duprez was inferior as an actor, he practised his role to Berlioz' moderate satisfaction and by mid-July everything was nearly ready. The censorship, it is true, "took away the Pope" from the cast and forced the substitution of a Cardinal, which somewhat spoiled the conflict of wills between the "bandit-genius" Cellini and Clement VII. The revolt in the orchestra had been more or less tamed, after which there was only "one more barrage, that of the newspapers and of one's intimate foes hidden in the four corners of the house." 15 What Berlioz was thinking of occurred even before the opening. An erstwhile friend, the German ex-priest and music critic, Joseph Mainzer, published a pamphlet elaborately seeking to discredit the composer, his writings, and his opera as yet unknown to the public.18 Benvenuto Cellini did not open on August twenty-first, nor on the twenty-fifth. There were unaccountable delays, conflicting announcements and denials, all matched by a steady cross fire of questions in newspapers friendly to Berlioz. The dress rehearsal took place on September ι, before a house of colleagues and critics, who kept distinctly cool. T w o days later was the scheduled première: postponed again. Duprez had caught cold and none of the roles had been understudied. "Cellini" was given a week to cure his cold. This brought the opening to the tenth of September and everyone knew that on the fifteenth Mme. Dorus-Gras, the leading lady, was quitting the Opera. By accident or design, a short run had been assured. The first public audience that heard the already maltreated score was most whimsical: it applauded the overture with great vigor, expressed its disapproval of the rather cheap scenery, then picked and chose, seemingly at random, from the rest of the offering. Mme. Dorus-Gras's roulades went well, but certain words of the libretto afforded great opportunities 14

A.R., 376-7. Berlioz here repeats his allusion to the final scene of the opera. But the score was never published during Berlioz' lifetime; nor ever in France; it is still unobtainable except on hire from theaters that own it, for actual performance only. T o acknowledge his friend's help Berlioz was to inscribe first the Benvenuto Cellini overture, then a book of essays to Lcgouvé.

"AR., 375· 18

.

Chronique Musicale de Paris: 1ère livraison: M. Berlioz. Au Panorama de Ρ Allemagne, Paris, 1838, 95 pp.

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for ridicule. In an air of Cellini's it was said that "in early mora the roosters crowed." Laughter swept the stalls. What Parisian could lend credence to such crude romantic realism? The parterre hissed and the gallery's barnyard noises managed to disconcert the actors. No such fun had been had in the City of Light since the first English actors had put on Shakespeare. The cabal deliberately killed the opera. The music was hardly attended to.17 Duprez-Cellini kept on singing as if he were in on the joke, though the two women in the roles of Teresa and Ascanio did their utmost and were warmly applauded by Berlioz* admirers. The faithful cohort called for him at the end, but his name was drowned in the tumult. He barely escaped the humiliation inflicted on Henry James after Guy Domville, of coming forward to be jeered at. The press behaved in the usual way, strong on politics and on the faults of the libretto, weak or irrelevant about everything else. The very next day Berlioz set to work altering words and making cuts. On the twelfth a second performance half filled the house. There was no more laughter, but not enough applause. On the fourteenth a fuller house witnessed a performance which, despite Duprez' cynical carelessness,18 aroused the public to genuine enthusiasm. But the box office is inexorable: three thousand francs amounted only to one third of what Meyerbeer could "do." At this point the press temporarily abandoned jokes and recrimination and suggested that an injustice was perhaps being committed. They urged Berlioz not to be discouraged, acknowledged the power of his music, the abundance of his ideas, and concluded that "such an opera is entitled to ten first performances." One critic roundly asserted that Berlioz "opens out to us a new continent." 19 Another, putting his finger on the difference between Berlioz and Meyerbeer, explained the conflict of tastes: "However useful and even glorious M. Meyerbeer's works may be, they are only transitional and . . . eclectic, which is a very different matter from creative . . . At certain times eclecticism is serviceable, for it sums up and prepares us for what is to come, but in order to last, a 17

Except perhaps by Spontini, Meyerbeer, and Paganini, who were present. Duprez told the story himself at a much later date: his wife was momently expecting a child. In the midst of the opera, the tenor saw the doctor gesticulating his congratulations from the wings; the singer lost his head and virtually stopped the show. T h e doctor's words at the end of the act did nothing to restore Duprez' poise. In admitting his confusion, the singer excuses himself with allusions to Berlioz' "complicated music" which was "not exacdy tuneful anyway." (949, 124.) 10 Morel in the Journal de Paris, quoted in i f , 445. 18

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w o r k of art must carry reality within its flanks. It must be a creation. Benvenuto

is such a w o r k . Benvenuto

is a masterpiece." 20

A private letter from a contemporary to Desmarest, the virtuoso violoncellist, shows h o w a witness w h o was free from party allegiance viewed the facts, and to what extent Berlioz could hope for understanding from the thoughtful minority: I thank heaven that an unforeseen obstacle put off the opening of Benvenuto. Its inexplicable failure would have caused me too much pain to look on directly, and I would rather take it in from a distance than be close to all the dirty business y o u tell me about. Whether as is said, poor Barbier's poem is no good, I hardly k n o w ; I paid no attention. But after all, what difference does the canvas make when a masterpiece has been embroidered on it? . . . One thing especially is beyond me and that is the reception given to the finale of the first act. I can hardly believe it. T h a t the public should have failed to grasp at once all that is subtle, delicate, w i t t y , and touching in this opera, I can perhaps understand. But this sublime finale, this magnificent conception which struck me like the fusion of a hundred thousand voices, distinct and single at first, then mingling and blending in a magnificent harmony, is fit to move the most vulgar clods, the most ungifted individuals. . . . I am no artist . . . but at the dress rehearsal, while listening to that finale I was sweating with excitement, I was shaking in m y seat with wonder and enthusiasm. N o one will persuade me that something which could move me so, ignorant as I am, is insignificant or dull music. Neither the public's opinions nor the hissing of a whole theatre will convince me that I was wrong. . . . But something w h i c h surprises even more, perhaps, and infuriates me, is the behavior of Duprez. . . . Duprez has forgotten that scarcely a year ago he too was making his debut, nervously trembling before the public, . . . he has forgotten that he would then have begged on his knees for the handsome support that Berlioz so generously accorded him. He forgot it, G o d help him. . . T h e protracted dispute over the merits of the opera led to the challenging of a stubborn critic b y an enthusiastic Vicomte. T h e duel did not take place, but it gave Berlioz an opportunity to defend Mme. DorusGras, w h o had been accused of sabotaging her role. In an open letter defending the cast, he said: "She gave me her fullest support with a fervor I should be sorry to see misrepresented." 22 A t the same time he stood b y his librettists. T h e f e w words that had offended delicate tastes he felt were a trifle compared to the genuine dramatic interest of the whole. 20 21 22

Chaudes-Aigues in L'Artiste, Oct. 1838. L. Jonnart: Sept. 24, 1838 (soi, 412-3) /07.

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Later, with more experience of the theater, Berlioz further recast the scenes, making of the two acts an admirable text in three.21 Throughout this voluble post-mortem, after the first shock of disappointment, Berlioz seemed the calmest and most confident. He had heard his score and knew what it was worth. Besides, there was still a slim chance of dinning the music into the public's ears by additional performances. The composer knew that no amount of journalistic drum-beating was going to increase the size of his public. Art is a serious addiction which newspaper reports and common opinion mistake for a gastronomic exercise. In this instance, Berlioz had learned like the hero of his opera that the artist having lost his proper religious function in modern secular society, he is at the mercy of the casual passions of men. He can succeed only slowly, by building up, inch by inch, the canons of judgment appropriate to his unique creation.

Berlioz' Reform oj Opera I am regarded as the subverter, the overthrower of the national genre. — BERLIOZ speaking of Benvenuto at its inception (1834) A fair judgment of Berlioz' first opera may be deemed impossible because it failed under ambiguous circumstances and because nowadays no one knows the work. But this is inexact. Though during Berlioz* lifetime the opera failed again in London and had only a brief (though triumphant) revival in Weimar, it enjoyed a veritable run in Germany between 1880 and the first World War. Played to enthusiastic audiences in a dozen cities, its performances according to one calculation totaled 23

A highly qualified judge, the American composer, conductor, and theorist Philip Greeley Clapp, witnessed a revival in Munich in 1910, and reports: "Berlioz' opera exhibited none of the shortcomings commonly alleged." ( /yy, 4.) See also Weingartner's essay (911 ) and Gautier's statement after the premiere that the libretto was no worse and no better than that of other accepted works. (434, 146.) In fact, the history of opera criticism suggests that no good libretto has ever been written. That of Carmen itself has been damned, yet there is a vast difference between it and the farrago of The Magic Flute, which is none the less a sublime work. Critics too often speak like those mischief makers who say: "It's not that I mind myself, but others will certainly object." Has Rigoletto a good libretto — or Traviata? It doesn't matter!

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more than six hundred. In the 1930's it elicited fresh and discriminating praise when Erik Chisholm included it in his Berlioz cycle at Glasgow, and a performance on the Paris radio by Inghelbrecht occasioned a critical study shortly to be quoted from. 1 What one critic or audience can admire, given the right conditions, others can; so one must conclude that despite its eventful history, Benvenuto Cellini was anything but stillborn. Rather, the work resembles the Emperor Barbarossa asleep in his cave but destined again for power. Berlioz was thus quite right when, reviewing his score after fifteen years, he confided to his sister, "I like better than ever that dear old Benvenuto, which is more vivid, more fresh, more neiv — that is its greatest disadvantage — than any of my works." 2 This is no more than was to be said a hundred years later by the British critic who heard the radio version and studied the score: "Listening, it seemed strange that a work so rich in ideas and of such beauty, should have been for so long completely ignored. . . . This admittedly flawed masterpiece surely deserves as much popularity as, shall we say, Boris Godunov, which, incidentally, it resembles in form. One is no less a masterpiece — and no more flawed — than the other." 3 It is invariably true of Berlioz* great works that the assimilation of their substance, the recognition of their form, and the enjoyment of their varied kinds of beauty is a much bigger task than seems required by the ordinary work of the same sort. Even a student who has gone to the trouble of searching and reporting his opinion may forget how much he has absorbed and how much calls for reflection. We may therefore sympathize with the Paris audiences of 1838 insofar as they were sincerely bewildered, and we need not be as surprised as modern critics at the unjust treatment of the score. It is no bagatelle which may be casually taken up, put on, or received.4 By J. Bornoff is46). D. E . Inghelbrecht, it is worth noting, had been Weingartner's understudy as conductor of the Paris revival of 1913, when the opera "amazed" French critics brought up on the hearsay of its "failure." W h a t failed again in 1913 was the whole repertoire (Weber, Gluck, Berlioz) which the energetic builder of the new Théâtre des Champs Elysécs hoped to establish in competition with the subsidized houses. (See 258; and, among the critics, Pierre Lalo, s49·) 2 M.C., 91. 3 546, 341. T h e piano score (French or German) is incidentally very poor. 4 In Akkorde Felix Weingartner tells of his labors while producing the opera in Berlin. Among other obstacles was the stubbornness of the director of properties who had. decided that in the last act the statue of Perseus was to be not cast but broken at every performance. Weingartner had to appeal to 1

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When first produced even the overture was an offensive novelty, for the opera public was not accustomed to hearing ten minutes of instrumental music ahead of the real show — the scenery and the singers. As for the alarm of the habitues at the "fifth-column" attack which Berlioz was making on their pastime, it can readily be understood. Here was an opera on an Italian theme, with the usual melodramatic plot —father, daughter, lover, duel, abduction, predicament, denouement by papal authority: the work was obviously (and originally) meant for treatment as an opéra comique. Turned into an opera semiseria, the work was accepted as much on the strength of its colorful scenes as on account of Berlioz' reputation for serious music. He had thus found his way into "the house," where he was now blowing up the conventions from within. He had used an Italian opera to criticize Italian opera, as well as to revolutionize the French national genre. He had not yet dared to put his views into words, but he already meant what he said later: "A new opera? To begin with, is there such a thing as a new opera? Is not the form worn threadbare, played out, squeezed dry?" 5 Berlioz knew the repertory as well as or better than any connoisseur, and he had the advantage of preferring the works that the connoisseur usually found heavy or dull — Mozart's and Gluck's, Freischütz and Fidelio. From them he could deduce principles which suggested to his inventive mind certain reforms that might revivify dramatic music. Though Berlioz introduces these gradually after the rise of the curtain, the form of Benvenuto Cellini is characteristic of Berlioz as dramatist. Hence the similarity with Moussorgsky's Boris noted by the modern critic.8 The libretto, as we know, was written under Berlioz' direction; he had himself chosen from Benvenuto's Memoirs the scenes that he deemed dramaticand-musical. Auguste Barbier and Léon de Wailly T had cobbled up a the highest authorities to prevent this "attraction" from being featured. ( 9 a , 74;) °Soirées (18th) Eves., 197. One director of the Opera, whom Berlioz had dealings with at this later time, defended the common run of pieces by explaining that "l'opéra est un art de joie." ( ioo$, 32.) 8 The principle is simply though inadequately put by a negative: "Benvenuto Cellini lacks a certain dramatic continuity and the various tableaux have little or no connecting links." {546, 343.) 7 Wailly was a cousin of the well-known historian of the same name, a lifelong friend of Vigny, and one of the interpreters of English literature in France. He translated Swift, Sterne, Burns, and Thackeray, not to speak of Uncle Tom's Cabin. During the Bourbon restoration he had been secretary to Sosthènes de la Rochefoucauld — Berlioz' old bureaucrat acquaintance — and later had become an intimate of Berlioz' other friend and collaborator Auguste Barbier.

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love-plot and written the verses. Vigny had gone over the finished product, and contributed one lyric — the fine Chorus of Apprentices.8 Finally Berlioz speeded up the action in his revision for Liszt in 1852. The present text consequently represents his thought as both dramatist and composer, and the result justifies the categorical statement made earlier, that "Berlioz' opera exhibits none of the shortcomings commonly alleged." The critic significantly adds: " — although such singers and hearers as depend for their happiness on solos and set pieces might be disappointed." In short, Berlioz broke with the current routine and liberated opera once more, as must be done every fifty years. What Berlioz gives us when "action, music and stage business are perfectly coordinated" is "an evening seemingly of Cellini himself — though one may suspect that when the mood was on him Berlioz was truer to Cellini's self-portrait than Cellini ever managed to be!" It follows that any future stagings of Benvenuto should be inspired by "the best practice in Meistersinger, Don Giovanni and Falstaff." · In some ways, Benvenuto is still beyond the latest of these scores, or to put it differently, is closest to Don Giovanni; for Berlioz' purposeful "discontinuity" is a principle of dramatic composition which has so far been adopted only by few. Benvenuto irresistibly suggests treatment by one of our enlightened motion picture directors. The decor, pace, drama, mass effects, and youth of the work call for a visual truth-to-nature that opera seldom has the energy to seek. As much as from Mozart, Berlioz drew his method from Shakespeare and from his own dramatic symphonies, the Fantastique and Harold. He no more wanted music to "accompany" a verbalized tale on the stage than he wanted his symphonies to narrate events. The music was to contain the drama. Hence no arias as such, no set pieces, but a sequence of "occasions" in the shape of dramatic conflicts that could be musically rendered.10 Explanatory recitatives must be kept to a minimum, for music must not be degraded by buzzing incessantly to every kind of chatter. The resulting music drama is thus a quintessence of imaginative and sensory perceptions. Just as Berlioz wished to rid the symphony of superfluous tissue and make it unremittingly expressive, so in his first so-called opera 8

°

10

For the validity of this ascription, see /190.

5·

T h e first act does indeed contain concessions to contemporary forms. A good idea of how novel the rest was as late as 1882 may be gathered from a detailed analysis written in view of a projected London performance. (Musical Times, Feb. 1881, pp. 61-6.)

Benvenuto Cellini

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he followed the equivalent rule of composing only what is composable — a minimum vocabile.ll Untrained to cross ditches without help, the French public found the "gaps" in Berlioz' dramas puzzling. Any audience equally unaccustomed to following intense and rapid musical thought would also think these dramatic scenes ineffective unless admirably duplicated upon the stage. That this would be duplication is shown by the fact that a trained critic who heard only the radio version readily understood Benvenuto'Í "drama by discontinuity." On this point, a writer not at all biased in the composer's favor has said that Berlioz' "attempt to escape the stereotyped opera forms" was "on the whole analogous to Wagner's." 12 This statement is important but it may mislead. Berlioz' reform of opera in Benvenuto Cellini rests on the same grounds as Wagner's — the failure of traditional opera to be genuine music drama because it is broken up by arias and dances and nonsensifíed by a uniform use of tricks. But Berlioz' whole effort was towards concentration and concision and radical skips; whereas Wagner's was towards elaborate development and continuity. Berlioz would let the audience supply — or forget — the unmusical, explanatory palaver. Wagner protracted and repeated both words and music so as to make action and detailed discourse match whole symphonic movements.13 The similarity and difference between Berlioz and Wagner are cut across by the fact that in Benvenuto Cellini, the composer again makes use of thematic alteration and recall "like veritable leitmotives." 14 There is a further kinship, as we shall see, in the plot and message of the play, but to put in a word the distinctive contribution that Berlioz made in Cellini (though in conformity with usage he called it an opera) it may simply be called a Shakespearean musical drama. This would distinguish it, on the one hand, from Wagner's Racine- or Hugo-like play patterns, and, on the other, from Meyerbeer's imposing but undramatic pageantry. What then is the "flaw" to which the British critic justly refers? It consists in the two or three concessions that Berlioz made to contempo11 H e was so little dependent on words that in accounting f o r " T h e F i f t h of M a y , " composed in the same period, he says that he was moved b y the musical sentiment which lay behind Béranger's "quasi-poem" (L.I., 169.) See below (passim) the several subjects that he considered "anti-musical." Masson: 289, 178.

13 14

901, ι $6-8.

289, 178. A comparison of the overture with the remainder of the score shows again Berlioz' power to develop and redevelop ideas seemingly fullyexploited the first time.

302

Berlioz

rary taste — fioriture, repeats, and the like. They occur chiefly in the first act, to woo the audience, and they could, perhaps ought to, be cut with a light hand until a given public becomes familiar with the rest of the score. In the published piano edition, these few numbers are the easiest to read, whence the erroneous impression that the symphonic innovator yielded without a struggle to operatic convention.15 The truth is that if Boris Godwiov thirty-five years later, is said on account of its form to mark a date in the history of opera, that date should be moved back to 1838.

The action of Benvenuto Celimi takes place in Rome during the Carnival of 1532. The sculptor-hero is in love with Teresa, daughter of the Pope's treasurer Balducci, and he means to elope with her during the confusion of the merrymaking. A recitative followed by a grumbling fugato gives us Balducci in the act of lecturing his daughter. From outside come noises of revelry; the dangerous Cellini is mentioned just as a bouquet is thrown through the open window with a letter for Teresa in it. She sings a romance completely traditional in form, but melodically of extraordinary psychological finesse. Balducci leaves. Cellini enters, announced by a fragment of love tune in the cellos; he enlarges the melody, in which Teresa soon joins, the voices one beat apart being delightfully treated as a canon in octave. W e are still in the operatic tradition, but handled with the maestria of a Mozart or Rossini. Also traditional is the fact that Cellini has a rival, the old and academic artist, Fieramosca, who is even now concealed in the room.16 The geniuslover continues his wooing and proposes the details of the elopement. Already in this ensemble, Teresa's part is entirely untraditional and "realistic." With the lover's pleading and the muttered comments of Fieramosca, the trio is as dramatically convincing as it is tuneful; it still sparkles after a century of other music fit to make us blasé. Balducci returns and Cellini barely makes his escape, but Fieramosca, caught in an inner room, is now subjected to a stage lynching by servants, men and women, who come in from three sides to a marvellous allegro of comic confusion. The curtain falls on a choral tutti of dazzling polyphonic verve and clarity. The drama is launched. 15

This may account for the summary verdict rendered by Mr. Grout, who farther on in his History of Opera accords Berlioz' Troy ens a discriminating approval. (722, 318 ff. ) 16 T h e name may have occurred to Berlioz from reading d'Azcglio's Ettore Fieramosca o la Disfida di Barletta, published in Paris in 1833, or perhaps from seeing the subject acted out by marionettes in Italy

Benvenuto Cellini

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The second scene shows the Piazza Colonna with its antique monuments and, to one side, the booth of a traveling showman. Cellini awaits his mistress and sings in the expected way of tenors a "romance" full of genuine melancholy. As characterization, it shows the reverse side of the "hero," who is not always a great artist nor a great bandit, but a man also conscious of weakness — romantic self-knowledge. Benvenuto's fellow craftsmen, the master goldsmiths and their apprentices, enter and give forth in high spirits a melody of typical Berlioz rhythm, which is to recur with great significance: Cellini had urged them to sing the praise not of wine but of art. Perhaps they sing too long before they drink, and the reason may be that they lack the wherewithal, for at this point the Pope's messenger brings money for the casting of the statue commissioned from Cellini, and they fall to. As they drink they mock the ostler's usual remonstrance — "this bill unpaid — ten dozen bottles of good lacryma Christi. . . ." There is a needless reprise of the chorus, followed by the reappearance of Fieramosca plotting to thwart the elopement. He sings a mock-heroic air, lunging with his sword to an ingenious rhythmic sequence," and chanting his bravura until we reach the great carnival scene. On one side of the Piazza Colonna the strolling players begin their evening show entitled the Pantomime of King Midas. Balducci and Teresa enter, soon followed by Cellini and his apprentice Ascanio, disguised as monks in white and brown. The players harangue the crowd, the crowd talks back, against an orchestral background of infinite rhythmical variety and melodic power. The pantomime is a double satire — on the stage it satirizes Balducci, in the orchestra, Italian opera. There is an arietta for Harlequin (the enchanting love tune in D of the overture) which here puts Midas to sleep. There is Pasquinello's cavatina for tuba coloratura, which is a gem of parody (as well as the anticipation of a fine scene in Petrouschka). And there is the crowning of the tuba player by Midas — a direct hit at the nature of academic choice in musical competitions.18 At this point Balducci angrily interrupts the stage show and leaves his daughter, who suddenly finds not one, but two pairs of "monks" designing to elope with her. Fieramosca and his accomplice struggle with Cellini, who stabs his rival's bodyguard. He is just being seized by the crowd 17 Four bars adding up to twice seven beats, followed b y t w o bars of six and (accelerating) t w o of five; the time signatures alternating 3 / 4 with 4 / 4 and 2/4. 18 T h e tuba was originally an ophicleide, f o r in 1838 the tuba was still a novelty unknown in France. Patented b y W i e p r e c h t of Berlin in 1835, and accepted in the forties, it was not heard by Berlioz until his first G e r m a n tour.

304

Berlioz

when the gun of Castle San Angelo signals the putting out of lights. Cellini escapes and Ascanio leads Teresa away. For this incomparable scene "which ranks with the closing scene of the second act of Meistersinger in sustained musical inspiration and lucidity of polyphonic writing." 18 Berlioz drew upon some pages of his early mass which had there expressed his vision of the Last Judgment, and which had not suited the Requiem. In effect, the confusion of passion, death, cross purposes, and panic treated here would characterize equally well the conceivable end of the world in the Eternal City. He added the comedy, of course, and changed much besides, but we understand better in retrospect why he had in the meanwhile been composing witches' sabbaths and brigands' orgies. Here is the perfectly logical development of one side of his musical powers; in all these scenes he was perfecting the art of rendering simultaneous and conflicting passions with clarity.20 In Benvenuto and the Requiem his technique fully matched his intention — as may be ascertained from a study of the successive versions of persistent ideas. The finished style of orchestration, voice leading, rhythmic counterpoint, and melodic ornament in this Benvenuto finale is throughout of the first order, and it justifies Liszt's sober judgment twenty years later: "He has fashioned a most impressive scene in which a whole people is the main protagonist . . . a scene so full of movement, passion, excitement, and contrasts between light and dark, laughter and the throes of death . . . love and murder, cowardice and scorn . . . a scene in which for the first time the crowd speaks with its great raging voice . . . and which surpasses anything yet done in dramatic music." 21 The third act takes us to Cellini's atelier, at dawn. The goldsmiths and foundrymen arrive, singing the guild chorus in minor, transformed into a dirge. From outside one hears a sad folk tune, which Berlioz had noted down in Italy and which he orchestrates here with the aid of a small goldsmith's anvil in lieu of triangle. Ascanio enters and tries to cheer Teresa with a barcarolle of irresistible lilt . . . "which would assuredly become very popular if it were at all known." 2 2 Next, in accordance with Berlioz' ever-present sense of manifold life, " 546, 346.

20

As late as 1906, music critics were discovering in a then new work entitled The Clown (by M. de Camondo) that it is possible to superimpose sonorities for dramatic effect without creating confusion or producing a mere blend, ( / j f f j , 1906, 3JI.) Later, Darius Milhaud played another variation on Berlioz'

idea in the trio of L'Ours et la Lune 21 587, 400. 22

„ S , 346.

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305

we hear a religious procession. It furnishes "a characteristic example of Berlioz' power of suggesting an immediate change of mood: in a very short number of bars he has created with complete naturalness an entirely different atmosphere. . . . " 2 1 Through beautiful modulations this sancta mater, ora pro nobis is intertwined with a prayer by Teresa and Ascanio for Cellini's safety. The artist returns and gives an account of his adventures which puts one in mind of Tannhäuser's Rome Narration. "Stranger still, however, is the coincidence of the musical phrase." 24 Cellini and Teresa thereupon sing a duet that does not forward the action, after which, in short order, Balducci strides in, followed by the Cardinal-legate (originally the Pope). Balducci demands Cellini's arrest; the legate demands the statue, threatening to have it cast by another craftsman. His theme, which some find too pompous,25 works up to a dramatic climax in which Cellini's life, forfeit by murder, and his art — treasured by Clement V I I — are balanced against each other: if he will cast the Perseus by nightfall, he will be pardoned.28 In the evening scene that follows, Cellini speaks with Berlioz' voice, the voice of the hero-artist pitted against his twofold destiny — the common fight against circumstance and the special struggle with his daemon and the materials of his art. The music reaches high moments of passion, despair, indignation and defiance, while moving "objectively" against the contrary background of the hostile forces — officialdom, fathers, and artistic Fieramoscas. Here we have not only Shakespearean roundness of character but also the intellectual and moral cargo of an Ibsen play. "Alone in my struggle, alone with my courage," sings Benvenuto as he prepares to cast his masterpiece. The thought of nature entices him: " W h y not live, a shepherd on the mountains. . . ." But despite the blind urge to strike out against coercion, the artist grows absorbed in his task.27 The actual casting of the great statue is imagined as taking place behind 23

Í A 347II 546, 347· 25

This is the theme in G , first heard in the pizzicato strings after the first pause in the overture. Varied again and again it is united with the whirling allegro at the end of the overture, and sung by the Cardinal when granting absolution. " T h e historic Pope had said: " W h e r e am I to get another Benvenuto if you hang me this one?" Mr. Masson amusingly complains that this monologue "unrolls with exasperating calm when there is only one hour more in which to cast the statue." (289, 176-7.) Perhaps psychological time at this point supplants clock rime, as in modern fiction. Casting the statue is just as impossible in point of time, as Berlioz well knew from reading Cellini's Memoirs, Ch. X L I - 1 J I .

3 o6

Berlioz

the visible scene, presumably in the Coliseum, which is peopled with officials and onlookers. The furnace glows red and work begins, to a stirring trombone theme punctuated by a rhythm suggesting the bellows of the forge.2® At the critical point, the metal grows short. T o save his life and fame, Cellini pours into the furnace all the finished works in his atelier. Tragedy broods over the holocaust but victory is assured and the hesitant mob rallies to Benvenuto. As he undergoes the ordeal of congratulation, he ticks off in an aside the flatterers and trimmers. The jubilant goldsmiths take up their corporation hymn, the Cardinal absolves, and the people and principals rejoice in a finale of Dionysiac élan. If the dominant musical conception of Benvenuto Cellini is the rendering of chaos clear through polyphony — the chaos of passions and purposes as they mingle in reality 29 — the abstract or intellectual conception which holds the scenes together is the Romanticist view of the artist as hero. Berlioz must have experienced a wonderful release for stored-up emotions as he penned love music, guild anthems, recitatives against bad artists and official busybodies,80 parodies of false styles, mockeries of commercial minds and treacherous friends, litanies to nature and to the deity, as well as mass effects expressive of popular joy and simple throbbing life. When finished, the work was a visible-audible presentment of the conditions under which the "Perseus," serving as symbol of all works of art, is made. In his version, Berlioz repudiates equally the false-romantic and the false-realistic view of the process. The artist is in the midst of life, and art comes out of life. This implies that the artist must cope with his own passions as a man — risking his life for love no less than for fame — and struggle as well with the established rules and vested interests that simultaneously demand and thwart his work. He saves himself by an act 28

Compare the six-note figure of this rhythm with the simpler beat of Siegfried's forging. It may possibly indicate a national difference between two kinds of blacksmiths' equipment, for the Dauphiné forges still extant use a clapper device which Berlioz' rhythm accurately suggests. W e know, incidentally, that Hector as a boy was regularly awakened at dawn by the smith

across the way. (A.R., ij8.) 29

Chabrier: " M y God! but Berlioz could put color, variety, and rhythm into [his works]. It spoils the unity, they say; and I say: Bunk! If in order to be One, music has to be dull, I prefer to look like T w o . . . Ten . . . T w e n t y . . . . " ( i j 6 , 171.) 30 T h e score adroitly combines the traditional recitativo secco (as in Don Giovanni) with the measured kind, and with the Berliozian half-melodic

chant-récitatif.

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31

of virtuosity and conscious sacrifice. Great art is thus shown to be neither a product of routine devoid of inspiration and energy, nor an improvisation open to dilettantes. It is not even a wholly individual thing but the fruit of well-led co-operation. Cellini and his mates are craftsmen in a guild and the full subtitle of the opera is significant: Benvenuto Celihri, or the Master-Goldsmiths of Florence.32 Operagoers will scarcely have failed to notice that between Cellini and his maîtres-ciseleurs and Walther and the Meistersinger there is that same "strange coincidence" which critics have noted between part of the music and Tannhäuser's Rome Narration. A German student of musicdrama has summed up the relation between the two works: "Not musically but in contents, Benvenuto Cellini reminds one constantly of Die Meistersinger. Fieramosca is an evil and narrow-souled character like Beckmesser; like him he is the unwanted lover of the heroine. . . . In both works the lovers plan an elopement by night during a street tumult . . . and there are still other resemblances in incident which space forbids listing." " The elopement at night is not of Berlioz' invention. He doubtless read it in Hoffmann's tale of Salvator Rosa where Wagner may have found it too. But the intent of the whole work, taken with such minor ideas as the listing of foods in the innkeeper scene, shows beyond a doubt that the dramatic substance of Die Meistersinger is a bürgerlich transposition of Berlioz' original. The same dramatic use of the "folk" as protagonist, the same twofold struggle of the artist, the same vindication by means of the finished work, the same treatment of the message as tragicomedy — these elements which have made Die Meistersinger a great statement of the nineteenth-century religion of art 34 cannot have taken such similar shapes independently in two minds otherwise as closely in touch as Wag31 Hans von Biilow, who as a young man worked at the Benvenuto revival of 1852, devoted some six articles to the score which had made him so enthusiastic. Besides the music, he discussed the moral question whether the artist stood outside the laws, and the esthetic problem of the artist's relation to tradition and to his public. (54S, 70-3.) T h e thoroughness with which Bülow mastered the work enabled him to give it a notable production at Hanover in 1879 and at the end of his life, despite his neo-classic conservatism, he was still "in love with Berlioz' Cellini." {¡η2, 373-4.) 32 Cellini was a Florentine who presumably took his workmen with him to Rome at the Pope's behest. 33 683, 34334 Edmund Crispin: "Meistersinger — apart from Henry IV — is the only thing I know which convinces one of the essential nobility of man." (124

128.)

3O8

Berlioz

ner's and Berlioz'." When the Memoirs of Benvenuto first aroused Berlioz' interest, Wagner was twenty years old and when the opera was first put on, he had not yet reached Paris, where the "revelation of a new world of music" — through Berlioz — awaited him. This was still twelve months away; the year was still 1838. 35 The plan of Berlioz' work is so to speak classic in its appeal: Franz Lachner, Kapellmeister at Munich, took it over bodily for music of his own in 1849. In 1845, Rossi had composed a Cellini in Turin, and so had Berlioz' classmate Schloesser in Darmstadt. Later attempts are: Leo Kern's in Budapest (1854), Orsini's in Naples (187$), Bozzano's in Genoa (1877), and SaintSaëns and Diaz, both in 1890 in Paris. Still later, a post-Wagnerian brew of the same materials was given by Pfitzner in his Falestrina. There the Council of Trent is the Beckmesser: it broods over a Mass of the hero's which (with the aid of the Pope) is finally triumphant but happily not given in full to the audience. Curiously enough, a more "exact" dramatization of Cellini in Spain, eight years after Berlioz', failed because "it sought to embrace too large and complicated a subject within the limits of drama." (1122, 20J.)

12. The Dramatic Symphony: Romeo and Juliet October 1838 to September 1839

. . . Let music's rich tongue Unfold the imagined happiness. . . . — SHAKESPEARE,

Romeo and Juliet

A " F A L L E N A U T H O R " at thirty-five, Berlioz could look back on seventeen years of unremitting struggle. Though he had not had to murder anyone in the process, his Teresas had been won and his Perseuses fashioned by sheer Cellinesque energy. As he tried to keep his opera afloat through the autumn of 1838, the score of the Requiem was published — the first work for which he had not had to pay. But the engraved notes had value only for other musicians, and only for the most gifted at that. Knowing that for his music to create a public, "it must be heard and heard frequently," 1 Berlioz managed to obtain no fewer than eleven announcements on the official billboard that Benvenuto was to be played "any day soon." By mid-October the words regularly put beneath the mention of other works were: "This is being played while awaiting the fourth performance of Benvenuto Cellini." Owing to the departure of Duprez and Mme. Dorus-Gras, two new singers had to be rehearsed, and the beginning of November found Berlioz exhausted. Once again he took to his bed, despite other pressing cares: his brother Prosper had been sent to boarding school in Paris and depended on Hector's attentions. On the uncommon mind of the boy of eighteen, the capital had the same effect as it had exerted on his elder brother in the now remote I 8 2 O ' S . A new world was opening out to the sensitive, nervous young provincial; his faculties were intensely aroused, and by a singular recurrence these were also musical faculties. Prosper went to the performances of Benvenuto and was later able to reproduce from memory at the piano large portions of this complex score. Sainte-Beuve, who made a point of searching biographies for indications of talent in the brothers and sisters of great men, would have found here a Mendelian proof that the Berlioz males of the seventh recorded generation were born musicians. l

A.R.,

381.

Berlioz Prosper was even something more. Matching Hector's literary facility, Prosper began to develop a supernormal mathematical g i f t w h i c h astonished his n e w teachers. T h o u g h the school building was far f r o m Berlioz' house, H e c t o r w e n t there often and tried to lessen the boy's homesickness, to dull the pangs of their mother's recent death, to give and to receive the affection w h i c h their upbringing had made either scant or stormy. T h e r e is something heartrending about Berlioz in this brief period — sick,

fighting,

harassed, and showering a fruitless maternal care on

Prosper. 2 For the b o y died suddenly, three months after his arrival, on January 15, 1839. T h e fourth performance of Cellini

had not y e t been given w h e n the

N e w Year began, though everything had been in readiness b y N o v e m ber 21. Berlioz was then in bed, feverish y e t satisfied, w h e n just a f e w moments ahead of curtain time, notice of one of the singers' illness postponed the w o r k . T h e same thing happened on December 2, despite a formal listing, and w i t h o u t any illness to account f o r the new delay. T h r e e days before, a concert of his works at w h i c h Berlioz could not be present was extremely well received. Public indignation at the treatment of the opera added to the warmth of the notices. A second concert was scheduled for December 16, but Berlioz did not k n o w whether he could rouse himself to direct it. H e was played out b y a series of events comparable to the most intricate plot of Dumas, and in which he was almost the only one aware of all ramifications: " M y sisters," he told his father, "wrote to Prosper asking him f o r details of the . . . multiple machinations that surround the production of m y opera. T h e poor b o y is far from being in a position to answer, and even I can hardly do it by letter. But d'Ortigue has just published a book in w h i c h everything is quite clearly set forth. W h e n I say 'everything,' I mean 'almost everything' because there is many a detail w h i c h I asked him to suppress. I haven't yet broken with the administra2 Here is what Berlioz reports to his father after a few weeks: "Prosper works hard, the headmaster has told me several times how well satisfied he was. You know that we have always been on very good terms, my brother and I, and I can assure you I have his full confidence. The best way to have it is to show confidence in him. He complains of being in a school for little boys: I do not know whether it was on purpose that you chose this particular school. He needs blankets; he is freezing cold in bed. He would also like to be able to work in his own room, like some of the others. I find him more advanced than I had expected: his mind is fairly well stocked and it seems to me my sisters have judged him pretty severely. His mind may be slow in developing but sooner or later it will turn out remarkable. He is wild with joy when I can go out with him and it does as much for me." (A.R., 386.)

The Dramatic Symphony

311

tion at the Opera . . . [which] is a world of intrigue as complex as any that goes on at court." 3 As for the causes of the present imbroglio, Berlioz had sketched them two months before: " T o tell you all the goings and comings, cabals, disputes, and insults to which my work has given rise is impossible. It is a miracle to have stayed in the saddle. The fury of certain newspapers against what they call my system gives you only a dim notion of their fighting madness. Pamphlets are being written. It is a mêlée in which my defenders utter almost as much nonsense as my detractors. It must all be borne; it will all dissipate in time. The French have a mania for arguing about music without possessing either the rudiments of the art or any feeling for it. It was so in the last century; it is so, and will be so. . . . I count on my music . . . far more than on anything that can be said in its favor. But there have been so many changes to make because of the alteration of the text that I am stupid with fatigue." * D'Ortigue's three hundred and fifty-page book 5 was a full vindication as well as a very sound critique, for d'Ortigue not only knew music but had "the feeling for it" and he could assess Berlioz' "musical revolution" in every department of the art even when he himself disliked some of the results. D'Ortigue's thesis was simple: Gluck had fought the Italian school of his day in order to reform opera in the direction of dramatic force and extended musical means. In fighting the modern Italian opera, still ridden by convention, routine, and misplaced virtuosity, Berlioz was carrying on Gluck's work. Had Berlioz not been ill, as well as worried by illness in his family near and far, he could have felt that his achievement in Benvenuto was veiy precisely measured by official opposition and admirably consecrated by d'Ortigue's essay. On December 16, he was able to get up and conduct. T h e program included selections from Gluck and Berlioz' symphonies 1 and 2. In the hall of the Conservatoire which was filled to capacity, Berlioz had a roofraising success. In 1838 in Paris, one concludes, there was a phalanx of some twelve hundred people who understood and admired Berlioz' music. They were not numerous enough to uphold an opera, but they justified the existence of an orchestral composer even though his financial reward was inadequate. Certainly the moral support was immeasurably greater than anything our own century has been able to do for comparable 3

A.R.,

4

385.

A.R., 380-1.

5 De l'école musicale italienne et de ΓAcadémie royale de musique OperaJ à l'occasion de l'opéra de M. H. Berlioz, Paris, 1839.

[the

312

Berlioz

innovators, for a Varèse or a Van Dieren. Nor has our collective practical faith in the arts been able to match the individual largesse of a Paganini. For it was at this very conceit that the thin cadaverous figure of the virtuoso came to the front of the stage and declaring in his hoarse whisper that "Beethoven had at last a successor" knelt at Berlioz' feet in full view of the circle of friends and handshakers. T w o days later, Berlioz —who had caught more cold on coming out into the damp fog — received the often quoted message: Beethoven being dead, only a Berlioz could reincarnate him. I who have fed on your divine compositions, worthy of a genius such as yours, feel it my duty to ask you to accept in homage the sum of 20,000 francs, which the Baron Rothschild will remit on sight of the accompanying note. Believe me always your affectionate friend NICOLO

PAGANINI

Berlioz replied: H o w can I express my gratitude? Though I am anything but rich, I feel bound to say that the approval of a man of genius touches me more nearly than the kingly generosity of your gift. Words fail me. I will go and embrace you as soon as I can leave my bed.® The newspapers having reproduced the letter and told of the act of homage on bended knee, Paris was as excited as if a new revolution had broken out. The scene was re-enacted on the stage by impersonators of the principals; 7 and Paris naturally had to "explain" what it could scarcely grasp — giving away twenty thousand francs, and to a composer! Paganini moreover had the reputation of being a miser, which in reality was but the desire not to be fleeced by plausible beggars, and not to be swamped by requests for charity concerts.8 Stories were soon made up to accommodate old rumors and new facts. The fiist inspiration of the crowd was that with twenty thousand francs Berlioz would surely buy a house. Then it sought to incriminate Paganini's motives: by his gift to Berlioz, he was purchasing public esteem; or else Paganini had not given the money, but only lent his name to cover a present from the Bertins to their protégé and newspaper critic. When these tales reappeared in books in the fifties, Paganini's son 8

A.R., 387-9. 23s, II, 184. 8 When Paganini refused to play for another artist's benefit, he was "a miser," but when he played in the cholera-infested city for the benefit of the plague victims, no one bothered to call him a hero. 7

The

Dramatic Symphony

313

utterly denied them, and modern students of the violinist's career sustain the good faith of the man and the deed." Human motives are mixed, no doubt, and Paganini may have enjoyed the histrionic side of the adventure, but he chose in accordance with his instinct and reason: there were dozens of others to be a patron to — more popular than Berlioz or less popular, richer or poorer. Paganini could buy himself whatever magnanimous role he wished, and he chose unerringly an artist who would use the gift to create music, not to set up housekeeping. In Paganini's own words, "I saw a young man full of genius whose strength and courage might have ultimately broken down under the strain. . . . I said to myself, 'It is my duty to help him.' . . . When my claims to musical renown are reckoned up, it will not be the least that I was the first to recognize a genius and draw public attention to him. . . . " 1 0 The whole incident may strike us today as ostentatious, overemphatic, but it speaks of its time as well as any deed of Roman virtue or Greek courage speaks of theirs, and the overemphasis of twenty thousand francs was one that Berlioz found himself able to bear with equanimity. Besides this "metal" which spelled for him the leisure to compose, Berlioz had two other pieces of good fortune by way of Christmas gifts: d'Ortigue's book appeared and caused considerable stir, and he was named curator of the Conservatoire library at an annual salary of fifteen hundred francs. Though there were delays, the appointment was ratified in February and made retroactive to January 1. Berlioz' immediate superior, the librarian, was Bottée de Toulmon, a scholar who was also an admirer and who had written excellent critiques — especially of the Requiem — in the Gazette Musicale.11 Under him, short of earthquake or revolution, Berlioz would have a lifelong post whose duties were extremely light. Berlioz paid his visit of gratitude to Paganini and in telling all his good news to Adèle gives us a glimpse of the virtuoso as he was and as he was thought to be: "You know he has lost the use of his voice [from tubercu9 But see Jeffrey Pulver, Paganini, London, 1939, pp. 297-8. A moment's thought is enough to dismiss the malicious imputations: how could Paganini both be a miser and act the bountiful for a pair of newspaper owners — themselves assumed too delicate to make the handsome gesture outright? What could induce the stubborn violinist to write a faked message, to kneel in public, and to protract the deception until his death? Sec Mr. Pulver's own estimate of Paganini's proud character, ibid., 306-9. Mr. Richard Franko Goldman, who has examined the Paganini papers in the Library of Congress, was kind enough to tell me that no new document on the gift to Berlioz is to be found in this voluminous collection. 10 Journal de Parir, Jan. 18, 1839, quoted in 300, 127. 11 1398 (1837) 33' ft

314

Berlioz

losis of the throat. ] . . . W h e n he saw me, tears came into his eyes. I confess m y o w n were not far behind m y lids. H e wept, this man-eater, this murderer of women, this ex-convict — as he has so often been called. . . . T h e n , wiping his eyes and striking the table in a loud burst of laughter, he started to address me volubly; but as I could not clearly f o l l o w his words, he w e n t to fetch his little son to serve as interpreter . . .

I gath-

ered that he was 'very happy . . . because the insects w h o write and speak against me would be rather abashed. . . .' W h a t a rumpus the news [of his g i f t ] will make in G e r m a n y and England. Such a gesture — and from an Italian . . . but one must add that he does not compose Italian music."

12

T h e n , unaware of the significant and touching jump in his thought: "I hope m y father will be satisfied. . . . N o w I shall be able to make m y trip to Germany. It so happens that many German artists are in Paris this winter, and they exhibit towards m y music a most encouraging fanaticism."

13

A f e w days later, on January 11, 1839, the fourth and last performance of the original version of Cellini took place. It was precisely at this time that Prosper took sick, recovered momentarily, then died. Berlioz wrote on the same day to Jules Janin, "I am v e r y sad today. I have just lost m y brother, a poor b o y of nineteen w h o m I loved."

14

H e c t o r could only

do what he had always done with grief: repress and b u r y it. But the effort brought on the usual nervous reaction, visible in his next letter to Liszt; to be affectionate and talk of music and recall Italian days was like passing from a place of torture to a perfect world: I am ruminating a new symphony, w h i c h I'd love to go and finish near y o u , at Sorrento or Amalfi — ( G o to Amalfi!) — but it's impossible. I'm in the breach and must hold it. I have never led such an agitated life. . . . M y followers send me a mass of prose and verse, and m y detractors anonymous threats. One of them . . . advised me to shoot mvself — isn't it delightful? . . . This is a sort of life I like about as much as y o u do, but b y dint of tumbling among the breakers we should manage to tame them and keep them from rolling over our heads. A n d so you're in Rome. M. Ingres will surely welcome y o u , especially if y o u will play him our A d a g i o in C-sharp minor of Beethoven and the Α-flat sonata of W e b e r . I greatly admire the fanaticism of this great painter's musical passions, and y o u will heartily forgive him for loathing me w h e n y o u remember that he adores G l u c k and Beethoven. H o w I enjoy chatting with y o u tonight! I love y o u so, Liszt. W h e n shall y o u come back to us? . . . I've had a severe bronchitis, which f o r 12

A.R., 391.

" A R . , 391-2.

u

A.R., 394.

The Dramatic Symphony

3l5

a while made me think of Gluck's ode "Charon calls y o u " . . . W h y am I so gay? Our friends are for the most part sad. Legouvé has a painful gastritis. Schoelcher has just lost his mother. Heine is not happy. Chopin is ill in the Balearic islands. Dumas drags his chain, which feels heavier day by day. Mme. Sand has a sick child. Hugo alone stands calm and strong. . . . Please remember me to Mme. d'Agoult. I sincerely thank her for her interest in the success of my doings. She does it from affection for you, but I am not the less grateful. Farewell. Farewell. I embrace you with my whole soul and wish you a north wind — since you are in Rome. Your friend. 15 The life of "tumbling in the breakers" was more tedious than the image suggested. The regular turning out of copy for the newspapers, the business calls, the correcting of proofs (the Benvenuto overture was coming out in full score), and the pelting succession of operas, virtuosi, and ballets — they had to be seen to be reviewed — all broke up the inner stream of thought indispensable for creation, not to say necessary to a humane existence. Berlioz' constant subacute irritation from these causes did not contribute to peace at home. Though the certain signs of a domestic rift cannot be pointed to for another eighteen months, it is likely that already at this time Hector and Harriet were in disharmony. She, wounded in her professional pride by repeated failures, knowing that her debts were a drag on her husband's career, and feeling that this lessened her right to demand more of his time, became restless, jealous, and in the end more demanding than she herself wished to be. True, there were visitors, friends, plenty of activity and no lack of intellectual excitement in the home. And there was Louis to love and the household to take care of, but Harriet's difficulty with French interfered with all these pleasures, just at the time when her physical charms were waning and her lateawakened love for Hector was reaching a peak of possessiveness.18 He, on his side, harassed, nervous, impatient, always rushing into his workroom to dash off a feuilleton or seize a musical idea in its flight, must have been equally unsatisfactory as a married partner. H e was extremely fond of his little boy and played with him in whirlwind snatches of gaiety, but even this may have seemed to Harriet a further exclusion. A.R., 395-9. From all we know of her early life and character — that is, her exemplary virtue —it may be plausibly inferred that her emotional development corresponds to that described as a generality by Freud: " W h e n later the retarded development of the wife becomes rectified, and . . . the full power of love awakens in her, her relation to her husband has been long undermined [by psychical as well as physical unresponsiveness]." (//Ó7, 180.) u

18

316

Berlioz

Hector was lavishing his affection, his energy, his zest on everyone but her; she had no means left to center them again on herself — or so it seemed. Despite later insinuations and the odd reasoning that because Berlioz met singers and ballerinas, and his wife was jealous, he must have given her cause for jealousy, no rumor at the time even hinted of infidelity on his part. Considering the degree to which the lives of all Berlioz' contemporaries, and his own, were reflected in the daily press, it is unlikely that his enemies would have left us ignorant on this score. And again, it is not likely that Berlioz, if in love with another woman, would have yielded to such épanchements de coeur as we saw him addressing to Liszt. Given the "mechanism" of Berlioz' genius, the musical love scene he was beginning to compose argues rather the absence of love than its possession: only once did he find himself able to write under the actual impact of a feeling." When we add that the love music being written made use of still another boyhood melody associated with Estelle, we may infer that Berlioz was only longing or ready to love, and we shall not be surprised at the later breakup of his marriage. At the moment he was too busy, too exhilarated by Paganini's gift of freedom, too full of musical strength — exuberant in his previous score, latent in the grandissime symphonie now in progress — to engage either in flirtations or in a passionate affair. In the last resort, Harriet could, for a time, rely on Berlioz' strong family feeling and thoroughly bourgeois sense of dignity. In April 1839, his beloved Adèle was married to Marc Suat. It would have been a great satisfaction to go to the wedding, but how could he, with or without Harriet? If she went, she might be snubbed; if he went alone, it would be a victory for provincial prejudices. He pleaded the perfectly real pressure of duties, but he would have been less than human had he not felt regret; and inevitably associated with this feeling were Harriet's inadequacies. With her loving tact, Adèle proposed that she should come to Paris after her marriage and take back with her little Louis, who would thus have a vacation in the country and be his parents' advocate in the hearts of his Dauphiné relatives. Hector was touched, though he could not help noticing that no one but her had written to him since the wedding. Harriet first consented to send the boy away, then wept, then agreed again. The father felt he must warn his sister: "He is the most charming and badly brought-up child you ever saw. He threatens 17

The Elégie included in the Irish Melodies of 1829. See Mem., I, 99, and compare his dreaming of Estelle's garden during the time he composed the Requiem. {Mem., I, 308.)

The Dramatic Symphony

317

everybody with his sword and utters all sorts of insults when crossed. He swears like — like his father . . . withal he is charming, and enchanted at the idea of picking peaches and strawberries with his grandfather, but I don't know how he will take his parents' absence: he can't be away from them for one evening without tears. Well, you'll see when you come to Paris." 18 Despite more illness, due to nerves and bad weather (it was a freezing cold spring) the writing of the new symphony was proceeding. At the same time, a certain thawing out of officialdom was noticeable — as if after all Benvenuto Cellini had been a success. On May 10, the Comte de Gasparin awarded Berlioz the Legion of Honor, and the next month, on the death of Paer, the press urged the Institute to elect Berlioz. Paganini's words, "the successor of Beethoven," had become a catch phrase embodying another consecration. Berlioz, not yet thirty-six, seemed the master of instrumental music in France. Nor does it look different in retrospect: between 1830 and i860, no one in Europe was writing music of comparable power. Berlioz was not to enter the Institute so soon. He learned that the aged and embittered master whom he so deeply admired, Gasparo Spontini, was a candidate for the vacant seat and he withdrew. He also spurred on his friend, the poet Emile Deschamps, to write a pamphlet on behalf of Spontini's election. T o this, the tactless Spontini returned "an incredibly ridiculous letter" which he made public, but he was elected just the same.19 Berlioz was wise enough to overlook the older man's blunder, knowing that musical genius does not preclude wordly ineptitude.20 He continued to admire and to soothe in his last unhappy years the master whose career in some ways resembled his own. 21 When the new symphony was near completion, Berlioz undertook a new project looking to his vindication at the Opera. Since nearly everyone but himself had blamed the libretto for his failure, he would secure one from the best manufacturer, Meyerbeer's own appointed tradesman, Eugène Scribe. On August 31, 1839, after approaches and interviews, " A.R., 402. ia L.I., 187. " H e has been virtually hounded out of Prussia, and so I felt it m y duty to write to him. In such a case one must miss no opportunity to put in a w o r d that might restore a little calm to the lacerated heart of the man of genius, regardless of his faults or even of his egotism: the temple may be unworthy of the indwelling deitv, but the god is a g o d . " ( T o Ferrand, L.I., 194.)

-> Soirees

(13th).

318

Berlioz

Berlioz wrote to him: "I shall not take the liberty of telling you the kind of dramatic ideas that would suit me best: you know perfectly well what they are. However, in seeking a subject which would afford occasions for broad musical developments, and passionate and unexpected effects, it may be useful for me to tell you that certain individuals and groups are deeply uncongenial to me — Luther, for example, the Christians of the Lower Empire, and those brutish Druids." 22 Berlioz goes on to say that he wants a simple love plot, however passionate, combined with scenes of terror "in which mass action would have a place." The Middle Ages, he says, or the last century (that is, the eighteenth) would suit him equally well. "I should greatly love an antique subject, but I apprehend the costumes and the prosy positivism of our audiences. Naturally, this does not mean that one must keep always in the heroic or dithyrambic style. On the contrary, I am fond of contrasts." 23 "The antique" stood here for Berlioz' cherished Virgil, just as the rejected eras and persons stood for the cruelty which he abhorred. A Virgilian libretto by Scribe would no doubt have engaged Berlioz' fullest attachment and robbed us of the epic Trojans, fashioned altogether by Berlioz twenty years later; but the popular playwright knew better than to make such an attempt. By an odd coincidence, as Berlioz was writing of scenes of terror, a woman living in his apartment house went mad and threw the other tenants into a panic.24 Berlioz had to remove his wife and child for a few days, just as he was about to write to Kastner concerning the new symphony: "I have finished, quite finished, what might be called altogether finished: not another note to write, Amen, amen, amenissimen." 25 The full title of the work was Romeo and Juliet, dramatic symphony for chorus, solo voices and orchestra, and Berlioz at once set about getting a hearing for it. For three whole months he had been practically a free man, a composer working on unmortgaged time. Now the business of copying parts, rehearsing, and reviewing others' works claimed him again. In addition, he found himself appointed Special Master by an equity court, and charged with arbitrating a suit pending between the violinist 22 86, 580. It seems probable that Berlioz had not read Luther's Life and Table Talk b y Michelet, in which he would have found that Luther loved music next to theology and like Berlioz himself played the flute and guitar. F r o m other references it is clear that in Berlioz' mind, Luther stood f o r Puritanism and the wars of religion.

Ibid. A.R., 25 A.R., 23

24

406. 406.

The Dramatic Symphony

319

Charles de Bériot and three different publishers, French, English, and German. Berlioz had to work up the facts and render justice without letting his equal involvements with colleague and publisher affect his judgment. While he was accomplishing this feat, his friend Dietsch was rehearsing the choruses in Romeo. Berlioz was himself gathering his orchestra, sending out requests and notices by hand, procuring special instruments,28 or scouring the town for two good harpists. Because of the shortness of time, Berlioz devised the method of rehearsing his instrumentalists by groups — strings, woodwinds, and brass and timpani in separate places. Thus the two days for each section plus two for all together became the equivalent of six or eight rehearsals. As soloists he had Dupont (who had ably succeeded Duprez in Benvenuto), Mme. Stoltz (the Ascanio of the same opera), and Alizard.27 In his favorite Salle du Conservatoire, "resonant like a good violin," Berlioz would have two hundred performers. The date of the première was November 24, 1839. A week before, advance publicity began to appear. Janin in the Débats summoned the faithful, promising (in Berlioz' very words to him) that "the symphony by itself and without the accessories of Shakespeare's play, will make known to you the sum of passion contained in the original." This was the essence of the dramatic symphony as a genre, the literal "music drama." The same day, a society columnist, the poetess Delphine (Gay) de Girardin, reported that the seats were sold out and that the fashionable world was busy haggling and trading for them. "Come, dears: you will hear wonderful things. Just see the libretto . . ." and the writer filled up her column with verses quoted from an advance copy of the Prologue. 20

Such as the little "antique cymbals" akin to those which "tinkling" — no misnomer as is sometimes believed. 27 Louis Alizard ( 1 8 1 4 - 5 0 ) was a violin pupil of Urhan, w h o voice. A fine bass, he made himself into a barytone in order to the Opera. Tuberculosis set in in his larynx and carried him off his success.

the Bible calls discovered his be taken on at at the peak of

320

Berlioz

The Third, Model of the Dramatic Symphony No one, I suppose, will misunderstand the genre to which this work belongs. — B E R L I O Z ' Preface to Romeo and Juliet On reading the first notices of Berlioz' new work the Paris public may well have wondered, " W h a t sort of symphony is it that has a libretto and verses to quote?" Beethoven's choral Ninth was scarcely known; Berlioz' note on the Fantastique was ten years past, and though all his intervening scores had been at once dramatic and symphonic, this was the first to exhibit in one form all the resources of the genre. November 1839 is therefore a milestone in the composer's history and in that of nineteenth-century music: in his own history, because here was the logical outcome of the genre instrumental expressif which he had taken up as Beethoven's successor; in the history of music, because paralleling the great fact of Liszt's presence at the première of the Fantastique, the première of Romeo and Juliet numbered among its hearers a youth of twenty-six named Richard Wagner. From the "revelation" which Wagner admitted experiencing 1 comes not only an important part of his own musical development, but his confusing attempts to theorize against Berlioz. When that confusion began to threaten in the late forties, Berlioz wrote for his Romeo and Juliet the short explanatory Preface which opens with the ironic sentence quoted at the head of this section. T h e Dramatic Symphony, as its name seeks to show, is a symphony and a drama; it follows — to use the terminology used in Chapter 7 of this book — " t w o programs, both formal." T h e first and most important is the musical-symphonic pattern. In Romeo and Juliet the outline of the regular symphony, though enlarged and supplemented, is easily recognized. If we begin with the familiar orchestral excerpts we find that the first (actually Part T w o of the symphony as a whole) is a double allegro — Romeo before, and at, the Capulets' ball. Its form combines certain features of the rondo and the sonata form. T h e next part, the love scene, is an adagio; and the next is the famous Queen Mai) scherzo, after which comes a complex Finale. This Finale is a choral ensemble, as in Beethoven's next-to-last sym1

24s, 234-5.

Romeo and Juliet

321

phonic plan. But just as in the sketches of the projected Tenth, Beethoven felt the need to introduce the voices at some point well before the end — perhaps in the adagio —so Berlioz, without knowing these intentions, felt that the "too sudden appearance" of the chorus in a final movement was "harmful to the unity of the composition." * On musical grounds, therefore, a choral symphony presented a problem whose solution called for a new structure. Berlioz decided to introduce the voices gradually, and in so doing to exercise the care of an architect whose edifice must seem balanced and proportioned from all sides. Since the work is symphonic, it was logical to begin with an orchestral (fugued) Introduction, near the middle of which occurs a "solo" for tenor trombones and ophicleide which is marked "with the character of a recitative." We are thus insensibly prepared for vocal utterance in the next number, called Prologue. In this, a contralto solo and a small chorus of sixteen voices sing the subject of the drama —the feud of the two families and the star-crossed love of their offspring. This very brief quasirecitative leads to the instrumental statement of several of the later themes — sadness, revelry, and finally the love theme which leaps out exultantly. The solo voice next sings of young love in strophe and antistrophe. The small chorus then resumes with a few words on Romeo, Mercurio, and Queen Mab, whose airy being forms here the subject of a scherzetto: she lends the comic-fantastic element to the tragedy, as a scherzo may in any symphony. The remaining seventeen bars of the Prologue dwell on the tragic death of the lovers and the reconciling of the families, the close itself being on a vocal figure drawn from the later funeral march. A pause, and Part Two, the previously mentioned instrumental rondoallegro begins, ushered in by a slow introduction. The function of the Prologue has accordingly been threefold: it has prepared the ear by subtly combining vocal and instrumental music; it has prepared the mind by staring in brief form the main musical themes to be later developed; and it has prepared the imagination by summarizing the subject of the drama. Berlioz naturally drew the idea of a Prologue from Shakespeare's play, as Shakespeare had drawn it — in the person of a chorus — from the ancient music drama of the Greeks: throughout the ages drama and music combine their forms whenever congruent. Berlioz' musical handling was so logical that Wagner adopted it a quarter century later when he made Rheingold the theme-stating prologue of his Ring trilogy. 2

Preface to Romeo and Juliet, Min. Sc., vii.

32 2

Berlioz

From this point we can go on to speak of music and drama as one, in keeping with Berlioz' interweaving of their formal requirements. The symphonic Part T w o takes Romeo through the contrasting moods of lonely sadness and of indifference to the gaiety of the concert and ball. In order not to let us forget the voices, Berlioz next provides a brief choral interlude" which introduces the adagio: the Capulets sing as they leave the festive dance which has just resounded in the orchestra. There is even a touch of satire in this vocal nocturne, for what the lightheaded guests sing as they depart is the theme of the ball music in the wrong meter, 6/8 instead of 2/2. The adagio unfolds its tragic passion instrumentally "because first of all, this is a symphony and not an opera . . . and also because . . . the sublimity of the love itself made its expression so full of danger for the composer that he preferred to give a wider latitude to his imagination than would have been possible with words. He had recourse to the instrumental idiom, a richer, more varied, less limited language, and by its very unliteralness infinitely more powerful." 4 Likewise the ensuing scherzo which stands for Queen Mab suggests lightness and free fancy without in the least following Mercutio's long speech full of concrete images. The form of the scherzo is regular, with slight variations dictated by the nature of the musical material. W e have now heard some fifteen minutes of instrumental music and it is time to recall the voices. A funeral march provides the occasion by means of an ingenious and original device: it is scored for orchestra with a psalmody (single repeated note) in the voices, and continues thus as far as the midpoint, when the disposition of parts is reversed: the orchestra holds the monotone and the chorus of Capulets sings the dirge. The mood and material of this combination have insensibly shifted for us the vocal and instrumental balance. In the first half (psychologically measured) of the drama, the orchestra predominates, but the voices are never very far away; in the second half the voices predominate and allow the climax that has been planned from the first to employ all the resources of modern music without upsetting the symphonic form by a top-heavy conclusion. But this fullness even in the Finale is not reached at once. After the funeral march comes a short instrumental scena which recalls earlier motives, and marks, with the end of purely instrumental music, the end of the tragedy itself. Berlioz' sense of symmetry makes him introduce here the songlike invocation for woodwinds which balances the trombone 3

4

Omitted in Toscanini's Victor recording.

Preface, Min. Sc., vii.

(1456.)

Romeo and Juliet

323

recitative in the very first section of the score. The scena ends pianissimo on the disintegrated fragments of the love theme. The vocal Finale thus stands outside the main action, again in balance with the Introduction and Prologue. Its design is that of a gradual crescendo, which incidentally served as the model for Wagner's practice in Terrmhäuser and elsewhere.5 First we hear a recall of the feud theme: the outraged families wrangle vocally over the corpses. But soon the voice of Friar Laurence recites what has happened and entreats the warring clans to make peace.* He proposes the oath of reconciliation in the "air" which follows the recitative, and as he pleads first one chorus sotto voce, then the other, joins in majestic phrases that slowly cause the vengeful hearts to expand; a threatening figure in the lower strings keeps taunting them with tragedy until their voices overwhelm it in a song expressive of the gladdened will at peace with men. The music drama is concluded. A Wagnerite critic who did not approve of the Dramatic Symphony could truly write that "Berlioz has pursued his double goal with a rare tenacity and displayed extraordinary skill in the ungrateful task. . . . The score shows . . . a complex plan . . . which must have been long pondered and painstakingly followed." T As we know, Berlioz had been thinking of Romeo and Juliet for about ten years. From the first he had said of the play that "everything in it is designed for music," by which he meant his quintessential kind of musical résumé." He never had any intention of taking the play or any reduced version and "setting it" from beginning to end. This is what he meant when he remarked of his own work that it did not resemble Shakespeare's masterpiece." He chose or invented strictly musical situations, which it would be easy (as before) to reduce to a series of familiar musical terms.10 5

1290,

β

83.

His solo matches the contralto's stanzas about young love in the Prologue. 7 489, 65. Compare Otto Lüning (of Chur), "The structure of this tremendous work is completely thought out, symmetrical, and grounded upon inner necessity." (363, I, 25.) 8 V.M., II, 90. He did not know that Beethoven had considered this same play of Shakespeare's before choosing Fidelio, nor that he associated the Juliet tomb scene with the adagio of his quartet Op. 18, no. 1. 9 Mem., II, 261. 10 For example: Music Drama ι. Thematic Catalogue PROLOGUE 2. Reverie and Bacchanal ) 3. Nocturne: Adagio amoroso) ACTION 4. S c h e r Z O

5. Marcia funebre ) 6. Scena: Invocation and Love-death) 7. Choral finale: recitative, air, and ensemble

INTERLUDE DENOUEMENT EPILOGUE

324

Berlioz

Berlioz' belief that the music-dramatist must follow a different road from the playwright's, even though inspired by him, is shown by the fact that in the first version of the Romeo symphony there were t w o prologues, as in the play. Berlioz soon cut the second — musically rich as it was, according to Heller's account — because Berlioz saw that it spoiled the form of the symphony. A t the same time, it was truly

Shake-

spearean to unite in one work lyric and dramatic expression and prose besides. When the score is well known it shows in a multitude of ways the art with which Berlioz avoids jarring us as w e move from one mood and type of sound to another; how constantly and yet naturally he keeps echoing in one movement the theme or atmosphere of another. A s in Benvenuto

Cellini, the leitmotif plays its role — Wagner heard it there —

but so free and flexible that it needs no labels to mark its uses. N o t a device for the theater, it is rather an illustration of the rule that ornament must flow from main subjects. T h e drama is thus not external to the music, nor added by the poet's contributing something which music lacks: the drama is in the music. It is only the story around the drama that justifies the verses and the libretto, for those who want to know the names of the dramatis personae and be reminded of Shakespeare's plot. W h e n Toscanini gave Romeo

and Juliet entire for the first time in

N e w York this century, 11 one critic declared that, for him, the work 11

Oct. 7, 9, and 11, 1942. A technical note: If one collates the two French editions of the symphony, one finds in the Adagio a difficulty with regard to the placing of the mutes. T h e German Edition is obviously wrong, but the second French Edition, which the Eulenburg miniature score follows, also presents a puzzle. It may be corrected by keeping the first and second violins unmuted until p. i j i b. 2 (Min. Sc.), and muting only the second violins at that point. T o this correction, Mr. Toscanini objects and substitutes another, as he kindly explained to me during a conversation sought by him before his first N e w York performance of the work. He contends that Berlioz cannot have intended to put mutes on the second violins and violas playing pp., while keeping them off the first violins and cellos. Toscanini accordingly takes them off all the strings throughout the passage. T h e first French Edition, reproduced in the Treatise, furnishes some warrant for this reading, but if one goes back to the Chorus of Shades in Lélio (p. 9 b. 1), one finds part of the strings muted, part unmuted. It is very likely that Berlioz tried out the effect over a broader range in Romeo. T h e retention of the marking pp. would then be the proofreader's error, and not the direction to use mutes. Berlioz' autograph corrections on the engraved score at the Bibliothèque Nationale tend to bear out this view. It is worth adding that a similar combination of muted strings with unmuted is found in Brahms' chamber works, as well as in a modern Adagio for String Quartet by Mr. George Perle (1938).

Romeo and Juliet

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12

"had come to stay." Others expressed reservations, saying that the familiar orchestral excerpts were great music, but that the other, unfamiliar parts were not. It is no reflection on their musicianship that the chief enthusiast after this performance was the writer of the concert notes, who had attended the rehearsals and analyzed the score. After a second performance, five years later, many of the other critics' reservations disappeared.13 The music no longer sounded new and strange, the sequence of the parts seemed more logical, and the mind could master the profusion of art which a contemporary of Berlioz* had found in the score: "Heavens, it's beautiful! But it keeps on until one is dazzled." " That it is not any programmatic literalism which makes the work difficult is shown by the complaints of operagoers familiar with Gounod or concerned about Berlioz' neglect of Shakespeare's plot.15 The formalists of course object tp the dramatic symphony that it is a hybrid, neither symphony, oratorio, nor opera.14 The work is no hybrid but a new species. Berlioz' "long-pondered plan" is simple and logical: given his notion of modern music, instrumental and vocal, his ideal of "one work," and his dramatic faculty, fertilized by Shakespeare's poem, the real problem of form was to achieve unity, variety, and balance in a series of movements displaying all the newest technical resources — vocal, choral, and instrumental. Tradition supplied the framework of the symphonic sequence, here enlarged to accommodate other elements in close concatenation. If the alternation of air, trio, and chorus in Haydn's Creation is intelligible, then soloists and double chorus can surely mingle their voices in Romeo and Juliet as they do in secular oratorio, opera, or sacred works like the Saint Matthew Passion. For Bach, too, was deeply influenced by opera and deeply repelled by its conventions. Yet the Saint Matthew Passion contains some of the most magnificent recitatives ever written. Do they belong to opera like a patented device, or would saying so be to import into a musical question the irrelevant question of where, in what house, or linked to what subjects, certain forms of sound are usually heard? 17 12

Mr. Robert Bagar in the N. Y. World Telegram, Oct. 8, 1942. Precisely what happened in Paris in 1890. See 406, 140 and 147-9. "Quoted in 300, 133. "E.g., Mr. Richard Stebbins: j18, passim. 18 Miss Dika Newlin (842, 157-8). On the other side, Romain Rolland, SaintSaëns, Alfred Ernst, Charles Koechlin unhesitatingly call Romeo and Juliet a masterpiece as well as a model for later composers. 17 The oratorio itself is only "sacred" by association. Akin to the masque, it is a secular, "storytelling," dramatic form. When Handel began to write dramatic oratorios instead of operas the outcry, the ridicule, the jokes and the 13

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This hardening of random associations has gone regrettably farther now than in Berlioz' day. His contemporaries could readily accept the form of Romeo and Juliet and appreciate its symmetry because nearly every concert included vocal and choral pieces side by side with symphonic. There could be no reasonable objection to making a meaningful oneness out of sensory experiences that were found acceptable separately. Less than a year after Berlioz' dramatic symphony, Mendelssohn fashioned a kindred work, which his friend Klingemann christened a "symphony cantata." 18 This was not so tightly knit an affair as Romeo and Juliet but it shows the feasibility of building up larger forms out of lesser. Fifty years after Romeo and Juliet, César Franck constructed his Psyche upon the same plan. Actually, what we hear today when Bruno Walter gives us Gluck's Orpheus on the concert stage, or when we play it on discs is close to a symphony cantata. Vocal solos and choral movements follow upon instrumental pieces, the effect being enhanced, not diminished, by the absence of ragged scenery and bad costuming.18 In his dramatic symphony, then, Berlioz was fashioning a synthesis based on his masters, Beethoven, Weber, and Gluck. Considering the Ninth Symphony the starting point for all modern music, he built his new form on the expanded but recognizable skeleton of the four-movement symphony. From Gluck's later works (which he called "vast dramatic poems") 20 and Weber's use of little instrumental scenas before or after vocal movements, Berlioz likewise drew elements of form visible in the grand design for which he had been steadily striving since his prize cantatas. A dramatic, choral symphony on a Shakespearean subject was thus the logical outcome of a tradition and an internal development as well. In short, the new form was evolved like any other historic21 genre. imputations of artistic folly were as violent as the later ones against Berlioz — and almost identical in wording. 18 The Hymn of Praise, op. 52. In Mendelssohn's letter acknowledging "the admirable title you have hit on so cleverly," he says he has added four new pieces and much improved "the three sets of symphonies." Moreover, he is seriously thinking of "resuming the first Walpurgisnacht under the same cognomen." ( 1 3 6 6 , 214-j.) 19 Toscanini's broadcasts have brought us concert operas in parts, just as Berlioz used to do with Gluck and Spontini. The American composer Mark Brunswick has done the same at the College of the City of N e w York, and Mr. Stokowski has reduced Wagner operas to concert form on discs. These alterations are by no means equally justified: the point is rather that they are feasible. 20 Grot., 197. 21 The so-called genres arrive at their moment of fixity only after successive mixtures; there is no more pure race in art forms than in human life.

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Whether we look back to Berlioz' early scores, or ahead to the Damnation of Faust, Les Troyens, and Beatrice and Benedict, we see the same conception of dramma per musica. Given such consistency, it cannot be said that the shape of these works was the result of accidental circumstances — the prospect or the impossibility of operatic staging — for the works designated as operas suggest the Dramatic Symphony; the oratorios and other sacred works {Te Deum and Injant Christ) suggest the Dramatic Symphony; and the work which the German editors class with Lélio as a "secular cantata," namely the Damnation of Faust, equally suggests the Dramatic Symphony." The Faust subject is conclusive. Berlioz' Eight Scenes composed in 1828 were arranged as an embryonic drama, with poetic tags acting as transitional stage directions.23 After the vocal Faust, Berlioz devoted himself to the instrumental genre, though suggesting by the pattern and the program notes of the Fantastique that the words might be considered as the sung portions of an antique drama. Lélio, especially in the Tempest fantasia, was a further essay in fusion, after which Harold in Italy, with its instrumental cantos, had for a time been planned to include voices. In Romeo and Juliet the chorus sings, antique fashion, the themes are enunciated and the fusion is achieved. The conclusion is irresistible that Berlioz, far from being swayed by diverse influences and opportunities, preserved throughout his career the fixity of mind of a monomaniac. Only, he had all the flexibility of a sane and intelligent man who, for each purpose and with each new subject, alters and adapts his preferred procedure. The body of his work thus constitutes, not a system, but a complete series of variants on one form. Though he liked for public convenience to keep close to the conventional designation for each score,24 he actually freed composers from enslavement to the mold and its label, and led them to respect the subtler demands of their dramatic subjects. It was after him, and not before, that the orchestral repertory came to be enriched by "Poems," "Meditations," "Portraits," and "Orations," with or without voices. His own nomenclature, modest in itself, expressed his concern "Landormy gives it that title in his Introduction. (575·, 7.) 23 See above, Subchapter 4. The manuscript fragments of the unfinished opera Les Francs-Juges, which antedates the Faust scenes by four years, shows the same construction by alternation of sizable orchestral movements and vocal and choral scenes. 24 Grot., 227. He used "symphony," "dramatic symphony," and "opera," side by side with "dramatic legend," "sacred trilogy," etc. The Damnation of Faust he referred to, at first, as a "concert opera" to make its character quickly intelligible, but after its performances throughout Europe, he always called it a "dramatic legend." Grot., 31.

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with design. Though his own deviations from the Dramatic Symphony may seem remote at the extremes, the intermediate ones touch, each specimen leading to the next through kinship of substance or subject.25 T o classify his contributions to music the proper term therefore is the one he chose for Romeo and Juliet;28 to classify him as an inventor of forms, we need only keep in mind the fact that he explored the resources of the Dramatic Symphony — "a form," says an excellent German work of reference, "whose first model, given in Romeo and Juliet, is not yet near the end of its influence." 27 In its day this third symphony by Berlioz was more than a seminal work and its title more than a symbol of freedom; work and title marked a synthesis. Music had long been subjected to institutional uses — the church, the stage, the tavern, the village green — and a good part of its hardening into sacrosanct genres was simply mutual ignorance by each group and its caterers of what the others did. Being afraid that the public would mistake his intention, the venturesome composer would only timidly adopt the forms or devices of another style. The Romanticist nineteenth century's intelligent realism and historical sense perceived the possibilities that lay in forgetting these arbitrary boundaries which were social rather than musical. The result was that henceforth in serious music — and especially in that of Berlioz — the folk song, the church modes, the instrumental and vocal soloist, the orchestral and choral masses, were given roles in accordance with a careful plan adapted to the special occasion. That is the lesson of Romeo and Juliet and its historic significance.28 • · · Thus the Requiem is closer to the Te Deum than the Harold symphony, but the Funeral and Triumphal symphony would easily link the two lastnamed. ™ It should have struck previous biographers of Berlioz as absurd to write separate chapters (as they do) entitled successively "Dramatic Symphonies" and "Dramatic W o r k s . " 27 Dr. Alfred Einstein in 1343, 51. It may seem outré to call some of Berlioz' orchestral songs "dramatic symphonies," yet that is the import of what is actually said about them: Mr. Wotton points out that La Captive is "a miniature symphonic poem," and another critic describes Le Spectre de la Rose as "a fully developed scena." (.310, 82; 596.) A s for the ambiguity of the term symphony, it is not of Berlioz' making. Well into the nineteenth century, "symphony" could mean any concerted piece — overture or intermezzo — using symphonic devices. T h e "symphonic poem" is not a symphony in form, though it is symphonic just as are Wagner's operas. Berlioz himself uses "symphony" to describe the "Royal Hunt and Storm" which is an orchestral interlude in Les Troy ens. 28 In her provocative book on the modern symphony entitled Mahler, Bruckner, Schoenberg ( N . Y., 1947), Miss Dika Newlin seems to recognize and yet to misconceive this historic role. She refers to Berlioz' "apology" for the 25

Romeo and Juliet But as he shaped his new work in the state of freedom conferred by Paganini's gift, Berlioz was not thinking of posterity, nor even in any marked degree of his audience. The musical tide inside him was at the flood and he was addressing himself to the task of channeling it into an ideal correspondence with the Shakespearean drama he knew so well. 2 · The English critics who, looking at the music, have said that Berlioz' symphony is "Romeo," and those who have denied it, are equally right and they can be reconciled by a distinguo. True, the brief recital of facts does not follow Shakespeare; the funeral march is wholly a creation of Berlioz', and so is the protracted oath of reconcilement in the Finale. As for the tomb scene, its four brief sections are inspired by the so-called "Garrick ending" of the play which was current in the early nineteenth century.30 But what Berlioz has done — to use Van Dieren's words — is to "suck all the music" from the poem,81 just as Shakespeare sucked all the poetry from the old play and set it to a music of his own. In Berlioz' version of the legend and in Shakespeare's, the fusion of lyric and dramatic elements was a bold innovation on the part of two young geniuses.*1 choral element in Romeo and Juliet, as if the composer had been uneasy about it. She makes this error in part because she accepts uncritically the old notions about Berlioz' sense of form — as her remarks about the first movement of the Fantastique prove. Then she argues against the idea of Berlioz' Dramatic Symphony by maintaining that it sacrifices the inner coherence of structure which Beethoven respected in the Ninth — except (says Miss Newlin) for the dramatic recitative in the last movement. This exception is of course fatal — not to Beethoven's sense of form, but to the critic's thesis. Her reasoning further involves the absurd contention that it was out of formal considerations that Beethoven wrote the vocal parts of the last movement so awkwardly. The truth is that Beethoven's treatment of the voice elsewhere shows the same disregard of performers, and that his recorded words express nothing but scorn for their convenience. Finally, his sketches for the Tenth and his practice in the last quartets show clearly that he was ready to jettison "form" in the sense of conventional symmetry whenever it suited his dramatic sense or his notion of superior art. That is why his late works were long held to be riddles. All attempts to hold him to a "so far and no farther" is in effect a denial of the very argument for which he is invoked. 28 ". . . je nageai sur cette grande mer de poésie . . . sous les chauds rayons de ce soleil d'amour qu'alluma Shakespeare. . . ." Mem., I, 341. 30 This "ending" shows — in Hazlitt's words — the "double revival of hope when the lovers meet at the tomb and the double agony of despair." Knowingly or not, Garrick was returning to the Italian original which Shakespeare adapted, and Hazlitt's feeling was that "Garrick has altered 'Romeo and Juliet' not spoiled it," although the emotions produced by the new ending caused him "deep distress of mind." (>2ff, IX, 81-2.) 31 S26, 26-7. 32 1270, 256 ff. Shakespeare was presumably 31, Berlioz 35.

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Shakespeare himself dwells on the musical quality of his work and virtually tells Berlioz to compose his adagio in pure sound: H o w silver sweet sound lovers' tongues by night, Like softest music to attending ears! 83 In both the play and the symphony, passion is lifted beyond sensuality and as it were vaporized by the pressure of tragedy and the high intellect of the poet-protagonist Romeo; in both, the touches of vulgar realism are sudden, the pace is swift, and the subtleties so numerous that a single performance no more reveals them in the articulate language than in the musical." If we seek proof that Berlioz understood what he was trying to translate, we need do no more than follow any good interpretation of the play by a critic who does not know the symphony, such, for instance, as John J a y Chapman. Berlioz' decisive inspiration, we remember, lay in grasping the musical function of the Prologue. "The prologue," says Chapman, "is a riddle to which the play is the answer. . . . Shakespeare's choruses are not finger posts for dull minds: they play variations on the theme. They instruct only the instructed." 35 As for the instrumental Introduction: "The street fight with which this play opens is a carefully worked-up scene, which comes to a climax in the entry of the prince." 36 Berlioz had no effort to make in order to match this Shakespearean "passion for realism." 37 But the listener must watch for "the subtler truths of Shakespeare which have always been lost upon the stage." 38 Just so in Berlioz' Prologue the statement of themes is swift and allusive; it can "instruct only the instructed." The relation between the scherzetto and the later scherzo does not disclose itself at once — it is "a riddle"; even the stanzas for contralto may when first heard convey inadequately that "passionate warmth and penetrating languor" which another critic, examining the music alone, has noted.39 The symphony's Introduction and Prologue set the ideal, invisible stage.40 Part T w o introduces us to Romeo — "a lyric poet in the intensity 33

A c t II, Sc. ii, lines 167-8 "Our blood is stirred . . . but our constitution could never stand the reality," as John Jay Chapman savs of the play. ( 1064,149.) 35 1064, 148. 38 1064, 147. 37 1064, 136. 38 1064, 147. 39 406, 193. 40 Chapman: " T h e t r u t h to nature is of a kind that the stage is almost powerless to render." (1064, 139.) 34

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of his sensations, a child in his helplessness beneath the ever-varying currents and whirlpools of his feeling. He lives in a walking and frenzied dream." 41 Berlioz' double allegro corresponding to this conception somewhat resembles the rondo form, that is, it brings back a characteristic theme after interludes, some of which are themselves repeated in whole or in part. It opens with the reverie entitled Roméo Seul, and goes on to Tristesse, Concert et Bal, Grande Fête Chez Capulet, the effect being to subject the initial motif to the "ever-varying currents" of sadness, gaiety and crowd exuberance. Romeo is as it were taken dreaming through a bacchanal, like his later alter ego, Tannhäuser. The opening "call," twice repeated in its halting incompleteness, is shortly developed with a passionate counterpoint which ends in a rhythmic anticipation of the ball theme. But the festivities are still distant. A second theme (larghetto for oboe), also beginning with an upward "call" and accompanied by a figure of which the germ was in the previous section (as well as in the stanzas of the Prologue) leads to an elaborate cadence preparing us for the fête. The music for this breaks out in all its glitter and agitation, soon to be joined and topped by the theme of the larghetto in the winds.42 Thereafter the rhythms of revelry mix, clash, go to pieces and resurge, ceasing only near the end to permit a fragment of the oboe theme to be heard at the throbbing close. Romeo's bacchanal has taken him from lyric soliloquy to naturalistic merrymaking. Now a sequence of sustained chords for strings, flutes, and horns restores the contemplative mood. It is broken very briefly by the distant nostalgic chanting of the Capulets leaving the fiesta. Then the adagio, nocturne, or love scene begins. A repeated violin flutter heard during the calm mysterious opening furnishes the material for the later allegro agitato, while the passionate love theme develops in its first or lyric form which runs through the movement like a refrain. Next it generates a contrasting "prose" version or chant récitatifFrom then on, although the material is familiar, the repetitions are varied until a sforzando scale passage ushers in darkness and tragedy." There is a return of the earlier animato, which increases in urgency but dies away before the last sounding of the love theme and the quiet close on a changed rhythm." 41

¡064, 136. It is scored for one trombone and woodwinds, all marked forte; not "the trombones bellowing fortissimo" as certain analysts keep repeating. 43 It begins in the flute soon after the return to tempo I. (Min. Sc., p. 152, bar 4.) 44 Min. Sc., pp. 159 S. 45 Afin. Sc., pp. 174-5. 42

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At no point is there any reason to suppose that Berlioz was illustrating Shakespeare's words or depicting the song of larks or the nurse's knock on Juliet's door.4* But there is every reason to think that he was at one with his author in his views on love. In all that Berlioz wrote about operatic Romeos, and in a special invective against "Capulets" who seek to destroy "such rare epic passions," 41 we recognize the characteristics which make the figure of Romeo more lifelike than popular.4* Most commentators agree in ascribing to Berlioz' adagio the purity that comes not from reticence but from incandescence, from the tragic, not sultry, acceptance of fate. The music also conveys a sensation of limpid depths which may be associated with nature in stillness, young love, or nighttime — the quintessence of the mood ad-agio." The ensuing Queen Mab scherzo resembles the familiar type with double trio. Its opening with false starts and frequent reprises vaguely suggests flight without unbalancing the form, just as later on a somewhat martial section reminds us of a corresponding passage in the scherzetto of the Prologue. Berlioz' idea that the Queen Mab speech could be transmuted into a scherzo had occurred to him at Rome and he had at once imparted it to Mendelssohn — only to regret his words lest his friend forestall him,50 the musical atmosphere of fairyland being already implicit in the mood of certain Beethovenian scherzos. Mendelssohn duly adopted the suggestion for his own use when he came to write his suite for Midsummer Night's Dream, but as Saint-Saëns pointed out, what gives to Berlioz' Queen Mab its incomparable lightness and grace is not solely its delicate orchestration, but its style." The technical imagination at work 46 T h e lark was W a g n e r ' s programmatic interpretation though the bird does not even occur in this scene of the play. T h e other suggestion was T o v e y ' s . W h e r e will critics find the nurse's husband's b a w d y joke?

47 48

Grot., 76-7.

Chapman: " S u c h pure passion . . . is not easily forgiven in a man . . . H e is not R o m e o unless he cries like a baby or a Greek hero." ( 1 0 6 4 , 139 and 140.) 48 Berlioz' caption f o r the movement is simply " T h e Capulets' garden, silent and deserted," which is of course a "stage direction" to precede the music. In all the references he makes to having performed the piece, there is no allusion to " e v e n t s " in the music. Only once does he speak of anything not directly musical, namely the "moonlit scene" in a letter to Lecourt. (M.C., 10.) W h e n the Odeon wanted to stage Deschamps's translation of Shakespeare's play and to "illustrate it" b y excerpts from the symphony, Berlioz thought it foolish.

(Corresp., 248.) 50 Mem., I, 2 1 2 n.

51 386, 6. " A s I w e n t into [Queen's] H a l l , " writes Busoni to his wife in 1919, " I heard sounds of Berlioz' Queen Mab. T h i s piece is a little miracle." ( 7 7 5 , 285.)

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— as in the play of harmonics which seem flung off the tip of the phrase — makes the airiness intrinsic. So far, then, musical form within each movement is self-contained and intelligible. Deviations from standard patterns are due in each case to the nature of the material, nothing else. That these structures are also dramatic in feeling is due to the choice of themes as well as to the intense rhythmical life which Berlioz has imparted to the whole score. Romeo the "man of moods — in quarrel, a man of action" " had the same electrical temperament as his musical interpreter, and this communicates itself through the great metrical variety of the music. Notice how in the Introduction, Berlioz treats in a fresh way the agitated fugato of the quarrel after the quasi-recitative in the brass: he is playing with a rhythmical figure, that is, fashioning pure music, and yet how expressive! Again, the adagio could easily end in the quiet swing of the last fragmented phrase, but four measures before the end Berlioz alters the rhythm, and together with unexpected pleasure gives us a sense of having passed beyond anxiety and passion. The funeral march which follows the scherzo is a vocal and instrumental movement, but it follows no verbal scheme. The words reiterate the single idea of "strew on her roses" and could easily be replaced by a vocalized "ah," as in the funeral march Berlioz was later to write for Hamlet. Here development is partly by fugai imitation and partly by contrast of the elegiac theme with the rhythm of the "monotony." After lamentation we come upon a passage which in another context might seem almost gay: its appearance in this place is like a hint of the extreme youth and sweetness of the dead Juliet.5' But the close of the march brings us back to somber thoughts, and the short instrumental coda sketches a rhythm of menacing aspect. The tragedy within the tragedy is about to begin. It is this next section, the tomb scene, which has lent color to the charge that Berlioz, overstepping the bounds of music, turns the symphony to illustrative uses. Weingartner calls this particular scene the only fragment of program music that Berlioz ever wrote.54 In all the rest, he 52

1064,

140.

Critics have wondered why Berlioz inserts a funeral march at this point, when Juliet has not yet died. T o follow the objectors on this literal plane, one might say that Juliet is drugged and believed to be dead; but it is even more important to remember that a symphony is not a play and therefore not subject to the same requirements of time and consecutiveness. In Berlioz' music-tragedy this movement has a place and — as the sequel shows — it occupies its propter place. 63

64

394, 2°'i 7S4, 7'-2·

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feels, one can discern the outlines of classic form; here not. And moreover here one can follow actual events, the effect being ludicrous.55 What "events" Weingartner saw, it would be difficult to say on his behalf. The music consists simply of four very brief contrasting sections — an anxious allegro reminiscent of the "quarrel" theme of the Introduction (later remembered by Tchaikovsky in his Romeo and Juliet overture); an invocation, which transforms the love theme into the love-death and which Weingartner excepts from his strictures; a second allegro — after a wonderful rhythmic bridge passage — expressive of joy that is unrefined; and a single page ending pianississimo with the faint echo, in whole notes, of both Romeo's reverie and the love theme.5® The drama is done; all the rest is Postlude. These twenty or thirty pages of the entombment are extraordinarily vivid and may induce visions in some listeners, but one can safely defy anyone to say what they imitate. When Toscanini rehearses this section, it is clear that the most it suggests is a variety of bodily gestures — impatient, tender, exuberant, defeated — like any music that is dramatic. It is as music that the scene is most interesting, for it chiefly employs material that we have heard before. Only, it is distorted, disguised, broken up. The invocation is a magnificent orchestral song without words. As for the brusque transitions, they convey nothing but the abruptness of pace suitable at that point. The true listener (as against the imagist) will, if he forbears to programmarne, readily discover that here is no substance foreign to the rest of the score. Far from being a weak spot in the Dramatic Symphony, this scene is perhaps the high point of its effort to be concise, free of the stereotypes, conventional "joints," and punctuation marks: the section is an equivalent to modern nonsyntactical poetry.57 Half a century ago, Koechlin protested vigorously against the omission of the passage, saying that "simply from the technical point of view, let alone the dramatic," it deserved to be restored.58 It is barely possible that the expurgators had followed Berlioz' wish, expressed in a sarcastic " TU, 7 2 · 50 A signal example of thematic plasticity in Berlioz: compare Min. Sc., 276 bb. 14-24 with 55 bb. 8 - 1 0 and 156 bb. 1-3. " I owe this analogy to Robert Pitney, the musician and critic already cited. In a later review of various Romeo and Juliet operas, Berlioz makes clear what he wanted to avoid. He is speaking of the tomb scene in Bellini: "Juliet comes down with measured steps toward her motionless lover and they begin to talk over their little concerns —'Whom do I seer'—'Romeo'—'Juliet alive?' — 'From a seeming death my waking on this dav restores me to your love?' — 'True: there are no stone walls in heaven.' " (A Trav., 342.) 58 1386, quoted in 406, 195.

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note to a late edition of the score: "The public being devoid of imagination, this scene should be omitted whenever the symphony is not performed before a chosen audience familiar with Shakespeare's play, that is to say, it should be omitted in nine cases out of ten." More likely, it was felt that by "imagination" Berlioz meant visualization, the music being deemed by an overwhelmingly Wagnerian population as inadequate to stimulate vision. We thus have the familiar paradox of a passage of dramatic music being impugned (a) because it makes us see, and (b) because it does not. In the Finale, at any rate, there is no difficulty. The opera-trained listener can both see and hear Friar Laurence and the two choruses representing the warring families. Occasionally he can even hear the words, which recount what has happened, invite the enemies to forget their feud, and intone the oath of reconciliation. The architectonic reason for this Epilogue was shown earlier. The dramatic purport, once again, lies not in the words but in the contrast between the Friar and the two hostile groups. One need not understand their words in order to feel creeping over one the magic of lofty persuasion, which little by little wins over the hesitant choral mass. As one musician has put it, "the spirit of a Biblical tale hovers over this final scene." 59 This analogy suggests very forcibly what Berlioz had in mind when he desired his symphonic drama to be played before an audience familiar with Shakespeare. He did not ask the "chosen listeners" to supply mentally what he, the composer, had either omitted or translated; he wanted them to grasp quickly and easily the occasions for the musical sequence, and to be at home among the meanings of the tragedy so that they would not have to invent one of their own in response to the musical expression. For Berlioz, Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet belonged to the body of secular scriptures which every educated man should know by heart."0 How would Renaissance painting, medieval sculpture and stained glass, and sacred oratorios affect us if we did not instantly know the names, relations, and motives of the dramatis personae? What would a musical Buddhist make of the repeated cry of "Barabbas!" in the Saint Matthew Passion? The previous explanatory words are seldom heard and they ''•'289, 154. Critics who find this finale "coarse" in comparison with the exquisiteness of earlier movements should reflect that collective emotions ought not to be rendered with the same elegance, finesse or lyric fire as individual feelings: the Capulet and Montague families are not a pair of lovers nor a volatile fairy queen. 60 Note his disgust when an educated Englishman or Frenchman confessed ignorance of Shakespeare or Goethe. ( L . I . , 286; M.M., 285.)

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scarcely count when compared with the violent musical expression. This in turn takes full effect when the general intent of the whole work lies deep in our minds, stilling idle curiosity. In the same way, we can look pictorially at the Madonna and Child the moment we have ceased wondering what this obsession with motherhood can possibly mean. In no other way does Berlioz' Dramatic Symphony function, once we possess the traditional tale that inspired it. Far from bringing forward the literary or visual or narrative aspect of drama, Berlioz wished us to know it so well that we would forget it and let the music speak the ineffable.61 This relaxed attitude, which was certainly natural to Berlioz and is apparently less natural to others, was the source of the lifelong misunderstanding between him and one of the first hearers of Romeo and Juliet — young Wagner. Aged twenty-six, fresh from his German province, and living as yet obscurely in the French capital, Wagner experienced, on hearing Berlioz' symphony, what he himself called "the revelation of a new world of music." 62 This was due partly to the power and precision of the orchestra, partly to the music itself. As the composer of two very slight operatic scores and a few overtures and songs, Wagner could reasonably "feel like a child" in comparison with his elder by ten years.®8 But even then, if we are to credit the recollections of forty years later, Wagner was critical of the Dramatic Symphony. He could not accept it for what it was but attempted in vain either to reduce it to the traditional pattern of the symphony or to programmatize it into the semblance of an opera. When Wagner had heard three more Berlioz symphonies, had returned to Germany, and had begun to grope towards his own dramatic synthesis, he disparaged Romeo and Juliet with little regard for his own debt to it and none for consistency. He had learned from Berlioz what the musicodramatic problem of the century was, and from the substance of Romeo he had absorbed enough to serve him in a number of his own later works. Mr. Gerald Abraham was not the first to notice the exact coincidence between Romeo's reverie and Tristan's motif for a similar situation, but 61 In Shakespeare's Henry V, when the chorus says: "On your imaginary forces work . . ." and again "eke out our performance with your mind," the appeal is surely not to our power of seeing what isn't there, but of understanding what is not shown. There is, moreover, a large and impressive body of opinion, beginning with Dr. Johnson, in favor of reading Shakespeare rather than seeing him acted. 2

"Ibid.

35·

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he was the first to trace in deuil the intimate connection between the two dramas. He concludes: "Romeo and Juliet was written when Berlioz was at the zenith of his power; Tristan when Wagner was at his, but 20 years later." (Italics in the text.) ** The important fact is, of course, not the lifting of a few themes from a colleague's score — that is an established practice among musicians " — but the discovery by Wagner in Berlioz* Romeo of a musical idiom allowing the expression of certain moods for which no earlier music supplied precedents. The abandonment of repetition except when dramatically motivated, the treatment of melody as a sinuous line which need not turn a corner every four bars, and the art of subtle psychological variation in themes once established — all this new armory of musical devices was in Romeo and Juliet and it constituted a new art for him who had ears to hear.** Wagner, it is true, came to reject what he took to be the "system" behind Romeo and Juliet, and his revolution was to carry Berlioz' conception of the symphony-with-voice back into the precincts of the opera.*' He asked that music there should be as rich, as symphonic, as continuous, as exact in performance, and as solemn as it might be in church and concert hall combined. The old distinctions fell away as to what was an operatic and what a non-operatic instrument, what was sacred and what was profane. In other words, Berlioz' secular scriptures, composed and sung in the symphonic style, became the Wagnerian opera as soon as 84

40η, 242. For more detail, see Subchapter 24. "Through Wagner and Gounod (who attended the rehearsals), that "Romeo" theme of Berlioz' has been worked over by dozens of musicians, including César Franck, Massenet, Mahler, Strauss, and Tchaikovsky. Pizzetti's overture to Fedra (1912) is a good example of its longevity. Melodically, the old master of thirty-six was even more daring than his pupil was to be twenty years later, e.g., in the Tristan version of the theme Wagner feels compelled to add to the Romeo phrase a litde conventional tail of three rising notes, and then repeats it so, whereas Berlioz stops on a single pizzicato note (twice) before giving it a really ample development of twenty bars. 97 In Wagner's Opera and Drama (1851) which represents a return to eighteenth-century ideas over the heads of the Romanticists. This is characteristic of the mid-nineteenth century reaction to Romanticism in all the arts and even in science. Here is what Marmontel, the protégé of Voltaire and librettist of Piccinni, wrote in 1795 of his intentions in opera: "I wanted action to be full, close, tightly knit, and its component situations linked each to each so that they might become the motive of the singing. This would then be nothing but the more lively expression of the feelings informing the scene, and the airs, duets and choruses should accordingly be blended with the recitatives." {Memoirs, Bk. IX.)

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music was reattached to acting and scenery: the Dramatic Symphony germinated the Music Drama. Between the t w o men w h o in November 1839 heard the same momentous concert there remained other differences of style, temperament, and philosophy. But w e cannot understand w h y these were so stubborn until we see how closely the two musicians agreed on the problem and on the means of dramatic music in their century. 68 It was a just but incomplete critique which described Berlioz and Wagner as "the two enemy brothers descended from Beethoven." 89 Wagner later proved to his own satisfaction that music cannot yield drama without being linked with words, nor be associated with an action unless the action is staged. Berlioz as w e saw was not averse to writing dramatic music for the theater, but he made every effort to preserve music formally and dramatically independent from its associates. He preferred to compose discontinuous "scenes" and indicate in printed words their locale, rather than to link musical ideas to unmusical discourse or behavior. T o make up for this self-imposed limitation, he strove to extend the inherent expressiveness of melody, harmony, rhythm, and tone color. That it was inherent and only "associated" with a subject he showed in the free way he assigned and reassigned some of his most poignant melodies. T h e second Romeo theme (larghetto for oboe solo) was originally used, not for the Tristesse of Romeo, but for the gloomy introspection of Sardanapalus on his deathbed. Similarly, the Capulets' concert music in an earlier form accompanied the dancing bayaderes in that same prize cantata of 1830. For Berlioz there was in short no such thing musically as a Romeo leitmotif, but only a connotative relation between phrase and personage. T h e esthetic question then is whether we can be asked to bear in mind this unemphatic parallelism, or whether we must be shown a flesh-andblood Romeo in red tights and slashed sleeves. T h e second way, Wagner's way, is the more assured, for as Dryden says "our eyes are our best witnesses." Berlioz' w a y is the w a y of imagination; "rich music's tongue," as Shakespeare instructs him, is to tell "the imagined happiness" — or death. This avoids literalism and keeps open the possibility of multiple interpretations; it is suggestive and symbolic instead of "realistic," though the reality it suggests is no less solid for being unconfined.

•

*

*

98 In his last days, according to Motti, W a g n e r would brook no criticism of the Romeo and Juliet score. (507, 370.) " S c u d o : quoted in 66η, jço.

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But this discussion of music drama must not make us think that with his Romeo and Juliet of 1839 Berlioz had said his last word, nor suppose that Wagner had uttered his first. One had created a masterpiece; the other had been awakened by it. But both were still young, so was the century; and the slight difference of age between the acknowledged and the incubating genius might reasonably suggest that they were to run on parallel courses. Yet Berlioz at thirty-six had accomplished half his work, and by the year 1840 just beginning, his specifically "French" period was virtually over.

13.

Vox Populi: Funeral and Triumphal

November 1839 to August 1840

. . . some day a grateful France will raise a proud monument on his tomb. . . . — WAGNER o n B e r l i o z

that the Paris audience — now more than ever enriched by the presence of foreign artists 1 — heard the Romeo and Juliet symphony was a critical moment in Berlioz' career. The work was new in every way, hence difficult to grasp. It might be hissed like Benvenuto by those who wanted to confirm their own adverse judgment or carry on the war against the Bertin family; or worse, the symphony might be chillingly received, politeness emphasizing disappointment. But Berlioz had not even finished conducting Part Two when loud, sustained, and spontaneous applause broke out. The "Ball Scene," or rather Bacchanale, broke the ice; the scherzo and Finale completed the victory. At a second concert a week later, the performance was technically far superior and the public acclaim spread more widely over the work. At the end the performers rose and kept up their bravos so enthusiastically that the composer-conductor almost lost his poise. For his father's pleasure, Berlioz went into details about both occasions. At the première the Queen had failed to come, but the two young Princes were there. Balzac, looking over the assembly, had described it as "the brain of Paris." As regards receipts, it appeared that nearly 1500 francs' worth of tickets had been bid for in vain. The hall was full, and in spite

T H E FIRST T I M E

1

Besides Liszt, Wagner, Chopin, and Heine, those likely to follow Berlioz' concerts included J . P. Pixis of Mannheim; Karl Halle (later Sir Charles Hallé, the founder of the Manchester Symphony); Sigismund Thalberg (Liszt's onetime rival on the piano); George Osborne from Ireland; the Alsatian Georges Kästner; Stephen Heller from Budapest; old Kreutzer's nephew Léon; François Seghers, the Brussels violinist who played in the Conservatoire orchestra; César Franck, another Belgian who was completing his last year in that institution; finally, musicians from the French provinces such as Auguste Morel of Marseille and Lambert Massart, newly appointed violin master at the Conservatoire.

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of numerous press seats, the gross was 4559 francs. These details Dr. Berlioz conveyed in his turn, with a tub of butter, to his daughter, adding that the news gave him a fresh lease on life.1 In proving himself, Hector had proved his alarming boyish predictions of sixteen years before. The third concert on December 15 was still more satisfactory for the artist: both performance and appreciation were more exact; comments and criticisms by trusted friends gave Berlioz the pleasant feeling of good work done, which might be further polished and perfected for years to come. The press was almost uniformly favorable and the younger men were wholeheartedly for the young master. Stephen Heller, the pianist and symphonic composer, wrote to his older friend Robert Schumann how gratifying it was to see the progress that public opinion was making about a genius who refused to commercialize his art.* Gautier attested the triumphant result of Berlioz' "unshakable will" which he declared indispensable to an artist in polemical times like theirs, for "originality acts on the French public like a red rag on a bull." * It was the first time in the history of French music that anyone had dared to give the same symphony three times in close succession. Knowing that he must be played often to be understood once, Berlioz undoubtedly helped to establish the practice which many concertgoers now follow, of deliberately subjecting themselves two or three times to a work that is new and strange.9 For this privilege, the Parisians paid a total of 13,200 francs. Deducting expenses, Berlioz earned for a year's composition and two months' conducting, exactly 1100 francs. "Once and for all, serious music does not keep its man. . . . Paganini is in Nice . . . enchanted with his score: it certainly is his score, for it owes its existence solely to him." ·

• 2

·

·

A.R., 407-9. * 268, 509-10. Heller should not be confused with Berlioz' intimate, also a pianist, Ferdinand Hiller. *La Presse, Dec. 11, 1839 (434, 147). "The practice was resumed and extended by Stravinsky for the première of the Sacre du Printemps which was played twice at the same concert; more recently Mr. Stravinsky did the same thing with his Mass for voices and wind. («949·) 8 A.R., 414. When the score appeared, it bore a dedication to Paganini, just as the score of the Benvenuto Cellini overture — the only part of the opera to be published — was dedicated to Legouvé, who had advanced Berlioz money for completing the work. All of Berlioz' dedications were expressions of gratitude, and when this happened to coincide with affectionate personal relations, he habitually referred to the work as "your" or "our" score, e.g., Harold in Italy, dedicated to Humbert Ferrand. L.I., passim.

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January 1840 saw Berlioz undergoing the inevitable depression. Exhausted and irritable, he was also worried about Harriet's health. She had tonsillitis and respiratory trouble which made him fear a recurrence of pleurisy. Young Louis, who had attended one of the concerts with his mother, was now down with measles. Being closeted, sick, with a sick family, after the excitement of victory, brought on the old spleen. "Everything bores me, disgusts, offends, and revolts me." 7 This mood made him oversensitive to the malicious inanities of a critic like Alphonse Karr,® and overhardened to the touching gesture of an English admirer of Beethoven's who bought from Berlioz' publisher the baton with which Romeo had been conducted. The collector had insisted on the article's genuineness being guaranteed. "I guarantee it," wrote Berlioz, "and may God grant that the merit of the work will justify, at least in part, the admiration expressed in this novel way." * It was clear that Berlioz at thirty-six should have been exclusively concerned with music — its composition, conducting, and criticism — not with publicity, management, Bertin politics, and the turning out of feuilletons about nothing: the fresh call to renewed musical activity for a first concert in 1840 (on February 6) pulled him out of the dumps as nothing else could. Carrying out an original idea sponsored by the Gazette Musicale and very probably due to Berlioz himself, this concert was free to the subscribers of the magazine. The Schlesinger publishing house supported both enterprises; that is to say, substituted a musical premium for the usual kitchenware or set of classical authors with which subscribers have been immemorially enticed. At this first symphonic dividend, Berlioz' Cellini overture and Harold symphony were played with admirable finish. The rest consisted of arias and virtuoso pieces by other hands. The effort and pleasure once over, Berlioz relapsed into gloom. It was not all weariness or temperamental failing. Berlioz had reached the high point of his possible career in Paris and saw what it was worth. He could subsist only by exceptional means — such as the gift from Paganini, which had prepared and publicized Romeo as a gala occasion. Only then would the fashionable world reinforce his 1200 followers. The net gain even under the best conditions was meager, and galas could recur only at wide 1

L.I., 190. Balzac, who had many serious quarrels with his journalistic critics, wrote in 1843 a satirical "anatomy" of their ways, winding up with a parody of Voltaire's epigram: "If the Paris press did not exist, it would be imperative 8

not to invent it." (1235, Oeuv. Div., I, 226.)

9 1../., 188. T h e London newspapers had given Berlioz' new work extended notice; the head of the Philharmonic had attended the première.

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intervals. As for the subscription concerts of the Gazette Musicale, they afforded merely a modest conductor's fee and a chance to repeat certain works. It was plain that the times were not favorable to the establishment of regular symphonic concerts, affording a decent living to all those concerned. On the contrary, the "railroad decade" was under way and the spectacle of its greedy folly was beginning to discourage all sensitive minds.10 Berlioz, for all his estrangement from state politics, noticed and reported it: "These are unlucky times, when artists ought not to be alive . . . when people, beholding them, only think: 'We are bored and it is you who are boring us.' " 1 1 The Romanticist generation, just in proportion as it had shed its undergraduate pose and gained mature solidity, ceased to interest a public that wanted chiefly to gape and to scorn what it gaped at. The bourgeois monarchy having given up all risk and all appeal to the imagination, whether through the drama of domestic politics or through a clear-cut foreign policy, was relying on the most selfish of self-interest to keep the nation occupied and untroublesome. The new prime minister of 1840, Guizot, despite his stern and noble view of constitutional liberties, was soon reduced to corrupt means of ruling and answered all demands for a wider franchise with the phrase "Enrichissez-vous." Things were in the saddle, as Emerson said, riding mankind. And the curious result was that despite men's concentration on clear, tangible, personal interests, everyone was bored: wild speculation expressed the desire for excitement at any cost — an excitement which the variety of civilized intellectual products no longer gave. Beethoven, observed Berlioz, had lost his snob appeal: "The dilettantes in the boxes no longer feel they have to keep up the pose which they had been assuming for ten years past. T h e y are frankly bored." 1 2 But so far Berlioz and his fellows of 1830 were disgusted and bored only by the outward shape of things. Their inner life was just as fresh and exciting as it had ever been, even though they no longer put on a show to amuse and enrage the bourgeois. Their task was now to accom10 T h e year 1839 saw the opening of four important railroads, including the Paris-Versailles line. This evident mechanical progress was not discounted or disliked by artists and philosophers, but it widened the breach between "those who own and those who earn"— to use Vigny's words. (1284, 236.) Others such as Louis Blanc, Ximenes Doudan, Lamennais, Liszt, George Sand began to see that the fight over social reform would drive art still further out of the world's consideration. (See, under the appropriate decade: ¡88; 1188; 210.) " ,398 (1840) 177.

12

1398

(1840) 215.

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Berlioz

plish what they could in the teeth of passive resistance. By mid-March 1840, the new ministry being in power, Berlioz approached M. de Rémusat with regard to a possible commission. The plan of a fête funèbre had been in the composer's mind since his return from Italy, and it would seem fitting to carry it out for the tenth commemoration of the July Days. On the spot where the Bastille had stood until 1789 a column was being erected which would be dedicated on the anniversary day. The ashes of those who had died fighting for liberty in 1830 would be transferred to a cenotaph at the foot of the column. Hence the procession would require a funeral march of military character — a "funeral triumph." This proposal, which was soon accepted, represented Berlioz' only chance of avoiding still another costly sacrifice to the muse: if he composed and played a new work uncommissioned, he would be out of pocket to his family's detriment. The Opera maintained toward him the attitude of a hibernating bear; Scribe was in no hurry to provide the libretto he had promised; nor was Duponchel, as may be imagined, eager for a second Benvenuto which in all probability would be still newer in form and contents." Duponchel was really troubled. Meyerbeer had refused permission to have his new opera (L'Africaine) put on. He could afford to wait, for, as his mother-in-law boasted, he did not have to earn a living, and he wanted the public to work up an appetite for his fare by being disappointed at other hands. This left Duponchel with only Donizetti's Martyrs, which would probably not carry the overhead. The director might have to resign. In these straits, managers or their entourage are likely to have a fit of memory and bethink themselves of masterpieces: there was talk of reviving Freischütz. But the idea was soon dismissed, after debating how the work could be "arranged." An unsigned note in the Gazette Musicale, very likely written by Berlioz, concluded: "The plan is given up, fortunately for poor Weber. The danger is past." 1 1 On May 27, while Berlioz was hopefully at work on his Funeral Symphony, Paganini died. In the Débats a week later, Berlioz expressed his sorrow and admiration.15 Although he had never heard his benefactor play in public, he was familiar with the virtuoso's innovations in technique 13

Berlioz, it is true, had promised to make the Scribe score "simpler and easier to play" (86, 580) but about the upshot the unintelligent suspicion of an opera director is possibly more reliable: he knows nothing about music but he can smell out his natural enemy. 14 1398, May 17, 1840. IS Reprinted in Soirées ( 16th).

Vox Populi

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and style of composition, both for violin and for orchestra. Berlioz was also impressed by the accounts of the improvised duets which Paganini playing the guitar had engaged in with his friend the violinist Sina, and which no one had ever been admitted to hear. The article on Paganini turned into one of those excellent biographical sketches which Berlioz has left us about Beethoven, Spontini, Chopin, Lesueur, and others. More than any of his contemporaries, Liszt excepted, Berlioz understood and sympathized with Paganini's strangeness. He could feel the reserve and contempms mundi behind the affectation of eccentricity, and he easily responded to the Shakespearean juxtaposing of deep feeling and boisterous humor such as Paganini had indulged in at their meeting after the gift. Berlioz himself would later develop something of the same forbidding exterior, quickly melting at the touch of genuine emotion or artistic intelligence. Meantime he had shown his gratitude and reverence for the old man dying in Nice by serving as his go-between in a pending lawsuit.18 During the completion of the July Symphony (as Berlioz usually called it then) his artistic nourishment from without was meager. The Conservatoire did give Beethoven's Pastoral again, together with fragments of Bach and Handel, but Berlioz was pleased neither by the performance nor by the music of the two older masters. He was downright academic about Bach's harmony, not knowing enough of the work to grasp its idiom. A later concert brought a psalm of Handel's which Berlioz found magnificent, but these two composers, with whom Berlioz had certain esthetic affinities despite divergent traditions, remained alien to him until almost the end of his life.17 The narrowness of the concert repertory in any epoch, as well as the rigidity of style with which works outside the common choice are played, is responsible for anomalies of the kind, which exist to a far lesser degree in arts other than music.18 To this day, though 19 In a letter of March 1840 to his lawyer and friend Germi, Paganini says: " Y o u may freely write to this same friend Berlioz, whom you must not confuse with the common scum of [musicians] but should look on as a transcendent genius such as rises but once in every third or fourth century; a man of perfect probity and worthy of our confidence. (225.) 17 On the kinship between Bach's art and that of Berlioz, see Albert Schweitzer's Bach, and below Subchapter 24. On the relation to Handel, see Romain Rolland's Handel, 109. T h e young Saint-Saëns used to play Bach to Berlioz in his later years. (386, 8.) 1M A judicious student of Handel writes: "Throughout the first half of the 19th century fragments of Messiah were feebly executed by amateur choral societies. . . . T h e Messiah remained unfamiliar to most Frenchmen till after 1900. . . . Like Berlioz and Wagner, Liszt found the 'Hallelujah-perruque of a Handel' tedious and old-fashioned." (841, 265, 266, and 278 n.)

34-6

Berlioz

Bach is moderately "available," who can say that he has a good knowledge of Handel's dramatic music? Berlioz consoled himself for the "desperate sameness" of operas and concerts by rereading Virgil, Molière, Shakespeare, La Fontaine, Cervantes, Bernardin de St. Pierre, and a few moderns: Balzac, Vigny, George Sand, Victor Hugo. The last-named had in fact just published a new volume of verse, Les Rayons et les Ombres, which chimed in with Berlioz' somber thoughts and his musical activity as well: the last poem in the collection was on "The Return of the Emperor" and the Preface was postdated so as to make its appearance fall on the anniversary of Napoleon's death. That very day, Berlioz wrote to Hugo: "If to feel is to live, I have lived much today. I read your lines this morning. At noon . . . I followed the people to the foot of the column [Place Vendôme], that immortal poem of the other emperor's. . . . Now I bow to you in tears and worshipful admiration." 18 Like the Requiem, Berlioz' new symphony had to be finished one month before the date of its performance, which was July 28. This had the same effect of cramping the working out of the last movement in each composition, and it took the same toll on the body and nerves of the composer. July was a month of harassing work done against time. The work being scored for military band, Berlioz had to keep in mind the desire of all the participating groups to have a share in the performance. Large forces were available, though not distributed ideally among the instruments. Moreover, the piece had been commissioned for the procession through the boulevards to the Place de la Bastille, and outdoor music is unsatisfactory except under specially arranged acoustical conditions.20 To increase the number of players does not help — they must play together, they must be led by a visible leader, and the proportions of various kinds of timbre must be kept sounding coherent. This is difficult if the performers have to march and reverberators are lacking. Berlioz gathered 207 musicians, some of them professionals who would help lead the less competent sections of National Guardsmen. Among the trained instrumentalists were the visiting band of Bavarian cornets who had recently given concerts in Paris.21 Berlioz again followed his system of rehearsing by groups which saved 19

A.R., 418. Berlioz had learned in 1833 that —as he maintained ever after — "music is not made for the street." (L.l., 131.) 21 For the distribution of instruments, see Supplement 5. 20

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both money and e n e r g y A n d these preparations exposed him again to the usual malicious rumors that make the Paris boulevardiers feel they control the destinies of art. Berlioz' symphony, it was said, was unfinished; complete rehearsals could not begin; the partial ones were going badly. The fact is that by July 19 the rehearsals were going quite well and Berlioz was arranging for a public dress rehearsal, indoors. T o this performance, which would at least be audible, he invited friends, critics, and notables. Chopin's ticket, signed by Berlioz, is still extant. Put into English it reads: Sunday July 26 at 11.30 A.M. Concert Hall rue Vivienne Dress Rehearsal of the Military Symphony Composed by M. Berlioz For the Funeral Ceremony of July 28 H. Berlioz This card will admit two. Funeral March, Hymn of Farewell, Apotheosis.*8 For a government as frail and composite as that of the July Monarchy, the "Twenty-eighth" was necessarily a political occasion — it was not yet a patriotic day for the whole nation. The fête had accordingly been planned in order to give the bellicose Parisians the impression of still being the heroes they were during the first revolution and Napoleon's Empire, and by means of this external pomp to reconcile them to a very cautious and unmilitary foreign policy. The people's demand for glory had something in it of the artist's attack against Philistinism: populace and artist both aspired to make life serve nobler ends than trade. But just as an artist must live — even a Berlioz sacrificing fame and comfort to his ideal —so the people grumbled at social and political conditions which they felt restricted life without the compensation of glory. Hence the cry of Reform. On the morning of the twenty-eighth the comic weekly Charivari came out printed in white on a black cover, with a cartoon showing mortuary remains and bearing the caption: "Funeral Procession of Liberties Dead for the Citizen, in step with the Procession of Citizens Dead for Liberty." Further on, with a pun on his name, there was a dig at Berlioz, "who will perform his defunct funeral march. A few unlubricated carriage wheels will add to the effect of his composition." 22

The first written statement of this practice is in his letter to Lecourt of Apr. 19, 1840: "it is the only way to obtain a good performance of modern music." (86, 581.) 23 Facsimile in Karlovicz, Souvenirs Inédits de Chopin; A.R., 419.

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Thus Berlioz appeared to the agitators as a minion of princes, a favorite of the government, even though his feeling about that government and his convictions about national ceremonies were precisely those of the opposition. By a paradox easy to understand, it was soon clear that the reformers did not care to commission symphonies either; when oppositions came into power they acted towards art like all other governments — at once neglectful and oppressive. The people and the artist could apparently not enter into the natural relation of expressing and responding to a fundamental feeling which they sincerely shared. The Charivari, which employed another great artist neglected by public and government alike — Honoré Daumier — was blind to this social and cultural contradiction. And being ignorant of music, it needlessly feared the "noise" of Berlioz' Fourth Symphony. In spite of its two hundred performers, Berlioz tells us, the work "resounded very little or very imperfectly." 24 Once for all, serious outdoor music was unpractical. Wearing his uniform of the National Guard and conducting with his sword, Berlioz could lead only the few front ranks of his marching orchestra. Down the open boulevards, amid the shouts of the people, the political altercations within the crowd, and the panic caused at one point by the near upset of the fifty coffins piled on a flag-studded dray (twenty-four horses could scarcely set it in motion) Berlioz' majestic sonorities scarcely carried. Only when the parade stopped at a point where the sound was reflected by houses and trees did the music have a chance. By then, the performers, having repeated the March several times, were blown and miserably broiling under the noonday sun. Finally, an hour or more after noon, the procession reached the Place de la Bastille. The burial service was elaborately performed and silence at last secured for the symphony. Berlioz' band occupied bleachers from which all could see his decisive beat, and he was on the point of raising his sabre to signal that arresting rhythm on muffled drums which begins the Funeral March, when the legion of the National Guard which had been on duty at this spot since 8 A.M. (it was now 3 P.M.) could no longer contain itself: it wanted to parade and go home. Their own drums beat and 60,000 men tramped across the Place for two hours, to an accompaniment of shouts from the crowd. Of Berlioz' symphony, as he himself reports, "not a note survived." 25 This was but a temporary extinction. Owing to the simple presence of his name on the program, more people heard of Berlioz in one day than 24 21

Mem., 1, 346. Mem., I, 347.

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Populi

349

if he had given concerts or written operas for twenty years.*" The very fact that his composition had not been heard kept it fresh, and a concert featuring the work would be sure to draw. He quickly mustered his men again, adding string parts to relieve the monotony of the brass bass," and sought to carry out his frustrated intentions for the last movement by setting as a choral climax a few lines by Emile's brother, Antony Deschamps. On August 7, an audience of standing-room size jammed the Hall rue Vivienne, and the unfilled demand was such that three more performances were planned amid general enthusiasm. Only one took place, on August 14, 1840, because a piece of unsettling news diverted public attention from art to politics: while Berlioz was re-creating in sound the Revolutionary-Napoleonic legend, its heir-apparent (in both senses of apparent) had attempted his second coup: Louis-Napoleon had landed at Boulogne. He too had been arrested, like the symphony, but not extinguished. For in these days everyone outside the government was a Bonapartdst, even the Republicans, who could stress the liberal side of Napoleon's career.2* Indeed, the government itself was Bonapartist to the extent that it wanted to be national and that it did iiot want to be more liberal. In May the Chambers had voted to bring back the ashes of the Emperor to Paris, to rest "among the people that he loved so well." It was a cheap substitute for war or administrative efficiency. Still the nephew's attempted coup d'état put a different complexion on the uncle's return, and a new sense of caution at once affected Berlioz' availability as a musician for official occasions. His Ode on the Death of Napoleon, composed five years before to Béranger's verses, was about to be published and he had asked permission to dedicate it to Louis Philippe. Berlioz' old friend and protector in Roman days, Horace Vernet, who steadily painted Napoleonic scenes for the government at the rate of one hundred thousand francs each, had offered to obtain for Berlioz an audience with the King. But after Louis Bonaparte's raid on Boulogne the opportunity was gone, the King never replied, and it became compromising to associate one's work or person with Napoleonic sentiments. Yet that association remained in the mind of one observer, who may himself have been under the spell of the Emperor. Writing years later about Berlioz, Wagner declared that he always visualized him "at the 26

One notes this at once in the letters of contemporaries, e.g., 188, I, 426. As did Stravinsky, for the same reason, in his Concerto for piano and band. 28 The chief locomotive of the Eastern railway had been publicly christened the "Napoleon" the year before. 27

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head of his troops, leading the orchestra like a Napoleon." 29 Very likely Wagner had been in the crowd on July 28 as he had been at the Romeo and Juliet and subsequent concerts. He knew Berlioz by sight, for he had submitted articles to Schlesinger, the owner of the Gazette Musicale, who had published them on Berlioz' advice. This was Wagner's first emergence from obscurity since he had come to the capital. Desperately poor and doing hack work, he was passing judgment on native and foreign music and also acting as correspondent for the Dresden Abendzeitung. T o that paper he was soon to contribute a sizable essay on Berlioz, in which after describing his character at second hand he paid respect to the man's determined will to create without a thought of money or ignorant opinion. Finally, Wagner gave his views on the Funeral and Triumphal symphony: "I am inclined to rank this composition above all Berlioz' other ones: it is noble and great from the first note to the last. Free from sickly excitement, it sustains a noble patriotic emotion which rises from lament to the topmost heights of apotheosis. When I further take into account the service rendered by Berlioz in his altogether noble treatment of the military wind band — the only instruments at his disposal here, . . . I must say with delight that I am convinced this Symphony will last and exalt the hearts of men as long as there lives a nation called France." 30

Fourth Symphony: A People's Music Let no one think that the number of performers is of small moment. Music on the grand scale requires a grand performance and what is false in other circumstances is true here, namely that in a vast enclosure quantity must prevail over quality. — BERLIOZ on religious ceremonies (1829)

One hundred and seven years after Berlioz had produced his Funeral symphony for military band, native New Yorkers and summer visitors to the city were given the first opportunity of hearing it on this side of the Atlantic. Richard Franko Goldman, in writing a survey of band music 29 30

Quoted in 307, 261. Dresden Abendzeitung, May 5, 1841

(243,

VIII, 1 3 1 - 7 ) ,

Symphonie Funèbre

3 51

some vears before, had rediscovered the work. Until then the accepted generality was: "There are no great compositions for the band." 1 Of course, the habit of superficial judgment being all too common in musical matters, some persons need only to be told that a composition is scored for two hundred wind instruments in order to act like the critics of Tom Jones who (as Fielding says) "called it low and fell agroaning." But what Berlioz designed and Wagner admired was something else than brass and blaring. It was, in Wagner's words, "a composition altogether popular in the most ideal sense. . . . I should indeed call it national rather than popular . . . " 2 in short, a piece of democratic art. The revolutionary ideal of art for the masses, which Berlioz inherited in purified form precisely because he was not contemporary with its beginnings, has often been invoked and talked about; it is another thing to put it into practice. For in spite of the broad human feeling required, the artist must tread a very narrow path if he is not to fall into alternative dangers —on the one side, queasy condescension to his untutored audience; on the other, vulgar platitude. Nor must he simply depict common emotions for the pleasure of the sophisticates; he must find original ways of being at once elevated and simple.8 Wagner felt sure that "every urchin in a blue blouse . . . would thoroughly understand the July Symphony." By what magic did the difficult, strongly intellectual art of Berlioz mold itself to the proper shape? * The symphony is in three clearly "characteristic" movements: a funeral march, a farewell hymn, and an apotheosis. Berlioz has again dramatized his subject in the most direct and fitting way. T o any one who might ask, "What are we doing here?" his three "acts" reply: we are marching to the tomb; we are saying farewell; we are dispersing to the tune of a glorifying hymn —an apotheosis.® ' J o h n Redfield in Music, a Science and an Art, N . Y . , 1930, p. 301. While still a student in 1927, Mr. Goldman himself had uttered this conclusion in an article for academic readers. (807, 30.) « 243, VIII, .34. 3 Chesterton: "Ordinary people dislike the delicate modern work not because it is good or because it is bad, but because it is not the thing that they asked for. W h e n they walk behind the brass of the Salvation A r m y band instead of listening to harmonies at Queen's Hall, it is always assumed that they prefer bad music. But it may be merely that they prefer military music." i " f h 77·) 4 Sevcntv-five years later, Debussy concurred, to his own surprise, in W a g ner's judgment that Berlioz' music had power to move the plain people. (789, >«7·) 6 It is interesting to compare this simplified and strictly musical expression of the nation's ritual with the elaborate plan drawn up b y David (the painter)

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Muffled drums open, solo, in a menacing rhythm which recurs throughout the first movement with the brutality of bare fact interrupting the numbness of grief. Then comes the march theme proper, solemnly intoned by the brass — unmistakable Berlioz in its breadth, but so scanned here that it is in no w a y elusive. A f t e r being declaimed twice, a derived theme of purer, more intimate grief follows, set forth by clarinets and flutes. T h e contrast may t y p i f y anything one chooses — masculine and feminine utterance; public and inner sorrow; brass and wood; solemnity and humbleness. Out of these two plaints and the drumming rhythm, the long processional is developed. Its symbolism is purposely obvious — war, a people on the march and grieving — at the same time as its development is symphonic. Doubtless because the cortege was to traverse a long distance, Berlioz planned the movement so that the first section, which works up to a great crescendo on the pedal held by the trombones and ophicleides, is heard entire a second time, but with each phrase amplified, elaborated, commented on by a profusion of countersubjccts drawn from the main ones. T h e effect is that of an infinite lament, which reflection deepens without foreseeing how it may end. T h e second climax reached, the march returns to the woodwind theme, now purged and almost reconciled. T h e cadence brings back the rhythm in a context which anticipates the third movement's apotheosis. Though of close workmanship, this funeral opening fulfills the requirements of simplicity and elevation. T h e hearer needs no explanation, and even the tone deaf must be aware that something solemn and grand is assailing their eardrums. T h e second movement, which is very short and lightly scored, introduces a new mood. T h e march rhythm is replaced b y a metric resembling that of speech, while the instrumentation suggests a dialogue between the trombone solo declaiming a kind of recitative and the orchestra acting as "chorus." In character, this "recital" belongs to the genre of the several similar passages for trombone found in the Francs-Juges overture, and the Harold and Romeo symphonies.® Here the utterance is at first incomplete, for the ceremony of the Supreme Being, June 8, 1794. T h i s employed not only all the musicians of Paris but representative groups of singing citizens, classed b y age and sex. T h e r e were several "stations" traversed b y the procession, which performed rites at each of the elaborate altars, and scenic backgrounds designed for the purpose. T h i s was a popular music drama in the Wagnerian sense: that of Berlioz is its condensation into sound alone. A full description of the revolutionists' plan is given in /305, 1584. 6 T h e r e are excellent musical reasons w h y the trombone should be used as a reciting instrument. N o t only is its tone rich and penetrating without harsh-

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like the cello voice which opens the choral section of Beethoven's Ninth; then it gathers momentum and unfolds in a touching melodic statement which justifies the alternative titles Berlioz gave to the movement — "Farewell Hymn" and "Funeral Oration." T This simple melody, which the American composer and critic Carter Harman called "one of Berlioz' triumphs,"8 leads directly into the Apotheosis which concludes the symphony and as it were resolves our anguish. This last part begins with a pianissimo drum roll that rises sharply into a trumpet call. We suddenly hear again the muffled side drums, but the fanfare continues and lifts us out of woe and fear to the point where we will sing and march in tune with a new melody, marked allegro non troppo e pomposo. It is so phrased that its shape and notes must soon become familiar to any crowd. This theme alone, developed very simply, indeed conventionally, in the manner of a good brass-band march, supplies all the substance of the movement; it makes one think at once of Mendelssohn's "War March of the Priests" and Wagner's "Kaisermarsch," both subsequent. Here and there in Berlioz' finale, his special touch can be seen in the way we have come to expect (i.e., in unexpectedness) but generally the Apotheosis remains musically primitive and solidly unpretentious. The fact that the composer had to finish the work quickly meant that he did not give this movement its obviously intended form — that of a rousing piece which an audience can hear for the first time and yet sing with the chrous at the last reprise. When after July 28 Berlioz asked Deschamps for words and set them for voices in unison, he was only adding the kind of tone color which he wanted to hear, and which in other days he might have heard from the throats of the people." As it was, the Apotheosis march as Berlioz left it became, in France ness, but upon it, unlike other brass instruments, notes of different pitch must be played slightly detached, or else a portamento (slide) is the result. The effect of this limitation is to give a trombone phrase a kind of resemblance to a phrase made up of distinct words. 7 Berlioz uses the title Hymne, throughout his works in the sense of "Praise" and not at all in the English, churchly sense of hymn. 8 N. Y. Times, June 24, 1947. "Distinguished . . . elegiac, and poetic," said Mr. Francis Perkins in the Herald-Tribune on the same day. 9 Still later, Berlioz arranged the melody proper for separate choral performance. T o combine this with the symphonic movement would, owing to the change of key, have required reorchestrating the whole movement, and by that time band instruments had themselves changed so much that the entire work would have needed revision. See another arrangement and its history in 308, Sept. 3, 1905, 284.

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at least, his most popular work. It certainly passed the private test that certain professed musicians apply: it can be whistled. W e have moreover the testimony of Berlioz* rather envious colleague Adolphe Adam, who gives us at the same time a sample of current musical thought: " I like neither the man [Berlioz] nor his work, but fairness compels me to say that the peroration of the second movement is very effective and superior to all he has done hitherto. The first movement and the beginning of the second form an inexplicable mess. But the last movement is really very good: there is no melodic invention but the rhythm is clear, the harmony original, and the entrances well managed. It's really a great advance, for the phrases are squarely cut every four bars and thus can be readily understood." 10 Despite the catchy simplicity of the last movement, the symphony forms a stylistic whole. When Sir Hamilton Harty revealed the work to London audiences in 1934, most British critics expressed the usual pained astonishment that such an interesting work should have been so long neglected. " I have found," said one of them, "all the supreme qualities of Berlioz' genius in [this] . . . extraordinary canvas employing an enormous wind band, every piece of which justifies its inclusion." 1 1 The scale of the canvas is of course one reason for its absence from the usual repertory. For performance by the Goldman Band in 1947, the symphony had to be reduced and rescored: some of the original instruments are obsolete and the band was perforce one quarter the size of the original group. T o the task of reduction the composer-conductor, Richard Franko Goldman brought his great artistic integrity and musicianship, yet the result did not fully communicate or satisfy the original intention.12 It was 10

499, 479-80. Among other things, Adam could not forgive Berlioz his low estimate of Auber — "Auber," said Adam, "whom I consider the first musician of the century after Rossini." {Ibid.) A t the very same time, Wagner was writing in his German papers: "There is really a vast distance between [Berlioz] and the author of Le postillon de Longjumeau," precisely this same Adam, who only came round to Berlioz in the fifties. ( I b i d 4 8 2 . ) 11 Havergal Brian: Musical Opinion (1936) 591. According to modern students such as Redfieid and Goldman, the modern symphony band would use a clarinet choir of about fifty to correspond to the orchestra's string section, a woodwind section of twenty-four, and brass totaling twenty to thirty more, with timpani besides. T h e difference between this and Berlioz' balance is largely due to the increased range and power of the bass instruments since 1840. 12 A technical note: in recent times, owing to the absence of a "Berlioz tradition" handed down from conductor to conductor, the tempo of the Apotheosis has been a subject of debate. It is marked in the score Allegro non troppo e pomposo. In his modern edition Mr. Goldman adds: quarter note equals 120, though the Original carries no metronome mark — probably because Berlioz felt that the movement could be taken at various speeds. Ñeverthe-

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good music with great moments but it fell short of the "popular sublime" that W a g n e r experienced. T h i s raises the important artistic question, so o f t e n mooted

about

Berlioz — and indeed first stated b y him — whether massiveness of effect through volume of sound is or is not an integral part of certain musical conceptions. H e said it was, and hostile critics have concluded that this implies something damaging about these particular works. In this view less, the modern tendency to make it a quick march should be deprecated. The considerations to bear in mind are these: Berlioz' description of the fanfare and song of apotheosis shows that he designed the piece as a solemn kind of jubilation: allegro refers to the mood and non troppo restrains the pace. If the movement is taken at 120, it is denatured into a sort of polka. N o w the reasons which made Mr. Goldman, and Sir Hamilton H arty before him, take this piece as a quick march are that we have previously heard two slow movements and need a change, and that the development of the Apotheosis theme is not sufficiently rich to sustain a slow unfolding. T h e second argument is better than the first, for the allegro quality of the theme with its repeated triplets is surely enough to give a sense of variety after the second movement. As for the development, we must remember that the function of the whole work is popular, and that when we reach the finale the people are participants, emotionally if not actually. T h e simplicity and repetitiousness, which made Adolphe Adam rejoice and which struck Wagner as fitting, are part of the whole design, and it is a sophisticated mistake to hurry over them as if to palliate a weakness. Lastly, the conductor seeking the right tempo may bring to bear additional sidelights: when the pianist Thalberg, who had heard the symphony under Berlioz, wrote his Grand Caprice pour piano sur la Marche de Γ Apothéose de H. Berlioz, he marked the opening maestoso and indicated no fast movements until the obviously caprice-like variations at the end. Before this we have andante, lento, cantabile, and other indications of the singing character of the theme. This character is borne out by the tempo at which it was taken by the Conservatoire orchestra when they made the film Symphonie Fantastique in 1946-1947. In his biography, M. Boschot refers throughout to the grande idée of this finale: he would hardly call it so if he considered it a rapid rout after too much funereal contemplation. Again, Bernard Van Dieren, who heard the broadcast conducted b y Sir Hamilton Harty in 1934, complained of the fast tempo, as did T . S. Wotton in an article published shortly thereafter. {¡54, 162 and 586a.) Berlioz himself reports a serious misapprehension of the tempo b y musicians who rehearsed the work ahead of his arrival in Lille (Grot., 298-9) and in the Treatise (p. 300) there seems to be an allusion to the same kind of misconception. Going through his later works one finds two passages also marked Allegro non troppo and differing widely in character. In Les Troyens Part I, A c t II, Finale, the quarter note equals 138; in the Emperor cantata, it equals 100. T h e question obviously is not one which can be finally settled unless the missing edition of the Apothéose, announced by Wieprecht in 1843 should turn up bearing a metronome mark. Meanwhile conductors should give a try to the tempo range 80-100 before embarking on the 120 of the N e w York revised edition.

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there is such a thing as "intrinsic music" which is independent of volume, timbre, or dynamics. 1 * W i t h this belief goes the assumption that it is easy to be impressive if one uses large means, which in turn fosters the illogical conviction that the presence of many players means noise." T h e question is not one of taste but of musical fact — assuming that music is the art of sound and not an abstract game. Berlioz' primary interest in composing some of his w o r k s for large groups of performers is made clear in the words quoted at the head of this section. H e was among the first to note the relation between quantity and quality in performance, and he goes on to illustrate his observation: " L e t a great w o r k be performed at N o t r e Dame b y sixty chosen singers, and let the same score be sung later b y 500 choristers unselected y e t competent: in the first performance the effect will be meagre, out of scale or downright poor; in the second, the effect will be majestic, imposing, sublime; the impression received will be profound; the composer's intention will be understood, and art will manifest itself in all its grandeur."

15

These words concluded an essay upon religious music written in 1829, before Berlioz went to Rome. T h e r e , as w e remember, he complained of the inadequacy of music as performed in Saint Peter's and he computed its requirements on the basis of the architectural scale. Berlioz' pragmatic premise that music exists as produced is of course that which allows a listener to complain of a bad performance; but Berlioz was more thoroughgoing than the ordinary listener and he included under bad performance any discrepancy of scale in both directions — that of insufficient volume, giving the audience the strained feeling that the music is being overheard from a great w a y off; and that of excessive volume, w h i c h either deafens the hearer or blurs the style of the piece. 1 " 13 This was Chopin's feeling about Berlioz' music, and particularly about the Funeral symphony, which was perhaps the last work by his friend that Chopin went to hear. T h e y hardly saw one another thereafter, and Chopin soon indoctrinated Delacroix and George Sand with the notion that Berlioz' instrumental requirements were somehow a denial of art. The all-sufficiency of the piano is still a familiar dogma, though one would like to ask Chopin and his fellow dogmatists why — if timbre and volume do not matter — they require the best available piano, one with a good tone, with dampers and pedals and a proper sounding board. 14 These beliefs seem so self-evident that the reporter from one of the news magazines which gave an account of the New York première wanted to know how the Berlioz symphony compared with Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture "for sheer din." 1 5 '377, Apr. i l , 1829, 55. 16 When Berlioz played Mozart — or his own Queen Mab scherzo — he was careful to reduce the orchestra to the dimensions he thought suitable. See his discussion in Mem., I, 355.

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Only three of Berlioz* major works require a specially large body of players, and they are naturally the ones commissioned and designed for festival occasions, religious and national: the Requiem, the Te Deum, and the Funeral and Triumphal symphony." Yet even in these works, the dosage of sound is carefully arranged so as to avoid the monotony of an unremitting display of power: in the Requiem, as we saw, the extra forces are used only twice, in movements totaling less than ten per cent of the playing time. In the Te Deum, the nave-filling organ is used most sparingly and its full force reserved for the very end. The Emperor piece and Hymne are no less discreet in their use of strong effects, and the Funeral symphony, it will be remembered, includes a gentle second movement, largely given over to the solo trombone. One is bound to conclude that Berlioz, far from wallowing in "tremendous" effects, is very prudent about unleashing them. He further insisted on the acoustical fact that soft passages depend for perfection on the presence of large numbers. The roughnesses and unevenness of attack cancel out, producing a solid round tone. As Mr. Patrick Hughes wrote a few years ago, "How can one keep [from enthusiasm] on noticing at the end of a pp passage [in the Funeral March of the symphony] eight trombones quietly put their instruments down, having been playing all the time. There is a book to be written about these two Berlioz works [the Requiem and the symphony]." 18 In what Berlioz says about quantity, therefore, the stress is upon musical results; he calls for masses either when individual quality (e.g., trained voices) is lacking or when the output would be dwarfed by large spaces.19 There is evidence, moreover, that Berlioz frequently performed his "monumental" works with fewer players than he asks for in the score.20 Either the hall or the distribution of available instruments motivated these reductions, which the first twenty years of his career had made him adept at improvising. It is therefore another groundless superstition that he inaugurated the evil of asking for exorbitant means and could not compose 17

T h e Emperor cantata and the Hymne à la France are much shorter and lesser works of the same type. 18 s86. 18 In writing casually to Liszt about his own just completed "Fifth of M a y , " Berlioz says: " I had to have it sung by 20 basses for lack of one good one." A.R., 304. In our day, for the same reason, the Bethlehem Choir in an emergency assigns a solo part to six soprani in works like the Β Minor Mass. 20 T h e Apotheosis, notably during his first German tours (M.E., 15, 29, etc.) and even the Requiem (A Trav., 288) and Te Deum (207, II, 37); but the adaptation calls for uncommon judgment.

3j8

Berlioz 21

unless he had them. The numbers stipulated in Berlioz' scores signify simply the optimum conditions for the playing of a given work and indicate the correct balance among parts. In the "colossal" works, Berlioz' ideas of number were the fruit of experience verified time and again by his own supersensitive ears. Experience has confirmed it after him, for every time that a conductor follows Berlioz' suggestions precisely, the critics exclaim at the unsuspected rightness of the result — especially in works that they knew from less exact performance.22 Berlioz had no a priori prejudice in favor of volume; it is we who have a priori ideas in favor of a standard orchestra. Berlioz hated noise and loved music — so much so that he was not content to hear it spottily rendered.23 These were the considerations Berlioz took into account when he faced the task of composing in the symphonic idiom for military band, and which made him ask for a total of two hundred and seven wind instruments.24 He had to employ elements which could compare in range and flexibility with the string sections of the concert orchestra and which could provide the bass without monotony.25 Unfortunately, the great revolution in the manufacture of the brass came after Berlioz had scored this work and it must now be rearranged. In his modern version, Mr. Goldman was quite right to introduce five saxophone parts: Berlioz was the earliest user of the instrument, not only out of friendship and admiration for Adolphe Sax, but because he liked the "mellow, half-veiled" tone of this newcomer to the family of reeds.28 Similarly, the tubas (baritone or euphonium) cor21

The first charge was carelessly uttered by Saint-Saëns and has since been repeated on his authority. For the second, Berlioz himself is the "careless" authority: he wrote to Schumann that he needed large means ( C o r r e s p 1 1 9 ) . He should perhaps have said, "larger than I can usually obtain," though even this would be an overstatement in the light of a good many scores of his that use the simplest orchestra. Compare Delacroix's exaggeration that he can paint only large pictures (182, I, 90). 22 E.g., the addition of choirboys for the last chorus of the Damnation of Faust (582, 32) or the presence of four harps in the Symphonie Fantastique. (632.) 23 All his reviews, from his twenty-second year onward, attacked current practices that made for noise, whether it was the voice production of singers who shout and shriek, or the scoring of composers who with bass drum and cymbals "bring the county fair into the orchestra pit," or the rearranging of old scores by adding trombones which destroy all balance. 24 For the distribution see Supplement 5. It is worth adding that early critics of Beethoven's first and second symphonies (1800 and ¡802) were disposed to call them symphonies for military band because they were so heavily scored for winds. (853, 16.) 25 The bassoons accordingly have virtuoso parts throughout their range. 28 Grot., 68 and see below, Subchapter 16.

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rectly replace the ophicleides as Berlioz would have wished; yet Mr. Goldman's "convenient" reduction expressed in, say, three bassoons instead of sixteen, and two snare drums instead of twelve, demonstrates upon hearing that Berlioz knew what he was about when he called for absolutely larger forces. Even with the Central Park shell to reflect the sound, and even on the records taken at the near-by microphone, the music is not that which Berlioz and Wagner heard." For the opening salvo the pair of muffled drums is too thin; throughout, the lack of bassoon tone robs the ensemble of a desirable reedy quality; the wonderful dialogue in the first movement between brass and wood does not stand out in sharp contrast; and the total dynamic range being reduced, the intermediary nuances tend to pass unnoticed, so that we arrive at the seeming paradox that it is primarily for delicacy and subtlety of effect that Berlioz required large ensembles. We come to his other purpose. In that same early essay on religious music he wrote: "The ancients graced their ceremonies with a musical pomp [appareil] of which we no longer have any conception What must we think of our orchestras of 50 players and our choirs of 40 voices when we read in the Scriptures that more than 4000 Levites were used in the temple of Solomon to sing the praises of God?" 28 The example of Greek drama and its associated festivals was also in Berlioz' mind — as it was later in Wagner's — and with the same intent of arousing a collective emotion through a work of art of broad popular appeal. Such a work must be on a large scale not only because massiveness calls for a special style —which in turn creates the genre· that Berlioz called "monumental" 28 — but also because festivals imply participation rather than spectacle, and the many performers assembled serve to represent the people for whom they sing. Ten thousand persons may gather to hear a coloratura soprano and will enjoy her performance, but on certain occasions such a ratio results in a spiritual as well as a numerical discrepancy. When that triumph of suspension engineering, the Brooklyn 27

T h e mere volume registered on the discs can of course be amplified at will but to no avail —which shows again that it is not noise but quality and scale that justify Berlioz' numerical demands. 28

29

1377 (1829) 55.

Whether or not the famous analogy between architecture and music holds good, the parallelism as to scale is exact, that is, size is an absolute as well as a relative factor: a building four times as big as another, if rightly proportioned, acquires a new quality, which is not merely an increase in the qualities already present in the smaller edifice.

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Bridge, w a s formally opened in 1883 in the presence of G o v e r n o r C l e v e land and President Arthur, the bells tolled and the whistles on the

river

tugs b l e w amid a general uproar of human tongues, but music — w e l l , music w a s not forgotten: there was a cornet solo b y the virtuoso Jules Levy. T h i s kind of disproportion, worse than omission, was the sort of public absurdity Berlioz vainly protested against long before Brooklyn Bridge was thought of. A s an artist with a v e r y lively social sense, he conceived h o w the elite of a great country must musically celebrate their p o w e r , h o w e v e r crass. But the cultural forms and the cultural means were lacking, as they still are now. 30 T o d a y w e have so standardized tastes and musical resources that one must scour the capitals of the world to find three Eflat clarinets w h o can play in tune. In Berlioz' time — as he said looking back after 1848 — "it is not the voices alone that would be wanting . . . to reveal to Paris . . . the sublimities of monumental music. W h a t would be equally wanting is the cathedral of vast proportions (the chapel of N o t r e Dame not being suited to music) and also, alas!, faith in art, a direct and impassioned impulse towards art, the calm, the patience, and the discipline of pupils and artists, together with the strong will — if not of the government, at least of the wealthy classes — to attain the goal after perceiving its beauty and w o r t h . Lastly, money would fail us, and the undertaking w o u l d come to grief from want of support. W e have only to remember, as a small instance of a mighty truth, the sad end that Choron came to after he had w i t h slender resources obtained such important results in the field of choral music: he died of grief because for sake the J u l y M o n a r c h y abolished his school."

economy's

S1

W h e n Berlioz w r o t e this, he had just heard in London the Anniversary Meeting of the Charity Children in Saint Paul's, and he had been shaken to the depths of his being b y the six thousand five hundred voices singing " A l l people that on earth do dwell," and other hymns. Sixty years earlier, H a y d n had been moved to tears in the same place by the same cause, which Berlioz analyzes: " T h e prodigious effect of this unison is due, as I believe, to t w o conditions — the enormous number and good quality of the voices, first; and next, the disposition of the singers on rising tiers of benches. T h e reflectors and the makers of sound being in good relative positions, the w h o l e atmosphere of the church is assailed from so many points at once, 30 S o m u c h so that w h e n S c h o e n b e r g ' s Gurrelieder w a s heard in N e w Y o r k , a critic c o u l d speak o f its massive musical requirements as a piece of "colossal i m p u d e n c e , " suggesrive of a " p s y c h o l o g i c a l q u i r k . " (826, 196.)

si Soirées

(21st).

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in depth as well as surface, that it begins to vibrate in its entirety; hence its resounding power acquires a majesty and a capacity to affect the human frame such as the most artful devices of music played under ordinary conditions have not hitherto produced."82 Berlioz goes on to wonder whether the quality of these children's voices may not be due to good nutrition, evidenced by their visible good health. "These English children . . . in no way show the sickly and underdeveloped aspect of our youngsters from the Paris working class, worn out as it is by bad food, overwork and privations." ** Then, reverting to the cultural problems, Berlioz sketches the possibility of paralleling in France this annual London festival and even improving upon it. He recurs to the scheme he had broached in 1837 for his Requiem, of using the unused Pantheon, which is not so large as Saint Paul's but is of the right shape acoustically.34 It would hold a "small orchestra" of three or four hundred instruments and in place of untaught orphans a well-trained choir of four thousand mixed voices. They could then perform "a work written in a style suitable to such means, on a subject in which grandeur should be blended with nobility, and which should express all the elevated thoughts that can move the heart of man. I believe that such a use of the most powerful of the arts, seconded by the spell of poetry and architecture, would be truly worthy of a nation like ours and would leave far behind the vaunted festivals of antiquity." " This lifelong concern of Berlioz' was at once a projection into the midcentury of the French revolutionary ideal and an extension of Beethoven's dream for the social function of the Ninth. In both men, individualists though they were, the impulse was to balance private by public emotion in a deep artistic protest against excessive concentration on the self. The triumph of mercantile individualism and the decline of religious faith in the nineteenth century spurred the desire of certain creators to recapture for art the privilege of expressing collective feelings. The "fraternity" of Schiller's Ode and the "elevated thoughts" that Berlioz wished to embody 32 Ibid., 225. The tradition of monumental music in England dated back to the Handel Commemorations in the 1780's (see Burney's General History of Music, passim), and something like it seems to have begun in Germany in Weber's time; see /0/7, 96. 33 Ibid., 225. The first factory act prohibiting the employment of children under eight had been passed half a dozen years before but it was not enforced. 34 L.I., 103-4. Berlioz had desiderated the Pantheon for music of this sort as early as his Mass of 1825 II, 160). He asked for it again in 1840, hoping to play the Funeral symphony there. Its use was never granted ( 138$, Aug. 4 and 11, 1912). 35 Ibid., 2 2J-6.

3Ó2

Berlioz

were alike rebukes to the prosperous bourgeois who thought he thrived by his own singlehanded efforts. 38 Bourgeois complacency, as embodied later in Dickens's Podsnap, went with conventionality and a fear of stirring the depths. The Podsnaps wanted an individual virtuoso to patronize while he played for them in the drawing room, and an individual painter to do them a landscape that would fit over the fireplace. Art stood in danger of being completely domesticated. Music in particular, by falling back into the place of entertainment, would lose the expressive powers it had won and content itself with teasing the mind by a species of stunt. Current taste reminded Berlioz of Molière's marquis who was engaged in putting all of Roman history into madrigals." For in spite of all that has been said about the nineteenth century's love of size, it had no taste for grandeur. Prince Albert's plan for a Crystal Palace in which to show modern industry as a cultural undertaking only made him scoffing enemies; and like the Duke of Orleans he was rebuked by his nearest advisers for wishing to associate with men of genius. For genius too is outsize and oversteps conventions both in refinement and in simplicity. In France, all that the government would provide for national holidays was military parades, and the account of July 28, 1840 tells us how poorly organized they were. In truth, despite a superficial and show-off patriotism, "the nation" scarcely existed. The government was unrepresentative and it rightly feared that public assemblies would lead to public disorder. A secular collective art was therefore impossible. The nearest approach to it was the opera, and Wagner himself — for all his advantage in coming after Berlioz — only led Europe back to a somewhat magnified opera. In his revivified form of it the desire for communing through music and drama was present, but what was its social significance? After [threequarters] of a century no one seems to know. 38 Berlioz' conception of a national art transcended the contemporary views of nation, class, and culture, and he created bigger works than France could, until recently, assimilate.38 But it may be asked in the light 39 It was in this same decade that Louis Blanc first used the term bourgeoisie to mark off a class distinct f r o m the people. (Histoire de Dix Ans, passim.) In 1837, Jean Reynaud had defined the term as "those w h o were above w a n t " (Encyclopédie Nouvelle, art. Bourgeoisie) which sufficiently shows the split in the formerly homogeneous T h i r d Estate: the bourgeoisie was n o w regarded as an aristocracy but without taste or tradition. 37 A Trav., 343. 38 H o w reconcile, f o r example, Shaw's Perfect Wagnerite, Dickinson's Musical Design of the Ring and Paul H . Lang's essays on Richard W a g n e r . (790, 1 - 3 and 832.) [ A d d the remarkable biography bv Robert W . Gutman, N . Y . i 968.I ' ' m

See below Supplement 1.

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of his contempt for politics whether he was a true democrat or — as his birth and ability might well make him — an aristocrat. At times he seemed like many others deluded by the mirage of the Napoleonic legend. Does this imply a hankering after absolutism? The Funeral and Triumphal symphony itself had its genesis in recollections of Bonaparte's Italian campaign, and later the Emperor cantata expressed something of Berlioz' faith in the nephew of the great man. Two thoughtful artists, the painter Odilon Redon and the novelist Romain Rolland, have expressed regret at Berlioz's failure to side with the rising forces of democracy.40 While recognizing Berlioz' greatness of character, Redon deplores that the musician should have been scornful and skeptical about the future of republics. And yet, as even Berlioz' harshest detractor is compelled to admit, there is in all of Berlioz' music a strong element of popular feeling.41 In every drama that Berlioz conceived the role of the people is fully and admirably represented.42 These two sets of facts appear contradictory only if put in political terms. Berlioz sincerely despised politics for the very reason that partisanship divided persons and ideas that he wanted to keep joined, while it took no cognizance of the ideas that mattered to him as a craftsman and creator. The ordinary contrast of democratic and aristocratic breaks down in describing the artist, for art means discrimination, judgment, selectness, superiority — which count as aristocratic virtues; and art means also recognizing and expressing the common feelings of mankind and cutting through the crust of convention to the simplest realities. Hence the artist, and especially the dramatic genius, is often a "democrat" in his choice of subject matter and an "aristocrat" in dealing with it. Poetry, as Hazlitt showed, is always aristocratic because "its language naturally falls in with the language of power."4* He is speaking of Shakespeare's Coriolanus and he means that we side instinctively with the hero and against the crowd because of his greater nobility, courage, and breadth of mind. The observation suggests its counterpart, which is that in order to represent a crowd as hero, the artist must choose its highest, most selfless emotions. If these are fine but simple, their mere multiplication will raise their esthetic merit. One rogue weeping — to use Hazlitt's language — does not move us, but a mourning nation, regardless of the cause, is a mighty spectacle. Berlioz describes music in similar terms, insisting that it is "like great poetry, 40 l2

7S> »H-? and 504, 51-5. Jean Marnold (460, 370). 42 See below the Damnation of Faust, L'Enfance du Christ, and especially 41

I.es Troyens, 43

'255, 5°·

in which the working classes are aptly celebrated.

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essentially aristocratic," yet he recognizes, as we saw a little earlier, the validity of common emotions raised to a high significance by the sheer extent of their sway. The obvious conclusion about his "nature" in this regard is that Berlioz is both aristocrat and democrat, depending on what element of his work one chooses to abstract from the rest.45 His behavior conformed to this inclusive range of sensibility. He could listen with unaffected joy to a peasant air or follow a fife-and-dnim corps "like a child" and he could also be entranced by the late works of Beethoven when they were, not caviar, but poison to the general.47 What he could not endure (it was this source of his anger and contempt that gave him the reputation of being arrogant) was the tawdry operas of "the first musician of the century," Auber, and even the more skilful synthetic products that Meyerbeer provided for the strong heads among the bourgeoisie. Such works were "popular" in the box-office sense and they did entertain large numbers of people throughout Europe — one has only to think of all the detachable airs and ballets which amateur singers and pianists played at home. This was a popularity Berlioz never did and never will attain, but in three of the works for communal use that he managed to impose on his compatriots and their pear-shaped king, he fully achieved his goal of blending grandeur with nobility and simplicity with elevation, which is to say the democratic and aristocratic elements within him. Of these three works, the Funeral and Triumphal symphony comes nearest to being entirely popular. Yet so little are we accustomed, even in a century of populism, to the intent of social art when it is divorced from current propaganda, that hearers of this symphony may still find the last movement vulgar, regretting to the end the varied "elegance" of the first two.48 The mixed public that attends "pop" or band concerts is no surer of itself; it has had on the whole a poor education of the heart as well as of the mind, and it is likely to feel that a rousing march can be enjoyed only if not taken seriously. "Real" music, acceptable on a "higher level," must speak of "finer things." Hence it is that in nearly every one of Berlioz' 44

Meni., II, 139; see also I, 216. T w o critics, one French and one German, have explicitly asserted this. (584, 313 and 576, 333.) T h e drama of one against many is a genuine conflict only when a composer feels this double sympathy — as in the conflict between Friar Laurence and the warring families toward the end of the Romeo and Juliet symphony. But this is also the reason why the themes of this Finale cannot be of the same musical order as those of the love scene. 49 A.R., 202 and 123-98 passim. 45

47

A Trav., 303.

48

154, '47·

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twelve great works, some fragment offends this high-brow taste by the revelation it affords of some aspect of feeling which is "common," "banal," "vulgar." " What this rejection overlooks, actually, is art — the art with which the composer has rendered and even commented upon his crude or coarse subject matter. Where, in the vast repertory of unknowingly vulgar music will one find anything as expressively and exquisitely vulgar as Berlioz' two dozen marching and drinking tunes? 50 This critical error occurs most often in persons who classify by externals and heed no further. A fanfare is enough f o r them to make them act as Fielding says his critics did about his realism. T o the artist, on the contrary, the banality of a device only incites to original uses. Thus do Hardy and Shakespeare disinfect words whose associations are low or cheap, and thus did Berlioz work upon a threadbare form: " W h e n I had finished the March and the Funeral Oration, and found the theme for the Apotheosis, I was held up a good while by the fanfare, which I wanted to have rise up from the depths of the orchestra to the high note on which the song of glorification bursts forth. I composed I do not know how many, all of which failed to satisfy me: they were either vulgar or too narrow in form, not sufficiently solemn or lacking in sonority, or badly graduated. What I dreamt of was the call of the archangel's trump, simple yet noble, bedight as in armor, soaring radiant and triumphant and overpowering in its fullness as it announced to heaven and earth the opening of the Empyrean gates. I stopped at last, not without misgivings, with the one now in the score, and the rest was soon finished." 51 48

The considerable yet secret party of anti-Beethovenians, or half-Beethovenians, make the same charge against such works as the Egmont overture and the finales of the Fifth and Ninth. An excellent musician who has often sung the work once said to me: "The 'Agnus Dei' of the Missa Solemnis is incredibly vulgar — it is pure Hollywood." 50 As an example of his powers of discrimination, compare the "joy" expressed in the Hosanna from the Requiem, the Finale of Harold in Italy and the Auerbachs Cellar scene from the Da?tmation of Faust 51 Mem., I, 345-6.

INTERCHAPTER

M. The Century of Romanticism All I read about Romanticism is wrong. — PUSHKIN to Bestuzhev, 1825 to the books, the flowering of art and action known as Romanticism came to an end in France in the early eighteen forties. T o say this is to posit that between Berlioz' Romeo and Juliet symphony and his next comparable work, the dramatic legend entitled Damnation of Faust, something occurred in European culture to outmode his cast of thought and that of his contemporaries. In poetic drama, the failure of Hugo's Les Burgraves in 1843 has often been used to mark the end of literary Romanticism. It is a corresponding fact that Berlioz' Faust, when produced in 1846, aroused little public response and lay unregarded in France for thirty years. In support of the theory of failure it can be shown that the Funeral and Triumphal symphony of 1840, built on feelings and ideas dating back to the Italian journey, marks a noticeable halt in Berlioz' career and in the times, for the work looks back in a period of diminishing freedom to the glorious dead of 1830, and in the life of the composer it closes an era of intense production, matched by ten years of hard-fought battles on native ground. Though beaten at the Opera, Berlioz had established himself as the unquestioned leader of French Romanticism in music; yet thereafter conditions at home compelled him to carry his revolution abroad, which resulted in a slowing down of his output. Finally, the style of these later works being different in certain respects from the earlier, they have been taken as signs of recantation and Berlioz has been described as a Romantic-by-accident, a young rebel who sobered down, an essential classicist who temporarily strayed. If we considered just these facts, historic Romanticism would remain as a flashing series of productions occupying little more than a decade of French history. But this way of approaching the movement is bound to mislead. For if Romanticism had so narrow a base it does not deserve to be the name of an epoch; and if on the contrary, the term properly desigACCORDING

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nates one age of man in Europe, then the fate of a single work by a Hugo or a Berlioz cannot be a sufficient test of decline. There must be certain more general truths as yet unformulated. In seeking out these truths, it is important to avoid the extremes of literalism and of vagueness. Bearing in mind the character and scale of European culture in epochs preceding the Romantic, we should be prepared to find, in the period under review, neither complete uniformity nor radical confusion. True precision, as scientists know better than critics, is relative to the magnitude of the thing measured: you must not push the decimals beyond the limit of significance. If historians have failed to find unity in Romanticism, it is because they either were expecting too much or magnifying what was little. In the hands of biographers this amounted to tailoring a separate Romanticism for every artist. N o w Berlioz' deeds and those of his fellow artists in the years 1827 to 1840 sufficiently show that an implicit unity of purpose and desire existed among the French Romanticists. They recognized, moreover, in the works and writings of other Europeans — Scott, Goethe, Beethoven, Hoffmann, Byron, Goya, Pushkin — intentions akin to their own. Lastly, the revival in nearly every cultural center of figures previously obscured or misunderstood — Shakespeare, Dante, Spinoza, Vico, Montaigne, Ronsard, Villon, Cellini, Rabelais — testifies to the presence of a common outlook such as is implied whenever a single name is given to an age. For all the differences due to individual sensibility, the conscious and articulate men of the first half of the nineteenth century shared a common attitude toward life and art, and that attitude is definable. Romanticism may or may not be the name we would choose for it, but this name being historic, traditional, it must be kept — and if possible filled with the right historical contents. It is not enough to say that Romanticism was a revolt from the Reason of the preceding age, as idealizers of that age pretend; nor that the movement originated in Germany and spread by contagion, as the political enemies of Romanticism would have us believe; nor again, that this characteristic culture of the nineteenth century was a hodgepodge of earlier tendencies, as our neoclassicists confidently assert. Like every large manifestation of the human mind, Romanticism has deep roots — roots in the past and in the eternal potentialities of human beings: the roots in the past being simply previous expressions of those same potentialities. Scholars who find Romanticist germs in seventeenth-century Pietism, or in eighteenth-century sentimentality and nature worship, are perfectly correct. For the neoclassicism of those centuries had its dissenters, who grew more numerous as time went on, and from them the Romanticists properly

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so-called drew important elements. Berlioz, it is clear, derived an explicit part of his musical conceptions from the Encyclopedists. He was familiar with Rousseau's Dictionnaire and "Letter on French Music," and although he combated Rousseau's demand for a simple musical texture, which ruled out counterpoint and expressive harmony, he respected other elements of Rousseau's theory and at many points fulfilled the ideal that Rousseau proposed to the French for creating a music distinctively theirs.1 Even more directly, Berlioz carried out, enlarged, and developed the musical suggestions of his immediate predecessors, bred on the Encyclopedia — Lesueur, Gossec, MéhuL, Grétry, Reicha, Monsigny, down to Rouget de Lisle. This relation supplies one clue to the significance of nineteenth-century Romanticism as a whole. In any art or country, Romantic work begins when form, substance, and conception are all of a piece. Thus in Germany, Lessing attacks French neoclassicism in the 1760's, but continues to write classicist dramas: form and intention are at odds. It is only in Goethe and Schiller that we find the new product, previously called for, but not previously embodied. In England, Walpole's "Gothic" novel or Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry indicate a new desire — for the supernatural and the folk ballad — but we must wait 1 The points on which Berlioz cannot but have agreed with Rousseau may be found in such articles of the Dictionary as Contre-sens ("the lack of expression is perhaps the greatest enormity of all. I should prefer music to say something other than it should, rather than that it should say nothing at all.") In the "Letter on French Music" (1830 edition of the Works, vol. X) one finds innumerable points of concurrence between the two theorists: on strict tempo (284), distinct melody (285), expressive nuances (286 and n.), vigor and pace in modulation (293), inexpressive fugues and musical pedantry (298-9), sparing use of dissonance (300), precision and sobriety in harmonic effects (303), lively recitatives (305), plastic melody (308), "one work" by means of recitatives (309), orchestral comment (311 and 315), ridiculous illustration of words (317), independence of musical expression (318). The "Letter of an Orchestral Player" which follows the first letter resembles the fictional tone of Berlioz' Soirées de POrchestre and anticipates several of Berlioz' principles: on accurate and energetic performance (320-24) etc. As for the essays discussing Rameau's system, the whole tenor of Rousseau's argument is pragmatic in the manner that Berlioz was later to make his own. See ΡΡ- 333—5. 337, 339, 34«. 343, 347, and 348: "Harmony does not consist in the relations among vibrations but in the concourse of sounds resulting therefrom." Rousseau's review of Gluck's Alceste is again full of observations that Berlioz would endorse, side by side with others he would repudiate. What is truly amazing is the similarity of tone and the power of logical deduction in the two men. In a fragment on bells, Rousseau writes: "If one were to compose airs for jew's harp, it would be imperative to make their character suit the jew's harp. But in France, musicians take pleasure in denaturing the quality of each instrument." (383.) Finally, Rousseau's lyric scene entitled "Pygmalion" reads like a shorter version of Lelio. (479-85.)

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until Scott's romances and the Lyrical Ballads of Wordsworth and Coleridge before the desire is satisfied. The odes of Collins and Gray and the forgeries of Chatterton still have the transitional look. In French poetry, the midway mood is absolutely explicit: young Chénier, over whom Berlioz brooded, had written the famous line: Let us upon new thoughts write antique verses.2 He himself did as much as he could to enlarge neoclassical diction but the unmistakable break comes only thirty years later, when Lamartine published his Méditations Poétiques. The signs of "crossing over" are so uniformly repeated throughout Europe between 1750 and 1830 that they can be taken as diagnostic.4 This holds for Poland, Russia, Italy, and Spain, where corresponding evolutions took place: everywhere in the eighteenth century a spontaneous demand brings about a return to native traditions accompanied by sentimental affectation of various sorts: simplicity, medievalism, and tearful emotion. More solid works and ideas gradually emerge until by 1800 Europe was ready for an artistic renascence. In any cultural center, foreign examples and translations had currency precisely because the indigenous mood was receptive. In France we see Berlioz, Hugo, Michelet, Delacroix, Sainte-Beuve, and others strongly moved by foreign writers. But the reason they read Goethe two decades late (and Shakespeare two centuries) is that the work of the imagination in France had been retarded by twentyfive years of war and censorship. No influence could enter until the artistic sensibility was ready for it. This gradual reformation of the western mind is something rather more awesome and worthier of attention than the supposed revolt of a number of young men against the conventions of their elders. Romanticism did 2

Sur des pensers nouveaux, faisons des vers antiques. T h e y help moreover to disprove the idea of "Romanticism b y contagion." Certain critics maintain that France turned to Romanticism because Mme. de Staël wrote a book On Germany in 1810: how was it, then, that Chateaubriand w h o knew nothing of G e r m a n literature was writing Romanticist esthetics in 1800? Conversely, if G e r m a n y is the common source, how is it that Kant, Goethe, Herder, and others acknowledge in their characteristic n e w w o r k s a great debt to Rousseau and Shakespeare? O r again, if Rousseau is alone credited with this onerous paternity, how does it happen that James T h o m p s o n was writing The Seasons in 1725, ancf French novelists of the mid-eighteenth century were hailing Richardson as the rediscoverer of human emotion? T h e crisscrossing of influences in so cosmopolitan a culture as the European was infinite and cannot be sorted out along national lines. 3

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373 not in fact devour its parent, rationalism or classicism. The eighteenth century lingered on, and paradoxically it is often the eighteenth-century survivals into the nineteenth that are most frequently attacked as the distinctive traits of Romanticism.4 By the time that Romanticism had purged itself of sentimentality, self-pity, and grandiloquence, and had thus found its unique character, it appears to some observers unrecognizable or "chastened," which is equivalent to saying that the ungainliness of adolescence is the true figure of the man. The three blemishes just named are but different symptoms of one state, which is that of anticipation. Sentimentality takes its rise in the eighteenth century (in Sterne, Richardson, Rousseau, and the "tearful" playwrights) because passion is still believed to be antisocial, and the adequate forms of expression for it are lacking although its worth is beginning to be known. For to act sentimentally is not, as commonly thought, to revel in emotion, but to show and indulge feelings while shying away from their consequences. The Sentimental Journeyman sheds tears over the donkey because true compassion for man would really mean changing the social order. Tears become the sign of right feeling, which so far means only right opinion about right feeling.5 In truth, before we can understand social evolution from Rousseau to Freud we need a Natural History of Tears. The Romanticists' references to weeping at any rate require a double interpretation. When Berlioz describes the physical effect of music upon him and weeps at the finest, gayest parts of the Barber of Seville* those tears are the unaffected result of intense participation, the resolution of a total strain — as in the frequently reported instances of athletes at a 4 As a measure of the cultural overlap, it is useful to remember that it was not until 1835 that the French Academy authorized the spelling -ait in many words so pronounced — a reform demanded by Voltaire — nor the naturalization of opéras with final s and accent. In Berlioz' handwriting and usage many traces of the eighteenth century are still to be found. Technologically, moreover, in the 1830's the use of envelopes was a novelty, lead pencils were a new invention and so were friction matches. 5 Thus in the late eighteenth century Mme. Dufrenoy was forced to explain to her friends that she had a good heart although she was physically incapable of shedding tears when convention required it. ( 1 2 1 2 , IX, 149.) In the next generation, Hazlitt offers a more balanced view, which most Romanticists shared: "Tears may be considered as the natural and involuntary resource of the mind overcome by some sudden and violent emotion before it has had time to reconcile its feelings to the change of circumstances." ( T h e English Comic Writers, 1.) β Compare Tolstoy's account of Prince Andrey's weeping as he listens to a song in War and Peace, Part VI, Ch. 19.

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race, sailors after a rescue, or statesmen in a crisis.7 Social convention alone decides whether such manifestations are yielded to or confessed. Verbal convention thereafter makes of tears an expressive reference — witness Mozart's account of financial distress: "Tears prevent me from completing the picture! — " 8 Conversely, when Berlioz reports or predicts that audiences will weep or did weep on hearing a piece of music, it is a shorthand term which means no more and no less than our emphatic modernisms: "went into ecstasies" or, colloquially, "turned handsprings." The same social rules control grandiloquence. The unlucky words which Berlioz used in exchanging batons with Mendelssohn strike us as pompous and absurd.' T h e y are of a kind with Victor Hugo's sententiousness and Balzac's melodrama; all of them hark back to Bonaparte's mode of addressing the Grand Army, and this in turn comes out of the eighteenth-century feeling for antique and primitive grandeur.10 In Voltaire, eastern sages and prophets speak as Berlioz did to Mendelssohn, though Berlioz* source was undoubtedly James Fenimore Cooper, himself reared on the neoclassics. The debates of the French revolutionary assemblies breathe the same epic diction. Through the power of the Zeitgeist to assimilate a rich diet, the flavor of Ossian, of the American Indian chief, and of the Roman heroes merged in one heady anticipation of greatness. Still in the eighteenth century, Bonaparte's hand thrust in the coat unmistakably conveyed to his compatriots the austerity of the Republican consul; it was a promise of constitutional rule like the grin on a modern president of the United States. The true Romanticist rhetoric, which comes later, is more vibrant than solemn, and rhetoric disappears from conduct in proportion as it informs great art. W e know that Berlioz' foreign hosts found him almost too reserved and self-controlled. T h e y had expected manners at once fiery and grandiose, but he had achieved a vivid grandeur in music and did not need to exhibit the same in life — whether as Mohican, Bonaparte, Gracchus, or Roi Soleil. Real accomplishment similarly dissipated youthful melancholy and selfpity. It is inaction and unfledged power that make gifted youth mope, or deceive them into thinking that to be miserable is to be great. The belief 7

See Life, July 12, 1948; Ciano's Diaries (passim) and N. Y. Times, Aug. 27,

1948: "General Hodges in Tears on Leaving Korea"; Sir Walter Scott weeping at a discussion of politics (Lockhart, II, 328); Wellington after Waterloo

(1230, 178); Dr. Johnson (in Boswell, passim). 8

219, 1394 (March-April 1790). ' S e e Chapter 16, n. 12. 10 Look at David's painting of the brothers Horatius swearing revenge or death.

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that great sensibility betokens genius is valid only when the sensibility is of a kind that brings forth fruits, that is, the power to feel must make a man act. He continues to suffer as Berlioz did, and he may be unreconciled to the terms on which he holds life and genius, but he no longer fears his weakness, knowing its worth. He no longer seeks to cover it up as the eighteenth century tended to do, with an affected strength, for he knows that the contradiction of weakness and strength is the polar axis on which Romanticism revolves.11 From that moment of full recognition as we see it in Berlioz after the Italian journey, Romantic melancholy is replaced by stoical pessimism, and the man himself embodies the ideal of the Indian chief which the conventional phrases of a bygone age failed to evoke. Despite conceded limitations and an eighteenth-century aspect, Napoleon was of course the living example of heroism who remained an object of wonder to the most remarkable men of his time. Beethoven, Byron, Stendhal, Carlyle, Hazlitt, Manzoni, Goethe, Hegel, Berlioz, and many others, were in that sense Bonapartists. Berlioz' Military Symphony was planned while traversing the theater of Bonaparte's first great campaign, and the same cluster of feelings also inspired his Cinq Mai, Te Deum, and Impériale,12 This does not mean that Berlioz' contempt for politics dissolved in the rays of Napoleonic glory. His scorn of conquerors' ethics as well as his hatred of violence persisted; but like most artists who lived close to the event he extracted from Bonaparte's career a quality meriting itself the name of art. Stendhal, who wrote two books on Napoleon, tells us precisely what this was: "His superiority lay entirely in the faculty of finding new ideas with incredible speed, of passing judgment upon them with perfect reason, and of carrying them out with a strength of will as yet unequaled." 11 Elsewhere, Stendhal declared: "I experience a kind of religious feeling in daring to write the first sentence of Napoleon's story, 11

The expressions of this insight during the Romantic period are legion. One may cite at random De Quincey's remark about Oliver Goldsmith: "Our revolutionary age would have unsettled his brain. T h e colossal movements of nations, from within and from without, the sorrow of the times, which searches so deeply; the grandeur of the times which aspires so loftily — these forces, acting for the last fifty years by secret sympathy upon all fountains of thinking and impassioned speculation, have raised them from depths never visited by our fathers, into altitudes too dizzy for their contemplating. . . ." (¡204, II, 285.) 12 Only a quarantine kept the young musician from going on a pilgrimage to Elba and Corsica in 1832. (A.R., 194; Corresp., 96, 98.) 13 1240, 47·

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for it is the story of the greatest man who has come into tfie world since Caesar." 14 T h i s emotion, so foreign to our hearts and so complicated for us by later irrelevancies, holds within it many of the elements that Romanticism chose t o stress from among the permanent tendencies of man. But we fail to understand this complex attitude if we simply repeat the phrase "romantic hero" and think merely of egotism and tyranny. Stendhal and Berlioz were as prompt as Beethoven to criticize Napoleon's selfish and narrow personal ambition and to reject perpetual war. W h a t Stendhal admired was a quality — the heroic — which was not limited to warriors, as Carlyle was to show, and therefore deserved to be admired wherever found. 15 W e must remember that if Bonaparte came to stand for all Europe as a heroic type, he earned that title in competition with thousands of extraordinary talents who had been heaved up b y revolution and who had become not solely generals but orators or statesmen, administrators or codifiers of law. T h e era believed in genius because it had seen it at work: Pitt, wartime Prime Minister in his thirties; Hoche, a great general among many, dead at twenty-three; the sons of peasants and cobblers risen to fame before middle age — this was the striking new social fact. It entirely changed the meaning of Greatness, which was now regarded as a faculty, not a rank. From Danton and Carnot to Nelson and Wellington leadership went to men whose strength all lay in genius, not position, who "formed new ideas, judged them, and carried them out" in the teeth of convention and routine. T h e y were indefatigable workers, "tireless athletes," as Berlioz and Delacroix were to be called, and ever ready to prove their worth. Measured by that exacting standard, Napoleon outtopped them all. Hence he could stand as their prototype. H e was the Individual that the new social order proposed to liberate, and he himself for half a dozen years acted as revolutionary liberator. It was no illusion to suppose that when careers were open to talents, these would manifest themselves early: the familiar instances of youthful maturity in Keats and Shelley, Leopardi and Byron, Bonington and Evariste Galois, Schubert and Berlioz, are a handful among a host. Sincc the phenomenon was new, men studied it, and the most thoughtful arrived at the conclusions we must share if we are to understand their outlook: originality and energy are virtues because they supply the ideas needed in a period of reconstruction. But judgment, reason, self-detach14

1240,

19.

Carlyle's Heroes, "it is too often forgotten, comprise the god, the prophet, the poet, the priest, the man of letters, and the king (or leader). 15

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ment — features of the Faustian "double man" — are equally necessary for choosing among the inspirations that the "inexplicable mechanism" of genius throws up. Finally, will power is required to make the idea — the imagined reality — a reality in fact. This defines the character of the romantic creator in any field, and it only remains to ask why admiration and even religious feeling are involved in a sequence that seems psychologically so natural. The answer is that the Romanticist had a sense of the world's resistance to change, to originality, and to genius. Against his thousands he found millions in whom art, glory, will, and the conquest of reality evoked no response. There seemed to be two varieties of the human species, the heroic and the conventional; Faust and Wagner; or again: the Philistine and the artist; the dedicated and Γ homme moyen sensuel. Whence the war depicted by Stendhal in Le Rouge et le Noir, by Balzac throughout the Comédie Humaine, by Berlioz and others in their memoirs." Inevitably, those who did more or wished to do more arrogated the superiority to themselves. The new aristocracy, they argued, must rest its claims on the kind of power that Stendhal found in Napoleon. Self-appointed at the beginning, this natural aristocracy was either sustained or denied by the heterogeneous world, which is why Balzac's Rastignac, looking down on Paris, says: "It's between you and me." 17 Viewed against the mass of mankind, the hero is Hegel's "worldhistorical character," the man who is both the embodiment and the creator of novelty." For it is a mistake to regard the struggle between the genius and the Philistine as one of pure antagonism: there is love as well. For one thing, the genius is in most instances sprung from the undistinguished mass; for another, the mass — now to be called "people" or "nation" — also possesses genius. Its traditions, which are the source of all true history, are a collective repository of art, wisdom, and heroism. The French revolution simply laid bare this reality by making the people for the first time a self-aware agent in history. Soon after, Romanticist art for the first time dramatized the people's existence. The historians gave the anonymous " It is impossible to read Goethe's Autobiography without recognizing the importance to him of Frederick the Great's contemporary achievements as warrior-king. One might surmise that the early appearance of the new Romanticist literature in Germany owed as much to this proto-Napoleonic symbol as to the inadequacy of the imported French style. 17 Père Goriot, last chapter. 18 Hegel's notion was obviously inspired by Napoleon's career. (Philosophy of History, Introd., and Part IV.) It is a striking coincidence that as Hegel was finishing his first great work, the Phenomenology, he looked up and saw Napoleon's troops entering Jena.

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crowd a genuine role in their narratives; the mob scenes in Scott, Carlyle, Hugo, Prescott, or Michelet added a new dimension to literature, and a Delacroix or a Berlioz could without affectation compose works like "The Twenty-eighth of July" or the carnival scene of Benvenuto Cellini. And from time to time, the mass responded, as we shall see when we find Berlioz conducting an incendiary March in Buda-Pesth.1® The conflict between leader and led was thus ambivalent, but the inevitable difference between their activities, together with the fact that power is always indivisible, led to the growth of two standards within one culture: creator and consumer valued the same things in opposite ways — life, art, pleasure, money, success. The works of the creators consequently show the characteristic Romantic tension: they express the time, place, people, and tradition, but without the consent of these inarticulate elements, and they project "ins Blaue hinein" the next step in that tradition. It is consequently an error to say that for the first time in history the Romantic artist is "divorced" from society: his whole art is a social mirror reflecting a social struggle. His own complaint is, on the contrary, that he wants to speak for his speechless fellows, instead of ignoring them as under the monarchy, and the populace objects, saying: "We do not feel, think, or act as you represent us." 20 Worst of all, this reluctant populace is not the real populace, but a limited group of well-to-do burghers with set ideas on the fine arts. Far from wanting to find their true life, full of conflicts and deficiencies, depicted in the works of contemporary artists, the bourgeois want these works to beguile, flatter, and soothe their bruised egos. Their mode of life and their prejudices must be as deeply respected by the artist who wants to succeed as the preferences of the princely patron ever were by his household entertainers. To the Philistine, art must remain entertainment through illusion while pretending to give the joys of self-knowledge. It is clear why the artist's war has to go on. It goes on against the Philistines because their full dense mass can be lighted and lightened by art, and it goes on amid the Philistines because they are part of life and because Romanticism is committed to inclusiveness. Indeed, from one point of view the unheeding are life in the sense that they define its social conditions: they are Polonius and Gretchen's neighbors, Fieramosca and 10

See Chapter 16. On the cultural split between nation and elite during the so-called classic centuries, see 1210, 428 ff 20

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Beckmesser. T o be "realistic," Romantic art stays close to the data of the workaday world; to bring novelty, it depicts the endless drama of the individual and the group. The conflict ranges from hell to heaven, and the drama is cast with personages drawn from all mankind. In representing this reality through art the Romanticist necessarily traverses a comparable range, from the wretched to the great, and from the dullard to the genius whom the natural conspiracy of dullards forces to become a hero. To sum up, all the relevant disciplines — history, psychology, social analysis, and the criticism of art —lend weight to the proposition that Romanticism is related to the previous age not in the way of revolt but in the way of revolution. Romanticism did not merely oppose or overthrow the neoclassic "Reason" of the Age of Enlightenment but sought to enlarge its vision and fill out its lacks by a return to a wider tradition — national, popular, medieval, and primitive as well as modern, civilized, and rational. At its fullest, Romanticism cherishes both experience and tradition, both emotion and reason, both the Graeco-Roman and the medieval heritage, both religion and science, both folk art and its cultivated offshoots, both formal strictness and the claims of substance, both the real and the ideal, both the individual and the group, both order and freedom, both man and nature. Its aim is inclusiveness, the recognition and placement of all experience as pro tanto valid, and the creation of a livable cosmology for man at the high point of his complexity and selfconsciousness. Actuality of course denies the complete fulfillment of this program — or to put it differently, Romanticism encounters what looks like irreducible contradictions, because it starts from man and accepts the contradiction which exists in him. Man is both great and puny, destined for glory and for wretchedness, superior to his fate and crushed by his fate, but he may achieve individual salvation through some unpredictable and unprescribed reconcilement of opposites which in retrospect we call his career. He must run the risk of failure because, as Pascal long before had said, "He is embarked." The outcome of the voyage depends on his individual energy, daring, openness to experience, stoutness of heart, greatness of intellect and imagination. It follows that Romantic accomplishment appears more incomplete, less equipoised than work done in the spirit of exclusion, of elimination of opposites, of social or other guarantees against risk, of refusal to accept as real the second branch of each dilemma. Romantic work is the work of self-reliance, tension, and perpetual innovation. It leads to the creation of the unique form for each conception, and hence to the regard for indi-

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vidual tone, nuance, local color, and what modernism calls "experiment." It leads also to the mixing of genres, because Romantic analysis undercuts verbal logic and asks why a man should not laugh and weep during the same evening's entertainment. The Romantic mingles comedy and tragedy and clears Shakespeare of imputed bad taste.21 Romantic criticism revivifies the arts by questioning the current — and historically recent — formulas in the light of experience: is it a fact that because the media of the several arts differ the realities which they evoke are distinct? — words rendering only actions, painting only images, and music only emotions? This has often been asserted but has it been ascertained? Experience shows that these various means of striking our senses do but suggest what neoclassical rule says they give; hence it is possible to extend communication across the arbitrary bounds: De Quincey can write in words an introspective "Dream Fugue" whose form justifies its musical title, and Berlioz can reclaim that same title and form for the last movement of his first symphony. It is a further fact that the Greeks and Romans who are presumed to have set the fixed boundaries of each genre did nothing of the kind. Aristotle, Longinus, and Horace are closer to Romantic precept — and the works they examine are closer to Romantic practice — than the works and precepts of their neoclassical eighteenthcentury interpreters. "Hence," said the Romanticist, "let us build in the open country, in the light of reason and experience: the zoning laws belong to an absolute monarchy that is dead." 22 The metaphor is a summary in itself: Romanticism is part of that great revolution which drew the intellect of Europe from a monarchical into a popular state, fom the court and the fashionable capitals into the open country and the five continents, from the expectation and the desire of fixity into the desire and expectation of change. No such enlargement of mental and physical horizons had been felt since the previous "Romantic" era, that of the expansion of Europe in the sixteenth century — whence 21 Paraphrasing H u g o ' s Preface to Croviwell, 1827. (1262, 19-50.) See also Berlioz' comments on Shakespeare {Mem., I, 9 7 - 8 ) , or almost any of De Quincey's essays, especially his " R h e t o r i c " and " T h e o r y of Literature." 22 T h e " l a w s " of music did not claim descent from Greek legislation, but f r o m Rameau's rationalization of harmony: " W h e n I think," said Berlioz, " o f the realm of chords w h i c h scholastic prejudice has declared forbidden ground, and which since m y emancipation 1 regard as m y o w n domain, I rush f o r w a r d in a kind of f r e n z y to explore it." (A.R., 88.) A n d again: "Lesueur's system was borrowed f r o m Rameau and his speculations on the vibrating string which he terms 'the sounding b o d y ' — as if strings were the only vibrating bodies in the universe; or rather, as if the theory of string vibrations were applicable to all other sounding bodies." (Mem., I, 30.)

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the sympathy of the later for the earlier period. Both were ages of exuberance and exploration, and both yielded comparable fruits: men of "universal" scope and works of art whose conception likens them to complete worlds. Nineteenth-century Romanticism would accept nothing less than the universe as a naked fact because it witnessed — or foresaw — the wreck of a society. But Romanticism faced the cultural task of primitive men without the relaxed responsibilities of primitives. It had to reabsorb the realities which the preceding two centuries had quite literally put out of court — wild nature, passion, superstition, myth, history, and "foreign parts." It was consequently not "exoticism" but discovery when Chateaubriand or Byron sought out the Near East or the Far West, when De Quincey or Nerval explored the world of dreams, when Goethe or Berlioz recaptured the supernatural, when Delacroix or Scott depicted the Middle Ages, when Rousseau or Wordsworth looked within themselves for sentiments hitherto concealed, when Pushkin and Balzac imported the commonplace and the extraordinary into fiction: Romanticism was a comprehensive Realism. There is no doubt that Romanticism accepted an enormous challenge and made an enormous claim. But to begin with, it inherited an enormous fortune, which had been accumulating since the fall of Rome. The Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment were an open treasure house, in which lay half hidden still older deposits, Pagan and Christian. When the twenty-five years of revolution had cleared the ground for a new start, the Romantics could build like first settlers who had not only brought with them perfected tools but who could also boast of abundant technical talent. In sheer amount of intellectual gifts, few epochs can match that which stretches from the birth of Goethe in 1749 to the death of Berlioz one hundred and twenty years later. This span, which brings it to within the birth years of eminent men now living, makes Romanticism the parent century of our own times. This is the major difficulty in seeing it steadily and whole. We have grown up within our father's house and our striving for independence makes us abhor the language spoken there. Until very recently our best critics have used every means to dissociate us from the Romantic era. It is they who keep repeating that the movement failed over a hundred years ago and that the monuments of Romanticist art are all "flawed masterpieces." The flattering inference is that after 1850 a new cultural start was made from whose finer strain we are sprung.

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Correctly interpreted, this double protection against the original R o manticism might be acceptable, but it is not likely that the anti-Romanticists w o u l d accept the necessary clauses of interpretation. Romanticism "failed" as a movement because, like all movements, it was the w o r k of men. Cultural history is a succession of failures in w h i c h are embedded great achievements or, alternatively, a succession of achievements w h i c h end in failure. T h e w o r k of an age is like a glacier, w h i c h strews the ground with debris, but also marks its passage w i t h great terminal moraines. Greece, Rome, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, all failed to usher in the millennium or to exhaust the possibilities of the human spirit. Death, fatigue, accidents of all sorts, put an end to whatever is " w o r k i n g " or has w o r k e d . Berlioz' vision of music festivals commensurate w i t h the needs of a great modern nation failed, as w e shall see, because the elements he sought in the social order were antagonistic among themselves, and no doubt also because he had not at his command the political p o w e r of a Louis X I V or N a p o l e o n — w h o in their sphere also failed. H e n c e those works of Berlioz' w h i c h were conceived for the nation's use lack the adventitious y e t necessary merit of having been assimilated b y his living compatriots. A n d this is true of innumerable other works sprung from kindred conceptions in the other arts.23 Does this mean that the great sketches of the Romantic cultural edifice are on that account worthless? T h e y are accurately termed "flawed masterpieces," for no earthly w o r k is flawless, and sketches are all w e have of any period. In time, our love and desire fill them in, w h i c h creates the pleasing illusion of perfection in the distance: the Mozart s y m p h o n y seems lucid and perf e c t because it no longer strives to speak, as it once did, of a life at hand, and so no longer provokes outraged comparisons. Habit, moreover, has given us an indulgent taste f o r the style's characteristic weakness or the form's inevitable padding. 24 But to g o o d contemporary judges the w o r k seemed rough and full of flaws.25 H o r a c e m a y tell us that sometimes H o m e r nods, but w e palliate the dullness under jargon or sentimental 23 E.g., François Rude's high-relief panels for the A r c de Triomphe. Though he is the great sculptor of the Romantic movement, Rude is scarcely known as such or in any other guise. Of his complete project for decorating the Arc only the "Call to Arms of 1792" was commissioned and executed. One modern critic. Miss Rebecca West, has written of her visit to the Rude museum at Dijon, but with uncomprehending eyes (Ending in Earnest, 148); the 14th Britannica has no article about him. 24 Compare Racine's galanterie, Pope's commonplace, Shakespeare's bombast. 25 See above eightcenth-century objections to Gluck, Mozart, and Beethoven, Chapters 3 and 4.

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28

attitudes that are entirely of our own making. It is proper that we should do so, but it follows that what we rightly value and call perfect is enjoyed at the cost of a wise and magnanimous overlooking of flaws. After a time — as Shakespeare's reputation proves — this becomes automatic and unconscious. The pressure of a relentless modernism which keeps offending us helps develop this receptivity for the work of thirty or fifty or a hundred years ago, all its modernism spent. Thus did a twentieth-century critic discover that the music of Berlioz' Damnation of Faust was "cleanly classical." 27 After making allowance for a changing perspective, there remains the broad distinction established earlier between Gothic and classic principles of art. The perfection of Romanticism is to bring into a tense equilibrium many radical diversities. It consequently produces work that shows rough texture, discontinuities, distortions — antitheses of structure as well as of substance. From the classical point of view these are flaws; but they are consented to by the Romanticist — indeed sought after — for the sake of drama; they are not oversights on the artist's part but planned concessions to the medium and the aim it subserves — as in engineering one finds gaps, vents, or holes to balance the effects of expansion by heat or stress of vibration. So, far from lacking a sense of form or neglecting its claims, the Romanticist abandons the ready-made formula because its excessive generality gives it too loose a fit. He constantly alters or invents formal devices — as Berlioz did in the Symphonie Fantastique — so that the work of art may satisfy the several requirements of subject, substance, and meaning, rather than simply fulfill a routine expectation.28 The result is a characteristic distortion or asymmetry, which may be observed equally in Gothic and Romantic work, in Shakespeare, Goethe, Berlioz, Hugo, Delacroix, or Stendhal. Hence, the folly of applying a classic or symmetrical "stencil" over a Romanticist conception: the parts that come through to the observer are bound to seem incoherent and to violate "the" form. A comparison of such attempts in the several arts yields historical proof of unity in Romantic principles, and serves to exonerate any great artist from the usual charges he is made to endure singly. Here is Delacroix 26

E.g., Zeus's bragging and bullying at the beginning of the Eighth Book of the Iliad, and the innumerable lines or half-lines of rhythmical filler. 27 See above, Introduction, and y62 28 Delacroix: " D o not run after a vain perfection. There are certain faults — or deemed such by the vulgar — which often are what gives life." And again: " T o make a wholly new kind of painting — by the extreme variety in the foreshortened parts." (182, I, 96 and j 2 . )

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being taken to task: " B y the aid of brilliant color he partly conceals his uncertain draughtsmanship; but the drawing is ragged, and the segments composing his pictures are broken by gaps and fissures. He obtains vividness by his sketchy technique, but the agonized faces, the swirling naked bodies, the faked ramping chargers, the theatrical Medea, . . . are too unsubstantial, too obviously put together by dextrous invention to convey the dramatic truth which Delacroix imagined he brushed into them. . . This might be called the standard accusation, at large and in detail. Change only the technical terms and titles of subjects and you have the usual denunciation of Berlioz the colorist who lacked "draftsmanship"; of Balzac, the melodramatic contriver of empty effects; of Stendhal, the injudicious artist who was led astray by love of the picturesque and who neglected motive to the detriment of clear design.30 But the constructive power of the great Romanticists — as the world is beginning to see in Berlioz — cannot be measured by casual or hostile inspection. Study is needed in order to find the deep premeditation of structure within a work which seems at first all improvisation and surface effects. Thus did Van Gogh and Emile Bernard study Delacroix, of whom Bernard asserts: " N o one more than Delacroix took greater care to establish his shadows with earths, ochres and blacks in order to weld together all the parts of his compositions . . ." 3 1 More interested in color, Van Gogh finds that Delacroix's composition also owes something to that supposedly adventitious element: "He proceeds by color as Rembrandt by values, but one is as good as the other." 32 We shall find that Berlioz, whose form can be vindi29 ( ιοηι, 446.) This is but one of a host of disparagements of Delacroix, from R. de Croy (1072, 161 ff.) to A . Clutton-Brock, who accuses him all at once of literariness, superficiality, formlessness, and impatient workmanship. (1068, IOO-I.) 30 On Berlioz, see for example, 1362 and η 18; on Balzac, Faguet's biography; the objections to Stendhal may be inferred from this spirited defense: "Stendhal knew what he was about. . . . T h e y have told [us] time and again that he was obscure (what a legend!) that his aridity and minuteness of style, his passion for paradox, his difficulty, in a word, kept him from being an author of the first rank . . . W h a t they have always seemed loath to do is to present him on his own merits." (1239, Preface.) 31

236, 3 3 . 236, 96-7. Washington Allston, the American Romantic painter, wrote of his visit to Paris in 1817: "It was the poetry of color which I felt . . . [the] great colorists addressed themselves, not to the senses merely, as some have supposed, but rather through them to that region . . . of the imagination, which is supposed t a b e under the exclusive dominion of music." ( / / / 7 , 41.) 32

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cated on traditional grounds, similarly made of tone color an element of structure and likewise incurred the charge of using it as a cloak.*3 Beyond technique and justifying technique is the provocative question of subject matter. Although critics often pretend to disregard the subject of a work of art, they respond to it; and if repelled, attempt to rationalize the impression by impugning the form. It was very justly said by one of Stendhal's first admirers in the 1880's that recognition had been denied the novelist because "he had taken the dangerous privilege of inventing for himself unique feelings and writing of them in an unexampled style." 54 The objections to Berlioz' subjects are familiar: violent, fantastic, extravagantly emotional. The modern critic cited earlier against Delacroix speaks of the painter's state of mind as "Byronism," which is "an extinct malady"; he takes it for granted that because "Greece [is] of less significance than Persian oil fields," the "Massacre at Scio" depicts unreal "hollow forms." ss This was written before the last World War, during which it was curious to observe the quick resuscitation of these various "Romantic" and "Byronic" subjects under the stern teaching of European events. The lesson of course is not merely that we must refrain from asking Romanticist work to show a classical surface, it is also that we cannot appreciate the art of any age without first acquiring an equivalent of the experience it depicts. Since we cannot turn the clock back, we must immerse ourselves in the literature, the history, and the speech of the period and observe its recurrent features, just as we might try to decode a cipher without a key: the longer the text in the unknown tongue, the sooner we unriddle it. But just as in ciphers or in kindred tongues resemblances lead to serious misconceptions, so between the speech of Romanticism and ours, confusions are bound to occur unless this overlapping is recognized and the separate meanings finely distinguished. Earlier chapters of this book tried to show in the person of Berlioz the effect of having been born at a certain time with an impressionable temperament. In him and other creators this temperament produced the works by which we still judge the times. Now by 1840 the point has been reachcd where the revolution of 33 For the rationale of Berlioz' forms: T o v e y (590, 76), Newman, passim, and Supplement 6. On color as a part of structure, V a n Dieren {$26, 24 and 27). 34 Paul Bourget in 1058, 278. Championing Stendhal was at that time an unpopular and even a discrediting occupation — a further parallel to the situation of Delacroix and Berlioz. (1241, v; //07, 33.) 35 1071, 443. But three pages farther, he adds: "I have no fault to find with his subject matter."

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Romanticism may be considered over, though its makers live on. T h e y continue to produce and exert influence, but European culture is caught between their action and the strong reaction of a second generation of men w h o know Romanticism though not its grounds. W h a t happened from first to last may be likened to a symphony in four movements. T h e initial Romanticism or first phase (stretching from 1790 to 1850) put forth all the themes used in western culture until our own times. T h e next three phases, commonly called Realism, Impressionism (or Symbolism), and Naturalism developed single themes previously stated, worked separate veins of the original deposit: they were periods of specialization. None of these four phases neatly stops in order to let the next begin. T h e y orchestrate their tendencies as best they may and project themselves into the present age. A f t e r 1840 one discerns moreover a movement steadily diverging from the main evolution of Romanticism and its various offshoots. T h i s once again calls itself Classicism. T h e neoclassic impulse is the same whether it moves Puvis de Chavannes, Brahms in mid-career, or Stravinsky in his postwar restlessness seeking "authority, order, and discipline." 39 T h e crisscrossing of styles, movements, and opinions then becomes wonderfully complicated, but not beyond analysis. T h e first transformation is that of the hospitable realism (with a small r) of the Romantic period into the specialized, restricted, and embittered Realism of the Realists with a large R . T h e change came from a desire to simplify in order to grasp the Real more surely and closely. T h e Realists carved themselves a path down the center of experience, taking as real what mankind share in common, what is ordinary, tangible, recurrent. Realism corresponded to the materialistic science of the fifties, which displaced Romantic vitalism. Soon Realism came to mean not simply the common but the sordid; it began not alone to "correct" Romanticism by reduction but to reproach it for failing to make its extraordinary visions an every-day occurrence. Whereupon in the eighties a new generation of artists, also seeking the real but dissatisfied with the Realists' limited definition of it, discovered that the true haunts of the Real were no longer in the factual and the commonplace but in the subjective and the mysterious, in "impressions" and "symbols." This was phase three, clearly related to Romanticism and sometimes called "neoromantic." 3 7 In the same decades (eighties and 3e889,

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nineties), still other men dealt with the decay of Realism by reacting against the reaction, and strengthened the dose of concreteness in their an by borrowings from science and sociology which they called Naturalism.™ This schema is necessarily abstract, but what it states as a generality is what everyone admits in detail: studying Balzac, the Impressionist Henry James says "every road comes back to him."** Delacroix, says the historian, is the fountainhead of modern painting: Corot, Courbet, Daumier, Signac, Van Gogh, Odilon Redon, and Renoir looked back to him and proceed from him.40 Yet not everyone whose eye can spot an Impressionist canvas would see its "descent with modification" from any given Delacroix. The reasons for this are two: according to the "schema" here given, there is bound to be more impressionism in an Impressionist than in a Delacroix; for the impressionist element is but one of Delacroix's many perceptions whereas it is the whole stock-in-trade of the Impressionist. The Romanticist is inclusive, his descendants exclusive. It cannot be too often repeated: technically and philosophically the Romantic is encyclopedic, his successors are specialists. They refine, extend, sort out, then multiply what he has found and made.41 The second reason is corollary to the first: you must know where to go in Delacroix to find the clearest foreshadowing of later methods; you must, for example, turn to his canvas "Jesus on Lake Genesareth," and find in it what Signac and Van Gogh found.42 If you seek instead Delacroix's meaning for the Realists, study "The Algerian Women"; for his Naturalism, the "Noce Juive" or "Massacre at Scio" — his Romanticism being the sum total of these styles, made into his style, by fusion with the less definable elements of an individual sensibility. This hypothesis may easily be tested upon Berlioz, and even by using evidence from an opponent: "There is not one Berlioz," says Mr. Elliot, "there are half a dozen; and they are as different from one another as pressions in the work of their predecessors. Thus the Romanticists' clamor about truth and drama meant new truth and more vivid drama; and oddly enough they were called "Naturalistic" and "Symbolic" as well as accused of cultivating "art for art's sake." (1114, 304 fi.) 38 Huysmans, the Goncourt brothers, George Moore, and others show how Symbolism and Naturalism can coexist in one man or one work. 39 The Lesson of Balzac (1905), p. 116. 40 11 i f ; and — among other notices — the "remarkable relationships" observed at a recent Delacroix-Renoir show ( N . V . Times, Feb. 17, 1948). 41 This holds true in other disciplines than art, in science, historiography, philosophy, economics, etc. 42 Van Gogh: "Ah, the beautiful painting of Delacroix — 'The bark of Christ on Lake Genesareth' . . . oh what a piece of genius!" (236, 112.)

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they are different from all other composers. The Berlioz of the Requiem and the Te Deum is poles apart from the Berlioz of Benvenuto Cellini. What have either of these in common . . . with the composer of Romeo et Juliette . . . ? What of him who penned Les Troy ens — or that unique middle section of L'Enfance du Christ?"43 Berlioz answered ahead of time: " A change of subject requires a change of style," 44 and the explanation is endorsed by those who have made it their business to trace the development of nineteenth-century music. Students of "Realism in Music" " can point to the ways in which Berlioz translated nature symphonically without imitation yet with a vividness which makes him seem to some listeners only a Realist. Other scholars point out that one of the founders of the Impressionist School, Debussy, grew up as an admirer of Berlioz and continued to be his debtor in technique and conceptions.4* Of their own accord, the German Naturalist Richard Strauss, and the Russians with Moussorgsky at their head, acknowledged their indebtedness to the aspects of Berlioz' art which were akin to theirs.47 One has but to hear A Night on Bald Mountain after the last movement of the Symphonie Fantastique or Don Quixote after Harold in Italy to perceive the connections — connections, it goes without saying, which leave the merit and originality of the later composers absolutely intact. The only reason — apart from its interest — for investigating this kinship is that it spells Open Sesame to dozens of historical riddles, while preventing the confusion of individual sensibility with Zeitgeist. Sensibility is the artist's personal touch — the tone or temper which no one is bound to like. Zeitgeist is the predominant outlook, the tone of time. Use for comparison Debussy's nocturne Fêtes, which discloses almost like a manifesto the Impressionist point of view. In this short atmospheric piece the melodic material is presented as if broken up; it is almost satirically distorted. The merrymaking begins afar off and we receive merely an impression, which so to speak interposes the sophisticated self between the vulgar noises of the fete and the delicate ears of the listener. But Debussy is only able to avoid what he might call rhetoric by relying on our knowledge of the real thing. If we had never overheard a parade nor listened to Berlioz' Roman Carnival overture, Debussy's fragments would fail to be 43

278, 203. Attentive criticism says of Turner: "In a sense his 'manners' were almost as many as his pictures, or at any rate as his subjects . . . T h e styles are not successive but concomitant." (1093, i-ii.) 45 See 464; 6857 and 77p. Also Mr. Elliot (278, 147-9). 44

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evocative. Indeed, Debussy repeatedly alludes to Berlioz' Carnival in his own Fêtes by touches of rhythm, melody, and timbre. But on purpose Debussy's pace stays unarousing and the melody never achieves breadth. Unlike the Berlioz saltarello, the nocturne does not make anything happen before us, much less involve us in its swing. For Debussy's conception is that of an observer who tells, Berlioz' that of a dramatist who recreates. Yet just as Debussy's allusiveness marks his reliance on previous art, so we find on the Romantic work anticipations of the Impressionist technique. Berlioz' Carnival contains at least one passage of Impressionist "comment" through distortion, when theme and rhythm "go to pieces" in a way comparable to the kaleidoscope of Fêtes.** The Impressionist may of course abandon his spectator's post and yield to the lure of energy: in the Prelude to The Afternoon of a Faun, the broken melody on which the opening section is based leads to a highly rhetorical passage of so romantic a strain that it reminds one of the Benvenuto Cellini overture. It is the proportion of these two elements that determines the difference in style and in generations. T o sum up: as in Delacroix, so in Berlioz one finds the constituent elements of subsequent styles down to the present,4' and in these styles a residue of the pure Romanticism; only its amount is minimal because of the imperative necessity to do something other and neater than their great and Gothic predecessors."0 In accounting for Debussy and his stylistic departure, it is usual to pit him against Wagner, whose historical role is deemed to be Romanticism at its culmination. In the present reading of the facts, Wagner already represents the anti-Romantic mood of the neoclassic and Realist. This view is shared by almost all his early apologists except Baudelaire. In L'art romantique, Baudelaire treated Wagner as Delacroix's counterpart, but allowance must be made for the critic's propagandists motive and imperfect knowledge of music. The common opinion of the refined zealots of the Revue Wagnérìenne, ranging from Mallarmé to Houston Stewart 48

Min. Sc., pp. 40-42. Dr. Alfred Einstein, in his Musik Lexikon of 1926, based on Eaglefield Hull, calls Berlioz outright the "father of Impressionism in music." (1343, 51.) An historian of harmony, E. Kurth, has explained the basis of the kinship. (831.) 48 For another example at random, see the harmonic structure of Berlioz' song Sur les lagunes and compare it with the technique characteristic of the modern French song writers, beginning with Duparc. "Paul Valéry (1134, 145) once defined Baudelaire's problem as "how to be a great poet without being either Lamartine or Hugo or Musset" — and so had Baudelaire himself expressed it in a preface to Les Fleurs du Mal. (123η, ι ι - ι . )

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Chamberlain, bears out the interpretation here proposed.51 Their editorin-chief, Edouard Dujardin (the same whose novel supplied a hint for Joyce's Ulysses), was explicit on the point: "Wagner is no Romanticist; Berlioz is; Wagner reproduces all of life, not a given emotion." The writer adds, to be sure, that Wagner's art offers a double synthesis which embraces everything from Bach to Berlioz in music, and from Racine to Hugo in drama.52 But Mallarmé in a neighboring essay makes the distinction — although on national grounds — between the poetic or imaginative Romanticist art, and the more earthy Realistic.53 All the evidence points to the fact that Wagner considered himself a Realist. His belief in the need for words, action, and scenery to fulfill the aim of musical discourse was strengthened bv his study of Feuerbach, the materialist, and Vischer, the advocate of a new realism in opera." T o Wagner, history was not real because remote and "romantic." The "naked man," as he told Liszt, could only be shown through the common fund of legend and its vivid embodiment on the stage. By these means he taught the younger generation music and philosophy at once. He was solid, continuous, and literal. The Wagnerian Revelation (as it was freely termed) was described as "positivist and mystic" — again no paradox when one remembers how naturally the father of Positivism, Auguste Comte, came to top off his philosophy with a mystical authoritarianism. By 1845 Comte's active disciple Littré was beginning to preach and proclaim the Positivist era. In every field Romanticist variety and freedom were being tightened up into rigid systems. Without changing its nature, Romanticism came to seem more than ever loose, unpredictable, and lawless. "As against the antithetical ways of Hugo and Berlioz," says one critic, "Wagner gives us Racinian Realism." 55 Another, who writes on "Wagnerian Painting," says: "Wagner does what Puvis de Chavannes did in opposition to Delacroix, whose romanticism was frequently crude." 56 And a third: "Berlioz occasionally makes us marvel, touches us often, but his preoccupations 51

T h e contributors included in addition: J. K. Huvsnians, Emile Hennequin, Paul Verlaine, Villiers de l'isle Adam, Catulle Mendès, René Ghil, Stuart Merrill, Hans von Wolzogen, and Alfred Ernst —this last being the son of Berlioz' friend, the violinist Heinrich Ernst. 52 140s, 76 and 130-1. 53 1403, 198. 54 "Vorschlag zu einer Oper" (1844). T h e opera, says Vischer, must turn from the subjective to the objective by a fusion of all the arts and a reliance on the truth of myth. For this purpose he suggested and sketched a Nibelungen libretto. (Kritische Gänge, II, 399 ff.) 55 1404, 98. 66 1404, 107.

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are no longer ours. . . . But Wagner, Wagner is enamored of intímate truth and unity." 57 The claim is revealing: all schools of art strive toward reality and unity, but they dispute about the hiding place where reality lies and about the devices for rendering it. The Realist with a capital R contends that the sensations which recur, which are common and fixed in Everyman's experience, best convey reality. This fixity and material truth Wagner achieves with his gigantic system of leitmotives, involving the tireless recurrence of short, denotative themes linked to persons and objects; while his continuous and as it were explanatory developments effectively persuade the senses that they touch the Real. This the Romanticist does not dispute, but he holds the effect and the means to be but one kind among many. The direct blow which he too aims at the senses he prefers to deliver through infinitely varied appeals to the imagination.™ It is in fact the common complaint that Romanticist work "appeals to the imagination rather than the heart." 89 The distinction occurs spontaneously to dozens of writers dealing with the Romantics, and what it implies is that the observer recognizes the artist's intent but is not immediately moved by its expression. He is not moved because the means chosen are not sufficiently massive, direct, usual — the "heart" is the place where familiar symbols strike, where, so to speak, melodrama comes home. It is no attack on Realism to point this out, for ultimately all art worth discussing must somehow move the patient. The argument is whether all the roads that lead to Rome must be equally short and straight. w

140s, 124-5. Both in England and in France, critics complained of their own untouched hearts and overworked imagination as soon as genuinely Romantic work began to appear (e.g., in 1818 the Edinburgh Review on Hazlitt's Lectures on the English Poets, and in 1830 the Moniteur on Martinez' Revolt of the Moors). Since then, the cleavage among critics has remained distinct, as may be seen in the footnote following. 50 Any sampling will show, in the uncertainty of diverse phrasing, what it is the critics are trying to unriddle — the relation of intellect to imagination, and of "heart" to what they call the Real: On Stendhal: "The qualities of his style, like those of his mind, go more directly to the intelligence than to the heart . . . and this is the greatest cause of his unpopularity." Charles Simon, 1926, 1128, 15. On Hugo: "His poetry is the work of the imagination rather than the heart." R. Fernandat, 1928, uo$, 179. On Berlioz: " T h e Damnation of Faust lends itself rather to the play of imagination than to a real representation." Paul Landormy, 1931, HS, 7. On Goethe: "Faust is a play designed rather for the ideal stage seen in the imagination than for actual production on the boards." Albert Schweitzer, 1932, 1123, 140. 88

392 To

Berlioz t h e o r d i n a r y and the doctrinaire Realist alike, o u r

representative

R o m a n t i c i s t B e r l i o z d o e s not, f o r all his imputed volcanism, m o v e the heart. 6 0 " F l a w l e s s dramatist t h o u g h he is, he does n o t t o u c h us." S o said the W a g n e r i a n T e o d o r de W y z e w a , w h o rejected M o z a r t and S h a k e speare f o r the same reason." 1 A n d the reason is that B e r l i o z and M o z a r t and Shakespeare r e q u i r e us t o be s o m e t h i n g m o r e than sensitive, n a m e l y imaginative, w h i c h is t o s a y that w e must b o t h feel and act u p o n o u r f e e l i n g ; imagination, like all r o m a n t i c faculties, is a fusion of opposites: it blends f e e l i n g and reason, apprehension and action, sense and

idea.* 2

R e a d e r s o f p o e t r y w h o p r e f e r S h e l l e y t o K e a t s w i l l understand h o w the distinction applies t o these poets: K e a t s is d i r e c t l y sensual and m o v e s e v e n those w h o n e v e r i n f e r his ideas. S h e l l e y m o v e s n o one w h o is n o t capable See comments above on Berlioz' melody, Subchapter 4 and also ' o j j , 44. 1404, 158, 193 and 267. In Shakespeare, the short scenes, the frequent breaks, and the allusive or mixed styles of dialogue must inevitably strike the classicist and the Realist as less than adequate. It is noteworthy that within ten years of Shakespeare's great popularity in Paris — a popularity created b y the enthusiasm of the Romantic professionals (so to speak) — he was neglected until G é m i e r and the T h é â t r e Antoine in the Symbolist (neo-Romantic) period. It was this eclipse w h i c h contributed to the ending of the career of Harriet Smithson Berlioz. "2 Baudelaire: " T h e imagination [is] the supreme and absolute faculty, w h i c h replaces the heart — or w h a t is called the heart — from w h i c h reason is ordinarily excluded. . . . Imagination is that sudden, active energy, that quickness of decision, and mystical fusion of reason and passion, which characterizes those born to act." (1049, 416.) W o r d s w o r t h defines the same faculty: "Reason in her most exalted mood." (Prelude, X I V , 188.) It was k n o w n to the Romantic sixteenth century, f o r Vasari speaking of the great Venetian painters, tells of certo fiantmegiare — a kind of flaming passion. T h o r e a u finds it natural to say: "Comparatively, we can excuse any offence against the heart, but not again the imagination. . . . T h e Imagination knows — and it controls the breast. It is not foundationless but most reasonable, and it alone uses all the knowledge of the intellect." ( 1280, 140.) Shaw has one of his most autobiographical characters say: " N e v e r mind my heart: an Irishman's heart is nothing but his imagination." (John Bull's Other ¡sland, 17.) Delacroix terms it "a delicacy in the organs of sense w h i c h makes one see when others do not see, or makes one see differently." (182,1, 87.) A n d Ruskin, defending Turner's Romantic esthetics, declares that "no art is noble which in any wise depends upon direct imitation for its effects upon the minds. . . ." It should depend on "that mode of symbolical expression which . . . in no wise trusts to realisation." (1120, III, 164-5.) Berlioz' statement on imagination is to be found in Lélio's monologue before the Chorus of Shades: it amounts to an identification of the music-making power w i t h the ability to conceive reality — something like Coleridge's esemplastic faculty. (See Biographia Literaria, Ch. 10.) 01

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of feeling thoughts — whence his false reputation as "an ineffectual angel." " In short, the triad of artistic ways runs as follows: neoclassic art appeals chiefly to the common, central perceptions of the mind: it is general and abstract; Realism, to the common, central perceptions of sense: it is of the heart and the senses; Romanticism assumes the active co-ordination of mind and heart (or sense) and plays an endlessly modulating nine upon the great distributor of impulses and re-creator of experience — the imagination. We can now unriddle the critical paradox which says — as above — "Berlioz touches us often" and again, "his music is cold, lacks eloquence — it moves us not." One listener has, or uses, his imagination while the other is waiting for his heart to be engaged. The felt contrast between Wagner's Tristan and Berlioz' Romeo and Juliet is an audible demonstration of the esthetic difference. It is not merely that at Wagner's opera one sees, whereas at Berlioz' concert one merely hears; it is that Berlioz' sounds are not designed to sweep us off our feet and impose their tale of love and death, but rather to start and guide an imaginative act — what for want of better words we have called a "gesture of the spirit" — which remains as invisible and intangible as the music." This is not to draw invidious comparisons, for it is perfectly clear that hitherto public judgment has always been rendered in favor of the direct hit — genius being equal. The preponderently imaginative artist, be he Berlioz, Goethe, Shelley, Delacroix, or Stendhal, is at a disadvantage when pitted against Wagner, Schiller, Keats, Corot, or Flaubert. Even the neoclassic is better off, for his rarefaction occurs where rarefaction is accepted, in the intellect. Accordingly, Wagner knew what he was about when he loaded his 83 Joseph Warren Beach has aptly said of Keats and Shelley: "In voluptuousness . . . it is hard to choose and fairly easy to distinguish between them. T h e sensuous effects of Keats seem more earthy, since in him the color is more often attached to solid substances, while in Shelley, it is so much more likely to be the tenuous attribute . . . of elements in motion and spiritual essences." (tojo, 1 2 - 1 3 . ) 64 For example, in Berlioz the unleashed spring of the great love theme when first sounded in the Prologue is a pulse that may speak to the imagination of fond meeting, eager recognition, transports of joy, embrace, or any other mental and physical concomitants of exuberant energy. It is unattached to the story, or even to the idea of love. Compare in Tristan, Isolde's waving scarf and the realistic figure that accompanies it in the orchestra, or still better, in the love scene, the rhythm and dynamics paralleling a physical act that the laws of the land will not permit Wagner to incorporate into the Gesamtkumtnxerk. [This legal restriction seems to be disappearing: 1969.]

394

Berlioz

music drama with an intricate allegory and at the same time repudiated the imaginative use of music in the very words of Heart-versus-Imagination: "So-called 'tone-painting' has been the manifest last stage of an absolute-instrumental music's evolution, no longer addressing itself to the Feeling, but the Phantasy, an experience which anyone may make for himself by hearing a Mendelssohnian or still more a Berliozian composition on top of a tone-piece of Beethoven." " It was no desire for meaningless "purity" which led Berlioz to prefer idealization and equivalence to direct Realism; apart from the Zeitgeist, it was a temperament essentially sober and aristocratic, which did not need thick sensations to move it. The contrast between Berlioz' wiry orchestration and Wagner's rich impasto is as the difference between Delacroix's glow and Courbet's opaque solidity —all four admirable in their place. Had Berlioz been a mid-century Realist, he would have put bells in the Easter chorus of his Faust (as Wagner was to do in Parsifal). He contented himself with plucked notes in the basses. He could have scored his Ride to Hell so as to sound no less physically exciting than the ride of the Valkyries; instead, he simply outlined the forward motion in a persistent but light design for the violins — we infer, with Marlowe's Faustus, that "hell is in the mind, nor am I out of it." Most conclusive, perhaps, is the forging song in Benvenuto Cellini, for here and in Rheingold each composer espouses a species of realism; but Wagner makes sure of his effect by an excellent combination of stage noises, orchestra, and eighteen anvils behind the scenes. Berlioz transmutes the bustle into a theme (trombones and basses) and by rhythm and dynamics alone evokes the forge as an accompaniment which rises and dies with the hope, fear, and distress of his hero: the reality is shown through the motions of the spirit; ideal connotations arise out of the transfigured sounds of nature. From this conception which — it must be said again — was itself natural and unpremeditated in Berlioz, it is easy to derive the Symbolism of the later French school. We have thus looped the loop, joining Romanticism to its grandchild, neoromantic Impressionism, while showing the relations of Realism and neoclassicism to each other and to their pair of opposites. In musical Symbolism or Impressionism, Romantic imagination becomes even more remote from things and their direct rendering — precisely as in Monet's canvases touches of shimmering light replace solid objects and in Seurat the world is all dots. *

"243, II. Î32·

*

*

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There would be no need of any schema, distinction, or terminology if our impressions of art were as pure and accurate as we tend to think they are. Everyone believes himself blessed with immaculate perception, though the most casual view of printed or spoken opinion proves the reverse. Buried assumptions waylay and trip us up without so much as apprising us of our stumbling. That is why like mariners we must correct our course by taking frequent bearings and making allowance for every kind of tide and drift. Unless we have charted the main currents of an age we mistake the usual for the unique and our judgment fails. So far we have placed Berlioz in his times by defining his forebears and successors, but in order to complete the topography of his age, there remains one element to describe. This is the secular religion of art with its corollary, the mission of the artist in society. Romanticism did not invent either the creed or its main commandment. They were implicit in the Deism of the Enlightenment, which made science (and the works of reason generally) the justification of man's existence. In music, Mozart gave this idea expression in The Magic Flute (1791 ), whose freemasonic allegory teaches a moral not very remote from Beethoven's setting of Schiller's Ode in the Ninth: the brotherhood of man and the fulfillment of the divine in him.8" But until the next century, the doctrine was only a catchword or a precarious policy. As Stendhal said, good intentions had been strenuously voiced for a hundred and fifty years and the task of the nineteenth century was to carry a few of them out. The practical Romantics supplemented the cult of science and pure reason with the cult of art precisely because they felt that art was closer to action. In the beginning, sang Goethe, was — not the Word — but the Deed; and Napoleon, as Goethe and others saw him, represented creativeness in fact. In the same social sphere the artist had a mission, which was to lead mankind to self-fulfillment by exalting heroism and the tragedy of effort. This raised art to the status of a religion, in the same degree that man had once more accepted his kinship with the gods. "All deities reside in the 68 Although Mozart's idiom was, in its outward manifestation, that of the "classic" century, his temperament and opinions were strongly marked by the period of cultural ferment through which he lived: he was in his twenties when Werther was sweeping Europe, and though Mozart's sensibility was tempered by irony, his letters show him to have been as nervous and tempestuous a character as Beethoven or Berlioz. Those who deny his connection with the age of Rousseau must rely on a conventional view of the times and the men. See rather W . J. Turner (1026, 227).

39 J a n ·

!

4>

i8

4'·

If y o u like the music, I shall instrument

Music for Europe

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the piano accompaniment for a pretty little orchestra and will have it played at one of my concerts." ,e For his other good friend Théophile Gautier, and upon his verses, Berlioz likewise composed the six great songs, Nuits d'Eté, which he published in June 1841.17 And within the same months he was still scheming to obtain the vaguely promised libretto from Scribe. For this purpose he even endured the agony of going fishing with him, at the cost of missing an afternoon with Delacroix.1* But Scribe's name was such an open sesame at the Opera that its bearer would not readily commit himself; he pleaded that he was extremely busy. Berlioz then tried to induce him to collaborate with Frederic Soulié in the making of a half-ghostwritten libretto. Failing this there was the possibility of reviving Weber's Freischütz and being put in charge of the enterprise. This did succeed, but not without incredible complications which show that it was neither Berlioz' personality nor his musical technique that created confusion around his undertakings, but an absolutely vicious tradition of musical management. In March 1841, the Opera announced that Berlioz would direct the rehearsals of Freischütz. This meant that he would also compose the necessary recitatives and perhaps a ballet, since the operagoers could tolerate neither spoken dialogue nor a masterpiece unrelieved by dancing. The proposed title — Robin des Bois — was that of the absurd but successful arrangement of Castil-Blaze, whom Berlioz had denounced sixteen years before. One result of trying to capitalize this past publicity was that, in spite of repeated protests from Germany, the rights in the opera remained the property of Castil-Blaze and Sons. Since they had despoiled Weber, the Blaze family now felt — on the principle of "set a thief" — that Berlioz was robbing them.1' So the press campaigns against Berlioz began anew. An anonymous article in the Revue des Deux Mondes, doubtless written by Henri Blaze, sought to discredit Berlioz as a conductor of works other than his own. He, who had never replied to a single criticism, felt obliged to refute the accusation of adding parts to the old masters. The reference was to his recent festival concert: "Iphigeneia was performed exactly as written; therefore no one can have " A J L , 43517

The choice and the titles are by Berlioz, with Gautier's consent. The actual dates of composition are not known. 18 Possibly a sitting for his portrait, a project which was never resumed. This was unfortunate, for otherwise we should have had Berlioz' portrait in three styles, those of Delacroix, Courbet, and Daumier. See below Iconography. 10 What is more, the opera "belonged," in a performing sense, to the OpéraComique, whose singers, managers, stage hands, and ushers rose as one man and swelled the opposition to the revival.

4o6

Berlioz

heard any ophicleides in it. As for Palestrina 'a few sopranos' cannot have been 'sufficient for him' since his madrigal . . . is in four parts. The critic must moreover have been oddly absent-minded if he found the work 'crushed under instrumental pomp,' since I performed it, as written, without accompaniment. These are the misstatements I wish to have corrected, for they libel me in my capacity as interpreter of the great masters." 20 The periodical did not print Berlioz' letter but alluded to it jokingly. Jokes took care of everything, including unspent aggressiveness. "Our musical world," wrote Berlioz early in 1841, "has been rent of late by a thousand rival ambitions, which go beyond the bounds of patience and reason and attain the pitch of envy and hatred." 21 By April, Berlioz was at work supplying Freischütz with recitatives written in the style of Weber himself, as well as arranging the Invitation to the Dance and other fragments for the ballet. Just then Liszt came back from Italy indignant at the pitiable sum that had been raised throughout Europe for the projected monument to Beethoven. T o raise more money he and Berlioz gave an all-Beethoven concert on April 25. It consisted of the Ε-flat piano concerto and the Pastoral: the public expressed its satisfaction by clamoring for Liszt's "Fantasia on Themes from Meyerbeer's Robert le Diable."21 The next month the Opera was rehearsing Weber, and quite appropriately the Gazette Musicale asked the young German musician Richard Wagner to write one or more articles for it on the subject of the opera. Berlioz had especially liked one of Wagner's previous essays — an imaginary visit to Beethoven — and had drawn attention to it in his own column in the Débats. Wagner now wrote two which, had Berlioz been like his French colleagues or like Wagner himself, he would certainly have "edited" or suppressed. For without having heard or seen a note of Berlioz' recitatives, Wagner condemned them — politely enough, but in a way to prejudice the public against the entire revival. Besides setting himself the precedent of passing judgment on Berlioz without knowledge, Wagner assumed that Berlioz' recitatives would be fiery, dramatic, "personal," and would therefore kill the airs and choruses that they introduced. Berlioz let the articles appear, with only a heading to the effect that Wagner was judging the work from the point of view of German tradi20

Corresp., 132. Feb. 14, 1841. 22 The proceeds were less than might have been hoped, for all the musicians, except Liszt and Berlioz, demanded, then and afterwards, the regular pay for their services. (23!, II, 360.) 21

1386,

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a

tion. This, of course, Wagner had every right to do, condemning in so many words any change from Weber's originally spoken text. But he also and illogically concluded that if Freischütz must be made into a grand opera, no one could do it better than Berlioz, "a man of genius whose poetic verve is of irresistible energy." 24 As so often in their relations, it is Wagner who is hasty, impetuous, and incoherent, and Berlioz who knows what he is about. Berlioz' aim was to rescue and restore Weber's masterpiece. This he did with a solicitous care to which his manuscript testifies. He copied out the translated words under the parts himself so as to make sure that neither rhythm nor melody should be destroyed for prosody. The recitatives might seem overlong — that was unfortunately determined by the number of words — but they were written as tightly as possible and not at all to show off Berlioz' "energy."28 The ballet music came from Weber himself, directly from Oberon and Preciosa, indirectly through Berlioz' orchestration of the invitation to the Dance. In that task, Berlioz could truly say, "not a note has been changed." Berlioz knew his Weber and respected his work. At first the cabal led by Blaze dimmed the success of the opera, but it overcame their efforts and even made money — almost as much as the Meyerbeer repertoire and a great deal more than Don Giovanni.™ Wagner fulfilled his prediction of not liking it. He uttered his distaste in a serial for his Dresden paper, largely devoted to congratulating himself on being a German and hating everything French.27 Of Berlioz' obvious feeling for Weber or the faithful musicianship of the revival, there is hardly any mention. Although Berlioz had not come to the end of his tribulations with the 33 " W e deemed it propter to publish this essay because on all questions it is right to hear both sides and our readers will find pleasure in seeing Freischütz treated exclusively as a German work." (1398, May 23, 1841.) 24 1398, reprinted in 243, VII, 178-82. Eight years later Wagner set his hand to revising the dialogue and recitatives of Don Giovanni for a performance in Zurich (1850), and lived to re-instrument the Ninth for the dedication of Bayreuth (1872). 20 The historian of opera, W . Apthorp, remarks that: "These recitatives of Berlioz', by the way, were probably the first attempt at doing anything colloquial in that line in French." (69$, 147 n.) For the score, see 18. Their mode of delivery was beyond Berlioz' power to change: the slow "broad" style was too deeply ingrained; we find Saint-Saëns still complaining of it forty years later. 2β 268, î83. 27 Dresden Abendzeitung, July 16, 17, 19, 20, and 21, 1841. When a few months later Wagner wrote to Berlioz asking him to use his influence so that a benefit might be given for Weber's widow, Berlioz replied cordially, saying he would try again to persuade the authorities. (23j, II, 185.)

4o8

Berlioz

Freischütz, it was dropped from the repertory within six months. Nevertheless it served him while it lasted by helping the sale of his Nuits (Γ Eté, which appeared towards the end of June 1841, and of which more will be said on a later page.28 Their success at this time only shows again the advertising power of the Opera. Two months later that establishment performed large parts of Spontini's Corteζ, which Berlioz was able to enjoy as an uninvolved spectator. Like the Freischütz, the work of Spontini enabled him to relive the enthusiasms of his youth. "I feel a hundred and ten years old." 29 He felt bound to express his admiration direct to the old master, sketching in the course of his letter the idea of a musical center for Europe. There the great masterpieces would be given with the utmost care, at wide intervals, before a prepared public. These performances would correspond to the great religious ceremonies of ancient Greece. Music would be sought out in a receptive spirit "instead of finding the art relegated to public charity . . . like a waif that the world is trying to turn into a prostitute." By this metaphor, Berlioz passed judgment on the Opera — he thought it "music's house of ill fame" 31 — as well as on the social pressures that dictated its taste and forced composers like him to submit or starve. One form of the pressure could be shown by the fact that his minor share in the Freischütz brought him automatically more than two hundred francs at every performance, tax free, whereas the gigantic efforts of his symphonic concerts rarely netted over one thousand francs once and for all. At his last "Festival" he had had to forego the five hundred francs agreed upon as his conductor's fee and even to pay three hundred and sixty francs out of his own pocket; for upon every "amusement" the Ministry of Public Charity levied for the poor one eighth of the receipts. The music of Berlioz and Beethoven thus helped square with God the accounts of a grasping bourgeoisie. In September 1841 Scribe at last delivered the first act of the new libretto. The subject, under the ghoulish title of La Nomie Sanglante, was drawn from a recent translation of Lewis's Monk. Scribe thought the midnight mood of the Huguenots and Robert still strong with the public, but Berlioz set to work with only superficial alacrity. Even if this operatic theme had been more congenial, Berlioz had grave preoccupations which might in any case have lamed his inspira28

29 30 31

See Subchapter 27,

L.I., 19.. A.R., 427.

Soirées ( 10th and Epilogue).

Music for Europe tion: a break in his domestic relations seemed inevitable. For many months now life with Harriet — and life for the child — had become increasingly difficult. Ever more jealous, she greeted her husband's daily return with scenes so violent as to terrify young Louis. She suspected Hector of love affairs with every woman he mentioned in conversation or in reviews; she scrutinized his mail. From an unhappy woman she had become a scold, and finally she took to drink. On his side, no doubt, he had little strength left for conciliation. He came home with frayed nerves from a weary struggle kept up by constant self-repression, only to face the grind of writing articles which too often required the same kind of diplomacy.32 He would have needed still more to deal with Harriet in whom he found, instead of affection, reproaches. Even had his temperament been more easygoing, less electric, it would have been difficult for him to maintain his love illusions about her. She was getting stout; réclusion and drink made her slovenly." Although she had in the past courageously shared Berlioz* views of artistic integrity, she had no direct interest in music and she now strenuously opposed his ancient purpose to give concerts in Germany. In all their discussions, moreover, his flashing mind and superior command of language must have given him an advantage that only aggravated her misery. Their marriage was doomed. Given this state of things, there was after a time cause for Harriet's jealousy." On his first trip out of France since the Italian journey, Berlioz 32

He termed reviewing "a dog's life — either biting or licking," and told his friends how to interpret some of his tactful reviews: "I said what I thought about Halévy's Le Val d'Andorre but the opposite is true of Clapisson's Jeanne la Folle." (M.E., 258.) Again, he vents his impatience in a note to his editor: "The need is universally felt that I should express myself in writing upon La Seraphina. I shall therefore get to work and try to speak of everything except that emetic. . . ." (12η.) 33 Though as late as August 1841 a journalist writing in the hostile France Musicale calls Mme. Berlioz "a charming woman indeed —none other than the famous Miss Smithson, the illustrious English tragédienne." (1383, 1841, 285.) 34 This order of events is that given by the latest writer who has reviewed the facts, M. Etienne Rey, in a book for a series on the loves of great men. Previous to his summing up, it had been believed that Berlioz at this time had innumerable affairs. His friend Legouvé had said so in his Recollections, and M. Boschot had accepted the testimony uncritically. M. Rey questions it, doubting first that in a troubled time, Berlioz should "abandon himself to a series of fugitive amours" of the theatrical sort. " N o other witness save [Legouvé], no allusion, no letters, not a word of Berlioz, usually so expansive and outspoken, supports or confirms the assertion." (302, 146.) He might have added, "Not a whisper in the press." But there is one word more to say. A s T . S. Wotton has pointed out, Legouvé, though well-meaning, is by no means

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was accompanied by a young singer, Marie Recio,35 who thirteen years later became his second wife. The first marriage was not wholly destroyed. It died hard, the agony lasting from 1841 to the final separation in the autumn of 1844. In a more enlightened time and place, an uncontested divorce might have regularized this painful situation. As it was, Berlioz' position, and even more that of his son, was left ambiguous yet unchangeable — a perpetual moral burden. He naturally continued to support wife and child, though some of his contemporaries found this quixotic, and it is amply evident that after the separation Berlioz continued to bestow much thought and affection on Harriet. He had said, "I will never leave her." He came to feel that he must leave her, but not completely, never finally. He was so constituted that his "tenacity" would not let him yield anything on which he had once set his heart, even if it were a dream like the love-image that he had fastened on the unfortunate Harriet Smithson. His feeling for Marie Recio was very different. She was a half-French, half-Spanish singer of mediocre talent, but of pleasing exterior and lively disposition, who succeeded in catching Berlioz' attention when perhaps others in the Parisian theaters had failed. She doubtless saw in him an aid to her career, but must also have found him attractive and lovable since she clung to him even after the end of his willingness to help her succeed. For him, the love affair seems to have been a weaker repetition of the Camille attachment. Marie, too, was a musician, had a watchful mother (though a far better woman than Mme. Moke), and knew how to cast a spell. For a long time, now, Hector had been starved of womanly sympathy. Harriet's late-awakened passion was too aggressive to be endearing, and we may read in Hector's virtual love letters to Liszt and to Adèle, as well as in the tenderness of the great music written in this period (the songs especially) how balked his outgoing affections were. Just then, too, he was at the critical turn from mature to middle age. Ever conscious, he accurate. Like every reminiscer, he confuses times and places, and as his contemporaries remarked, he showed towards women a mixture of gallantry and chivalrousness that perhaps made him take Harriet's complaints at face value. He also liked to make "good stories" and in the passage where he innocently incriminates Berlioz he gives no sign that he had received his friend's confidences. A s for Berlioz, he said not only in his Memoirs but also to his confidant Adèle that he had given his wife no cause to be jealous. W h e n he did give such a cause, the fact was kept neither from Adèle nor from Harriet. 35 Her real name was Marie-Geneviève Martin. She was born in 1814 near Paris. H e r father, a captain, had married a Spanish woman, Sotera Vilas; both had taken part in the Russian campaign, after which he had died, leaving the family in straits. Marie had studied singing with Banderali and was, when Berlioz met her, under contract at the Opera.

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dropped a word of his feelings to the faithful Ferrand: "I feel that I am going downhill very fast . . . The idea that life has an end, I notice, occurs to me frequently. So I find myself snatching rather than culling the flowers on the stony way . . . " 38 It meant a shift in bearing and manner, half organic, half conditioned by the changing times. He writes to the same trusted friend: "Believe it or not, there has come over me, in place of my former artistic fury, a kind of cold-blooded poise, a resignation, or contempt, if you like, in the face of whatever offends me in current musical practices. I am far from being alarmed at this change in myself. On the contrary, the older I get the more I see that this outward indifference saves my strength for a struggle where passion would cripple me. It's like love again: if you seem to flee, you will be run after." 31 This simile contains a prophetic hint of his affair with Marie Recio. He left with her for two concerts in Belgium on September 18, 1842, but on his return a month later went back to his own home. By mid-December, which was to open his carefully planned tour of Germany, he intended to go alone, but Marie persuaded him to let her go with him. When she insisted on taking part in his programs, making scenes at the very thought of any other prima donna, he tried again to shake her off. Since infancy he had had enough of scenes, which may be why he was plagued with them in all his loves. Marie at any rate caught up with him at his next stopping place and he resigned himself. He sanctioned their relations by designating her, during an awkward social moment, as his second wife, and she soon gave up her pretentions to a singing career and loyally devoted herself to helping him. She kept his accounts, and, when he was in Paris, provided him with a quiet and well-kept home. He bore the expenses and included her mother in the arrangement; the two women were good managers and their intérieur must have been a relief after the disorder of Harriet's house and the spectacle of a badly reared child in violent and intemperate hands. The first phase in the dissolution of Hector's marriage to Harriet occupies the period from the fall of 1841 to the September following, when Berlioz and Marie Recio left for Brussels. This twelvemonth had not been without important musical activity on Berlioz' part, nor without further signs of the gradual decay of the Orleanist regime. In November 1841, possibly under the stimulus of the work he had done on Weber's piano waltz, Berlioz began to publish in the Gazette Musicale se L.I., 195. " L.I., 193-4.

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a scries of articles on instrumentation — the first draft of the later epochmaking TreatiseHe had given two more concerts, at one of which Artot had played a new composition of Berlioz* for violin and orchestra, Rêverie et CapriceThe work is unimportant save as an indication that Berlioz could with a little practice have turned his hand to "slick" money making stuff. Written as a favor to his violinist friend, the short composition has no program or significance beyond the contrast indicated in the title.40 It suggests Wieniawski without being as successful as he in his genre, and here and there it also suggests the real Berlioz without sustaining that impression. During the summer, Berlioz received permission to dedicate his Funeral and Triumphal symphony to the Duke of Orléans, who now and then bestowed his genuine regard upon artists and intellectuals. In October the work was played again at the Opera; the last movement, Apothéose, was becoming Berlioz' indestructible war horse. Meantime the Prince had been killed in a carriage accident and many hopes for the future of the regime died with him. T h e grief of the seventy-year-old King at his son's death was both personal and dynastic. A regency was spoken of, but popular unrest made the prospects of any orderly succession very doubtful. T h e July ninth elections had gone against the government, even though the franchise was limited to two-hundred thousand wealthy men, each casting his ballot on behalf of approximately fifty unrepresented adult males in the nation. If this voting aristocracy was turning more liberal, the monarchy was in danger. News from England confirmed the feeling that further reform was making headway. Feargus O'Connor agitated and produced a second People's Petition, so large that it had to be cut into portions and carried into Parliament by sixteen men. On its being refused, he called a general strike. " T h e sacred month" succeeded in the midlands, though it only led to his arrest in London. T w o more attempts were made to assassinate Victoria. Both in England and in France, moreover, the industrial revolution was achieving social and cultural, as well as political expression. When Guizot undertook, as a sincere doctrinaire liberal, to "fight tenaciously against anarchy," he saw the middle class as "the rational mean between two absurdities, divine right and popular sovereignty," which he also called "the threat from below." He feared the proletarian agitation stirred up by Louis Blanc's widely circulated Organi38

1398, 1841, Nos. 60 to 64; 1842, Nos. ι to 29. Based on a fragment first sketched for Benvenuto Cellini. 40 On another occasion Berlioz listed it in a program as Tetidvessc et Capricc. (28$y 226 «.) 39

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satton du Travail, Proudhon's "Property is Theft," and the less economically conscious views of hosts of republicans. In this atmosphere, the decline of Romanticism, which is to say the settling down of artistic effervescence, was no individual phenomenon within each creative mind. Rather, it resulted from a redirection of public energy — toward railroad building, speculation, and agitation for reform, no less than toward the repression of democracy. The demand of the wellto-do for entertainment at any cost was the counterpart of volcano-sitting and stock-market nerves. The steam engine was in fact transforming the sensibility of mankind by changing its responsiveness and its pace. Berlioz, who took his first train trip in these years, reports how backbreaking the new convenience proved.41 But it was astonishing to cover sixty-five leagues in a few hours, which enabled one to leave Leipzig, rehearse in Dresden, and return to Leipzig in time to hear Mendelssohn the same day. Whereas the Prince's runaway horses had killed one man by a relatively clean death, the dreadful Versailles railroad accident had mangled, charred, and suffocated sixty persons as undramatically as our rudimentary airplanes do today.42 Berlioz's compatriot and fellow-romantic Stendhal was therefore well advised to die, of natural causes, that same year — within a week of Cherubini, Berlioz' earliest official enemy. Only three people attended BeyleStendhal on the way to his grave, and forty years were to pass before anyone in France dreamed of taking his books seriously. In 1842, he was merely a salon wit who had died of apoplexy like the bon vivant that he was. Berlioz' slight contact with him in Italy had probably slipped his memory, or if present, had only reminded him of a Rossini fanatic who was too much of a littérateur to be a judge of music. Cherubim's death was another thing. It left a vacant seat at the Institute, to which Berlioz had reasonable claim.4* His competitors were Adam, Auber, Onslow, and a younger man, Ambroise Thomas, who had been Lesueur's last pupil. Berlioz' name was carefully omitted from the first list presented by the musicians of the Institute to the full body, thus con41

M.E., 40. 'ln 1844, Vigny wrote one of his great poems, La Maison du Berger, in which he sings the passing of the Open Road and the mechanization of our individual destinies. 43 It is difficult for citizens of a federal union to appreciate how much power and financial advantage result from membership in the national Institute of a centralized state. A professorship in a great university only begins to approximate this degree of leverage while creating the same ambiguity as to actual merit. ,L

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firming Swift's dictum that "when a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him." 44 Berlioz withdrew his name and Onslow was elected. Berlioz had meantime written an obituary review of Cherubini's career, in which he did his former oppressor full justice.45 He knew what qualities to look for in the limited art of the Franco-Italian master, and he pointed them out to the public. This act of impartiality was by no means due to the hope of flattering Cherubini's colleagues at the Institute; Berlioz knew better than to think justice to the dead would flatter the survivors. He acted simply on critical principle, as he did whenever he wrote about Rossini's Barber, William Tell or Comte Ory: he hated Italian music and disliked in Rossini as a man the cynical affectation of commercialism, but he could not refrain from praising genius. Anecdotes and bon mots were something else again, reserved for lesser occasions. This disinterestedness carried Berlioz still farther. Cherubini had been Director of the Conservatoire and it was likely that the leader of its orchestra, Habeneck, would succeed him. This would leave the conductorship of the Opera orchestra vacant and Berlioz sought to obtain it, even though its acceptance would disbar him from having any work performed at the official theater. As early as October 1841, he had written to Ferrand, "I was and still am in line for Habeneck's post at the Opera. It would be a musical dictatorship of which I should hope to make the most in the interest of art." 46 In other words, he would use his influence to raise the level of musical performance through respect for the written note, since as mere conductor he could neither choose what to perform nor submit works of his own composition. The advantages to him would be the salary and the good will of the players. W e can again infer from this voluntary choice of Berlioz' that the Scribe opera did not tempt his musical daemon to manifest itself. T h e fragments that he composed make us glad that the libretto did not blossom. H o w could it? It was neither Virgil nor Goethe nor Shakespeare, and Berlioz had not included it among those flashing intentions of his thirtieth year. The orchestra post was not reassigned. Auber was chosen head of the Conservatoire and Habencck stayed where he was. Berlioz therefore pursued his plan to visit Germany and give concerts. It was an ideal time for him to leave Paris where journalism, domestic life, and public apathy were alike inimical to art. On this first trip Berlioz visited Brussels twice, Frank"Thoughts on Various Subjects." Reprinted in M.M., 25 ff. 48 L.I., 195. 44

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fort-on-Main, Hechingen, Carlsruhe, Stuttgart, Weimar, Leipzig, Dresden, Brunswick, Hamburg, Berlin, Hanover, and Darmstadt. In eight months he gave nineteen concerts. He was not able to arrange performances at all the places he visited, but everywhere he established friendly relations and studied the local resources of musical talent. Long before, Weber had thought of writing a guidebook for orchestra conductors who had to travel in Germany, but the work was never finished and Berlioz had to develop from scratch the technique of the musical conquistador. With stretches of residence in Paris and London, this was to be his life for twenty-five years: he did not cease from his mission until within two years of his death. If in the twelve years since the Symphonie Fantastique he had, as d'Ortigue wrote, accomplished a musical revolution in France, he was now, like a second Napoleon, carrying it to the four corners of Europe.41

Philosophy of a Musical Mission It is indeed dreadful to have to tell oneself, and with pitiless certainty: "What I find beautiful is beautiful for me, but it may not be so for my best friend. . . ." Such truths are palpable, evident, and only a stubborn adherence to a system prevents their recognition. — B E R L I O Z in A Travers Chants A mission implies a set purpose, just as a revolution implies a doctrine. One may well ask, therefore, what purpose and doctrine lay behind the revolutionary mission that Berlioz was undertaking in the most theoretical and academic of countries — Germany.1 Although he repeatedly declined to make a system out of his convictions, he had thought and written about his art for twenty years. His scores and published views had simply " This was soon to be said by a German in Germany itself. See below Chapter 23. For d'Ortigue's statement, see 185, 319. 1

They even called a concert an "academy" after the old Italian habit. As to "musical mission," note in Berlioz' Memoirs (I, 86) the reference to Weber's in those very words. Again, in 1836 Berlioz had written about finding Barbier congenial because "no one understands better than he the worth and seriousness of the artist's mission." (L.I., 173.)

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broadened the channel he had first cut in his initial essay of 1823. Most recently, he had contributed a formal definition of music to an encyclopedia and he had written three papers on Gluck's lyric dramas for the Gazette Muricale. These essays, together with an analysis of Beethoven's symphonies and the earliest account of his Italian journey, Berlioz would shortly issue in two volumes entitled Voyage Musical en Allemagne et en Italie.* T h e critical parts of this work he recast and republished two decades later as A Travers Chants. In both titles, the idea of voyaging through the worlds of music stands out, but the poetic wit of the second title 3 so aptly describes Berlioz' deeds that it suggests itself, ahead of its actual appearance, for the title of this chapter. T h e mission Berlioz assumed as composer was to develop dramatic music on Shakespearean lines, and as theorist to defend the German or symphonic conception of the genre against the Italian; in other words, Gluck, Mozart, Beethoven, and Weber as against Pacini, Vaccai, Donizetti, Bellini, and the lesser works of Rossini. This was no sentimental partisanship. Berlioz' conviction rested on three postulates about the nature of his art: 1. That modern music was a new and independent art. 2. That music possessed intrinsic significance, which he called "expressiveness." 3. That music could not be judged by pre-established scholastic rules, but only a posteriori, through experience, by ear — in a word, pragmatically. T h e belief that the genre instrumental expressif was the youngest birth of the human spirit, just come to maturity, 4 Berlioz derived from direct observation, for his pragmatic temper went with an ability to make exact discriminations. He was therefore a pluralist in his judgment of art forms, and what he saw was not simply that the convention known as equal temperament dated back only a century and a half, before which harmony and tonal structure were unknown or radically different, but also that within the life span of a single man — Beethoven — music had sloughed off the bonds of its primitive attachment to dance and words: its forms and its utterances could now develop at will. Moreover, in the multiplication See V.M.; 53; 54. T h e title substitutes chants (songs) for champs (fields) in the French idiom meaning "across country." It faithfully renders Berlioz' sense of freedom in the t w o realms for which he had predilection. In a kindred mood, Cyril Connolly made the same pun on word and idea when speaking of la clé des chants (1069, 86). See also 1394, May 13, 1905, 365. 4 "Music today has the strength of youth; it is emancipated, free, and can achieve whatever it purposes." (A Trav., 312.) 2 3

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and perfection of instruments, music was finding new ways to be expressive überhaupt. The modern "revolution" could then be easily defined: any composer who followed Gluck in "dramatizing the orchestra" and who followed Beethoven in making form organic was a soldier in the war of independence. Trial and error, innovation and pragmatic testing were the signs of the disciple on mission. The guilt of the Italians, and to a large extent of the French operatic composers, lay in toying with the new gains and, by dilution with old routine, reducing them to insignificance: they were reactionaries, or to use Berlioz' words, "infidels in regard to expression." 5 Among the old ways were such things as the virtuoso's supremacy over the composer — the singer who changes his part, interrupts with encores, draws attention to himself as more important than his role; or again, the belief that music is for "pleasure" in the narrow sense of "pastime."® At the same time, Berlioz wanted music to keep its connection with life, through its adaptation to the needs of drama, psychological delineation, mass expression, the rendering of nature, and expressiveness tout court. But in so doing it must be jealous of its rights and keep as free as possible from accessories and empty conventions — the accessories for the dramatic musician being words and stage effects; the conventions being the clichés, padding, repeats, or anything else done "because the public expects it." 7 The self-sufficiency of music also excludes the fusion of the arts preached in the eighteenth century and practiced in the nineteenth by Meyerbeer and Wagner. On this cardinal point, Berlioz takes issue with Gluck, whose famous preface to Alceste8 he otherwise approves: "When Gluck says that music in a lyric drama has no other end but to add to poetry what color adds to drawing, I think he is guilty of a fundamental error. The musician's work . . . already contains both drawing and color; and to carry on Gluck's simile, the words are the subject of the painting, hardly anything more." ' s

Grot., Ì 1 9 - 3 6 . T h i s is what Berlioz meant when he said, " D o y o u think I am listening f o r m y pleasure? I w a n t music to set m y nerves in vibration [me fasse vibrer les nerjs\." j i i . ) Shakespeare's Jaques had previously said: " I do not desire you to please me. I desire you to sing." 7 E.g., Berlioz' analysis of the public's failure to applaud a beautiful aria in Fidelio because it does not end with a rousing allegro. ( A Trav., 76 and below, Chapter 26.) 8 Epitre dedicatone, Vienna, 1769. "A Trav., 154. In this respect Berlioz is at one with Mozart; like him he wanted — on occasion — the poet to fit his words to the pre-existing music. 8

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Berlioz goes on to reassert the rights of music as sound: "Expression is by no means the sole aim of dramatic music; it would be foolish and pedantic to disdain the purely sensual pleasure of melody, harmony, rhythm, or instrumentation, independently of their power to depict the passions . . . And even if one should want to deprive the hearer of these pleasures and not let him turn his attention away from the main object, there would still be numerous occasions when the composer must alone sustain the interest of the lyric drama. In dances, for example, in pantomimes and marches, in all the pieces where instrumental music is the only fare . . . what becomes of the poet's sway? There, surely, music must contain both drawing and color." 10 Berlioz then shows the consequence of these principles applied to particular works: they must possess musical form: "It was still true thirty years ago that most of the instrumental compilations which the Italians honored with the name of Overtures were grotesque absurdities. Gluck himself, under the influence of bad example, and being moreover . . . not so great a musician as he was a composer of scene music, allowed himself to put forth that incredible inanity, the Orpheus Overture. He did better for Alceste and still better for Iphigeneia in Aulis. His theory of expressive overtures gave the momentum which later produced symphonic masterpieces, . . . though here again, in overdoing a sound idea, Gluck fell into error, not this time by limiting the power of music, but by ascribing to music a power it will never possess. For he says that the overture must indicate the subject of the drama. Musical expressiveness cannot go that far. It may render joy, sadness, gravity, playfulness; it will show a striking difference between the joy of a pastoral people and that of a warlike nation, between the grief of a queen and the sorrow of a village girl, between calm, serious meditation and the ardent reveries which precede the bursting forth of passions. Or again, by using the characteristic musical styles of different peoples, it will be able to distinguish the serenade of an Abruzzi brigand from that of a Tyrolese or Scottish hunter, the evening march of religious pilgrims from that of cattlemen coming home from the fair . . . But if it wishes to go beyond this immense circle, music will have to have recourse to speech, whether sung, recited, or read. Thus the overture to Alceste will foretell scenes of desolation and tenderness but it will never impart either the object of this tenderness or the cause of this desolation." 11 The allusions in this passage to movements in his own cantatas and A Trav., 155-6. A Trav., 157.

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symphonies " show the way in which Berlioz found in Gluck's work the true precepts while signalizing their distortion in Gluck's theorizing. On a last important point, Berlioz quietly condemns his revered master who had made light of innovation: "Composers had already blackened a good deal of score paper by the time Gluck wrote, and any musical discovery whatever, though it were but indirectly connected with dramatic expression, was not to be despised." 13 These extracts are enough to show that Berlioz' doctrine was doubleedged. Against the upholders of routine and convention he preached expressiveness and psychological or dramatic truth; and against the theorists who wanted to subordinate music to stage effects or poetry he preached the formal unity of musical structures and the sensuous pleasure they can give apart from expressiveness. This is a position which critics apparently find it hard to grasp, or rather to classify — hence easy to misrepresent. In the history of ideas, all Third Positions incur this fate, the two-party system being intellectually simpler as well as more appealing to the instincts of partisanship. What is more, the comfort to be derived from a rigid verbalized system — which can engender rules and provide the means of sectarian inquisition — makes the flexible pragmatist suspect to all. Berlioz knew this but did not yield to the temptation of cobbling up some absolute theory to furnish his followers with a creed. Gluck was an intelligent man and yet had misconceived the character of his own work; this suggested that perhaps artistic theory is a task apart, which most creators may be illfitted to take on. The principles that count must be looked for in a man's works rather than in his pronouncements; so when Berlioz' great admirer, Johann Christian Lobe, asked him for an esthetic creed, he replied, "My esthetic is in my works, in what I have done and what I have not done." 14 Berlioz did not of course undervalue the critical warfare he was even then waging in new territory, but he recognized the danger of taking a description for a rule. Unlike Wagner, he did not utter manifestos and then compose. His significant choices came out of experience, in both "Namely to Cleopatra and Faust (Gretchen), the Religious Meditation, the first movement of the Symphonie Fantastique, and the third and second of Harold in Italy. 13 A Trav., 158. "Af.C., 132 and below. Lobe (1797-1881) was a composer, critic, and theorist predisposed by nature to understand Berlioz: as a youth of twenty-three he had called on Goethe and tried to show him how antiquated were the ideas of Goethe's musical oracle, Zelter!

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senses of that word — the things he felt within and the works he heard and studied. And his studies, as we know, took place equally in the library, the opera house, and the concert hall. The current repertory was a hodgepodge of styles and genres, and if we except the works of Beethoven and a few others we have only a verv imperfect notion of what Berlioz' musical experiences were. We know little at first hand of the Italian and French operas that he reviewed, and we know only a fraction of the works of Weber, Gluck, and Spontini — the tradition of which is virtually lost — to say nothing of the eclipsed Meyerbeer, then a dazzling sun.15 As for the symphonies, concertos, airs, and fantasias that kept virtuosos alive in that half century, most of their names have died with those who heard them.16 It thus takes an effort of the imagination to recapture the state of mind which it was Berlioz' mission to work upon and reform. He addressed, on the one hand, a public of exclusive operagoers who became deaf the moment they could not also see; on the other, a fashionable and academic circle of amateurs, reared on the eighteenth-century classics and contemporary "little pieces," to whom Bach meant C. P. E. or J . C. but never J . S. All but a few felt that the uncouth Beethoven went too far. On this basis, if we eliminate what Berlioz preached and played, go on to reconstruct the features of what was then "music," and then jump ahead to the conceptions and the substance of modern works such as those of Debussy, Mahler, Strauss, Moussorgsky or Schoenberg, we can gauge the impact of Berlioz' mission and judge the merit of his Third Position, which repudiated alike the purveyors of airs and operas and the feeble imitators of classical masterpieces. In setting out for his German tour, Berlioz was under no illusion about its inherent difficulties. Although a few years before Liszt had written him an open letter, saying, "Germany is the country of Symphonies; it is therefore yours," 17 Berlioz knew better than to take music for a universal language. His very devotion to certain masters implied that there was not one Music but many musici. And he knew from Liszt and others that in 15

We may gauge this difference in part by what Rimsky-Korsakov says of the Gluck tradition being extinct in the early 1900's (885, I, 4) and by what Shaw had to tell the innocent Wagnerians about the genuine music contained in the Italian and French operas of the first half of the nineteenth century, particularly Meyerbeer's. (880, 30.) See also poi, 142 ff. 16 All but a few of Berlioz' friends, co-workers and critics were "well-known composers": Heller, Reber, Hiller, Pixis, Kittl, Bourges, Méreaux, Morel, Thalberg, Schloesser, Kastner, Moscheles, and so on. "210, 264. Earlier still, Schumann had also publicly urged Berlioz to visit Leipzig.

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Germany almost as much as in France, the taste for the Italian kind prevailed. Its inroads had helped darken Beethoven's latter days, and the resistance to it had only stiffened the upholders of the native tradition into academicism. At Leipzig, for instance, even Mendelssohn seemed musically modern and venturesome. Hence Berlioz would have to overcome the host of dilettanti, virtuosi, soprani, true or false castrati, and eternal scholastici. Like most creators he would also have to fight the stiffer battle arising out of the originality of his own personal idiom. For music is not only not an international language cutting across political and cultural boundaries, it is also a form of individual utterance of which every hearer has to learn the vocabulary and syntax.18 At the very least, each composer's work is a dialect of the main speech current at the time and place, but more often — and this was and remains true of Berlioz — the "new music" communicates new modes of musical thought which only deceptively employ the same technical means as previous music: they are of course "the same" in the abstract and in retrospect, but their first concrete presentation immediately puts the hearer on the defensive; he invokes earlier standards of beauty or meaning and the ancient debate begins afresh. Berlioz was very much alive to this permanent state of artistic affairs, which he often analyzed in print, but which to this day is imperfectly recognized. Ernest Newman suggests that on this account a history of music is perhaps impossible to write — no one masters sympathetically all the musics, and in practice "love of music" reduces itself to the worship of one composer.19 The late M. D. Calvocoressi was similarly dismayed to find that the critical Babel could not be explained away by greater or lesser degrees of competence in the critics.20 The d/rsensus is irreducible. But to Berlioz, who was among the first to explore it, this realm of cultural truth had far-reaching implications, affecting his critical and compositional techniques, his social conception of art, and his ultimate philosophy of life. Not once but again and again throughout his writings he discusses this primary dilemma, the cause of immeasurable anguish: how is it possible 18

A l l his interpreters in France before 1842 — d'Ortigue, Liszt, Bottée de T o u l m o n , Bourges — dwell on this point and try to show that Berlioz' melody, structure, and orchestration are unfamiliar but logical, unlike tradition but rationally related to it. Berlioz knew that all these attacks and arguments would have to be gone through again in Germany. 4*37 7 Í ; 2 5 · H e went even further and collected instances to show that in musical criticism an appeal to fact was frequently unavailing or impossible: the intent of the observer creates the " f a c t " which another, equally honest and competent, finds imaginary or different. (1391, 1934, 2 2 9 a n d n · ) 19

20

42 2

Berlioz

to reconcile artistic convictions with the plain fact of the dissensus? Berlioz is at a concert with a friend whose judgment he respects; a Beethoven adagio is being played. Berlioz is transponed while his companion remains cold, and is even angered by the music.21 This paradox is not simply an external phenomenon, to be recorded with amused interest by a third party: it involves the whole reality of art, especially for the creator. The critic cannot believe in Absolute Beauty; the artist must believe in it. Unless he is a mere contriver, an artificer, a charlatan, he must work in the conviction that there is such a goal for him to reach. N o r is this the end of uncertainty, for experience confuses us still further by seeming to offer a partial verification of the creator's pragmatic hope: " A t the first hearing [of Beethoven's Second Symphony] Kreutzer fled the hall with his hands on his ears. . . . Let us not forget that Mr. Kreutzer's opinion of Beethoven was that of 99 musicians out of 100. . . , nor that without the repeated efforts of an imperceptible contrary-minded fraction of the public, the greatest composer of modern times might still be scarcely known to us." 22 History, in short, gives evidence of the possibility of change. What at any time was modern and ugly becomes beautiful. There is, too, a mysterious affinity between new art and the younger generation, so that it seems as if recognition of the absolutely beautiful was constantly being reached. But this recognition is neither steady nor complete. "Understanding" follows fashion, comes in waves, depends on the persistency of a conductor or a group. At any one time, the repertory of music resembles, not a body of literature, nor even a well-stocked library, but a one-volume anthology, a capricious Oxford Book of English Verse. W e see this in the relentless repetition of the piece that "represents" a given composer to the exclusion of his other work. At any one time also, it requires a kind of fanaticism — like Berlioz' and Liszt's for Beethoven — to maintain public faith in an artist or a school, and this faith, no more than any other kind, never achieves universality.23 There are still anti-Beethovenians and anti-Mozartians. At best what we see is a number of overlapping sects which ignore or condone one another's existence (or 21 22 23

V.M., I, 287. V.M., I, 264.

" I n v a r i a b l y , " wrote Berlioz in 1842, "one comes back to intolerance and fanaticism when art is at stake, or religion, or love. T h o s e artists w h o tolerate all things and manage to be constantly calm have probably never believed in anything nor loved anything." (1398, 1842, 149.) A s a youth he had written: " T h a t which transports one individual remains unintelligible to others and may even seem to thern ridiculous." (A.R., 7 1 : 1829.)

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else join forces against a common infidel) in the smug belief that each worships the true God. Less apparent but no less real is the subdivision of musical faith by genres. It is rare to find any devotee for whom music means all or even several of the forms which it has historically assumed. Many concertgoers scorn opera; the zealots of chamber music will not enter a symphony hall·, the piano brigade detest choral music; the passionate followers of song recitals are unmoved by violin soloists; the "classicals" in a body loathe jazz; the jazz fans look upon traditional pieces as a junk heap from which to pick up tunes. Among performers and pundits the provincialism is even worse. The violinist who for twelve years has trained his fingers to play the Wienawski concerto faster than any man alive is absolutely deaf to a slow "easy" tune in a Bach sonata; while the scholar or teacher who knows all that the Vatican manuscripts tell us about counterpoint is convinced that no real music has been composed since 1700.24 As for educated instrument makers, don't talk to them about anything but the harpsichord or the old organ. Historical knowledge misapplied has completed the atomizing of art, so that nearly every time the word music is used it really stands for an accidental fraction of its total meaning.2" Berlioz' own historical sense brought him a different message. Although he made no pretense at being a scholar or musicologist, he grasped the essential point that among the Western arts music had developed late, often in isolation from intellectual enlightenment, and that consequently it had almost always been shackled by prejudice. In the Foreword to his Treatise on Orchestration, he reminds his readers that: "When Monteverdi tried to add the chord of the unprepared dominant seventh, criticism and denunciation of every kind were heaped upon him. . . . When melody came to prevail, the cry was that art was degraded and ruined, and the sanctity of rules abolished — it was clear that all was lost. Next in turn came modulation. . . . The first who tried to modulate into an unrelated 24

A great modern architect has said that in his radically new art museum music should be broadcast for the delectation of visitors —but no music later than that of Mozart and Haydn. 25 In a recent work on teaching, edited by the U. S. Commissioner of Education, one finds music defined as "a field [which] represents [sic] aesthetic sensitivity in relatively pure form, uncomplicated by subject appeal, functional purpose, dense historical, sociological and philosophical relationships, or close correlation with other fine arts." (1106, 205.) This statement which obviously excludes from the "field" of music songs, operas, cantatas, military and sacred music, and much of the dramatic instrumental music of five centuries, comes from a symposium entitled Toward General Education: what are we to expect from writers dealing with special education?

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key was inveighed against. He should have foreseen it. . . . The innovator could keep saying 'Do but listen; see how gently the modulation is brought about, how well motivated and ingeniously linked to what precedes and what follows, how delightful it sounds.' 'That is not the point,' he was told. 'This modulation is prohibited; it must not be done.' But since on the contrary it is the point, the only point, here and everywhere else, nonrdative modulations were finally accepted." 28 Berlioz' training at the Conservatoire had largely consisted in observing prohibitions and he knew how these avoidances form our taste: the boy drilled against the split infinitive grows into a man who sincerely shudders at its presence. It takes a Schumann or a Scarlatti to calmly say "Count the fifths and leave us in peace." Expounding Beethoven to his readers, Berlioz accordingly defended those violations of academic rules that seemed to him self-justifying. For instance in discussing the Sixth Symphony, he takes up the forbidden resolution of the 6-5 chord on the subdominant: "This harmonic effect is most severely reproved by scholastic doctrine . . . [though] it is most felicitous . . . and the sudden passing from piano to forte on this singular change of harmony . . . doubles its charm." 27 He points out likewise that if Beethoven defied the "principle of unity" by bringing together the two unlike themes in the instrumental part of the last movement of the Ninth Symphony, it is too bad for the principle.28 More than that, Berlioz discovered that change and improvement themselves create prejudices in reverse. Living in an age of rapid orchestral innovation, he had to remind the public that chamber music was a high form of art and to show how senseless and inartistic it was to demand at all times a large ensemble displaying the latest brass. "It is even possible," he adds ironically, "to compose exceedingly beautiful music for the keyboard, since Beethoven has written for the piano some sonatas that are perhaps superior to his admirable symphonies." 29 The task of the artist who is at once original and comprehensive is therefore double. First, in composing he must remain entirely pragmatic, 26

27

TV., ι.

A Trav., 45-6.

28 A Trav., 57. Berlioz' early admirers independently made the same kind of remark about him. Zani de Ferranti praised him for making violations of the rule seem more attractive than its observance and Ehlert declared that the errors of giants w e r e more interesting than the correctness of ordinary mortals. {Mem., I, 351 and 425, 182-96.) Both these comments were elicited in the course of Berlioz' first G e r m a n tour. 29 ,398 ( 1 8 4 2 ) 4 4 2 .

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that is, follow his musical instinct and test the results in context and by ear, regardless of the rule and also regardless of any systematic wish to break the rule. He must dare and see what happens, not in order to shock the bourgeois (that is only an incidental reward) but in order to find out how his mature judgment and that of others respond after the passage of time. This is why Berlioz kept all but one of his scores for years before publishing, why he destroyed several early ones, and why he heeded the remarks of d'Ortigue, Liszt, Heller, and other critics, as well as the advice of humble performers in the many orchestras which he led." There was thus a thoroughly empirical control through fresh experience, through pre-existing knowledge, and through divers sensibilities, which gave innovation its sole warrant of worth. No one knew better than Berlioz how much the art of music depends on the inspiration and powers of others and no one acknowledged his debts more fully and frequently. Still, it was not enough to insure the integrity of the product, letting it take its chance in a culture ruled by competitive passions and incomplete dogmas. The art of music is especially vulnerable to both, because its existence is by nature transitory. Accordingly, the creator with a mission and without protectors must — and this is his second task — serve as midwife to the work of art by teaching the public what to hear and how to think. For his part, Berlioz felt that he should not do so upon the body of his own work. He chose Gluck, Weber, and Beethoven as the masters whose interpretation would best acclimate his contemporaries to modern dramatic music, including his own. We have already seen how, in discussing Gluck's theories, Berlioz alluded to elements discoverable in his own symphonies. His discussion of the last movement of Beethoven's Ninth says not a word of the Romeo and Juliet symphony, but none the less throws a great light upon its conception.31 He seized topical occasions to make clear what he considered important as well as strictly speaking undefinable. For instance, when polytonal effects became a fad in the sixties, he who had ventured upon their use in 1830 wrote (apropos of Offenbach) : "All this may be done, no doubt, but only with art, and here the effect is put forth with a carelessness and an ignoring of danger that are unprecedented."32 It was a question, he felt, of preserving the 30 Sometimes, as in the orchestral "Prelude" of the Te Deum, he acquiesced too readily in the objections and pure chance has preserved a small masterpiece. (See below, Subchapter 19.) A s to the tradition of Berlioz' respect for the performing musicians whom he trusted, see j88.

31

32

A Trav., 53-4. MM., 326.

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"very substance of music," which could indeed be molded to the creator's will, but "the w a y must first be found" (il faut la manière).™ Again, whenever performances of his chosen masters afforded the chance, he drew attention to facets of music that are usually overlooked. H e had observed that "an audience which would be instantly critical of poor intonation can listen without displeasure to a piece whose expression is entirely false"; 34 and he knew that to increase the general awareness of "expression" was not gratuitous: it protects the masterpiece from absurd objections: "I have often heard people make fun of this first theme [in Beethoven's Seventh Symphony]. Perhaps the charge that it lacked nobility would not have been made had the composer written in large letters at the top of his allegro, 'Peasant Dance.' For although some listeners do not want to be told that any subject has presumably been treated by the musician, there are others ready to condemn an idea which appears strange unless they are given some reason for this strangeness beforehand." 38 Berlioz had good reason to know that dramatic music without commentary stood at the mercy of the uncultivated imagination. T o the audiences of the 1840's —and possibly of the 1940's —the inherent expressiveness of music was a closed book. If a given theme or movement was vaguely titillating and allowed their individual daydreams to go on undisturbed, they found the music "beautiful." 38 If not, the tune or piece was held to be ugly, affected, "unmusical." Like children, who often mistake sweetness for flavor, they wanted candy all the time, and composers stood ready to furnish such music, however dangerous to diabetics. Even for connoisseurs of stronger stomach, Berlioz' dramatic range seemed excessive. What a modern writer said about the emotional accuracy of Berlioz' melodies must be said about his contrasts and conjunctions: they proceed from a moral realism that alienates many sincere listeners." The majority of those who are said to enjoy any art demand quite literally a diversion; they want not so much an ordering of life-stuff as a softening of the contours of experience; and it is no exaggeration to say that it takes them from six hundred to two thousand years to grow accustomed to the sterner methods of a Homer or a Dante. Even had he wished to, Berlioz could not have complied with the Tired Business MM., 328. A Trav., 10. 35 A Trav., 44. 36 Santayana: " W h a t most people relish is hardly music; it is rather a drowsy revery relieved by nervous thrills." (Reason in Art, j i . ) 37 See below (Subchapter 17) Jacques Riviere's opinion of a scene in the Damnation of Faust. 33

34

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Man's requirement. Beethoven's "Peasant Dance" in the first movement of the Seventh struck him as of equal beauty with the Allegretto which follows it, "that high sublime in symphonic music." It was not the contrast as such, not the shock of surprise that moved him; it was the ideal correspondence with a full and varied reality." When he was reading Lamartine in Rome, he found him "delicate, celestial" but regretted that the poet was "so incomplete: he never leaves the skies." w When Berlioz was discussing librettos with Scribe, he urged the dramatist to provide scenes which would not "keep steadily to a heroic or dithyrambic style; on the contrary . . . " 4 0 For the artist as evangelist, music presents yet another difficulty: it is such a powerful tonic that most people's nerves do not easily recover their poise under its impact, and so cannot report truthfully what displeases them. Thus one man will object to the harsh modulations in a piece that does not modulate; another hates the accompaniment of a theme which is in fact unaccompanied.41 Sound, in short, acts like a drug that causes hallucinations; its devotees respond allergically, fantastically, to the slightest deviation from blandness. If one adds to these impediments the lack of stylistic sense in composers, performers, and concertgoers alike, one can measure the strength of the resistance which a Berlioz encounters in his path. His mission seems self-centered until one perceives how few elements of understanding he can count on; the broader his scope the more he must teach, explain, and rationalize by means of analogies. Because of this, perhaps, Berlioz has been called a "greater artist than musician" by some who did not quite see the trap their distinction led to. For the either/or would imply that musical sound is not so much material for an art as substance for a trade ruled by routine.4* If one translates the comment as "more artist than practiced hack" or "more artist than confectioner" the fallacy gives itself away. Nine times out of ten, what is meant by "truly musical" is the cliché, the inevitable association of ideas, the tastefully bromidic." It is consequently no paradox to say that when =8

The marvel of Fidelio was that all its parts were differently superb. (A Trav., 75.) 38 A.R., 173. Compare Byron to Thomas Moore: "Tom, don't be so damned poetical." 40 In 1839: 86, 580. 41 Grot., 167-8. 42 To rebut this view is, once more, the point of Benvenuto Cellini and Die Meistersinger. 43 This is shown by the quick and flashing fame achieved by a certain order of talent which after twenty years subsides into the third or fourth rank of worthies.

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Berlioz seems "unmusical," he is likely to be not remote from, but close to, the original sources of all music. He is recapturing and using the inherent plasticity of his material and disregarding only the turn or shape which the hearer of settled musical habits expects. 44 This is not to say that whatever Berlioz does in the way of free handling must be accepted without question; it is to say rather that any criticism of his work must make sure that disapproval or displeasure does not spring merely from expectation denied — something like the feeling one has when a traditional misquotation is replaced by the poet's original words. An additional sign of Berlioz' direct contact with the intrinsic and historic sources of his art is the number of elements which he feels impelled to treat simultaneously or in quick succession. In his encyclopedia article he had enumerated and defined them: Melody, Harmony, Rhythm, Expression, Modulation, Instrumentation, the Point of Origin of Sound, Dynamics, and the Multiplicity of Sounds.45 A tenth element which needed no definition but to which he attached importance was the negative one of silence.48 If one compares a Berlioz score with that of any contemporary down to Moussorgsky and the Impressionists, one is struck by the integral role Berlioz assigns to silence.47 Not only does he frequently give the first sketch of a melody the barest accompaniment or none at all, but his harmony is never thick, any more than his orchestration or polyphony. There is air, as it were, around the structural members (as in medieval or modern architecture) and the prevailing transparency in every section is designed to heighten the moments of pressure, complexity, or artful disorder. T h e net effect is a unique sort of aliveness, a breathing quality. Berlioz may have learned this lesson from Gluck — who condemned opera scores that "stank of music" — or from Nature, whose steadiness hides behind intermittence. In either case, the result is capable of disconcerting tastes formed on other models. T h e sense of forward motion is more easily conveyed by steady singleness of thought and continuity of sound as, say, in a Bach chorale or a Brahms symphony. But the lighter texture can be 44 Newman's studies of Berlioz' form and melody, or Koechlin's of his harmony and counterpoint, demonstrate this beyond doubt (484 and 453). But see further Supplement 6.

45 48

A Trav., 1 ff.

T h e Roman Muses included Camena tacita, or Silence. Among the Greeks — which may be considered symbolic at this point — the Muse of history, Clio, was credited with the invention of the guitar 47 In L'Enfance du Christ even the pauses between sections are measured.

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no less solid at the same time as it affords a special pleasure of its own — what Emmanuel in speaking of the Harold symphony called "particles of pure sound . . . music weighed and doled out as a precious substance." ** This precious substance Berlioz worked at with an untiring hand until it was so molded in all its aspects as to afford sensuous, structural, and expressive interest simultaneously. N o detail was too minute to consider in the total effect as heard — hence difficult choices had to be made between rival virtues. This is what leads to the two divergent interpretations of his technique which Berlioz was to encounter in Germany as elsewhere. On the one hand he can seem heedless or crude because he goes against the refinements of common practice: squareness, the pairing in cut or shape of elements that are usually made to match, well-filled harmony or smooth modulation. On the other hand sensitive musicians can come to see with Schumann what a "fine engraver's hand," what "stylistic elegance," what concision, economy, and care to make everything "tell," Berlioz exhibits in his work.4" T o become aware of this, however, takes time and thought. The usual analysis only ascertains the harmonic and formal structure of a movement and takes the other elements as bonuses which it is pleasant to have. In Berlioz we cannot make this distinction between superstructure and base. T o him neither orchestration nor dynamics nor any other detail was a priori of secondary importance, for nothing was absolute. All elements were constitutive and modified each other. Thus the quality of a melody could determine an alteration in the form (say a shortening of one of its parts) if the theme, otherwise appropriate, did not deserve extensive development. This curtailing might in turn call for a heightening of rhythmical force and a richer orchestration to restore equilibrium by equivalence instead of symmetry.50 Berlioz' pragmatism goes deeper, therefore, than a desire to achieve the right auditory effect at the moment of performance. It poses the problem of relative values and so impels him to search for the highest harmony possible among the greatest number of elements. This is par excellence the technique of the dramatist, to whom rendering the object in the round 48 42η, 25J. Compare Proust: "Perhaps the most beautiful passage in Flaubert's Education Sentimentale is . . . a white space. Flaubert . . . [composes] like a musician." ( 1 1 1 2 , 205-6.) 49 After Schumann the critics I quote or paraphrase are, in order, Otto Luening (of N e w York), Saint-Saëns, and Pierné. 50 This is a rough account of what occurs in the second section of the Roman Carnival overture.

43 o

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matters more than any other quality. Y e t it does not prevent temporary concentration on one purpose: the dominant feature of a movement may, for dramatic or other reasons, be rhythm rather than melody (e.g., Introduction to Romeo and Juliet), counterpoint rather than orchestration (third movement of Symphony N o . i ) , harmony rather than thematic development ("Herod's Dream"). Moreover, musicians are attracted like other men b y "problems" that stimulate their technical imagination. Berlioz was constantly incited in this w a y , though he never felt that triumphs of technique were the goal of art, or exempted one from supplying other sources of interest. He would have strongly discountenanced Wagner's rationalization — in answer to an inquiry about his lack of rhythm — that after all one cannot have everything. 51 Berlioz' esthetic principles are easy to sum up: music was an art related to life through the recently magnified expressiveness of sounds; all the elements of music were capable of receiving or contributing to Form; the highest music must be as complete and independent an art as possible, even though there are many mansions on Parnassus — many genres and musical idioms. Absolute beauty was therefore a chimaera, however much one's "fanaticism" desired it — especially as creator. A s critic, one must be a pluralist. For the dramatic composer, the primacy of music meant the shaping of forms suited to words or action but never subordinated to them, and more often wholly autonomous. T h e occasion of a drama might be civic, social, or simply imagined; it should in any event need but a f e w signs to recall the mood or the myth to the hearer's latent responsiveness. W h e r e this was lacking, the public must be taught b y word and performance. Such was the art which Berlioz in 1843 had been cultivating for t w o decades. H e had produced some fifteen sizable works, of which about half deserved to be taken as models in contemporary music, and which actually were beginning to be regarded as such: just four years before, Schumann had written as editor of a leading music review, "Honestly, I grudge the paper for (a hostile essay], for as far as I am concerned, Berlioz is as clear to me as the blue sky; but of course in other respects the affair is sufficiently important. I think there is really a new era dawning in music; in fact, it must." 52 A new era could only mean new works in abundance, and the only convincing demonstration of the new principles must con732, 220. 232, I, 139. It appears from an earlier letter rhat the objector was judging without having heard any of the works he condemned (¡bid., 122). 51

52

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sist in artistic successes. Berlioz had little hope of seeing his Benvenuto revived on any German stage — opera managers being seldom venturesome—but he had four symphonies, four overtures, a dozen songs and one Requiem mass with which he could by himself indoctrinate the rising generation of musicians in Central Europe.

16. The Art of Composition: The Treatise January 1843 to July 184$

As far as I know, all writers repeat his observations on orchestral technique. They do not always acknowledge the author . . . But . . . Berlioz' subtlety of construction is beyond the cerebral powers of authors of pedagogical treatises. — V A N DIEREN in

1935

BERLIOZ' first trip to Germany was also an opportunity for renewing many old friendships. Companions of youthful days were now established men nearing middle life. Ferdinand Hiller — Camille Moke's former admirer — was musical director, in Frankfort. Schloesser, Berlioz' classmate at the Conservatoire, held a post at Darmstadt. At Leipzig, besides Robert Schumann whom he had never met but who had publicly invited him six years before, there was Mendelssohn occupying a well-entrenched position. Berlioz' discreet letter of inquiry from Weimar drew from his friend of Roman days a cordial invitation. Berlioz replied in January 1843:

You are wonderfully good and kind, as I was sure you would be. Luck is on my side these days: the concert went well and this morning I received your letter. . . . Yes, indeed, I should very much like to give concerts in Leipzig. If it does not depend on someone's special permission, granted as a favor, I should like to give two, since I see that expenses are moderate. . . . Though it irks me, I shall have to begin with my old stuff, my latest scores being still in Frankfort, whence they are being forwarded. So please thank the directors [of the Gewandhaus] and tell them I shall be happy to present on the 22 nd the Finale for three choruses from my Romeo and Juliet symphony. But they must be warned that the part of Friar Laurence requires a first-rate bass.1 This letter illustrates Berlioz' problems and procedure. From one center he prepared the concert for the next by arranging for a personal invitation and, if possible, securing the co-operation of a friend. From Stuttgart he had written to Meyerbeer at Berlin, and to an old Conservatoire man, Chélard, who directed the Weimar "chapel"; 2 and from Weimar to Karl 1

M.E., 26-7. Hyppolite Chélard (1789-1861), Rome Prize winner in 1811, was a productive opera composer whose success came to him in Germany. He had volun2

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Lipinski, concertmaster at Dresden, where Wagner, just turned thirty, had become court conductor. At Stuttgart, where he had no acquaintance and where no one spoke French, he (who knew no German) managed pretty well by speaking with Dr. Schilling in Latin.8 Everywhere he was known through his feuilletons which for three years had been reproduced in German, chiefly in Schumann's Neue Zeitschrift für Musik.* The financial arrangements varied. Berlioz bore the cost of transporting himself and his music, as well as of any extras on the spot —he usually had to import at his expense one or two instrumentists such as the harp and English horn. He supervised the rehearsals and, if the local rules allowed it, conducted. In return he received half, or sometimes less, of the net profits. This was no lavish compensation, for the halls were generally small, the price of admission was low,® and his own outlay considerable. He had with him "500 pounds of music," which the railroads in their infant weakness were unwilling to carry with any guarantee of delivery. So the parts and full scores had to go by mail coach at exorbitant rates. Traveling and living in hotels was also costly, especially for a man of reputation who could not scrimp too obviously. As keeper of the purse, Marie was of great help, for she had habits of economy which she could exercise on Berlioz' behalf with complete propriety. He was thus able to send a good part of his earnings to his wife and child, which supplemented the royalties from the Freischütz that he had made over to them. From the start of his tour, Berlioz' art and person made him many new friends. At Brussels, the guitar virtuoso and music critic Zani de Ferranti became an enthusiastic advocate; at Hechingen, the Prince took part in a performance specially arranged by Berlioz for a very small ensemble; the King of Württemberg also proved very gracious; at Dresden, Baron von Lüttichau, superintendent of theaters for the Saxon King, seconded Berlioz' efforts with great courtesy; at Brunswick, he made a lifelong friend of the composer Robert Griepenkerl; in Berlin, Alexander von Humboldt introduced him to the King of Prussia. In turn, Berlioz introduced the harpist Parish-Alvars to Chélard, and many other instrumentists and singers to officials who needed their services or might help them. tarily removed there when his Macbeth, on a libretto b y R o u g e t de Lisle, had failed in Paris in 1827. 3 V.M., I, jo. Gustav Schilling ( 1 8 0 3 - 1 8 8 1 ) was a prolific musicologist and critic until about 1857. H e then emigrated to the United States, f o r no k n o w n reasons, and died obscure in Nebraska. * F o r a fairly complete list, see the appendix of 286. 5 A top rate of 48 kreutzers (about 25 cents) was not uncommon.

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It was a musical round, and Berlioz had to charge his memory with the names, capacities, and concerns of dozens of artists in order to act efficiently in his new role of impresario for himself and musical missionary at large. The most rewarding moments of this first trip were the concert and visit at Weimar; the meetings with Mendelssohn and Schumann at Leipzig; the lively discussions with Lipinski and Wagner at Dresden; the enthusiastic ovation at Brunswick. Elsewhere the response to Berlioz' music varied from respect to hatred, just as the performances varied from poor to perfect. Marie's desire to sing did not make for success, but her pretensions were soon reduced to one song, "Absence," which Berlioz orchestrated for her. It was at Weimar that he shook her off for a time, before this compromise arrangement had been reached; 4 and it was there that he enjoyed the pleasure of a successful concert and the free run of a town whose artistic associations were particularly inspiring. The memories of Goethe and Schiller and Mme. de Stael, the smiling aspect of the countryside, the neat walks in town and outside, and at night the mild moonlit sky, enchanted him. The fever and sore throat that had plagued him at Frankfort disappeared.7 Invariably the atmosphere of intellect and art proved a cure for ailments of nervous origin. The one flaw in his enjoyment of the ducal city was his discovery of Schiller's narrow dwelling: "Gin it be that these two small windows light the garret where . . . the great singer of every noble feeling wrote Don Carlos, Mary Stuart, The Robbers, and Wallenstein? Is it here that he lived like a poor scholar! Ah! Goethe ought never to have allowed it. He, a rich man and minister of state, might surely have softened the lot of his poet friend — or was this illustrious friendship not genuine? I fear it was genuine chiefly on Schiller's side . . . Ah, Schiller, you deserved a less human friend." 8 At Leipzig, Mendelssohn and Berlioz greeted each other like old companions, long separated, who both shy away at first, expecting a rebuff. But nothing of the sort ensued; on the contrary their earlier friendship was cemented for life. Mendelssohn still sincerely disliked Berlioz' music 6 Pourtalès compares Berlioz' eluding of his mistress with the incident of Liszt's shaking off Lola Montez. Liszt had a double reward: the adventuress whom he liberated for higher things showed her gratitude by sending him a decoration from her new protector, the King of Saxony. 7 T h e winter of 1842-1843 was unusually clement, and proportionally rife in respiratory infections. 8 Mem., II, 43. Berlioz was quite misinformed in this matter and his remarks have value only as an indication of his feelings.

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and Berlioz knew it. Yet Mendelssohn helped to rehearse and produce it, and Berlioz no less sincerely admired and praised his friend's works till his death and after. Curiously, it was Berlioz' orchestration that Mendelssohn could not stomach: "It is so entirely slovenly — scrubbed up anyhow — that one has to wash one's hands after reading one of his scores." * T h e melodies he rather liked, and most of all he liked Berlioz as a man, knowing after renewed contact what qualities of mind and heart lay behind the distant or ironic exterior: "It grieves me [that Berlioz should compose as he does] because Berlioz is intelligent, cool, and sensible in his judgment, and always thoughtful." 1 0 Mendelssohn helped him, says Berlioz, "like a brother . . . His patience was indefatigable." 11 T h e y exchanged batons, and it was on that occasion that Berlioz, remembering his boyhood admiration of James Fenimore Cooper, wrote as a gift card the jeu d'esprit which when published caused a flurry of censure.12 Close to Mendelssohn was Schumann — who had praised and played Berlioz' earliest works —and with him Clara, his pianist-wife, whom Berlioz had met at the Bertins' house in Paris. Schumann was already plagued by the depression which marked his latter years and hence exceedingly taciturn, but he let drop a word which deeply touched his visitor: " T h e Offertory [of the Requiem] surpasses everything."" At the concert, the Symphonie Fantastique was applauded, together with Reverie et Caprice, played by the virtuoso concertmaster Ferdinand David; but the public as a whole was rather of Mendelssohn's opinion. Despite Schumann's discreet but single-minded propaganda, die Tante (as musical Leipzig was familiarly called) found Berlioz a dangerous revolutionary." 9 21η, 97· This opinion was probably due in part to ingrained habits of reading. Schumann had replied to a similar objection: "Pardon me, but you are judging without having heard the overture. You bave no idea of his way of treating the orchestra." (1226, I, 122.) 10 217, 133. 11 Mem., II, 54. 12 These are the remarks: "Great chief! We have promised to exchange tomahawks. Here is mine, which is rough; yours too is plain. Only squaws and pale faces are fond of ornate weapons. Be my brother! And when the Great Spirit shall have sent us to hunt in the land of souls, may our warriors hang up our tomahawks together at the entrance to the council." (Mem., II, 54 ) 13 Corresp., 134. 14 Between the long review of the Fantastique in 1835 and this meeting with Berlioz, Schumann had written notices of two other works and countered a number of violent attacks. His clear intuition is shown by the final words on Berlioz' sincerity being equal to Haydn's ($oS, 192 and n.) and although he

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W h y , asked the critics, did he not write harmonies like everybody else? W h y did he use instruments not generally found in the classical masters — harp, ophicleide, English horn? T h e summing up, though adverse, was perceptive — which usually means the beginning of the end for any conservatism whatever; it protests but sees the point: "Berlioz refuses to please us; he wants to be 'characteristic' . . . he seeks to liberate music, tolerating neither shackles nor boundaries. His fancy alone he regards as law. . . . After the Witches' Sabbath of the Symphonie Fantastique, Weber's 'Den of Wolves' is a lullaby." 1 5 Mendelssohn's friend Moscheles was similarly stung: "His barbarous and wicked counterpoint seems to want to show that ours is pedantic." 16 A t Dresden, hallowed for him by the memories of Weber's conductorship, Berlioz heard Wagner direct The Flying Dutchman. Although the score did not move him deeply, and he is said to have found the instrumentation excessive, Berlioz saw as soon as anyone else that Wagner was an artist worthy of special attention. He admired the "uncommon energy and precision" with which Wagner conducted. But the two men seem to have had few opportunities to converse. Baron von Lüttichau — "a tall thin man with a hard, dry face" (Wagner's description) — monopolized whatever time was not taken up with rehearsing. In the brief intervals of relaxation Berlioz chatted with Karl Lipinski who, like Lobe at Leipzig, was already a stout disciple. Lipinski suspected Wagner of obstructing Berlioz' efforts, but the two concerts were none the less successful, well attended, and financially profitable. 17 The players were so enthusiastic that on the day of departure they serenaded the composer under his windows.' ' After a second turn in Leipzig, a little more satisfactory than the first, a racking ten-hour trip in an open coupé brought Berlioz by March 1 to Brunswick. There he was greeted bv his old friends, the four brothers of the Müller quartet, and the orchestra proved to be "excellentissime." A t the later lost touch with Berlioz' artistic development, he made good his boast to posterity of having been the first German to proclaim the Frenchman's genius. 15 Allgemeine Musikzeitung, quoted in 300, 164. 16 5910- But Moscheles lived to revise his judgment. W r i t i n g to his daughter in 1859, he says: " A l l that y o u tell me about Berlioz interests me especially, because he is certainly among the fighting artists one of those who have the most inventive power and one w h o does not distort art of set purpose. His Benvenuto Cellini, which I heard in W e i m a r , gives me the highest expectations for the forthcoming Troy ens." (978, II, 297.) 17 M.E., J4 and n. 13 " W i n d o w s " ! T h e word reminds one with a shock that Dresden's charming streets and monuments — the Zwinger among them — are a pile of ruins: saturation bombing in the Second W o r l d W a r . W e progress!

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first trial of the Queen Mab scherzo, however, the players broke down in confusion. This gives us a good idea of the average technical ability in an unusually good orchestra, or rather, it confirms Wagner's estimate of four years before when he first heard Berlioz conduct in Paris: the new music was composed for, and had to be played by, virtuosos. The conception of the orchestra was being transformed, and the thing itself reshaped into a new instrument. After fatiguing rehearsals, the conductor-composer had his reward. The audience stood up and cheered and the players invited their leader to a banquet of one hundred and fifty covers. There were speeches, toasts, reiterated invitations, and what is more, the critic Griepenkerl wrote a pamphlet expounding Berlioz. "I confess," wrote the composer to Heine, "that these demonstrations made me very happy." 19 Hamburg gave him equal satisfaction. As Berlioz wrote to his father after the first of these triumphs, "I have been wanting to write to you for quite a long time. I do not know what instinct made me wait until I had a really great success — greater than the rest — before telling you anything. I do not think I shall ever have another like this recent one. The performance, first of all, was marvelous. . . . Then they put crowns of laurel on my score, on the stage. . . . " 20 In Berlin, the composer had his first experience of the disagreement-inreverse which may occur between public opinion and the critics' judgment: the audience cheered and the papers damned. Meyerbeer — Spontini's successor in the post of royal music director — was officiously present helping Berlioz and keeping up the instructive relations he had initiated in 1829. Frederick William I V , King of Prussia, came to the concert, heard Romeo and Juliet, and was charmed. He came a second time, all the way from Potsdam, and finally gave a small party in Berlioz' honor — only a dozen guests or so; but after a space the curtains at one end of the apartment flew open and three hundred musicians under Wieprecht, the bandmaster, played the Francs-Juges overture.21 It was now late May. After two more concerts, Berlioz' first care was to see Harriet and his son. The meeting must have been painful, and to live 19

Mem., II, 86. W o l f g a n g Robert Griepenkerl ( i 8 t o - i 8 6 8 ) was the son of the editor of Bach's instrumental works, a teacher also, a composer, and a writer on musical and literary subjects. (440.) 20 M . E . , 39. Berlioz' eagerness to please his father never changed, as if he could never sufficiently prove his affection and obedience. 21 It was probably during this visit that Wieprecht expressed the wish to bring out an edition of the Apothéose of the Funeral and Triumphal symphony. It was announced but has so far not been found.

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with them again disheartening, for he wrote to Adèle: "Your children are, I hope, in good health. Harriet often speaks to me of your quiet and happy household. She envies you. Louis has grown up . . . and will write y o u a letter. Harriet is beginning to grieve again because I have had another offer from the London Philharmonic to conduct a concert . . . But the trip is not yet decided upon; they have not replied to the musical and financial stipulations I made. W e both send your husband greetings, and kisses for your little daughters, and we kiss you into the bargain While London was pending, Berlioz wrote to Ricordi, the music publisher at Milan, where he remembered hearing the fine orchestra of La Scala. T h e possibility of a concert there was tempting, but nothing came of the suggestion. 23 Meantime there was enough to do in Paris. T h e score of the Funeral and Triumphal symphony was being published and Thalberg wanted to make a free piano transcription of the Apotheosis, which required complicated adjustments between two publishers.24 As for operatic plans, the libretto of the Nonne Sanglante still hung fire. Berlioz had made but little progress with the first act. If his voyaging in new lands had stirred him up spiritually, as was probable, the result was not immediately apparent, nor was it likely that the impressions gathered from new aspects of nature and fresh musical emotions would suit Scribe's banalities. Rather, the German countryside had awakened recollections of his early fondness for Goethe's Faust. O f more immediate importance was the forthcoming publication of Berlioz' Treatise upon Modern Instrumentation and Orchestration, which was a revision and expansion of the series of articles published since 1842 in the Gazette Musicale. For the version in book form, Berlioz had illustrated his chapters with musical quotations from the masters and himself. A s the best and most objective proof of his "science," the volume must now be launched throughout Europe. T o this end, he secured permission to dedicate the work to the King of Prussia. It was a kind of authentication from Berlin, from Germany, which the interlocking arrangements of publishers and the drift of musical opinion made desirable. Already the previous year, an unauthorized German translator had hailed the technical essays, and with his slim collection had prepared an audience for the complete Treatise. 22

M.E., 50.

23

H e was, however, made a member of the Saint-Cecilia A c a d e m y of Rome.

(392, 693.) 24

Schlesinger in Paris and Breitkopf und Härtel in Leipzig (/y).

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Finally, Berlioz had his journalistic duties to take up again — his "semicritiques," as he called them; for residing as he did in Paris he could scarcely say all he felt about his colleagues. Yet in the course of supplying the market these colleagues could not prevent their scores from undergoing Berlioz' judgment, just as if the works had not been mere commercial products — semi-works of art. Berlioz' first feuilletons on returning from abroad consisted of letters from Germany — reports and anecdotes on his recent trip, which enabled him to thank his recent hosts, and which formed the core of a volume of musical travels to be published the following spring. Destined for the Débats, these letters detailed the conditions under which the art of music was carried on in the middle of the ninteenth century, and their substance was preserved for inclusion in the later Memoirs™ For the Gazette, Berlioz combined not fact but fiction with musical ideas long pondered and produced a notable document: the serialized novelette called Euphonia, in which he set forth the ideal conditions for producing the great works since Gluck and Beethoven. The imagined Euphonia was a city organized for music the way Paris or London were not even organized for making boots. Besides anticipations of Dalcroze eurhythmies and modern conservatory teaching, Berlioz* plan is the blueprint of Bayreuth.2* Pressing practical affairs also occupied him. Through his influence, Marie Recio had been engaged at the Opéra-Comique. She again failed to attract notice, which marked the end of her musical career. Berlioz henceforth supported her and her mother, relying on the care and affection she gave him as well as the quiet which he could no longer expect at home. Nevertheless he was frequently to be found at that home, with his old unhappy love and their son. During his absence in Germany, moreover, a project he had discussed with his friend Baron Taylor had taken shape. Under the title of Association of Musical Artists, a group of Paris musicians had agreed to band together for mutual aid and the furtherance of modern music.27 Berlioz 25

Mem., opening chapters of volume II; chapters 52 to 61 in the Newman edition. 26 The fictional essay, with the significant subtitle " A Novel of the Future," is reprinted in Soirées de l'Orchestre (25th) Eves., 249-87. In the original, the anagrammed names of the dramatis personae hark back to the Camille Moke episode and the tale depicts a melodramatic "revenge." In the reissue the names were changed, and the serious portion set off under the heading "Description of Euphonia." For the text and its relation to Wagner's plan, see Supplement 4. 27 Isidore - Justin Sevérin, Baron Taylor, was born in Brussels of English parents and died in Paris in 1879. During his busy life he was a man of letters, an engraver, a soldier, a sociologist, a public official, and a patron of the arts.

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was a charter member. Shortly the Association decided to sponsor symphonic concerts, with a view to relieving the individual composer of just those risks that Berlioz had so long shouldered alone. By September 1843 a festival was planned which Berlioz was to direct in December. In between, a concert of his own at the Conservatoire earned him a rousing ovation and a few hundred francs. The program included — among more familiar pieces — a trio from Benvenuto Cellini, the Rêverie and Caprice for violin (played by Alard), and the great song "Absence." The Apotheosis from the fourth symphony brought the audience to its feet. The press for once was short of jokes. Berlioz' singlehanded efforts were termed "a prodigy of human will power," and it was noted that the audience listened ". . . with religious silence" between its salvos of applause. "Woe to anyone hereafter who shall dare deny M. Berlioz' genius." 28 Habeneck of the Opera did not deny it, he feared it — principally as a rival orchestra leader. He therefore managed to prevent the concert of the Association from taking place. Despite all his hard-won success, Berlioz' position was as precarious as ever. As a free lance he was a menace to others and hence to himself; for if one of his enterprises failed, he must redouble his efforts in the face of lost prestige; and if it succeeded, it only closed the ranks of the placemen against him. He was to official music what Swift was to the Church of England: alarmingly strong as an underling, therefore never to be made a bishop. No institutional group could assimilate so much genius, neither side could quit the struggle. It must go on. Aptly reflecting on "our culture and our form of government, which victimize the artist in proportion as he remains an artist,"28 Berlioz drew out his score of Benvenuto and, reliving its vigorous inspiration, was impelled to compose on two of its themes a new overture, the now well-known Roman Carnival. In the Spanish campaign of 1823 he was aide-de-camp to General d'Orsay; a f e w years later, as director of the Comédie Française, he helped the Romanticists secure a foothold, and it was then that he and Berlioz met and developed feelings of mutual esteem which lasted through life. A f t e r the J u l y Revolution, T a y l o r made several trips to E g y p t for the purpose of securing the L u x o r obelisk which now stands in the Place de la Concorde. In 1838 he was appointed Inspector of Fine A r t s and shortly thereafter he organized the first mutual aid society for men of letters. Its success led him to found four others, all of which have survived. H e wrote several plays as well as lively accounts of his travels in Switzerland, Italy, France, England, G e r m a n y , and Greece. 28

269, 47· 269, 49. It was after his concert of N o v . 19, 1843, that his enemies at the Conservatoire managed to deny him the use of the hall forever after b y securing a ministerial ruling against its being rented. 29

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Worked up symphonically, this felicitous by-product occupies in the complete Benvenuto the place that Beethoven's Leonore overture does in Fidelio. Each sufficiently anticipates elements of the music drama so that it seems a pity to play it ahead of the second act. Yet the music so clearly belongs to the larger work that its separate performance is a tantalizing hors d'oeuvre. Berlioz played his Roman Carnival, separately of course,30 at his first concert of February, 1844, and the new work was encored. The overture soon became a general favorite and finally a concert "war horse." Being simple in its contrast of love song and dance, it was found "melodic," it was compared to Schubert, and it even caused a few of Berlioz' fanatical enemies some embarrassment. "What is the fascinating overture you have been playing? " the conductor Seghers was once asked. "That was the Roman Carnival by Berlioz." "Well! I must say — " "You're right," broke in one of Berlioz' friends, "I agree with you that he ought to be ashamed to go against an honest man's prejudices in that way." 3 1 On the same program Berlioz, still fresh from Goethe's Weimar, had announced the hitherto unperformed Gretchen song from his Eight Scenes of 1828. It again remained unperformed because the singer was ill, but his revived interest in the score was to last and to bear fruit. At the moment, the chief novelties on the program — aside from his conducting the saltarello of the Carnival alla romana instead of at the chugging pace Habeneck gave it when Benvenuto was staged82 — were two songs from the Irish Melodies of his youth. He had revised them, and one, the Chant Sacré, which dated back still further to his second prize cantata, was to go through yet another transformation which happens to mark a date in the history of instrumentation. Three years before, Adolphe Sax, a young Belgian musician with a scientific turn of mind had come to Paris from Brussels with thirty francs in his pocket. His plan was to develop systematically the wind choir of the orchestra, and he needed the support of eminent performers and 30 The least desirable practice is that occasionally followed, of using it as an overture before the Romeo and Juliet symphony, The Infant Christ, or Harold in Italy: this mixing of works and styles is a serious dramatic mistake. 31 Mem., II, 365. The comparison with Schubert is curiously exact as to a passage near the close of the Rosamunde overture; yet Schubert's score was not discovered until some 20 years after Berlioz had written his Carnival. 32 A recent work of reference states: "Its introduction is slow and lyrical, and is followed by a wild tarantella as danced by the participants in a carnival. . . ." (128η, 63.) On the proper tempo of the saltarello, which should by no means be a wild tarantella, see Cauchie, "Respect for Rhythm," 1391, Oct. 1, 1929, 890.

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composers to obtain the necessary financial backing. One interview sufficed to convince Berlioz, who gave him a public endorsement in the Débats. Meyerbeer, Rossini, and Kastner followed suit with testimonials such that all other instrument makers leagued themselves against Sax. When he developed an entirely new instrument, later named saxophone, his rivals took steps to oppose the patent on the ground that it was not new. He defied them to produce its like and once again enlisted Berlioz' support. The composer could write stingingly and from experience about such innocent conspiracies. Would he also score a work for the new reed instrument and the other wind improved by Sax? Berlioz fell in with the idea of a "propaganda concert." 3 3 His old "Prayer" from Herminie which had become a six-part chorus, he now arranged for two clarinets (soprano and bass), two bugles (large and small), a small trumpet, and a saxophone." The new version was only a qualified success, largely because Sax's new instrument was still imperfect — the saxophone "leaked" — and the inventor-performer forgot the fingering. Berlioz' little work was not repeated, though Sax and his friends gratefully serenaded the composer at home with the same instruments, much improved, later in the year. Between the spring and summer of 1844 five more concerts either featured Berlioz' music or consisted entirely of his works. T h e Roman Carnival and the Weber-Berlioz Invitation to the Dance had, together with the Sax venture, renewed the public's interest in the composer. A helpful catchword began to pass current: Berlioz was the foremost instrumental composer of the day {i.e., don't, my dear, expect coloratura effects or wonders at the keyboard). Still, the tyranny of the piano was now unshakable and at one of these concerts the Roman Carnival, whose structure and atmosphere are wholly orchestral, was rendered to thunderous applause by eight hands on two pianos — the forty fingers being those of Pixis (the arranger), Heller, Hallé, and Liszt. Stephen Heller, who also composed, could well wonder " w h y do we not hear Berlioz played by the Conservatoire [that is, by the Concert Society, not merely in their hall at Berlioz' expense]. He is the greatest 33 939> >3« 5 I - 2 < 21 3-4· See a l s o 861. It can readily be guessed that Habeneck and his troopers of the Opera opposed Sax. M ¡398, Feb. h , 1844, 43. Modern reference works keep repeating that the saxophone "made its first appearance in a symphonic orchestra in 1844." This is ambiguous: the first concert appearance was in Berlioz' piece. Toward the end of the same year, Berlioz' friend Georges Kästner scored a part for saxophone in his oratorio The Last King of Judah, which was played at the Conservatoire.

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French composer. Must he first make up his mind to sleep the long sleep? Once dead, he will live for a long time. The cry of 'Berlioz is dead' will make thousands shout: 'Long live Berlioz!' " " In May the Voyage Musical — part autobiography, part music criticism — went to press with a dedication to his royal highness the Duc de Montpensier. The two handsome volumes, priced at fifteen francs, appeared in August and sold very well. In four years they were out of print, and whether he knew it or not, Berlioz had given status to a new literary genre — that which his great forerunner Weber had not lived to establish firmly and which his great follower Wagner would amplify still further. Opposite the title page of the Voyage Musical was a lithograph of the author as conductor — his first portrait, excluding caricatures, since Signol had painted him at the Villa Medici. A little later at Vienna, Prinzhofer drew a finer portrait in a similar pose." We see Berlioz in the full strength of maturity and at the height of his second period of fighting success. This is the way he looked and remained to the thousands of European musicians who played or spoke with him during the first campaign of 1843-1855, and who did not see him in the later one, as an old man. Holding his public position as orchestral virtuoso by main strength of composing, conducting, and organizing, Berlioz cast about, in the spring of 1844, for his next occasion. That summer the first great exhibition of industrial products was to be held in Paris. Always interested in science and technology, Berlioz saw no reason why the show should not close to the accompaniment of music. He and the violinist Strauss (the master of the dance in Paris as his unrelated namesake was in Vienna) petitioned the Ministry for the right to present a double program — a serious celebration in the afternoon, a program of dance music in the evening. The idea being new and perhaps profitable, it raised enormous opposition. Everyone expressed a different fear. The police commissioner thought that the mob might storm the Tuileries. Why the mob, if so minded, could not do it without music was not explained. Again, though Berlioz did not intend to fill the afternoon concert with his own works, he could not play every living composer's hymn or march. Hence the omitted musicians formed a cabal, under the natural leadership of Habeneck. Berlioz was busy unknotting every intrigue when Strauss fell ill and the whole burden of organization dropped on his partner's shoulders — from overseeing the printing of handbills and filling out requests for constables 35 36

269, 55. See page 480.

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and firemen, to gathering f r o m all over France and rehearsing in Paris the twelve hundred singers and players w h o would participate. In spite of the careful drilling of this small army, the dress rehearsal on July 31 was a near-fiasco: in the vast hall of machines, the carpentering of stands and the dismantling of steam engines made music virtually inaudible." A t last, leading seven subconductors, each with his battalion, Berlioz created order and music out of noise and disarray. T h a t night the stands had to be altered under his direction because the chorus blocked the orchestra.3® A preliminary survey of ticket sales was w h o l l y disheartening. But the next day the people rushed in a whole hour before the concert, and from beginning to end applauded the music. Berlioz himself had composed a short Hymne

à la France which, as he said on another occasion,

"not having been done w i t h the aid of time would not be preserved b y it."

39

Still, his magic has touched the w o r k at more than one point, in the

rhythm especially, and in the breath-taking economy of the orchestration. T h e hall being lined w i t h curtains, flags, and other decorations, the volume of sound pouring d o w n on the audience was b y no means a Niagara, on the contrary. T h e preceptor to the King's sons, CuvillierFleury, w h o was also a colleague of Berlioz at the Débats, gave a firsthand account to the D u e d'Aumale immediately after the event: " N o spot could have been more badly adapted to the purpose, f o r the hall is entirely lacking in the resonance necessary to favor Berlioz' attempt, w h i c h was patterned after that of the German musical societies. But where else could he put his 1200 performers? H e would not give up a single contrab a s s — s o everyone rushed to his aid when he called. T h e c r o w d was a brilliant one. Y o u r y o u n g brother, the D u c de Montpensier, was in a box to w h i c h I had the honor of being invited, and he was seen — to everyone's satisfaction — applauding with all his might the refrain of the chrous from [Halévy's] Charles VI, ' N e v e r will the English rule!' T h e execution was truly formidable because the entire audience joined in."

40

T h i s enthusiasm

caused a governmental tremor. Louis Philippe was at the moment on good 37 An accidental demonstration of the fact that those who think large-scale music is noisy do not know what they are talking about. Those same sensitive ears tolerate without protest the deafening racket not only of their industrial and commercial pursuits, but also of their dance halls and cocktail parties. 38 In Central Park a hundred years later, for the American première of the Funeral and Triumphal symphony, the same occlusion took place: music is always at the mercy of the man with a hammer. 39 Grot., 294. It none the less served in 1948 to celebrate in France the centenary of the 1848 Revolution. 40 n 8,1, 328-9. S

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terms with England, which was of course sufficient reason for the public's singing defiance. Berlioz was haled before the Prefect of Police, who charged him with having provoked the demonstration. This was easily refuted, since the program had been posted and approved in advance. In spite of the incident, the Duc de Montpensier sent Berlioz a congratulatory letter and a handsome piece of china. As might have been expected, Berlioz was nearly dead. During the intermission he was wet to the skin, his teeth were chattering, and his face was unrecognizable. For a moment his alarmed friends among the orchestra did not think it safe to let him go on. They sent for fresh clothing and set up an improvised screen of harps with their slip covers, behind which Berlioz mopped himself, changed, and caught his breath. Marie, who was singing in the chorus, saw him safely home. The reaction came less than three weeks later, in the form of a fever diagnosed as possibly typhoid. His old teacher, friend, and physician Amussat bled him and ordered him out of Paris for a complete rest. Berlioz went to Nice. It was at Nice that nearly fifteen years before he had spent the twenty happiest days of his life, after Camille's treachery and the mad attempt to commit suicide. He found again the "sublime sea" and serene skies of his "return to life." He found the old martello tower up in the rocks, and soon, under the spell of nature and memory, he began to compose the overture which he had sketched at the same time as the King Lear and Rob Roy.*1 But though the mood was propitious and the will and musical daemon in working order, the tired body put obstacles in the way. The overture was finished and christened, for association's sake, Tour de Nice, but at a first hearing in Paris the next year, Berlioz put it aside for recasting.42 A new melody came to him, La belle Isabeau, and found more favor in his eyes, since he published it at the first opportunity. He came back to Paris restored and found that an entertainment king by the name of Franconi wanted him to direct a festival at his establishment, the Cirque Olympique. This time, at least, Berlioz would not have to do his own managerial chores. Just then the mind of musical Paris was being stirred by the revelation of a new musician, Félicien David,43 who for ten years had been composing unplayed and unknown. Now at a concert in the Conservatoire, for which David had had to borrow 41

A century after that first visit a memorial plaque was affixed on the tower. (I¡lustration, Nov. 26, 1932.) 42 It emerged brilliantly as the Corsair overture. See below, Chapter 21. 4:1 Not to be confused with the North German violinist Ferdinand David, %vho had played for Berlioz as concertmaster in Leipzig.

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twelve hundred francs like Berlioz in 1825, he displayed a talent for atmospheric pieces of oriental coloring which infatuated the public. As a disciple of Saint-Simon, the doctrinaire socialist who advocated a Christian technocracy, David wore clothes of a Utopian light blue, and with hair falling to the shoulders paraded on the boulevard with a gay band of fellow-believers who sang his party hymns. They came to the concert, and celebrated on the streets afterwards to such effect that the citizens who had stayed at home were sure it was a new revolution. It was not even a revolution in music. David's most famous piece was a "Caravan Procession" from an oriental suite, Le Désert, which suggests rather too much the Pilgrims' March from Harold in Italy. The form of David's Symphonic Ode was likewise derived from Berlioz' early essays at a dramatic symphony. But this did not keep Berlioz from seeking out David, asking him for works to put on his programs, and giving him a cordial and detailed boost in the Débats.** Meanwhile rehearsals for the Franconi festival were begun, but not satisfactorily from a musical point of view because the oval bowl made sound reverberate unpleasantly. The four scheduled concerts took place once a month from January to April 1845. At the first, despite bad acoustics and a ragged performance, the Tuba minim of the Requiem and the Hymne à la France came through. This was music, said one critic, "fitted to electrify the masses." 4r' It was then that Berlioz heard his Tour de Nice overture and decided to lay it aside. The second concert was given over to David and the pianist Leopold von Mayer, who performed a new "Moroccan March" of his own composition.4® A t the third concert, in March, Berlioz introduced Glinka to the Paris public by playing excerpts from A Life for the Czar and Russian and Ludmilla. The two composers had met when both were still students in Italy and had found their views of music highly congenial. Both were more or less consciously founding new schools of dramatic music upon a solid background of national traditions, and it was no accident that their paths should cross again in 1844, nor that later their musical tendencies should merge in a common influence upon the Russian Five. In a long article in the Débats, Berlioz followed up his presentation of the music with criticism and biography, and Glinka, whose main object in coming to Paris had been to study Berlioz at close range, declared himself more than rewarded. He heard the music, read Berlioz' new 44

Reprinted in M.M., pp. 219-37. 269, 77· 48 Later orchestrated (with a new coda) by Berlioz ( G e r . ed., vol. X V I I I ) . 48

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works in manuscript, and felt that his own talents had been at once consecrated and fertilized during the encounter.47 The fourth and last concert in April was chiefly devoted to Berlioz' own works — those that he felt were least known and undeservedly overlooked because of their mild and subtle coloring — his Impressionist movements, so to speak, such as the Offertory of the Requiem and the Queen Mab scherzo. His performers were now playing at the top of their form, and he was musically well satisfied, but public support was dwindling as other novelties drew the crowd away from Franconi's Cirque. The impresario lost money and the decline unfortunately coincided with the finest rendering of Berlioz' finest work. With hardly time to catch his breath, but only to be bled again, Berlioz left for Marseille where his friend the cellist Lecourt was eager to have him conduct. The local talent, especially the singers, were worse than inadequate, yet Berlioz managed to inspire them with some rudiments of musicianship by June 19. Like many a Berlioz première before an unprepared audience, the concert left everyone cold. A second performance on the twenty-fifth went better, musically and financially. On the way back to Paris, Berlioz stopped at Lyon where George Hainl — soon to be a devoted friend — directed the Grand Theatre. To the regular orchestra, Berlioz added amateur singers and other instrumentists bringing the total to two hundred. Among these, he had included his old teacher Dorant, met by chance on the streets of Lyon. He was the versatile player of several instruments who had taught Hector the guitar at La Côte and helped him with his first harmonizations. In presenting him to the orchestra as a first violin, Berlioz took occasion to express his affectionate old memories in a characteristic little speech: "Gentlemen, I have the honor of presenting to you a very able teacher from Vienne, M. Dorant He has in our midst a grateful pupil — myself. You may shortly be thinking that his pupil is no great credit to him, but I beg you to welcome him as if you thought otherwise, for this is in any case what he himself deserves."18 The public of Lyon was as slow as that of Marseille to like anything but the sure-fire pieces. It responded not at all to the Pilgrims' March, but rose to the March of the Fantastique. The Apothéose of the Funeral " Letter to Nestor Koukolnik (Paris, April 15, 1845), 192a, 83-5. Berlioz' essay, reprinted in M.M., 205-15, was republished as a separate work in Milan for a Glinka revival in 1874. iB Grot., 279. Berlioz adds: "It was to me a singular emotion to be conducting the 'Pilgrims' March' and the 'Scenes in the Country' with my old master playing, whom I had not seen in 20 years." Ibid.

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Symphony — to us the least interesting of movements when detached — was found "sublime, thrice sublime." 49 A second concert, after the orchestra had learned a little more and had serenaded their trainer, caused greater pleasure and even stirred the local gentry to entertain their fellow countryman. By July 25, Berlioz had just one week to turn around in: back to Paris to write a few columns overdue by reason of his absence, to thank by letter all his friends, hosts, and helpers in the provinces; then off again for the great musical event he had been dreaming of: the inauguration of Beethoven's statue at Bonn.

Structure and Harmony Through Timbre Beethoven did not write music for the eye. — BERLIOZ on several occasions

The Treatise on Modern Instrumentation and Orchestration which Berlioz published by subscription early in 1844 may be considered the portable lexicon of his artistic doctrine. At this virtual mid-point of his career, Berlioz' direct action upon the musical centers of France, Belgium, and Germany had established him as one who was making musical history. His works might charm or repel, they left no one indifferent. Meanwhile his conducting proved him a master of the practical side of his craft, an artist of unimpeachable integrity; his Treatise would show the many-sided knowledge upon which both his practice and his art were grounded. The success of the work was immediate, far-reaching, and permanent. Had modern copyright rules been in force, Berlioz could have lived comfortably on the proceeds of this work alone.1 Though the orchestra has changed in the intervening hundred years, the essence of Berlioz' teachings has not grown obsolete and the detail has been easily amended to conform with the new designs and possibilities of instruments. In our century, eminent technicians, such as Richard

«269, 87. 1

W i t h i n his lifetime it went through several German and English editions, and after his death it wae translated into Italian and Spanish. T h e latest re-issue is an English translation of the Richard Strauss edition, N e w Y o r k , 1948 ( s i ) .

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Strauss and Felix Weingartner, have been content to edit Berlioz' text; nor have new works on the subject, like Gevaert's or Rimsky-Korsakov's, superseded it. The survival of this textbook — usually the most perishable of literary goods —can only be compared (aside from Euclid) to that of William James's Psychology; and in both the modern instances the cause of longevity in spite of the progress of the science is the same: the philosophic personality of the writer. It is this quality which makes the Treatise good reading even for those who have only a remote interest in orchestration, and which has given to Berlioz' ideas influence even in quarters where these ideas are consciously resisted. There is hardly a composer since 1844 who has not at some time or other looked into the book. 2 Many have taught themselves from it, and we know from freely offered testimony that it has served as the inspiring guide of many a distinguished beginner — Mahler, Delius, Elgar, Moussorgsky, Busoni, Vincent d'Indy, and Debussy are among those who have told us so. A book designed ostensibly to inform the student about which shakes are difficult on the B-flat clarinet and how far down the tenor trombone can play may seem at first sight ill-adapted to spurring others to musical creation. Still less would it seem to explain the characteristics of Berlioz' individual style. T h e Treatise does not, it is true, expound the technique of composition nor didactically enunciate artistic principles. 1 It sticks to its business of teaching Instrumentation; but it constitutes none the less a course on musicianship from which it is possible to deduce the workings of Berlioz' mind and from which any reader can learn much about A r t in general.* As William Wallace says, the work "came as an awakening and a message which no one in the world of music could afford to disregard." s Berlioz achieved this result quite simply by means of historical and critical comments upon current practice; by pointed precepts regarding harmony, rhythm, melody, and counterpoint; by expressions of admira2 Sir Charles Stanford gives a typical indication of the contemporary response: "The organist Robert Prescott Stewart [active in both London and Dublin] knew well how to orchestrate and one of his favorite books was 'our Hector's' (as he called Berlioz) Treatise on Instrumentation." (1016, yo.) Compare the way in which Wilhelm Mayer, Ignaz Dorn, Alexander Ritter, and other influential teachers used the Treatise to arouse their pupils — Busoni, Bruckner, Richard Strauss. (926, 174; 944, 41.)

3 4

901, 232.

Saint-Saëns: "My whole generation was brought up on the Treatise and, I may say, well brought up." (386, j.) 6

i3'S> H'- 73°·

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tion or disgust, b y analyses of musical passages; and not least by redefining and reclassifying the technical matters that form his subject. But like everything that Berlioz set his hand to, this compact essay is also a work of art, its artfulness carefully concealed; the contents of the book are deceptively simple and light.* Every philosophic insight being unobtrusively in its place, the great subjects that Berlioz settles in passing would have to be extracted and grouped by kinds, and then recast in academic language, if one wished to bring out the weight and completeness of the teachings: this is the way in which a textbook of human anatomy seems fuller and weightier than a living man.7 T h e winged, transparent prose suggestive of Voltaire is matched by a corresponding rationality. Berlioz' standards are: Order, Precision, Economy, Practicality, and Elevation of Style. His knowledge of the past puts him ever on guard against absurd extremes: in the very brief introduction he shows that historically all the constituent elements of modern music have been first resisted, then misused, or overused. T h e art of Instrumentation, "which was virtually unknown at the beginning of the last century," is still in an unsettled state, characterized by exaggeration. Berlioz concludes: "It takes much time to discover the musical Mediterraneans and still more to master their navigation." 8 A f t e r self-control, Order — albeit an original order derived from a revolutionary definition: " A n y sounding body put to use by the composer is a musical instrument. From this follows the division of the means at present at his disposal." 9 This starting point in natural objects rather than in the practice of one instrument chosen as prototype has important consequences for harmony which will occupy us later.10 As for the division of instruments into kinds, Berlioz' logic bases it on the mode in which the "sounding bodies" set the air in motion. This discloses eleven " Saint-Saëns noted this about Berlioz' teaching in general: "He would give illustrations apparently off the point, but they started one thinking and opened up undreamed vistas." (386, j.) 7 Stendhal: "If the Academicians had received the manuscript of my Life of Rossini, they would have regarded it as written in a foreign tongue and would have translated it into beautiful academic language . . . but if I had tried so to write it myself, I should have been bored and doing fool's work besides . . . who among us can write like Montesquieu so that seven lines can furnish four pages of very reasonable amplification?" (1054, Part II, Reply to Letter I.) 8 Ττ., i. 9 TV., 2. 10 Note the contrary outlook down to the end of the century: "Berlioz seems to ignore what he missed in being unable to play the piano, an instrument which holds the key to the science of harmony . . . the true, the practical kind of harmony." (283, 197-8.)

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families of instruments (the human voice taking its place among the wind instruments) and forecasts the overarching conception of the modern orchestra with which Berlioz concludes the Treatise; for the reunion of these eleven choirs constitutes "a great instrument capable of making heard, simultaneously or in succession, a multitude of sounds of diverse character, and whose power is mild or colossal depending both on whether it unites all or a part of the means now available . . . and on the skill (or lack of it) in the choice and placing of these means under favorable acoustical conditions. The performers of every kind who make up an orchestra might be said to be its strings, tubes, boxes, and plates — wooden or metallic — and to resemble machines that have become intelligent, though still subject to the action of a huge keyboard touched by the conductor under guidance from the composer." 1 1 In such a view, orchestration is a constituent element of music,12 not a polish or coloring matter applied from outside to a pre-existing, quasifinished work. The idea of "coloring" has its place, but it is secondary in the same way that other musical elements may at times supply modest ornaments, or again may contribute to dramatic expression. Otherwise timbre is to be considered a thing in itself, capable of producing "impressions sui generis (whether motivated or not by an expressive intention) which are independent of the concurrence of the other three great musical means." " Berlioz then distinguishes — he was the first to do so — between instrumentation strictly so-called, which is a discipline, and orchestration which is an art. The former, dealing with the range and power of instruments, may be acquired by study; the latter, which he calls "poetry" or the "poetic aspect of instrumentation" is "as little teachable as the art of inventing beautiful melodies, beautiful chord successions, or rhythmic figures that are original and potent." 14 Orchestration being a relatively new element, it not only enters as a constituent of form, but must itself possess form. Hence the need to study the combinations of instruments "in groups, in smaller orchestras, and in great masses; how they should be united, or mixed so as to modify the sound of some by the sound of others, and thus produce a sound that » TV., 297. 12 Rimsky-Korsakov: "It is a profound error to say, 'such and such a composer is a good orchestrator, such and such a piece is well instrumented.' For instrumentation is one of the facets of the very soul of the work." ( i j j , I, 2.) 13 TV., 2. Compare Matisse in 1948: "I came to understand how one could work with expressive colors which are not necessarily descriptive colors." From "The W a y of Color" (Propos de Henri Matisse), Art Présent, No. 2, 23. 14 Tr., 2 and 29}.

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none could individually or generically produce . . ." 15 A t the same time, the properties of these sounds must be adapted to the ways of harmony, counterpoint, rhythm, expression, and vice versa. T o compose for orchestra is thus a perpetual adjustment of diverse and sometimes irreconcilable claims, just like the art of the landscape painter or poetic playwright. It is this perpetual striving for the highest possible yield of varied artistic satisfactions which conditions technique as Berlioz understands it, and which explains how a treatise on the function of the instruments can at the same time reveal its author's philosophy of art. Believing that in his day orchestration was both backward and excessive, Berlioz began his work of sanity by pointing out every instance of confused purpose, slovenly habit, and terminological error. He advocated a new nomenclature so that the division into transposing and non-transposing instruments should be clear at a glance; 1 8 he rescued a number of instruments such as the viola from neglect and misuse by pointing out their unique qualities; 1 7 he inveighed against indiscriminate writing for horns and trumpets as "fillers" of the harmony; , B he protested against the barbaric practices that had followed the Italians' introduction of the bass· drum and cymbals into the opera," and showed how necessary it was to find new figures f o r fanfares on the cornet, whose tone quality was unpleasantly associated with banal ideas; 20 he pointed out how unsatisfactory it was to join the trombone with the lower strings; 21 and how impossible it was to supply an instrumental bass for vocal parts which did not include their o w n . " Finally, he upheld as the chief condition of good order the maintenance of Proportion. Thus, he deplored the practice current in his day of adding horns, trombones, trumpets, and percussion to the old opera orchestra without proportionately increasing the number of strings: "Equilibrium has been destroyed, the violins are scarcely heard, and the result is a detestable ensemble." 23 N o r are order and proportion related to quantity 15 18

Tr., i.

I.e., by dropping the names based on the instrument's fundamental note and using only the name of the key in which it actually plays. 17 Tr., 34 ff. T h e viola is apparently still in need of rescuing. See the spirited essay by the distinguished American violist, Louise Rood. (86o.) 18 Tr., i8o and 191.

['Tr., 20 Tr., 21 Tr., 22 Tr.,

275.

191 and 198. 20J and 233. 249. 23 Tr., 294. Compare Lalo; " W h e n I hear at the concert the excessive sonorities of Wagner, I am charmed because the great mass of strings balances the

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merely, but to quality — as when contemporary French and Italian composers "write for horns . . . without taking into account the enormous difference between open and closed notes, between some closed notes and others . . . [thus] throwing sounds haphazard into the orchestra. The poorer texture of the old masters is obviously preferable to this ignorant and odious waste." 24 This wish for economy naturally leads to precision and practicality. Throughout, Berlioz preaches and illustrates the need of the orchestral composer to leave nothing to chance, to use no instrument without knowing exactly what notes it can furnish, in what strength and with what effort; and to study the many ways by which to maintain the musical virtues of just intonation, tone quality, and audibility. For he continues to regard music as "an art based above all on the study of the impressions produced by sounds on the human ear." 25 Any effort made by the player, or any intention prescribed by the composer, which cannot affect the ear is at once futile and outside the domain of music — hence the insistence on not scoring for the eye. This does not of course mean that unknown effects may not be tried, but they must be tried and tested in the only conclusive way, by ear. Berlioz welcomes new instruments, describes the saxophones, and other Sax instruments, the Melodium (organ) of Alexandre, the Octobass of Vuillaume (reaching a third below the double bass); and at the same time he urges the retention of instruments falling into desuetude through caprice or indolence, such as the viola d'amore and Basset horn. For his ultimate aim was double: to include in his great orchestra-instrument every distinctive timbre, and of each timbre to possess a complete family covering the widest range of notes. These might then be used as melodically and harmonically independent choirs, sounding as many different "lines" whose reunion would form the characteristic polyphony that has aptly been called "polychromy." 29 Zest for any new artistic medium can lead in two directions — towards virtuosity and towards expressiveness. The developing power may be shown off as remarkable in itself or as rich in undreamt-of suggestions. brass, but those same passages which I have heard in all the German theatres — excepting Bayreuth where, I am told, the balance is perfect — cause me a most disagreeable surprise — the brutality of the brass overwhelming the insufficient number of strings." (Letter of May, 1888, 200, 117.) 24 Tr., 180; see also the chapter on trumpets p. 191. Horn writing has been altered by the substitution of the valve instrument but the principle remains. 25 Tr., 288. 552 and $26, 24. [The R C A Victor sound synthesizer used bv composers of clcctronic music is a near-realization of Berlioz' dream.]

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T h e definition of instrumentation given by Berlioz includes both possibilities; and having told us earlier that Expression was one of the nine facets of music, he was very likely to stress it in discussing the nature of instruments. Indeed, the hasty reader of the Treatise may be so struck by what might be called its psychological insights — often so detailed as to distinguish among the several registers of one instrument — that he may regard Berlioz' interest in orchestration as being insistently poetical." This impression is not in itself false; it is false only if one forgets the rest, including the historical place of Berlioz' Treatise. Throughout the eighteenth century musicians had sensed the poetic powers of the orchestra and had in fact theorized on the subject ahead of their full realization. As far back as 1713 Johann Mattheson had sought in his Neu-Eröffnete Orchestre to open to music the ways of poetry and dramatic realism and to unify under one conception — called by him orchestre — the separate disciplines of vocal, instrumental, and operatic music.28 Half a century later, as Berlioz never ceased proclaiming, Gluck began to explore the sensitive and emotional character of the instruments. Bv the turn of the century Gluck's followers, serious and light, had at least an interest in orchestral innovation; and Mozart's instrumentation, though limited in resources, was — as Berlioz said — "perfect." 29 The Encyclopedists meanwhile dreamed of music drama, and found it natural that one of their number should, like Stravinsky in our day, publish his views under the title Poétique de la Musique."0 Using the same vocabulary, the Alsatian theorist Georges Kastner brought out in 1836 a Cours d'Instrumentation "considered in its poetical aspects." 31 Like Berlioz, though half a dozen years younger, Kastner had studied under Reicha and was in touch with advanced musical circles. But a comparison of his work with Berlioz' Treatise shows what a stride forward the latter represents. It is not merely that Kastner, even in his 27 E.g., " W e saw that the clarinet has four registers: each of these has a distinct timbre. T h a t of the treble has something piercing which must be employed only in the fortissimo of the whole orchestra . . . those of the medium and of the chalwneau suit melodies, arpeggios, and short figures; and the bass is fitted especially f o r those held notes of a coldly menacing effect, those black accents of motionless rage, of which W e b e r was the ingenious inventor. . . . T h e characteristic of the medium range is that of a proud, noble tenderness which makes it available f o r the expression of the most poetic ideas and feelings." Tr., 137-8. 28 See the admirable monograph on Mattheson by B. C. Ginnon, N e w Haven,

1947 (937)· 20 Grot., 225. 30 31

Lacépède; see above, Chapter 7 See 822, 823, and 824.

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revised editions of 1837 and 1844, is incomplete, unclear, and unsystematic, but that his conception of the "poetic" side remains primitive, literal, and unanalytic, as in most of his eighteenth-centurv predecessors. He finds interesting, for instance, the effects obtained by Adam's use of whips and carriage bells in Le Postillon de Longjumeau, or Halévy's use of anvils in La Juive. Though he cites Berlioz' Fantastique and Requiem with a respect approaching awe, what really attracts him is the imitation of barking dogs in Méhul's Chasse du Jeune Henri, while his notion of chiaroscuro goes no farther than the nuances piano and forte." Contrast Berlioz dealing with this same "poetic" purpose as he finds it in Gluck, the topic being the flute: The sonority of this instrument is soft in the medium, rather piercing in the upper register, and strongly characterized in the low notes. The timbres of the medium and high notes have no very marked expression of their own. They can be used for melodies and accents of various kinds, but without their being able to rival the naive gaiety of the oboe or the noble tenderness of the clarinet. It therefore seems as if the flute were an instrument almost devoid of expressiveness, which one may therefore introduce any- and everywhere, owing to the ease with which it can perform quick passages and sustain the high notes of the orchestra in completing high-register chords. All this is in general quite true, yet if one studies the flute closely, one discovers that it possesses an expressiveness of its own, and an aptitude for rendering certain moods that no other instrument can compete with. If it is a matter of imparting to a sad melody an accent of desolation, though humble and resigned at the same time, the weak sounds of the medium range, in the keys of C minor and D minor especially, will unquestionably produce the necessary nuance. Only one master seems to me to have fully availed himself of this pale coloring: I mean Gluck. In listening to the air-pantomime in D minor which he wrote for the scene of the Elysian Fields in Orpheus, one perceives at a glance that only a flute should play the melody. An oboe would have sounded too childlike, and its voice would not have seemed sufficiently pure; the English horn is too grave; a clarinet would have been better, no doubt, but some of the notes would have been too loud, and none of the softer notes could have been kept to the mild, veiled, self-effacing sonority of the F natural in the medium and the first Β flat above the staff, which give so much melancholy to the flute in this D minor key where they recur. Finally, neither the violin, nor the viola, nor the cello, whether solo or in groups, was proper for the plaint, sublime to the highest degree, of a desperate and suffering shade. It required the very instrument that Gluck chose. And his melody is so conceived that the flute lends itself to all the anxious moments of this unending pain, still marked as it is by the pas32

822,

35; 823, 56.

45 ó

Berlioz

sionate accents of earthly life. At first it is a scarcely audible voice, which seems afraid to be heard; then it moans quietly, rises to the pitch of reproach, then to that of deep sorrow, as of a heart torn by incurable wounds, and falls back gradually into plaintiveness, the sweet moaning and murmuring of a soul resigned to grief — what a poet! " This, the longest "poetic" interpretation in the Treatise, takes us beyond refined discrimination based on technical knowledge: it shows how Berlioz studied the masters and how he understood expressive instrumentation — in a word, how he composed and how he was able to write the Treatise.3* So much for Berlioz' sense of the poetic, which is only a part of what he understood by "musical." His orchestral research was not spurred by the wish to combine whips and piccolos in a rendering of postillions, but by the desire to invent and discover the uses of novel sounds. While still in Rome he had written prophetically to Ferrand about some fairyland verse: "It is enchantingly full of grace, freshness, and light, but I shall put it aside until later. N o w is not the time to compose music to it; the art of instrumentation is not sufficiently advanced: ive must wait until I have dematerialized it a little. . . [Italics added.] This "dematerialization" Berlioz had achieved in the intervening decade, and doubtless some of the poet's grace had gone into Queen Mab. But as one must not dwell exclusively on the poetic, so one must not stress the atmospheric side of Berlioz' orchestra. A glance at the passage on the flute shows that the use of the instrument for harmonic purposes is mentioned early, and throughout the Treatise Berlioz' solicitude for a complete, concise, and clearly audible harmony is paramount.3® Unlike most of his contemporaries, Berlioz felt that true harmony should be a resultant of all the musical forces at work — not melody or structure alone, but rhythm, expression, dynamics, and most significantly 33

Tr·, 153. H i s frequent references to "the ancient composers" with regard to usage prove how thorough was his search in the eighteenth-century repertory in addition to G l u c k , Mozart, and Beethoven. T h e German and the Italian instrumental composers he did not, of course, know, both because they were in many cases not published and because their style was not in Berlioz' sense orchestral. His contemporaries, whether he liked their works or not and regardless of his personal relations with them, received credit wherever due. T h u s he cites Rossini, A u b e r , Habeneck, H e l é v y , and Meverbeer for innovations he considered valuable 34

35

L.I., 108. See the chapters on the viola, p. 34; cello, pp. 43 and 46; double basses, pp. 53, 61 and 74; piano, p. 100; organ, p. 168; trombone, pp. 205 and 223; voices, pp. 249 and 252; timpani, p. 254; concertina, pp. 288-289; melodium ( o r g a n ) , p. 290. 36

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timbre. This explains why critics or theorists brought up on keyboard practice find Berlioz' harmonic writing puzzling or disagreeable, and why some have tried to find in the composer's early virtuosity on the guitar a reason for such things as his "awkward bass." " The question cuts deeper than idiosyncrasy; it reaches, through the mass of superstition about harmony, down to Berlioz' fundamental sense of music as heard and as multilinear — his pragmatism and his pluralism. To make this relation clear, the essence of his practice and the objections to it must first be indicated. For this purpose the locus classicus is the third bar of the very song "Absence" which Berlioz orchestrated in Dresden during the period reviewed in our present chapter. In that measure, the resolution of the tritone Β—E sharp is wrong according to the textbooks, and to keyboard ears hearing or imagining the piano version it may perhaps sound odd. For them the bass of the next chord should be A sharp instead of F sharp. But to orchestral ears hearing the "same" notes, the resolution is not only acceptable but it actually takes place correctly according to rule: the lower note on the oboe and second clarinet goes down to A sharp while the upper, on the voice, goes to F sharp. The other instruments break in (giving the "false" note) but without obscuring the resolution, and the composer has thus achieved a number of musical purposes: he has "avoided the unbearably banal affectation" — to quote Koechlin on this passage M — of mutilating his opening phrase for the sake of the eye; he has resolved his chord correctly for the ear; and he has followed his method of considering instrumental groups as independent voices. In short, his harmony is at once polyphonic and orchestral, as against the conception, engendered by keyboard habits, of chords as monolithic pillars "supporting" the melody. Similarly, Berlioz displays a fondness for unisons and octaves, which in the pianistic idiom are felt as showing a weak harmonic instinct. But in the orchestra the different timbres result from the unequal prominence of different upper partíais; hence an adroit combination which seems a unison on paper produces for subtler ears the audible equivalent of a chord.3® The fineness of Berlioz' "analytical ear, surely the most sensitive to sound," 40 is only matched by the care with which he avoids repeating " S e e the article by W . Denis B r o w n e (41S, 141 f f . ) . 38 45 J> 87· A critic w h o can be v e r y choosy has called this song "the most perfect thing Berlioz ever w r o t e . " (E. W a l k e r : 604, 104.)

46U >32· 131s, III,

39

730. In the Treatise, Berlioz unwittingly illustrates how analytic his ear was. In speaking of untuned instruments, he draws attention to the 40

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his effects." If Berlioz in 1838 had obtained the professorship of harmony which he applied for at the Conservatoire,*2 he would undoubtedly have put his ideas on the subject into a second treatise, which would have saved critics much trouble. As it is, it would take a fluent harmonist w h o was at the same time an expert in acoustics to deduce the principles implicit in Berlioz' scores." Such a student's analysis would not merely reconcile the rules of harmony current in 1840 with the actual chords that Berlioz heard and wrote in combined timbres. It would once for all drive misplaced abstraction out of musical criticism. In the phrase "the same notes," used earlier in this chapter, "same" was put between quotation marks to suggest how clumsy our nomenclature is when seeking to define the elements of an art. W e call C every sound at recurring intervals from a deep boom to a shrill whistle; we speak of the "same chord" whether strings or woodwinds play it and regardless of register; we also say the "same chord" if it is insistently repeated a dozen times, as Beethoven likes to do, even though the twelfth repetition feels no more like the first than the twelfth lash on your back feels like the first. Our words are patently false, which helps to explain w h y "identical" devices in two artists yield such different effects, mean different things.44 And it is precisely because the character "singular and real charm for the ear of a multiplicity of unisons, that is, the simultaneous production by a very large number of instruments of the same nature of whatever noise they emit. T h u s in watching infantrymen at drill, one notices . . . that the small crackling noise of shifting arms and the dull sound of the butt striking the ground give . . . when produced b y a thousand men, a brilliant ensemble which forces attention, which is pleasing, and in w h i c h I detect a certain vague and secret harmony." (P. 281.) 41 A s a single example of Berlioz' unobtrusive variety, notice how in the apparent repetition of the flute-and-trombone chords in the last movement of the Requiem, the flutes are written in four parts, as against the three indicated in the earlier movement. 42 T h e reason Cherubini gave for not nominating Berlioz was that he did not play the piano. 43 It may be well to remind the reader that the science of musical acoustics bore its first fruits in the w o r k of Helmholtz some 20 years after Berlioz' Treatise on Orchestration. A modern student would point out, for instance, that the expressive qualities of the flute as described by Berlioz come from the fact that in the middle and upper register its tones give forth virtually no harmonics. W h a t Berlioz heard as the "strongly characterized" lower register is due to the richer harmonic contents of those notes, in which the octave and the fourth stand out. 44 Schoenberg points out in his Theory of Harmony how a sequence may be construed out of four identical diminished sevenths rooted upon different bass notes b y imagining between each pair a pause for "reinterpretation." (Í70, 306-7.)

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of the basic units named in any art defies ultimate classification that in a great work the substance carries a unique meaning. Berlioz' harmony has always satisfied the most fastidious judges, from Schumann who admired its force and concision to Koechlin who says that "from the expressive point of view Berlioz is a greater harmonist than Handel, Beethoven, and even Wagner up to Tristan." 48 Masson adds: " H e proceeds by successive touches on the essential points, and one must admit that these touches are of a sureness, originality, and daring that deserve admiration. He does not hesitate to write the expressive harmony even if it lies outside accepted usages." * T h e concision owes much to Berlioz' long practice as a student and a critic of "the rules"; his proceeding by touches results from his direct scoring for, and testing by, the orchestra. He discovered that effects of undoubted subtlety on the keyboard disappear when transferred to the instrumental choir, and he found new subtleties avoiding the harmonic overload which often results from this transfer — the new art must fit the new medium: anything else would be writing for the eye.47 Considering this problem and Berlioz' solution it is remarkable that in him the chords or progressions which lie outside current usage are very sparingly used. This is also true of dissonance.48 In many instances where Berlioz gives an impression of harshness or angularity in progression, it will be found on a closer look that it is the expectation he raises, the context he suggests, by the chord or progression, and not the notes themselves that are uncommon and cause surprise. 4 · For the rest, Ernest N e w man showed as long ago as 1905 that Berlioz' harmonic style was part and parcel of his idiom, and that so far from indicating lack of thought ts

4U, 13'· 46$, ι j ι. "Just try," says Koechlin, "under a given bar in one of his melodies, to write what you think is the 'true bass' —a sixth, for example, in place of the tonic which you find 'awkward'; and you will see what a platitude you have produced! Don't you suppose that he could have thought of your sixth, had he wanted to? . . . If he did not, it is because he knew what he was about." (4s 3, 176.) " η 19, 2ΐ3· Mr. Newman likewise has pointed out how in a score of Richard Strauss's "a good third of the notes" are "perfectly superfluous. . . . It looks far more impressive on paper than it actually sounds." (374, 302.) 48 It would take us too far afield to consider dissonance in Berlioz. But see in the next chapter the discussion of the "Invocation to Nature" in his Faust. 49 One might instance the treatment, both harmonic and rhythmical, of the "Caliban" episode in the Tempest, or the conclusion of the trombone solo in the Funeral and Triumphal symphony, as samples of the logical though uncommon touch. This has been noted by independent students such as SaintSaè'ns 406), Koechlin (453, 177), Hippeau (28j, 197-8), and Hadow (443, *8i)· 46

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o r knowledge, it g r e w more and more individual as time went on.*0 H a v i n g reflected on the subject f o r thirty years more, M r . N e w m a n could only laugh at the academic minds w h o "rail at Berlioz' harmony . . . merely because his harmonic sense was different f r o m , and subtler than, their o w n . "

51

Saint-Saëns went one step further and made a proph-

e c y . Because Berlioz' w r i t i n g was not based on enharmony (that is, on the piano's tempered scale) Saint-Saëns felt that his alone might survive of all the music w h i c h f o r t w o centuries had exploited equal temperament, that is to say, keyboard harmony. 5 2 Berlioz himself had dealt with this subject in a chapter of the Treatise, but without dogmatism. A l t h o u g h he preferred just intonation, he was reconciled to the practical adjustment which occasionally

transforms

the orchestra into a great tempered instrument. W i t h the theorists — whether of physics or of music — w h o found insuperable difficulties in uniting discrepant values of the "same" note, he had little patience. 53 In short, Berlioz unwittingly agreed with his predecessor Mattheson: " N u m bers in music," Mattheson wrote, " d o not govern but merely instruct; the Hearing is the only channel through w h i c h their f o r c e is communicated to the inner soul of the attentive listener . . . the true aim of music is not its appeal to the e y e nor y e t altogether to the so-called 'reason' but only to the Hearing. . . . " 5 4 It would take more than a subchapter to draw out of Berlioz' Treatise its many lessons and relate them to his musical practice. In a limited space one can only draw attention to the remaining topics that Berlioz treats and t r y to characterize his orchestral style as one finds it in his works. B u t first it is necessary to banish one old legend. Combating as he did all vulgar abuses, Berlioz could not have been more displeased b y anything than b y praise f o r his supposedly "glorious disproportion."

55

It is critical

nonsense to begin with, and the extravagance it imputes is contrary to 50 51

374, 50-2.

486, Jan. 21, 1934. 386, 21 -1: " F r o m this heresy [enharmonic writing for other than keyboard instruments] has sprung almost all modern music; it has been too fertile to give us the right to deplore it, but it is none the less a heresy destined to disappear in the distant but inevitable future . . . W h a t then will survive of present-day work? Perhaps only the music of Berlioz who, never having learnt the piano, had an instinctive objection to enharmonv." 52

53

65

Tr., 288. 7, ι*4· 88η, 12.

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56

fact. Like anyone who thoroughly understands his medium, he knew that economy does not mean smallness of expenditure but nice calculation of means and ends. Whether in art or in hospitality economy is never skimping, nor can there be a predetermined measure of what is enough." T h e concluding chapter in Berlioz' Treatise must therefore be read with care, and not used — as is often done — for facile expostulation. It is in those pages, of course, that Berlioz describes in a sort of Blake-like vision the orchestra, large and small. He speaks of an ideal ensemble of 465 instrumentiste, to whom a chorus of 360 may be joined. These totals have been quoted as if the very digits betrayed the madman. But as with any balance sheet one must read and grasp the point of the appropriation. This large array Berlioz terms a Festival Orchestra; the ordinary orchestra he sets at 119 performers, which is only a f e w more than the accepted twentieth-century total of 1 io. M Berlioz moreover explains that he wants his large masses, not for din but for smoothness, not for double f s but for quadruple p'i. A final tutti of eight hundred winds and strings would certainly yield volume, but more smoothly, hence more musically, than a scratch orchestra of thirty. "Vulgar prejudice," as Berlioz points out, "calls large orchestras noisy, but if they are well balanced, well trained and well led, and if they perform true music, they should rather be called powerful — and nothing can be more dissimilar than those two designations." 59 In the Berlioz orchestra, which harnesses the several species of controllable sound, the orchestrator's power was indeed enlarged but the M

Sir Charles Stanford, who disliked Berlioz' music, acknowledged this in a vigorous image: "Berlioz knew too well the glories and beauties of individual instruments to encourage his successors to throw them all into a cauldron and boil them together." (1362, 172-3.) 57 "Why two flutes should be right and three flutes shameful extravagance; why the double clarinet should be looked upon as an interloper; why the tubas should be thought the inferiors of the trombones merely because they came in later — these and a hundred other things pass the comprehension of everyone who gives ten minutes' serious thought to the orchestra." (40$, 114.) 58 Incidentally, the foreign editions of the Treatise are often at fault in reproducing the distribution of these instruments as well as in adding them up. 59 Tr., 297. W. G. Whittaker has drawn attention to the fact that Berlioz had a sort of precursor in vocal orchestration, Thomas Tallis (c. 150J-1585), whose "motet Spem in alium is in forty parts . . . The portion where all voices move independently suggests the throbbing cries of many nations prostrate before their Maker and is a curious anticipation . . . of the extravagant dream of Berlioz . . . in the final chapter of his work on orchestration." (914, 89·)

46 2

Berlioz

traditional structure was b y no means destroyed. With Berlioz as with Beethoven the proportion of strings to the remainder is three fourths. It was after Berlioz that b y the increase of the winds, and especially the brass, the ratio fell to two thirds."0 Nothing can be more erroneous than to ascribe to Berlioz the brazening of the band. Though he drew attention to the melodic use of several neglected woodwinds, and had like Gluck a fondness f o r trombone recitatives, he gave the great majority of his melodic ideas to the strings, usually the violins. He has still another reason for requiring a large body of players — a reason derived from his contrapuntal sense. From his earliest performed work of 1825 he wanted to subdivide the main sections of the orchestra into lesser groups and entrust each with a real part. By this means he obtained that steel-mesh texture which some find objectionably thin; though by using numerous strings in octaves or unisons (often without the double basses) he could attain a rounded softness unapproached by any other master.*1 His scoring, if truly read, is consistent: he usually states the lowest number of strings to be used in any one movement and almost invariably reserves the brass. T h e three trombones, two cornets, two trumpets and one or two ophicleides (later supplanted by tubas) 8 2 are a regular part of his orchestra, but they seldom play in more than a f e w portions of the work. T h e horns —still hand horns in the early works and therefore not available for extended melodic use 83 — lie between the trumpets and trombones, forming with them a family. Their union in a movement comes only at the point of theme reunion characteristic of his form. In his handling of the woodwinds, besides their constantly expressive or melodic use, one notable feature is the employment of the English horn as the middle voice of the group." Another is the retention of four bassoons. This was the usual number available in French orchestras, a 00

T h i s was due in part to the heedlessness with which the Wagnerian Ring orchestra, scored for playing virtually under the stage, was brought out upon the stage of the concert hall and imitated in its original form. (See 921, uj.) 61 It is for such a pianissimo that he wants the second small band of strings in his orchestral song La Captive. It was during his German tour that Berlioz first came to know the tuba and the Treatise at once recommended its use (p. 229). T h o u g h Berlioz continued to write ophicleide parts because tubas were introduced late into France, his annotated scores at the Bibliothèque Nationale bear the indication "change to tubas"; but see below Supplement 5. 01

7J·?, 456 ff. Berlioz recommends the valve instruments in Mem., II, 94-5. W a g n e r first used it so in Lohengrin doubtless remembering the A d a g i o of Romeo and Juliet. 94

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remnant of the glut of bassoon tone frequent in the eighteenth century. Berlioz ordinarily writes for bassoon in two parts and in a work like the Funeral and Triumphal symphony entrusts a good deal of the bass to the instrument. As regards percussion, Berlioz was so inventive that after him the group must be regarded as the Fourth Estate of the orchestra.*3 Beethoven had been the first to give these instruments motives and solos. Berlioz used them in addition for protracted harmonies and what he called "the coloring of rhythm." At the end of the third movement of the Fantastique, for example, a wonderful effect is achieved by letting the English horn sing its solo over three kettledrums tuned in seconds. In the Requiem, the sixteen kettledrums form a choir that provides three- and five-part double chords to stand against the brass. But Berlioz did not prescribe noise: even at the if all sixteen are played with sponge heads, and the four tam-tams and cymbals are used with equal moderation. As for the bass drum, it either comes in as the last step in a bacchanalian climax (Romeo ball scene) or else it is struck piano, in menacing counter-rhythm, as in the FrancsJuges and Benvenuto Cellini overtures. Berlioz' percussion pianissimos are in truth an anticipation of modern music for drums, both classical and jazz. One thinks of the soft bass drum passage in his Ode on Napoleon's Death, and of the cymbals (also pp) that yield a magical effect during the Sanctus of the Requiem. In Lélio, again, the chorus of shades haunt the living to a pp stroking of the big gong (tam-tam). At every point, Berlioz is true to his aim of extracting the quality of a sound without violence, and ridding it of the crude associations it may have acquired by misuse. He is still fighting his French and Italian contemporaries when he wants a cloth spread on the drumhead, or when he mutes the clarinet by putting its bell in a pouch; when he forbids the cymbal to be fastened to the drum, when he invariably requires spongeheaded sticks, and when he orders a suspended cymbal to be struck lightly with such a stick."* It would take a book even larger than the Treatise to list all the novel, charming, majestic, or tender instrumental ideas that Berlioz found for himself and put into his scores."7 An excellent sketch of such a book was 65 He pointed out, incidentally, that the kettledrum notes are in unison with the cellos, and not an octave below as some musicians kept repeating. ( 7 > . , 267.) ""TV., 267, 144, 262, 275, 279. In the Benvenuto carnival scene, the din of many cymbals is dramatically in order, as in Mozart's Entführung. "T " A l l his works are studded with original effects ranging from picturesqueness to splendor." ( / j o j , 2544.)

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Berlioz

in fact written not long ago, a product — as one might have expected — of German scholarship.™ In the author's learned pages, one finds technical and esthetic discussions of the main innovations in Berlioz' scoring, from the use of harp harmonics to the pizzicato arpeggio done with the thumb which is explained and called for in the Damnation of Faust. The writer also treats of the historical and artistic relations of Berlioz' orchestra, both to his predecessors and to his followers, and concludes that its lasting influence may be traced most distinctly in Germany, Russia, and France. Through Saint-Saëns, Gounod, and Reyer, Berlioz acted upon the French Impressionists from Fauré to Debussy, "who owed more to Berlioz than he was conscious of." In Germany, by way of Liszt, Wagner, and Cornelius, it was the Naturalists (Strauss, Pfitzner, and Reznicek) who profited; while in Russia, the entire modern school learned from Berlioz, as did Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky, "on which point much could be demonstrated."e® Mr. Bartenstein notices the parodoxical fact that the individuality of Berlioz' methods is such that the best students of the orchestra cannot, on reading his unfamiliar scores, represent to themselves how they must sound. The master's influence was thus exerted through the ear and through the scoring of later composers who first studied him in performance.70 Often, as Saint-Saëns remarked, the arrangement seems to go counter to common sense. Yet as he added, "It sounds; it sounds marvellously!" 71 Weingartner said as much to Bartenstein, and Pierné writes to the same effect. Bartenstein explains this difficulty of judging a Berlioz score by the fact that the reader usually looks for expressive intentions whereas Berlioz is creating "pure sound relations." This is of course what the composer himself maintained. Theorists and conductors had previously shown how in Berlioz' disposition of forces 68 Hans Bartenstein, Berlioz' Instrumentationkunst, vol. 28 of Karl N e f ' s series on the musical sciences, Leipzig, 1939. (675.) 69

¿75, 148. T h i s corroborates the necessity Berlioz lay under of touring Europe to play his music. L e f t in book form it might have remained a riddle. But this same fact also shows up the folly of those w h o apply the "piano test" to such works, or any other test than correct performance. It passes understanding w h y critics w h o usually define perfection in art b y saying that "nothing can be added or taken a w a y " love to "test" music b y reduction — Runciman's "piano test" or Brahms's habit of hiding melody and bass in order to judge a song. Others "test" poetry b y removing the adjectives, and painting by consulting a black and white reproduction. D o they subject their women to mutilation to test their beauty? 70

71

386, 3.

465

Treatise "all the work has been done ahead of time,"

72

but the modern scholar is

the first to demonstrate that "Berlioz appreciated at all times that orchestration is a means of formal organization; he therefore utilizes timbre as a value in the structure, as may be seen unequivocally in a movement built on the classical sonata scheme such as the first of the Symphonie 73

que."

Fantasti-

That Berlioz was conscious of how new this was, we know from

the distinction he drew between instrumentation and orchestration. If the orchestrator assigns to each instrument its uniquely playable part, he obtains timbre as an independent quality; and to handle this he must devise ways that will give it shape, variety, recurrence — all the attributes of structure. Failing this he would be neglecting certain ideas aroused by the sensations, he would be shutting out one aspect of musical experience. For example, in the treatment of instruments as families, we do not hear simply the English horn, but the middle voice of the woodwinds. This does not suggest space, as does the physical distance or closeness Berlioz occasionally calls for, but it establishes the instrument's position along an ideal dimension.74 Such is the point of the flute-trombone chords or of the voice-and-woodwind orchestration of the opening bars of "Absence": we are not given an effect but a relation. Similarly, we measure the components in Berlioz' use of contrary nuances — forte in strings against piano 72 130s, 2547. With respect to practicability, Berlioz differs from both Beethoven and Wagner, whose hopes occasionally outran possible performance. In the Ring, Wagner wrote for "five instruments that existed only in imagination . . . and he did not get what he expected." (.921, 225.) 73 6η3, 142-3. 74 The common definition of music which distinguishes it as a "time art" from such "space arts" as painting, is after all a very rough notion. It is true that music unrolls as time passes, and vanishes with the instant; this is what makes it hard to discuss. But it would be equally true to say that a piece of music must be perceived, just like a painting, instantaneously in all its parts. Short of this the significant relations of beginning, middle, and end are lost. Such godlike comprehension is doubtless impossible, although Mozart said that he mentally heard his compositions in one act of thought. On the other hand, no painting other than a very small one can be taken in at one glance. Yet unless we strive in both arts for that comparative, simultaneous, single perception, we run the risk of misunderstanding the work. This, which rather damages the description of music as a "time art," is true of almost all new music and of Berlioz' music in particular, since everything in it, from his transformation of themes to his arrangement of sounds in space, acts as a constituent of the total form. It might be added that although he paid great attention to "the point of origin of sound," he reprobated the metaphor by which we speak of "high" and " l o w " notes, especially when used by composers for illustrative effects. ( A Trav., 115-7.) The metaphor, probably drawn from bodily sensations in singing, loses its point when applied to other instruments than the voice.

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Berlioz

in winds. Here the interest lies in the contrast plus the relation of each voice to its potential strength. Throughout we may say that in the care he lavishes upon instrumentation, Berlioz is not simply handling "colors" but composing "values." Being "composed" in the strictest sense, the Berliozian orchestra is in all ways an adjusted instrument — intimate in the songs, in The Infant Christ, or in certain movements of the dramatic works; powerful and monumental at other times. Always highly articulated, it need never sound the same, no uniform "style" need reduce a variety of moods and intentions to one generalized blend of scraping and blowing. In Berlioz there is in fact no "blend" at all. Each of his works has an atmosphere and plasticity of its own, the few unconscious reminiscences of texture only emphasizing the remarkable diversity. In effect, the scores and the Treatise taken together correspond in the nineteenth century to Bach's earlier example of teaching and creation in the Well-Tempered Clavichord, Art of Fugue, and other "textbooks" — precept and example from the hand of a master. Berlioz* seeming specialization — in reality his role as pioneer and settler of a new realm — cannot any longer be suspected of serving as the refuge of a composer who sought to cover up bad draftsmanship by the use of iridescent tints. This charge has also been used to discredit the work of colorists in the history of painting, but in reality it is never applicable: "color" does not conceal faults, it emphasizes them.75 But if we try to elicit "the latent truth which all superstitions may be charitably supposed to contain," we can see in Berlioz' orchestral style certain features which at first create confusion and lead the unwary to fall back on the formula of "mere effects." Weingartner, it will be remembered, made this mistake when he originally came to the pizzicato basses in the Cellini overture." " T h i s can be demonstrated from the very definition of the terms: if an "effect" generates a form, a continuous line whose purpose and modifications are rational, it ceases to be a trick; if, on the contrary, no such thing follows, the trick reveals itself as such. It is therefore self-contradiction to say that an artist builds up his art out of tricks or effects. T o build means to compose. This truth is only obscured by the fact that effects, when described or when very new, seem to be "mere" effects; whereas old effects, such as tremolo, types of bowing, pizzicato, double stops or muted strings, seem to be "music itself" — which indeed they are. T h e very name pianoforte denotes nothing but a pair of effects, and the first devotee of instrumental color was the man who blew through a tube instead of remaining "classical" bv using onlv his vocal cords. 78 See above. Subchapter 4.

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The paradoxical cause of the error is that from the point of view of the unaccustomed ear, most of Berlioz' music is ¿«effective. Berlioz noticed this himself from the time of his earliest premières and his German experience confirmed it. T o this day, unfamiliar listeners of his unfamiliar music must be prepared for disappointment, and even an incomplete disappointment. Just as Sherlock Holmes said to the man who was unable to see that he was being followed, "That is what you must expect when I am following you"; so one must expect that the finest of Berlioz' works will at first appear like partial confusion. One misses the rich, steadystreaming sound to which more recent masters have accustomed us; one's attention flags because of the very delicacy of the "solo" parts. Until we become attuned to the new scale of nuances and the sinewiness of the scoring, the texture seems at times thin, at other times capriciously rough. Berlioz does not give us what our perhaps narrow habits make us desire. Surprising as it may seem, the best preparation for Berlioz' orchestral texture is that of Mozart's operas. Setting aside the moods and melodic ideas which belong to different centuries, the dramatic sharpness and clarity in both men is much the same 77 — at the opposite end of the scale from the style of Strauss and Wagner, despite tlicir debt to Berlioz. He disliked the thick impasto which comes from mixing timbres and which we now tend to accept as the sound of the orchestra. T o stress the difference one might say that hundreds of Berlioz' pages are really a unique kind of chamber music, with concerto-like sections framed within more massive yet always aerated ensembles. This is consonant with his personality and amounts to self-expression in the best sense. For Berlioz must be called an imaginative spirit rather than a throbbing heart; lie was — if the distinction may be made — not emotional but passionate: white heat, not red. He loathed wallowing, and his love of sound was sensuous, not sensual. This is the best reason why he will never satisfy the greater number, who necessarily come under Flaubert's definition of l'homme moyen sensuel And it is this too which distinguishes Berlioz from Wagner — each an irresistible artist for one type of human organism and psyche. One might express the difference architectually by contrasting the George Washington bridge in New York — wiredrawn, suspended, vibrating like an aeolian harp — with the no less admirable Egyptian colonnade at Luxor — massive and overwhelming by its immediately felt solidity. 77

It is a mere detail but Mozart and Berlioz are almost alone in using the first violins and violas in octaves instead of violins I and II. 78 In Berlioz' words: "Music is understood only by a very limited number of cultivated minds; it acts on the uncultivated solely bv its sensual side. Hence . . ." (M.E., 147.)

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Berlioz

It is relevant to this comparison between the two artists to contrast their opposite valuations of Rhythm. The Treatise says of the untuned percussion instruments that one of their functions is "to give color to rhythm." Elsewhere Berlioz deplores the fact that this department of music was in his day "the least advanced of all." 79 In his ideal Musical City he wanted "twenty classes in rhythm," and what he would have taught in them is the esthetics of an element which he himself carried to the highest point of complexity and expressiveness. He would have shown how rhythmical balance may be achieved without the symmetrical subdivision of phrases, how accents may be made stronger by not falling on the strong beat, and how a rhythmic pulse may unify a whole movement in a quite different way from the obsessive tom-tomming in certain modern scores. Lastly, he would have exemplified from his own works what he called "harmonies of rhythm," that is to say the counterpointing of several rhythmic lines — Mozart had shown the way in Don Giovanni — to create what Richard Pohl later called "polyrhythm." 80 As against this physical and intellectual preference for giving sound a marked and varied contour in time, the German school, led by Wagner and ending with Mahler and Schoenberg, showed a relatively weak interest in rhythm. Owing to this neglect it has become a part of tradition that true "romantic" feeling swims about on an unbounded musical flow. The pacing of emotion is then achieved by frequent climaxes, as in Wagner, which again contrasts with Berlioz' preference for long slow progressions of which the listener does not immediately perceive the goal. Caught between this dynamic delay and the unexpected metrical forms, Berlioz' German-trained listener feels like the landlubber on the deck of a ship. The resulting discomfort is serious, for rhythm lies deep in our bodies and is least subject to argument, whence it so often happens that our musical tastes manifest little more than our rhythmic sympathies and antipathies. True, when we once become aware of these unsuspected factors in our enjoyment, we are better able to hear Berlioz' music as it actually is. This experience reproduces what happened during Berlioz' tour in Germany: performers and conductors who worked over the music found their enthusiasm increasing in proportion to their knowledge. "How it all sounds!" exclaims a conductor in our ow n century. "Nothing in the score 79 M

7>., 253; A Trav., 10.

552 and 708, 134. See in Lelio (Chant de Bonheur) the five-beat figure which accompanies the 6-4 chorus without coinciding with the bass. Berlioz would have welcomed the instruments developed by Theremin and Cowell which produce up to seventeen simultaneous rhythms.

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is unnecessary, everything is in its proper place. Details that seem at first sight most insignificant have their hidden purpose which is revealed on performance . . . In his moments of greatest simplicity he is always full, rounded, and of the utmost perfection. . . . It is well-nigh miraculous." 8 1 T o Berlioz it was easy — easy in the sense of the Shavian formula that great art is either easy or impossible. Hear how simply he states his own aims and methods as he reviews Liszt's first orchestral score. Liszt's instrumentation, says Berlioz, "is remarkable by its power and variety. One never hears in his orchestra the succession of similar sonorities that make certain works, otherwise worthy of respect, so tiring for the listener. He knows how to make appropriate use of small and large means, and he does not ask of either instruments or voices more than they can give. In a word, he has shown at one stroke what one might have feared not to find in him all at once, namely style in orchestration, such as he already possesses in the other departments of music." 8 2 T h e work that elicited this self-revealing comment was the cantata Liszt had composed f o r the Beethoven celebration at Bonn in 1845: it might well be called the first fruit of the French master's teaching of his art upon German soil. 81 82

Gabriel Pierné (1305, 1J48 and 2J43).

Soirées (2nd Epilogue) Eves., 329. Liszt had written one orchestral score earlier, the Fantasia for piano and orchestra on two themes from Berlioz' Lélio, which Busoni found unpublished in 1907. (775, 1 1 6 . ) The work had been played in Paris in 1835 (99 f , II, 38-9), but apparendy Berlioz did not account it an original work. Liszt's first symphonic poem was not orchestrated till 1849.

17. Form and Philosophy: The Damnation of Faust August /, 1845 to October i f , 1846

This word "damnation" terrifies not him. — MARLOWE'S D r . F a u s t u s ,

about himself W H E N B E R L I O Z called himself, or allowed others to call him, "a musician three quarters German," 1 he had in mind no musical nationalism, either of spirit or of technique, but only a grateful feeling for the artistic sympathies he found in contemporary Germany, a feeling heightened by his admiration for his musical models, all of whom were German. In the course of his dozen visits to this region which was still a land of artistic internationalists, Berlioz made many more friends than enemies, but still more important, he soon drew from the cultural contact the inspiration that produced one of his most resplendent scores, the Damnation of Faust of 1846.

T h e fourteen months that saw its completion began most appropriately with Berlioz' departure for Bonn, on August 1, 1845. Beethoven's statue w s to be dedicated in this, his native town, after incredible (but usual) obstacles had been overcome by Liszt, 2 and the unveiling on the fourteenth was to be preceded by numerous musical events: we have just read Berlioz' comment on Liszt's commemorative cantata. T h e rest of Berlioz' account of the proceedings gives us an excellent insight into the musical manners of the period, while showing at the same time his grasp of organization and his sense of humility in the presence of Beethoven. N o t that Berlioz had had anything to do with the arrangements of the fete, beyond contributing twenty francs toward the statue and conducting without fee Liszt's money-raising concerts. Liszt and Liszt alone was "the soul of the festivities" and the "delegate from the wide 1 2

A Trav., 317.

These are related in part in Liszt's articles in the Gazette Musicale for 1839 (210, passim). B y the end of that year, the total sum collected among French musicians was 424 francs 90 centimes ( = 85 dollars of the period; ibid., 265).

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3

world." But even Liszt's money and zeal had not been enough to galvanize Europe or the Bonn Committee. Though Frederick William of Prussia attended, with Queen Victoria and her Consort as his guests, and though musical celebrities from England, France, Russia, and Central Europe came to demonstrate their faith, Beethoven's eminence was far from an established fact. Italy sent no representatives, neither did the Paris Conservatoire. In fact, all the French musicians present were there unofficially. The Conservatoire had refused to give a concert for the benefit of the celebration when Liszt petitioned for it. And there were other notable absentees: Wagner, Glinka, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Marschner, to say nothing of the entire crowd of French and Italian opera makers. The local Committee, it is only fair to add, had issued its invitations somewhat casually and had made no provision whatever for the reception of any but titled guests. T o get to hear the Mass in C in the cathedral and avoid being crushed to death by the Bonn citizenry, Berlioz had to slip in through the artists' entrance; and later, for the unveiling of the statue, to vault a fence. "Taking one thing with another, the invitation I received from the Committee in charge of the festivities did not actually prevent me from witnessing them." 4 Still worse, the Committee had neglected to call on the best available performers, and the orchestra purposing to honor Beethoven with his own music was needlessly inadequate.5 " T o do the right thing would have been not only possible but very easy, merely by asking our leading instrumentalists everywhere six months in advance . . . But this would also have meant overcoming narrow nationalistic ideas, which in circumstances of this kind can only have disastrous results, and which are besides infinitely ridiculous to all sensible people." 9 N o r did prejudice affect only nations. "It will be asked how and w h y there could be any ill-will against Liszt . . . to whom the credit must go for initiating and carrying out whatever has been successful at Bonn . . . It is chiefly this deserved credit . . . which gave offense. Some had a grudge against him because of his extraordinary talent and success; others because he is witty, and yet others because he is generous, because he has written too fine a cantata, because the others' compositions . . . 3

Soirées (Second Epilogue). Soirées (Second Epilogue). 6 For example, there were "eight or nine cellists trying to compete with a dozen double basses." Ibid., 320. β Ibid., 320. Berlioz is hinting at the fact that there was some anti-French feeling among the Bonn patrons, which led to a few unpleasant incidents during the Beethoven week itself. 4

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Berlioz

were unsuccessful·, . . . because he speaks French too well and knows German too thoroughly, because he has too many friends, and doubtless because he has not enough enemies. . . . " 7 As is usual in celebrations, some unfamiliar works of Beethoven were played, and some well-known works played for the first time as written. Ad hoc songs and hymns by venturesome living composers filled the subsequent programs. From lack of foresight, one of these outdoor cantatas remained inaudible. " A similar fate was reserved for the German song, chosen by competition and crowned by a jury which had probably heard it." 8 T h e last program, reorganized by royal order, joined to an overture and songs by Beethoven the Weber piano concerto. This was played by Madame Pleyel, Berlioz' onetime fiancée, whom he praised in his review. T h e n came virtuoso pieces — mostly variations on operatic airs — finally a small musicale was given at Brühl by the King of Prussia, to which Berlioz was invited. There he heard Jenny Lind for the first time. " H e r voice, of an incisive metallic timbre, great power, and incredible flexibility lends itself equally to mezzo-voce effects, to impassioned expressiveness, and to the most delicate embellishments." 8 At the same concert, Berlioz' lifelong favorite, Garcia's daughter Pauline, who was in private life Mme. Viardot, sang three pieces "exquisitely," and Liszt and Meyerbeer played. Midnight struck and Berlioz returned to Bonn by railway "dead drunk with harmony, wearied with admiring, feeling an irresistible need of silence and calm." 10 He found lodgings in a cottage at nearby Königswinter, where he collected his thoughts and wrote his article. In the course of its skillful combination of reportage, anecdote, philosophizing, and music criticism, he found a place for drawing the artist's moral, obvious and self-interested, but eternally right and needful: " I t is very fine to glorify in this fashion the demigods who are no more. . . . Today, all these intelligent and sensitive beings on whom [Beethoven's] genius has shed its radiance, turn to him as to a benefactor and a friend . . . But it is too late. This Beethoven in bronze is unaware of all this homage, and it is sad to think that the living Beethoven, whose memory is thus honored, might not have obtained from his native town in the days of suffering and destitution which were so numerous during his Soirées Soirées 9 Soirées 10 Soirées 7

8

(Second (Second (Second (Second

Epilogue). Epilogue). Epilogue). Epilogue).

Form and Philosophy

473

troubled life the ten-thousandth part of the sum lavished upon him after his death." 11 Back in Paris after this spiritual bath, Berlioz found nothing to keep him on that exalted plane but his own thoughts. The Opera "is in a state of madness, beastliness, and feeble-mindedness to the very tip of its long ears." 12 Scribe's verses and plot for La Nonne Sanglante reminded him of their destination. Berlioz dropped them where he had left them and took up instead a double project — to revise and enlarge his "Eight Scenes" into a complete dramatic work based on Goethe's Faust and to pursue his musical mission by "invading" Austria. Early October found his plans laid for leaving later that month. Before setting out he had tedious business to attend to: suing a delinquent vicomte who owed him five hundred francs on a bill of exchange, and turning out some pieces for harmonium which had been commissioned by his friend, the organ manufacturer Alexandre. The three pieces add nothing to Berlioz' stature, though one of them again exemplifies a characteristic mood and technique in the solemn religious fugato of the "Hymn for the Elevation of the Host." " On the way to Vienna, Berlioz had to stop at Nancy, being ill. He soon recovered, though he and Marie missed the steamer at Regensburg and had to go by post chaise. They arrived in Beethoven's second home town on November 2, 1845. Cordially received on the strength of his earlier German reputation, Berlioz was immediately in the musical swim. A concert with which he had nothing to do, but to which he was urged to go, showed him what a thousand Viennese amateurs (four hundred instrumentists) could do. T o his surprise they played with extraordinary "verve and precision" the Magic Flute overture — "that wonderful work, of which the motion is so fleet and the texture so tightly and delicately woven." 14 His own rehearsals were a delight, only topped by the knowledge that he was in the Theater an der Wien whose boards Beethoven once trod. Moreover, musical Vienna was agog at the recent discovery of Gluck's place of burial. Discovery implied forgetfulness and Berlioz could not refrain from exclaiming, "Viennese! you are almost worthy of inhabiting 11

12 13

Soirées

(Second Epilogue).

M.E., i n .

Ger. ed., vol. V I , p. 36 ff Mem., II, 183. The remainder of the comment explains w h y Berlioz would not employ a large orchestra in playing the classical masters. 14

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Berlioz

Paris!" 15

But they had not forgotten how to be lively at concerts. At Berlioz' first they encored the Roman Carnival overture, and divided on the rest of the program. The press and the green rooms were buzzing with discussions of the "new esthetic." Two more concerts in November brought the composer's local fame to a high pitch and secured him a new batch of affectionate devotees. The audiences, as he wrote to a friend in America, "are most gracious to me; they applaud fit to shatter their knuckles and make me encore as many as four numbers in one concert." 1Λ One of these was a charming bolero, Zaïde, which Berlioz had just taken from his unpublished melodies and orchestrated. On the eve of Berlioz' birthday, that is on December io, a hundred and fifty musicians gave a banquet in his honor and presented him with a baton of silver gilt, bearing the titles of his works, as well as the names of the first forty subscribers to the presentation. Baron de Lannoy, the AustroBelgian composer, former director of the Vienna Conservatorium, in speaking for the musical home of Gluck, Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven, expressed the hope that the stick would remind Berlioz of the music lovers who now joined in the cry of "Long live Berlioz!" 17 In his reply, the composer immediately associated the other French musicians then in Vienna (naming Félicien David) as sharers in this token of fraternal feeling.18 Berlioz had to extend his stay. In the course of it, he visited the famous hall where Johann Strauss and his choice band produced the waltzes which had added a new glory to Vienna's musical renown. Greatly impressed by the quality of both the music and the dancing, Berlioz did not hesitate to call Strauss a genuine artist and to commend his orchestra as superior to many more pretentious bands. He also noted with pleasure the rhythmical interest of Strauss's compositions which "made use of every beat in the bar" for syncopation or secondary rhythmical lines, in a manner that Berlioz himself had advocated earlier against the proponents of squareness and the strong beat.1" For the additional concert Berlioz had proposed to give the Dramatic Symphony, Romeo and Juliet, and the suggestion had been eagerly taken up. "And all this," as Berlioz wrote to Desmarest in Paris, "is due to our dear old Symphonie Fantastique. The Scenes in the Country and the Mem., II, 199. M.E., 118. 17 1 3 9 8 , Dec. 21, 1845. 18 A more than verbal flourish of amity, for it seems that on Berlioz' arrival David had behaved with ill-concealed jealousy, despite the welcoming hand Berlioz had given him in Paris the year before. (502, 417.) 19 Mem., II, 195 and 1398 (1834-40) passim. 15 1β

Form and Philosophy

475

March to Execution have turned their hearts inside out. As for the Roman Carnival and the 'Pilgrims' March,' they are now popular pieces. (Things have gone so far that pies are named after me.) The musicians are firstrate, and the orchestra is young — half Czech, half Viennese — and trained by me, since it was only made up two months ago. It is now as strong as a lion. This morning, I rehearsed in addition the Kärntnertor orchestra (the leading orchestra in the Germanies) for . . . my concert tomorrow. . . . On the 30th I shall have the chorus and orchestra of the theatre, doubled in numbers, for Romeo and Juliet complete. For Friar Laurence I have Staudigl, who is a fine strong bass. And what a musician! . . . " 4 0 Other details follow of a more intimate nature: "Marie is radiant with pleasure at all this success. . . . What is the exact amount of the tailor's bill outstanding . . . ? Will Latte [the publisher] pay his usual price of 200 francs for Ζ aide? I am going to bed a little weary from rehearsing." 21 Romeo and Juliet, given on January 2, 1846, proved too difficult a dose for the audience, but the performers having grown familiar with it felt, like the later New York critic, that the work "had come to stay." As the double chorus ended, they raised a great shout for the composer, as well as a banner bearing commendatory verses. Berlioz had not conducted and thus had heard his score for the first time with relative detachment, jotting down numerous alterations for a future edition. Despite the hurly-burly he was in a composing vein. His new sketches for Faust were taking shape; notably the Enchantment scene, which had grown into three variations upon the original theme of 1828. It was encouraging — and so different from the Parisian battle — to have one's musical output understood, even if sometimes rejected; for partisanship here seemed to be about his work, not about his affiliation with the Bertin family or his relations with the minister of the day. Though no one was calm enough — as the critic of the Theaterzeitung wrote — "to assess his extraordinary talent, . . . wherever he goes with his music love springs up and hate also. Berlioz acts like spiritual veast and causes a general ferment of the mind." 22 A fifth concert, spontaneously organized to honor him as he left, and an audience with Metternich completed Berlioz' round of pleasures.23 20

M.E., 124. M.E., 12j. •-26g, IOJ. 23 It was during this interview that he was asked whether he always composed for joo instruments and replied "No, sometimes I use only 450." Considering how often this has been quoted to prove Berlioz' lavishness by his 21

Berlioz

476

He felt happy and grateful. On the eve of his departure (as originally set) he had sent to the Friends of Music — the thousand whose performance he had enjoyed — a letter of compliments: " T h e magnificence of your ensemble, the power of your resources in the superb rendering of the three great German masters [Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven] never kept one from perceiving the vivid harmonic sense animating each orchestral or choral section, nor the musicianship that guided them through the notable difficulties of the scores . . . This marvelous performance, largely the work of amateurs, would be enough to assure Vienna's musical preeminence over all other European cities." 24 N o w for Prague, whence there were signs of Berliozian "ferment" even before the trip was thought of. Young Dr. Ambros, the critic and musicologist, urged the visit and took upon himself all the preparations for it. Schumann's review of the Fantastique was familiar to the younger crowd of composers and a new conductor-composer-professor, Johann Friedrich Kittl, had just begun to impose Beethoven on the conservative townsmen's taste. This undoubtedly fortified them for the advent of Berlioz. Three concerts in mid-January 1846 insured him a reception as enthusiastic as Vienna's. The musicians especially took fire. Classes from the Conservatoire came to learn his ways of rehearsing. Tomaschek, the dean of Czech composers, then over seventy, declared himself "one-third won over." T h e intellect and aristocracy of Prague were similarly split, but with the larger fraction favorable. A more regrettable division was that of the gate receipts, much diminished b y complimentary seats, and by the theater manager's levy of twelve per cent. " T h e only thing to do is to render unto Caesar, as usual, what does not belong to Caesar." 25 Berlioz promised to return soon if Romeo and Juliet could be rehearsed in his absence. It is clear that he was deliberately working, not for public applause, but for the approval of the next generation of composers, determined to give them his richest and most advanced thought as exemplified in the Dramatic Symphony. T h e audiences at large were obviously better able to appreciate his first works first.24 Meanwhile Vienna wanted still another concert, scheduled for February 2, which Berlioz returned to direct; and bv that time Buda-Pcsth was own words, it may be said here that the retort to the Prince was a piece of irony. 24

25 28

M.E., 119. M.E., 131.

T h e Roman

simplicity.

Carnival

is an exception to be explained by its thematic

Form and Philosophy

477 feeling the "musical earthquake" (so said the Wiener Theaterzeitung) and was clamoring for his presence. A friend advised Berlioz to bring the Hungarians an orchestral version of one of their national airs. Berlioz chose the so-called Rákóczy theme, and spent the night preceding his departure fashioning the now famous March." He was still in the flood tide of his creative urge and what he made of the military tune was a short symphonic poem of irresistible effect. The story of its first performance is told in full in the Memoirs, its most interesting points being the various signs of the Hungarians' nationalistic fever, which was to burst forth two years later. M. de Horvath, to whom Berlioz showed his new score tried to warn him: "Your exposition of the [Rákóczy] theme is marked piano and we are in the habit of hearing it start fortissimo. . . ." Berlioz would be affronting national honor, but he kept calm. "Yes," he said, "your Zigeuner play it f f , but never fear, you will have a forte such as you have never heard. . . . In all things one must look to the end." ω The effect was what he foresaw. The gentle woodwinds and strings which state the theme after the rhythm-setting fanfare, lead it very gradually into the battlelike climax with dull pulses of the deep drum on the off beat. Dismayed at first, the hall was electrified at the end. In the green room, Berlioz was embraced and wept over. An unprepossessing, haggard veteran, seizing his hand, told him in halting French, " 'Monsieur, monsieur . . . me poor devil Hungarian . . . Forgive excitement . . . the French they revolutionary . . . know how to make music for revolutions.' It was almost frightening," adds Berlioz, "it was sublime." " The Hungarians, as well as Berlioz' Viennese and Czechish friends, "Mem., II, 210. M. Boschot, who on principle always believes the opposite of what Berlioz says, doubts that the March was written so quickly. The point would be of slight importance if it did not by implication raise die questions of boastfulness and lying. Berlioz mentions only three pieces and one whole work — the Requiem — as having been composed with unusual speed. This is one of the pieces. At other times, he mentions movements which took laborious working over before they satisfied him. Therefore in the present instance he was not trying to prove himself cleverer than he was. In Berlioz' original version the Hungarian March lacked the present coda, consequently it could have been written in a ten-hour night at the rate of a dozen bars an hour, which is no unbelievable feat. But M. Boschot is so filled with "the spirit that denies" that he could not even read Berlioz' statement to the end: " — the parts," exclaims Boschot — "being, I suppose miraculously copied on the instant!" The parts, as Berlioz indicates, were copied in the usual way at his next stopping place. On the genesis of Berlioz' March, see E. Haraszti (572). 28 Mem., II, 211. 29 Mem., II, 213. Confirmed by contemporary accounts. (¡72, 217.)

478

Berlioz

were going to be plunged in revolution sooner than they thought, and the composer might have told them that the art thereof can only be made after the fact, when the feelings can be recalled in tranquillity and given form. It is no less genuine art for being retrospective, as is shown by the fact that Berlioz' portrevolutionary march could look forward and inspire an anonymous hero of '48.a0 Berlioz' muse continued active. His plan for Faust was clear in his mind, and its music, like the march he had just written and could use for the work in hand, came into being of its own accord. Having lost his way one night in Budapest, he wrote the refrain of the Peasants' Dance on a street corner, under the lamppost. At Breslau, his next stop, more numbers came, including the students' song. Everywhere he is "furiously at work." But suddenly he misses his old Paris comrades and "the whirlwind of ideas in which one moves." 31 So he told his affectionate brother-in-arms Joseph d'Ortigue, in all sincerity, for Vienna had just offered Berlioz the post of Imperial Kapellmeister. He declined without hesitation, which with him argues previous thought: Paris tugged at his heart, of course, but he also must have considered that his critical post at the Débats was a necessary and induplicable weapon of defense, while at the same time its obligations left him free to carry on his European mission. The Imperial Chapel would fetter him. In the foreign-speaking city, once his musical honeymoon with the Viennese was over, he would be merely another working musician in a small provincial colony of outsiders. No. The mission was paramount — and besides, there were Harriet and Louis for whom he felt responsible in more than a material way. Once more in Prague at the end of March 1846, Berlioz made new converts with his Romeo and Juliet and two other concerts. The supper following the dress rehearsal was graced by toasts; Liszt drank to Berlioz' "erupting crater of genius" — drank so efficiently that he was with difficulty prevented from fighting a pistol duel "at two paces" with a Bohemian nationalist. Pleased with his latest corrections in the score of the Dramatic Symphony, Berlioz was still, as Lesueur had said long ago, "streaming music from all his pores." One night he was awakened by the thought of a melody which made him "tremble lest he forget it." He used it for the angels' greeting to Margaret which closes the Damnation of Faust. 30 T h e exception of Rouget de Lisle's "Marseillaise" occurs at once, but its being the w o r k of a very ordinary mind, raised b y emotion and drink to an unusual pitch of excitement, may well reinforce the rule while seeming to disprove it.

31

M.E., 135.

Form and Philosophy

479

Before returning to Paris Berlioz had taken on a collection of errands and messages to and from musicians. It was an admirable artistic freemasonry: he was to buy two violins in Paris for the Prague Conservatoire; another Czech musician, the young Hanslick, who in those days was still favorable to modern music, wanted a recommendation to Liszt; the Vienna clarinetist Tropianski wished to transfer to Paris — these were but a few of the occasions for letters and visits. T o Mendelssohn, Berlioz sent greetings and congratulations on his Midsummer Night's Dream, which he had heard for the first time at Breslau: 31 "I have never heard anything more deeply Shakespearean than your music. . . . I would have given three years of my life to embrace you. Farewell, farewell. Please believe that I love you as much as I admire you, which is to say a great deal." " Finally on April 19 a "very brilliant and very profitable" concert at Brunswick — where he had so many close friends — marked the close of the second campaign. The "whirlwind of ideas" in Paris turned out, when near at hand, to be mostly wind. This did not include Berlioz' circle of intimates, all of whom were as weary as he, though with rather less to show for it. Gathering his impressions of musical life, he could see that when compared with Central Europe Paris was stagnant. It was no longer the hub which it had been three decades before when the Conservatoire, with its faculty of over one hundred, rivaled the numerous theaters and private societies in attracting quantities of foreign musicians, many of whom came to stay. Although no other center replaced Paris, that subtle but perceivable fluid which accompanies the motions of the spirit was flowing in the contrary direction. Prague now had a great Conservatory, Vienna the best orchestra, and the separate German states an enormous urge to produce and perform. Though this activity owed much to decentralization, to the diversity that comes of pluralism, it seemed also to go with the desire for national unification. The goal of statehood and constitutional liberty aroused strong feelings bent on something greater than self; whereas in France the status quo, moderately good but monolithic, aroused only hatred and self-despising. In politics, disgust was held in check by despair, and in the arts a kind of torpor overcame even the best minds. "Here," wrote Berlioz to a German friend, "we have nothing 32

The overture Mendelssohn had composed at seventeen, in 1826, but the remaining numbers of the suite, including the delightful scherzo, were new since he had met Berlioz again and rehearsed Romeo and Juliet with him. 33 M.E., 137.

480

Berlioz

but shabby scores, sprinkled with shabby melodies, accompanied by shabby orchestras, sung b y shabby singers, and listened to by a shabby public, which fortunately never listens to them twice and forgets them at once."* 4 T h e exceptions to this oblivion meant less than nothing — as Berlioz later showed in a little anecdote of his own invention. A sea captain, whose distant cruises bring him to the capital at wide intervals, notices that every time he leaves Paris he sees Donizetti's La Favorita on the bill, and every time he returns he sees Donizetti's Lucia. " N o , " says a fellow mariner, "that's an exaggeration . . . when I leave for India, it is true I also see La Favorita, but when I return they do not always give Lucia: they often give La Favorita again." 35 T h e Opera had in fact died in its tracks and the public had begun to notice it; the press was up in arms against Pillet's directorship. A s for Berlioz, strengthened in his o w n faith b y his trip abroad, he had dropped all operatic schemes. T h o u g h for brevity he spoke of the Damnation of Faust as a "concert opera," it is no such thing. T h e form had g r o w n out of the Eight Scenes and was a further extension of the dramatic symphony. Its completion and instrumentation were going satisfactorily throughout the summer, with but one interruption. Jules Janin, amiable and everready, had written a cantata for the opening of the Northern Railway at Lille on June 14. H e naturally applied to "friend Berlioz" for the music, which was put together in a f e w nights. This pièce de circonstance, like half a dozen others in Berlioz' output, does not greatly signify. A s the composer ironically put it, "If I had had three full days, it would have been fit to live 40 centuries more." 36 Y e t in addition to further proof of the composer's speed, one finds one or t w o passages of real beauty in this song celebrating Peace, the Nation, and the Workers. Berlioz went to Lille — "the most musical town of the French provinces" — in order to conduct the work. Three military bands would also play, beforehand, the Apothéose of the Funeral symphony. A t the end of this the local National Guard wanted to discharge its artillery. " T h e cannon are on the program," they told Berlioz, "the public expect them, and w e cannot back out." Berlioz consented, conferred about the signal for the explosion, and proceeded to conduct. But on the final chord, no cannon: the fuses had burnt out to no purpose. T h e rest was silence and Ber34 M.E., 145. Compare Tocqueville: "I lose my mind trying to recall that maze of petty incidents, petty ideas, and petty passions; of private self-seeking and incoherent projects in which the public men of that time exhausted their lives." (1223, ι . ) 35 /jitf, May 14, 186j.

M

Grot., 294.

Berlioz in 1845, by Prinzhofer " H i s m a s t e r l y c o n d u c t i n g . . . w a s o n e of the decisive influences in my musical l i f e . " — HANS

VON

BL'LOW

(Autobiography)

Form and Philosophy

481

lioz dashed to his other chorus and orchestra, indoors, to conduct the cantata." The social aspect of music continued to occupy him. In order to celebrate — and to feed — the musicians of Paris, their Association planned a festival like the one projected three years before. The Apothéose of the Funeral and Triumphal symphony was to be played, and this time the concert took place with the aid of forty regimental bands. Berlioz being in sympathy with the object but having had no share in the arrangements, could judge them with some detachment. He concluded once more that open-air music was a delusion and that the organizing powers of his compatriots were not equal to their tradition and opportunities: "The French, who fought the campaigns of the Revolution and Empire, and who made good the July uprising, cannot manage to build a concert hall." Behind this lay moral defects. "What we lack is seriousness, gravity, calmness . . . , the qualities that make the adolescent superior to the child and the mature man superior to the youth. . . . We lack the ability to rise above petty passions, petty ideas, petty objects. We lack the ability to examine instead of half seeing, to listen instead of overhearing, to think before speaking. We lack the ability to scorn maliciousness and the wretched popularity that we gain by it; we lack the ability to believe — and to believe steadfastly — that the spirit that creates is superior to the spirit that destroys." 88 Suiting the action to the word, Berlioz set on foot a celebration for the anniversary of Gluck's death. Baron Taylor and the Musical Association were for it; the indestructible opposition was against it. Part of the objections may have been due to the fact that the work chosen by Berlioz and the Association was the former's Requiem; but the other, greater barriers were raised from sheer hatred of seeing something succeed. Berlioz circumvented the willful obstructionists, collected his musicians, trained them by sections, and gave at the Church of St. Eustache on July 29 a performance of his Requiem which the participants long remembered. Berlioz was by now a seasoned commander-in-chief. He could make up programs, cope with officialdom, draft publicity notices, watch the accounting, see that notables were sent tickets, and kindle the zeal of janitors; he could rehearse, conduct, train the amateurs, cajole the professionals, disarm the grumblers, and impart passion to the mass. He knew how to word reminders and sugarcoat admonitions; he could induce the 37

=s

Grot., 300-4.

26 ç, 118-9.

482

Berlioz

press tò write, the printers to print, and the public to come.®9 His mind was an electric distributor which gave the well-timed spark to each cylinder of his vast machine. He did this without the aid of secretaries, telephones, dictographs, typewriters, automobiles, or benzedrine. It was a princely expenditure of nerves, and Berlioz loathed the impression of coercive pushing which it could not help generating like ozone in the air around a dynamo: "Thanks to the ill-will provoked by my criticism in the Débats, and to the raging anger of envious natures, I can make my way in Paris only like a red-hot cannon ball that hisses, burns, and shatters. I have noticed that this hostility increased during my absence in Germany." 4 0 Meanwhile the invisible inner mechanism, the demon inside the cannon ball, was still functioning in the frictionless world of thought. On a trip to Enghien, Berlioz found the rhythmic finale for Part II of the Damnation; at Rouen, where he went to see his son at school, and to rest from practical affairs, he wrote the love duet of Part III and began the polishing and fusing of all the scenes and parts. "I am working strenuously," he wrote to his father, "on a large work which is nearly done and which I want to put on in Paris by the end of November." 4 1 And a new faculty, long latent, was developing: "I have had to be poet and musician both, because my score, begun and pursued across country, in Bavaria, Austria, Hungary, Bohemia, and Silesia, was going faster than my versifiers in Paris and I was thus compelled to do without them. It quite surprised me to be able to." 42 For another six weeks he worked with "all the care and patience of which I am capable," and on October 19 he dated the last page of the completed score. S9

For this typical activity as reflected in notes and letters, see M.E., 155-66, and almost any collection of his autographs, from the Paris Conservatoire to Harvard University. Here is a sample: "My dear Monnais — Enclosed the program. Could you prefix a few lines about the hall which will be magnificently decorated, lighted, and heated; whose acoustics will be excellent; and where the ladies will be visible almost from head to toe flow-edged boxes] and hence will dazzle by their gowns? I rely on you for the musical froth. Greetings : Yours, H. 3." (90, 213-4.) 40 M.E., 152. 41 Ibid. 42 M.E., 152. Notice the phrase "begun and pursued across country" which records an experience that may well be the source of the title À Travers Chants. As for earlier and later instances of Berlioz' being his own poetlibrettist, see the summary below, Subchapter 23.

Damnation of Faust

483

Depth and Design of the Damnation T h e composer would have led Faust to any spot whatever, had he found the slightest musical reason for doing so. — From B E R L I O Z ' Foreword to

The Damnation of Faust

Most American listeners know of the Damnation of Faust three orchestral excerpts —the Hungarian (Rákóczy) March, The Dance of the Sylphs, and the Minuet of the Will o* the Wisp. T o know these is to know rather less than nothing about the work from which they are taken, since their extrusion gives them a false prominence together with a misleading context. When they are played in succession, as they once were on a world-wide network for a war celebration,1 their effect is like that which might be obtained by reciting Hamlet's three soliloquies in a row. For the Damnation of Faust is a highly organized entity who. e parts cast mutual reflections one on another, and whose philosophical purport deserves as much meditation, after full and repeated hearings, as that of Don Giovanni or Tristan. Not that its aim is to preach. The work may be penetrated on several planes, defined at one level by Sir Thomas Beecham's dictum that it is "a bunch of the loveliest tunes in existence" 2 and at the other by Jean d'Udine's opinion that the work is "a plastic expression of Nature" which "suggests its philosophy indirectly by the lucid and vivid rendering of a symbolic drama." * In France, where it has become the best known of Berlioz' large works, where it is indeed "popular" and a money-making score, it is undoubtedly taken as a "concert opera" whose central situation has been learned from Gounod's Faust, and whose music has come to be known by ear from Edouard Colonne's unrelenting repetition of the score beginning in 1877.4 T w o of Berlioz' conditions were thus fulfilled: the "secular scripture" which occasions the music could be taken for granted, and the music was made familiar by frequent hearing. 1

March 9, 1944 in honor of the U. S. A r m y Air Force. 1380, May 27, 1933. 3 $68, 13 and u . Jean d'Udine is the pseudonym of Albert Cozanet (b. 1870), a theorist and composer who founded an important choral school in Paris in 1909 and has written extensively upon music and musicians. * Between 1877 and 1903 the Colonne orchestra played the work an average of half a dozen times yearly. See Supplement 1. 2

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But the Damnation is not an opera, neither a concert opera nor any other kind. It is, as it subtitle shows, a Dramatic Legend adapted to music in keeping with Berlioz' fixed principle.5 He recast his Eight Scenes of 1828 and added to them a dozen more, the twenty scenes being grouped into four main parts, each made continuous by recitatives. The whole aim is compactness: "Berlioz' concision in the Damnation of Faust is almost unbelievable, if one considers that in two and a quarter hours so many high-colored tableaux, so many entanglements, are displayed before us. As for their variety, it is naturally very great in an artist who eschews sentimental monotony and is inspired instead by the eternal diversity of the phenomenal world." β It is this diversity which nullifies, and ought to prevent, the attempt so often made of carrying the Damnation to the stage. Such transfers always involve mutilation, interpolations, utterly needless visual effects — and moreover leave the spectator disappointed.7 For the drama of the Damnation is symbolic, invisible, evocative. Had Berlioz intended an opera, his design would have been notably different; he would not have limited himself to three principals, chorus, and orchestra, and other scenes would have been chosen: we know this on his own authority, in letters relating to the requirements of a true Faust opera.8 What Berlioz drew for his Legend from Goethe's presentment of the phenomenal world (to use the words of the critic quoted above) falls in with his usual dramatic method. He chose objective situations capable of being translated into music. Thus in the first scene Faust sings of returning spring; in the second he hears peasants singing and dancing under the lindens; in the third he hears an army on the march — through hearing the Rákóczy March itself, which quite naturally forms a rousing finale for this first part. The three scenes are joined by forward-moving recitatives, as well as by a symphonic working up of the three themes r> [ T w e n t y ] years ago, Mr. Arthur Honegger used the same subtitle for his very similarly constructed score, Nicolas de Flue. (American première, N e w York, Mav 8, 1941.) e

S68, 12. So said Mr. Richard Capell on seeing Sir Thomas Beecham's adaptation in Covent Garden (1380, May 27, 1933). The Paris Opera version, in the repertory since 1921, is a deplorable affair, but at least it does not introduce pieces from The Infant Christ into the markedly different music to which Faust is damned. This cobbling up, however, has gone on at Brussels, Monte Carlo, N e w York, and elsewhere ever since Clarence Gunsbourg started the staging mania in 1893, and produced a forged autograph to prove that he was fulfilling the author's intentions. (M.E., 164.) On his patchwork, see Debussy, j8ç, 175—81 and the definitive objections of an English critic in " F r o m London to Scribe in 1847-8 (23s, II, 188-93). 7

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(or rather, two themes and one rhythm) the whole constituting our introduction to the character of Faust. In short, the hero-philosopher considers Nature, the joys of the people and the lure of military glory; the "action" is at once particular (psychological) general (dramatic) and musical, for what we hear is the conjunction of a pastoral song, a carol, and a march. Part II follows Goethe's initial scene in Faust's study. The hero muses on life and death in a chant récitatif treated fugally, and is about to take poison* when the Easter chorus breaks in and makes him abandon his resolve. He joins in the magnificent six-part chorus which is one of the small masterpieces within the greater. It ends on a heart-rending lament which forecasts both the melodic soliloquy of Faust alone in Gretchen's room and the later Invocation to Nature. The philosophic limits of the drama within which Faust moves have been set: the search for surcease through contemplation, the possession of earthly and divine love, and the pleasures and contingencies of the world. T o implement these last, Mephisto appears without ado, announced by the three sizzling trombone chords which form his spiritual signature.10 Faust scorns the magic that "the poor demon" can show, but follows him to Auerbach's Cellar. The ensuing succession of musical moods is dazzling by its pace and brilliance. The chorus of drinkers, Brander's song of the rat, the parody "Amen" fugue for the dead rat, Mephisto's political satire on the flea, and the terse recitatives that link them, prove that the young melodic genius of 1828 had ripened into a consummate music-dramatist. As August Halm says: "Berlioz' ability to make the drama come out of the parts and not out of the story — this I call Berlioz' claim to fame as a dramatist. . . . The ideal direction of the whole drama issues from the power of music. . . . This is genuine music drama, as against the plays that are merely 'composed,' the verbal dramas that are 'set to music.' " 1 1 9 Berlioz' words, "Verse-moi le poison qui doit illuminer ou tuer ma raison" bring irresistibly to mind Baudelaire's equally "romantic" lines in Le Voyage: Verse nous ton poison pour qu'il nous réconforte. Nous voulons, tant ce feu nous brûle le cerveau Plonger au fond du gouffre, Enfer ou ciel, qu'importe! Au fond de l'Inconnu pour trouver du nouveau. 10 The cornets and bassoons fill out these syncopated chords. Saint-Saens, as a professional musician for the stage, could not get over the "stroke of genius" by which Berlioz transfixes Mephisto with three notes. (1006, 207.) 11 57o, 100. August Halm was a theorist, music critic and conductor in Munich (1869-1929).

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The scene shifts magically, invisibly, while the violins alone and four woodwinds trace a brief whirling figure that brings us to the enchantment scene. Mephisto sings the lulling Voici des roses to a quiet but threatening accompaniment, entrusted chiefly to the trombones. The effect is a fresh sample of what Beethoven had done in Fidelio and Spontini in La Vestale. Mephisto's lullaby is now taken up as a variation by the chorus of sylphs and gnomes, who cast their spell on the sleeping Faust. He sees Margaret in a dream and thrice calls her name. This variation ends ppp, after which a third one begins, instrumental only — our familiar excerpt, Dance of the Sylphs, which is as it were the echo of the preceding. 12 In a short recitative the awakened Faust demands a sight of the living Margaret. Mephisto bids him join the passing throng. A march rhythm in pizzicato is heard, briefly traversed by a chromatic bassoon phrase that ushers in the soldiers' chorus, soon followed by the student song in Latin which Berlioz wrote (both words and music) in Breslau. Then, by a device Berlioz especially liked, the two choruses are heard together, the students accompanied by the brass, the soldiers by the woodwinds, brief pauses having been artfully left for this overlapping. Each song keeps its own tonality during the ensemble and each its rhythm, respectively 6/8 and 2/4, while the strings scan the two common beats.13 "The whole reaches an intensity of life, a tumultuousness of action, and a musical dynamism absolutely unheard of before Berlioz." 14 This musical slice of life dies away to a return of the bassoon theme over the throbbing beat of the strings: it is the end of the second part. Part III begins ex abrupto with Faust in Margaret's chamber. He sings (as in Goethe) a hymn of thanks to twilight, the friend of lovers; after which comes a purely Berliozian invention — the long undulating melody for strings with a linear modulation, whose mood prepares us for Margaret's entrance. But the meeting is not yet. She appears and remains alone, her recitative telling of her premonition of evil and of the lover she has seen in a dream. The music hints phrases of the later love song. Gretchen now sings of faithful lovers in the ballad of the King of Thüle. T h i s musical idea is a favorite one of Berlioz'. In Lelio the "Aeolian H a r p , " in the Requiem the Quid sum miser are variation-echoes of the number they follow. Hence the relative futility of playing these pages bv themselves. " T h e instrumental distribution recalls the Francs-Juges overture, and the melodic combining had occurred in several of his previous scores, but the dramatic idea m a y have been suggested by a performance of Monsignv's Le Déserteur which Berlioz saw and highly praised in 1843.

"ji/,40.

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This is the haunting, quasi-modal tune that Berlioz wrote in Dauphiné just after his discovery of Faust in 1827." At this point Mephisto takes charge of the innocent girl: he calls up the spirits of evil in a stern Evocation, and sets them to dance the Minuet of the Will o' the Wisp. This, as d'Udine pointed out is "the first instance of absolute impassiveness known in music." It is the original ballet mécanique — "music fit to frighten, made of sharp, cutting rhythms, of mysterious gusts which swell and collapse suddenly, of brief strident cries, and of total insensibility. . . . These melodic flare-ups and intermittent bursts seem to obey the command of a diabolical master and take on I know not what aspect of fascinating and cruel hardness." 1β Certainly, coming as it does after Mephisto's directions to the malignant Kobolds, the piece can stand the critic's reading-in of demonic intent. It makes one think of the different but equally infernal music that Mozart wrote for the Commandatore — and one thinks no further: the common (or Covent Garden) variety of operatic devil has no kinship with these two. Not content with spectral manifestations, Mephisto sings Gretchen "a moral song, to mislead her more certainly." This serenade Berlioz had also written for his earlier score, to a guitar accompaniment. He rescored it, replacing the guitar by a small orchestra which concertizes with the large. After this ditty has ended on a sardonic "Ha! " from the chorus, a very short recitative between Faust and Gretchen leads to their love duet, which acts as both a recognition and a seduction scene." The twenty bars of this last phase of the human drama drop without warning into an extremely vigorous trio and finale representing the neighbors' discovery of the lovers. Faust repeats (and spoils by a trite coda) his beautiful love lament, but he is overborne by the voices of the crowd, in which " The subtitle is "Chanson Gothique," which has excited some critics' risibilities because it is not, of course, a restoration or imitation of the Goths' presumable love tunes. Berlioz never thought it was. The adjective gothique was used till late in nineteenth-century France to mean "popular," "of folk origin." (See Delacroix's Journal and Sainte-Beuve, passim.) Berlioz' ballad has the "breathings" exacdy where an untaught country girl would put them — hence his first note to the score asked that it be sung "without expression," i.e., without expression laid on — and it ends, like so many French and Italian country tunes, with an " A h ! "

" f t f í , 13.

" T h i s duet is not at first especially winning, partly because it contains echoes-in-reverse from the later Carmen, pardy because its psychological compression is possibly too great. But like much else in Berlioz, it improves on further acquaintance.

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Margaret's pleas and Mephisto's sarcastic advice only increase the ordered confusion. It is needless to point out that the swiftness of this combined climax and denouement in three hundred and fifty bars, very lightly scored until near the end, is, except for the repeat, utterly unoperatic: the action is in the mind's ear. The forsaken Gretchen opens the fourth and last part with her "romance" based on Meine Ruh' ist hin but not treated as a spinning song. In form and dramatic power, the song compares with any great lied of Schubert's, Schumann's or Wolf's.18 The close "O caresse de flamme" reaches the sublime effortlessly and justifies the description of the whole as "music of touching simplicity and ardor." 18 With no break, the last repetition of the refrain on the English horn joins a muffled rhythm on the timpani with which we are already familiar: it is the soldiers roaming the streets. In the distance they sing fragments of their wenching song. Bugles (really horns and trumpets) blow taps as Margaret laments the end of another day when her lover has failed to come. Bits of the students' chorus mingle with her despair as the English horn melody twice tries to reach completion and falls both times into the marching rhythm.20 There is a pause and we are with Faust among the "rocks and woods" which Goethe makes the setting for his scene. Faust addresses to Nature, majestic and indifferent, the spiritual longings that no experience has yet satisfied. The lines in French are by Berlioz himself and worthily express the pantheistic faith which he poured out in the music.21 A new height 18

Early recordings of this song helped break the monopoly of the "three excerpts" and served as "a reminder of the magnificent music there is to be found in the Berlioz opera." Ν. Y. Times, Feb. 15, 1948. 19

20

Ibid.

Here one may note the parting of the ways for those whose idea of art is of something uniformly sweet and remote from life. Thus the excellent critic Jacques Rivière, writing to his friend Alain Fournier in 1905 when both were at college and saturated with the symbolist spirit — ". . . Berlioz is absolutely devoid of taste. For example, after the admirable plaint of Margaret, d'amour Cárdente flamme, he has gone and thought up the idea of sticking in bugles playing taps! That, I tell you, beats everything. It's impossible to destroy more brutally the impression one has just created. It's such an enormous absence of tact that it puts you in a bad humor." (/p3, I, 200.) 21

Nature immense, impénétrable et fière, T o i seule donnes trêve à mon ennui sans fin; Sur ton sein tout-puissant, je sens moins ma misère, Je retrouve ma force et je crois vivre enfin. Oui, soufflez ouragans, torrents, précipitez vos ondes, Croulez rochers, criez forêts profondes, A vos bruits souverains, ma voix aime à s'unir. Forêts, rochers, torrents, je vous adore; mondes

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is reached here at a bound and sustained through ten pages of unequalled power. This cry of a soul as desolate as Pascal's in the face of the infinite spaces ends on a hypodorian cadence which superbly renders the feeling of unsatiated aspiring. Suddenly we startle to the chilling sound of Mephisto's voice telling Faust that Gretchen has poisoned her mother. As the rapid dialogue flashes between the two, remorse on one side, cynical amusement on the other, one hears hunting horns in the distance: they accompany the tragedy without being part of it.22 Under the weight of this new horror — for Gretchen, says Mephisto, used the drug as a sleeping potion in hopes her lover would visit her — Faust consents to make a pact with the demon if he will save her. "What matters tomorrow, if I am racked in the present hour." But we never rejoin Gretchen. We plunge with Faust and Mephisto toward the abyss, in a hurtling but wholly symbolic "ride." As it proceeds, with the strings that give the rhythm but not the pounding of horses' hoofs, Faust's monotone is embroidered by a lament on the oboe, the voices of praying women and children are drowned out, and weird dissonances in the brass prepare us for the supernatural. It is the sole movement in the entire work which belongs to the category of the fantastic. With a single resonant chord given out by the whole orchestra but held by the winds, On a sudden open fly With impetuous recoil and jarring sound The infernal doors, and on their hinges grate Harsh thunder, that the lowest bottom shook Of Erebus.2* The scene is Pandemonium and the Princes of Darkness sing in the unknown tongue to which Swedenborg refers, and which Berlioz reinvented for his purposes." Yet the atmosphere is not what one would Qui scintillez, vers vous s'élance le désir D'un coeur trop vaste et d'une âme altérée D'un bonheur qui la fuit. 22 " T h i s indifference on the part of nearby humanity . . . forms a musical commentary sufficient to freeze us with horror." (568, 12.) 23 Paradise Lost, Bk. II, 1. 879 ff. 24 Berlioz did not say, as his commentators have supposed, that he had found this speech in Swedenborg, but only the idea of it. Berlioz' first essay with mysterious syllables goes back to the Italian journey, when he composed lines for his Chorus of Shades in Lélio which the border police took for a revolutionary code. In 1846 he returned to the idea of such vocables for his Faust and supplied French words for the Shades. (See 690.) T h e work of Swedenborg's that Berlioz read must have been the Spiritual Diary, also called Memorabilia, 1224, 262-7.

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expect. Faust's reception has at first a certain grandeur and it conveys a certain macabre excitement, but what follows lacks the fiery-festive élan we associate with the keepers of brimstone. For Berlioz conceived the infernal regions as a sort of awkward middle-class party trying to romp and be gay. As Halm wittily remarks, "The rhythm is willing, but the harmony is weak." 25 Then the rhythm itself breaks down in despair and the music whines. Gradually, the lost souls pick up courage and attempt a fanatic religious dance, Scythian style, in 3/4 time, to which they sing a lifeless chorus which ends in the hush of fear before their master. The whole is a hymn to odious desolation; or in other words, sixty years before Shaw's Man and Superman, Berlioz shows us that Hell is dullness, stupidity, and weakness of will. The dramatic legend does not end on this note. In an Epilogue on earth, a reciter tells us very tersely that the mystery of Faust's perdition took place ánd that quiet was restored below. This affords a transition of sixteen bars to the final Scene in Heaven, where Gretchen is received in forgiveness for having loved so well. The divine melody of her translation is the one which woke Berlioz in the middle of the night at Prague, and we may well share his anxiety at the thought that he might forget it.2" How faithful, one must ask, is this kaleidoscope of musical forms composed to Goethe's drama? Is it a whole, or is it a haphazard exploitation of whatever is picturesque in the philosophical poem? In the first place, Berlioz made it clear that he was no more setting Goethe's drama than he had set Shakespeare's Romeo. As he explained in his one-page foreword to the score, no dramatic work can be made into music-drama without extensive alterations. Moreover, although he acknowledged the profound effect that reading Goethe had had upon him, he reserved the right to modify the legend precisely as Goethe had done before him.27 Berlioz has Faust damned (since the expiatory second part of Faust is outside his purview) he omits Valentin, the duel and the infanticide, and he places the compact with the Devil nearly at the end, under the pressure of Gretchen's reported suffering. no, 9 ' · He did not forget it, but the Paris public usually does, clapping loud and long before the end. Mr. Ernest Newman also forgot it when he wrote that "the work ends with a macabre ride to the abyss." (845, III, 164.) 27 Berlioz cited Marlowe's Faustus as a previous treatment which did not stay Goethe's hand. Later the composer regretted having explained himself to "people who need to have it proved that one had no intention of draining the Caspian Sea or blowing up Mont Blanc." (Min. Sc., Avant-Propos; M.C., 202; and Mem., II, 261.) 25

28

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Despite these liberties which Berlioz took for translating an action into music, he adhered very faithfully to the form and spirit of his model. Goethe's form is the Shakespearean "open construction" pushed to its ideal limit. Lacking the aid of the spectator's imagination there is no more "continuity" in the two poets than there is in Berlioz without the hearer's. But Berlioz has condensed the drama still further to three characters (the role of Brander in the Auerbach Scene is a mere vocal contrast by means of the bass register) and a sequence of "moments" in which music and action can be wedded in a single form. The true continuity of the work is twofold: by the art of the musical psychologist each character has his own "speech," e.g., Faust's recitatives and melodies are Faustlike throughout. In the second place, by the art of the symphonic composer, the score is unified through thematic recall, repeat, and echo. From beginning to end, numberless ornaments, rhythms, and timbres act as unobtruded leitmotives to make the music one texture. This naturally does not appear on a first or second hearing.28 At first everything seems episodic, undirected, discrete. But this is a superficial impression due to the pace, the variety, and the force of invention unremittingly displayed. With Goethe's poem before us, we can learn from the Damnation of Faust what those situations were that Berlioz thought implicitly musical. The nine songs, first, then eight or nine more occasions which clearly suggested music — pastoral scenes: the opening reverie and the hymns to twilight and to nature;29 then charms and spells,®0 love dialogue and its sequels,81 moody introspection, M and lastly the ride to the abyss." For two further scenes, Berlioz had only the barest hint, in one line each: the compact in the open heath with hunters' horns nearby was doubtless suggested by the scene where Faust pities Gretchen "in misery . . . despair . . . delivered up to . . . condemning, unfeeling Man." M Musical vividness required that Faust's sense of "unfeeling" be rendered palpable by indifferent activity, the hunt. Finally, Berlioz felt like Mozart in Don Giovanni that the action must not end on the clanging gates of 28

Rivière, for instance, wrote: ". . . T h e only link, I believe, that one can discover, is a recall of the first theme in the second and last parts." (193, I, 199.) There are in fact dozens of reminiscent links. 29 Scenes I, VIII, and X I V of Goethe's text, which is full of musical hints. 30 Scenes III and X X I . 31 XII and X I X . 32 1 and VIII. 33 XXIV. 34 X X I I I : " A Field."

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hell, but should be framed off by a reflective Epilogue, on earth and in heaven. Gretchen's cry, "Ye angels, holy cohorts, guard me," and the reply "She is saved!" were enough to occasion the final chorus of angels.®5 The two dramas, poetic and musical, are thus proportional though not congruent; and their spiritual import is equivalent, not identical. That the Damnation has been charged with lack of philosophic depth is due to a very literary idea of musical meaning. Had Berlioz set philosophic words to almost any music whatever, most persons would call the result deep. It would have struck him as shallow. Any given scene illustrates Berlioz' entirely different conception of philosophic depth in music — as the critic saw who thus describes Mephisto's serenade: "A musician could write for it a melody more or less sarcastic, having in itself no specific virtue and attaining no farther than the usual opera piece. That is what Gounod did. Or again, one could have tried to indicate by means of an orchestral paraphrase, by a contrapuntal complexity, and by a mosaic of leitmotives the work of perversion and the black machinations of Hell. A German composer would have done just that. Berlioz did otherwise. He kept to the form of the traditional serenade — but what a guitar he fashioned for it! The whole quartet of strings, scraping furiously, seems to say 'this is a serenade, only a serenade,' but the dry pizzicati, dismally brutish, add a flavor of death: sensation here does all the cruel work." 34 There was of course the formal possibility of summing up in a number of instrumental or choral movements the composer's idea of the several characters, each typified by a single theme. That is what Liszt did, and Schumann; it is also Wagner's later system. But instead of this subjective or discursive "concentration on the feelings . . . Berlioz moves our hearts and minds by first striking our senses with a whole world of sharp, concrete objects. The advantage of such a system is twofold: it permits concision and it insures variety." 37 The difficulty of this simple method is that it requires the hearer to reflect, and to reflect upon accurate perceptions. Take an example from the close of Part II: the soldiers sing of girls and glory; the students sing of girls and gaiety; the two songs once established, they mingle. But when we hear them the second time, the recurrent dying fall on the brass which accompanies the students' song, coming between the shouts of the soldiers, 35 Goethe's Scene X X V . This desire for a frame around the tragic picture being evident in artists such as Mozart and Berlioz, those portions of their respective works are frequently cut in performance by people who obviously know more than the masters. 30

37

S68,

II-I2.

s68, io.

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imparts to the ensemble a desolate, forlorn, almost suicidal character which is as profound a moral comment as the sorrow of Ecclesiastes. Each of Berlioz' songs or movements is thus double: it is an object and an embodied criticism upon it. The ballad of the King of Thüle is a folk song, but listen to the double basses and the countersubject for viola, both musically appropriate, yet full of foreboding. Or again in Gretchen's lonely plaint, love, memory, and the innocent vulgarity of the girl herself — expressed in the gruppetti — work up to the climacteric utterance, ennobled by passion, on the words " — and in his arms to die." The merit of the method is that the idea resides in the music, and the success of the artist is that he was both purposeful and nonsystematic about what he was doing. He did not, in penning the students' song, say to himself, "Here is where I preach the vanity of sensual delights by means of comets." Rather, he felt at once the lure and the futility of roistering, as Goethe did, and in seeking to reproduce them objectively he found the timbre and cadence that answered.58 The degree of this self-knowledge obviously varied. The pantheistic Invocation was the core of Berlioz' philosophy but he struggled long before he extracted from the simple means that he chose to use the tremendous result we now hear." An artist's technical imagination, so to speak, grows with the years. In the first version of Mephisto's serenade, as we saw, the blithe malicious tune had a guitar accompaniment. In the Damnation, the guitar consists of the sixty strings of the orchestra and the chorus of devils chimes in on the second refrain. But Berlioz goes further, and it is here that the listener must keep pace with the composer: in this refrain, Berlioz scores a false start on the flute which stops the chorus while Mephisto goes on: for a reason that defies analysis this is devilry incarnate. Rhythm and form carry the connotation with not a single imitative detail. The entire score deserves study from this point of view.10 For although our knowing the story of Faust and our hearing some of the words help to still our whys and wherefores, they do not provide the clue to the inherently, musically, "characteristic" elements. Just as in an unnamed symphony we say "the last movement is based on a chorale treated thus 38

For confirmation, note the vocal expression of the same feeling in Faust's recitative "Assez, fuyons ces lieux où la parole est vile . . ." (Min. Sc., 131, bb. 2 ff. ) One thinks of the "vulgar tavern musick which," says Sir Thomas Browne, "makes one man merry and another mad, but struck him with a deep devotion." 39 Available separately on records 1424, 1425, 1426. 40 See the admirable analysis of the opening movement by Jules Combarieu:

119. î8î-35·

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and so," here as analysts we should say "lullaby, love song, lament, serenade, invocation, headlong ride, march, choir of angels," and so forth.41 T h e upshot would be a reconstruction of the dramatic purport of the Damnation, which in turn would suggest its "philosophy," as follows: Part I

— Man in Nature: the simple life and the path of glory and power. Faust rejects the last, but

Part II — he is tempted by doubts, bewitched by sensuality and dreams of love. Part III — Gretchen, who feels and represents the love that Faust only dreams, is transfigured and destroyed by it under worldly law. Meanwhile Part I V — Faust has reverted to self-torturing in the face of nature, and is justly damned for his failure to rescue Gretchen; whereas she is saved. This "philosophy" is the more persuasive in that Berlioz did not consciously force it into plot or words but let it express him, through his choice of musical scenes and their treatment. One is incidentally struck by the similarity of meaning between this sequence of scenes and that of the Symphonie Fantastique, also inspired by a reading of Faust. The Berlioz version of Goethe's drama is interpreted by d'Udine as the working out of "psychological justice" in contradistinction to Providential justice and Fatalism alike,42 and the consistency of Berlioz' outlook is all the more evident that even in dealing with the specific Faust theme he deviates somewhat from Goethe. In both poems, Faust's odyssey exemplifies the romanticist creed of experience and action; it vindicates love above prudence and pleasure while asserting moral responsibility and recognizing evil as a positive force to be fought.41 Berlioz likewise shares Goethe's esthetic respect for the forms of the Catholic Christian religion and feels humble before its human wisdom, though lacking the faculty for accepting its dogma. He adds his private discovery that Hell is dullness. But the core of the two dramatists' Weltanschauung is their pantheistic worship of nature, and here their expressions diverge. Berlioz interprets the cosmos as being more indifferent than Faust felt it to be. From the very opening, Berlioz' Invocation reminds us of the baffled Faust who cries, "Wo fass 41 W h o can hear or remember the words of ensembles — whether Viva la libertà in Mozart or the Easter chorus and Concert of Svlphs in Berlioz'

"¡68,

13.

It seems likely that Goethe was purging his remorse at the abandonment of his youthful love, Frederike. Was Berlioz thinking of Harriet? 43

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ich dich, unendliche Natur"; rather than of the later "Erhabener Geist." It is not fanciful to find in the twenty-seventh bar of the piece44 an intimation that the musician felt his adoration of the impassive world to be a presumptuous fallacy. The invoker resembles Shakespeare's Timon of Athens, who says: Common mother, thou Whose womb unmeasurable, and infinite breast, Teems, and feeds all; whose self-same mettle, Whereof thy proud child, arrogant man, is puffed. . . .45 Indeed, the inspiration of Shakespeare is everpresent behind the work of both the nineteenth-century artists. It is from him they both learned that verse, prose, catches, rhetoric, dialogue, and fanfares could combine into a coherent unified work of art, provided that psychology, inherent expressiveness, and imaginative truth were sustained.4® Similarly, Berlioz had learned from Beethoven the art of enhancing the value of successive musical numbers by making them "diversely beautiful," 47 by using all the resources of the orchestra and all the forms of musical discourse. The result entitles us to conclude with an English critic that "the more one studies . . . 'cette magnifique Damnation de Faust' as M. Gounod calls it, the more one marvels and likes, the more one discovers to admire. There is lovelier music in the Romeo and Juliet; there are greater aims and larger effects in the Requiem; there is nobler drama in the Troy ens, with a loftier style and a simpler perfection of technical inspiration and achievement. But in variety and completeness, in movement and romance, in life and color and charm, the Damnation is unrivalled, not only among the works of Berlioz himself, but as it seems to us, by anything produced by the masters of symphony since Beethoven." 48 Mention of Beethoven and the symphony appropriately introduces the question of form. The Damnation of Faust has marked affinities with the Dramatic Symphony. But in Romeo and Juliet the orchestral and the vocal elements were balanced in a recurrent interweaving. Here the human voice predominates throughout, for which reason the work has no over44

The bass rises to G under a persistent Β flat while the D comes down to C, forming a cavernous fourth though only a few strings and the bassoons accompany the voice. (Min. Sc., 339 b. 1.) 45 Act IV, Sc. iii. " T h e reader will remember that the Eight Scenes of 1828 were sandwiched between successive pairs of quotations from Shakespeare. 47 A Trav., 75. 48

556.

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ture: it opens with seven bars of Faust's pastoral theme, given to the violas in unison before he himself sings it in somewhat altered form, richly accompanied. Yet within the score the purely orchestral moments are numerous, though brief; the three concert excerpts are merely the detachable ones among many. Of these three, one occurs in each of the first three parts; the fourth part being preponderantly vocal as is fitting for a finale. T o mark the close of each part, Berlioz has adroitly chosen numbers of some massiveness: the first ends with the March (another reason why an orchestral overture would have been redundant), the second ends with the joint choruses of soldiers and students; the third ends with the three solo voices in conflict with the mob that breaks off the love scene — the only scene that shows a touch of the operatic. For the fourth and last close (Gretchen's Apotheosis in Heaven) Berlioz wished an additional chorus of two or three hundred children, which would give that power-in-softness he desired, as well as sustain the burden of concluding. This choral close balances the Easter Chorus in Part II, just as the orchestral March and Minuet balance each other in I and III. The first three parts open with Faust, the last — in which Faust sinks to perdition — with Gretchen; each opening is individual and characteristic and marks a leap forward in the drama, just as each closing is collective, anonymous, and, except the last one, tragically soulless. In short the whole arrangement betrays a masterly plan. Within each part also, one can see the effect of "all the patience and care" Berlioz mustered. The alternation of vocal registers and of solos, with ensembles, recitatives, and purely orchestral interludes, shows the same skill in providing rest through contrast, the same love of subtle preparation and resolution, the same urge to construct "one work," which we have seen gaining strength ever since his Opus ι W h e n one knows the Damnation, it is inconceivable that any other fragment by Berlioz could be inserted into it. In the Dramatic Legend, to be sure, the outline of the four-movement symphony which was still perceptible in Romeo is no longer present. Part I of Faust does contain a symphonically developed section, just as Part II contains a set of variations, but their intent, like that of all the other parts and sections, is dictated by drama on the one hand, and on the other by these considerations of balance, preparation, and conclusion, which have just been enumerated. These are of course the original, primitive, and eternal considerations 48 Marnold concedes Berlioz real merit in this branch of artistry, but for reasons of his own does not consider this to have much to do with the art of music. (460, 362.)

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that have governed the elaboration of all forms from the most rigid, the fugue, to the most nearly improvisatory, the toccata. But the conservative always asks whether music will not cease to be music if it abandons the set patterns. When Berlioz was fashioning his dramatic works under the guidance of musical instinct and the fundamental conditions of structure, Adolphe Adam was still arguing that Rossini was a greater artist than Beethoven because Beethoven had no regard for forms.50 The assumption seems to be that musical substance is so fluid that if the arbitrary frontiers and signposts are removed art will perish. A distinguished lecturer once said, analyzing at sight the Mozart piano trio in Β flat: " W e now come to the contrasting second theme." But there was no second theme. In its place Mozart had given the violin the first theme in a different key. This lessened the contrast while introducing a new artistic element: the unexpected. It did not spoil the form — it varied it; but it upset the lecturer, and this is as dangerous as the offense Samuel Butler calls "a wound in the solicitor." The issue of form is indeed so disturbing that one seldom finds it clearly put. That four-letter word acts like the bite of the tarantula, and those who remain calm are only displaying the serenity of souls armored against reason. T o make matters worse, nearly everyone seems to have interested motives for saying that form is a mystery inaccessible to simple mortals; it even appears that great artists were deficient in it, while scholars, especially the heaven-born tribe of academic musicians, possess it by nature.91 Finally, since Pater's unfortunate and ignorant hypothesis, music is widely held to represent "pure form" — whatever that may mean — and success in it to betoken marked powers of construction.52 The truth is that most musical forms have been imposed from outside upon a material which is very malleable, and that the instinct for what is inherently musical remains, as Koechlin says, elusive and diverse.5* 50

"Beethoven . . . composed admirable symphonies . . . but he composed only symphonies. His sonatas and quartets .are more or less developed symphonies scored for more or fewer players. It is useless to cite his Mass and his Fidelio. Fidelio is not an opera but an admirable symphony, in which the voices play a subordinated role . . . The Mass is no more a vocal work than is the Choral Symphony." (13S3, 1841, j86.) 51 In academic halls one hears it said of Meredith's sixteen-line sonnets in Modern Love, "of course they are not sonnets," though an earlier lesson states that the original sonnet form varied from twelve to twenty-five lines. Nor is the academic point made simply on behalf of nomenclature, but against Meredith's "sense of form." 52 For an attempt to make matters clearer, see Supplement 6. 53 72j>, 632 and 4$2, 120.

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These are some of the reasons for the confusion and the acrimony of the debate which a Berlioz was bound to find raging about him. As a dramatic musician coming after Beethoven's expansion of the symphony into a vocal-instrumental genre, Berlioz could only further and complete the fusion of expressive elements. The very social structure of the nineteenth century impelled him to it. After the bourgeois revolutions, Haydn's resident orchestra at Esterhazy castle could no longer be the prevailing medium of musical production, nor was the new, public orchestra any longer a thing remote from the cathedral choir and the resources of the metropolitan opera. Rapid transport and the secularization of belief had combined with the presence of a paying public to abolish this earlier segregation: all conceivable musical elements could now meet under Berlioz' baton. In his work, accordingly, all known forms and devices coexist and cross-fertilize: the folk song with refrain, the durchcomponirtes lied, the six- or eight-part chorus (accompanied or a cappella)·, the march, waltz, or minuet; the recitative and chant récitatif; the major-minor system and the modes; the sonata-allegro, the fugue, the free variation and the unifying leitmotif; the virtuoso voice, the choir, the organ, and the orchestra. Music, in short, had established its great lexicon and declared its right to free speech. It is not likely that a man who dealt constantly in his writings with the questions of form presented in Beethoven, and who composed the massive portions of his own works with the care for unity and coherence that we have seen, should on the smaller scale of a single movement have lacked the qualities he displayed elsewhere. Yet it has been assumed that he did lack them, an assumption due to the fact that he was carrying forward Beethoven's musical re-formation even before Beethoven was fully understood. In the very first movement of his first symphony, Berlioz reinforces unity by welding a phrase of the Introduction into the theme of the ensuing allegro, by combining a single motif with the material of five contrasted movements and by superimposing (in the last) two widely divergent themes in the course of a double fugue.54 Berlioz was certainly setting himself as many problems as any theorist could desire, and apart from one or two stumbles which we noted, he solved them for the greater good of the guild. He likewise met the demand for coherence, but here complications arise which cannot be unraveled by reference to Beethoven; for Berlioz 54

Aim. Sc., 214 ff. Compare the similar combination of two melodic fragments in the Ninth Symphony, last movement.

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was a different temperament, working on different materials, namely, his own distinctive melody. The development formulas he learned at school or studied in Beethoven were thereby rendered useless for his purpose, for they imply short figures or themes, which grow by addition, by being twisted and turned one bit at a time, in order to arrive at an unfolding, a large-sized melodic (or harmonic) culmination. Berlioz works on the contrary with a completed statement from the beginning. Perceiving the true nature of his material he saw that the regular German way would not do for him, and that he must abandon even the idea of a "development section." Better than some'of his successors, who were also lyricists," he knew how tedious it would be to hack away at his long phrases like a sailor picking oakum, and go mechanically through the motions revealed in the German phrase "thematische Arbeit." The admirable side of the German classical technique might be called synthesis: it builds up from a germ the full-blown flower. Berlioz' way is analytic: he develops his themes by total or partial transformation, by reduction, by parthenogenesis, and he does this throughout an overture or movement, rather than in a designated spot. If sought for at the usual point the expected Arbeit will not be found, and the hasty reader will conclude that Berlioz was incapable of development. The truth is that Berlioz uses all the devices of development and more, and by the time he has finished with a musical idea it has both yielded all it contained and struck out new shoots. In the opening scene of the Damnation for instance, the seventeen variations or returns of the theme constitute a completely adequate analysis of it. It is a full "development" even though arrived at by an inversion of the usual method; and the interruption of its treatment after forty bars, only to recall it after another thirty — which happens again more briefly — satisfies our wish for symmetry. Despite an apparent confusion adapted to the dramatic purpose, the handling gives us statement, episode, and return: it is perfect form.se This is a relatively simple instance. Elsewhere, as in the Minuet (to which, by the way, Berlioz restores the grave pace of pre-Haydn days), the interderivations of the several motives and their modification by "E.g., Brahms and Tchaikovsky. Liszt occupies a middle place in this regard; Wagner is of course in the short-theme tradition. 58 Mr. Newman came to the same conclusion about the allegedly programmatic "Royal Hunt and Storm," finding it formally more satisfactory than a Brahms symphonic movement. Obviously there are two (or more) criteria of perfect form, depending on one's view of the materials and the purposes of art.

5

Berlioz

ómbre and rhythm arc more difficult to grasp, especially if the name Minuet arouses very definite expectations. Yet "form," and regular form at that, is not hard to find: Berlioz keeps the traditional alternation of motifs, and using the repeats for sinister emphasis (the dynamics aiding) goes on to a lyrical section which corresponds to the old trio, after which he returns to the first motif. This he allows to "fall apart" so that — and in this Beethoven was first — he finds occasion for a sort of coda, presto, in 4/4 time, heralding the serenade which we are about to hear from Mephisto, on a theme introduced earlier.57 Throughout, the principle of the "thematic catalogue," first used in the Dramatic Symphony, Romeo, is adapted to the needs of the Dramatic Legend of Faust, where it replaces the routine transitions and standard couplings that Berlioz scorned. Hence the charge of fragmentariness or patchwork ceases to be plausible when the whole work lies well in the ear. It is fair enough that Berlioz should not eat his cake and have it too — be an innovator and succeed like Mendelssohn — but it is temperament as much as reflection that impelled him to seek compression without loss of clarity. Aristocratic in gait, Berlioz' muse prefers to skip intermediaries when they can be "understood." Being thus elliptical, he runs the risk of being obscure, but it is the obscurity of wit, not of unawareness.58 As Schumann observed, it is usually in his harmony that Berlioz allows himself the most startling discontinuity — as in quantum mechanics or the divided palette of a Delacroix. For example in the Pandemonium of the Damnation, he leaps from a Β major chord held by the whole orchestra and chorus to a lightning figure for string basses written in F.se That the effect is dramatically successful does not make it any more a violation of coherence than Shakespeare's hurtling sequence of images in "To be or not to be." T o condemn the latter as "mixed metaphor" or the former as technical ignorance of the rules of modulation would be to argue against evidence of the same artists' power to sustain metaphor and to modulate.60 Worse, to object would be to overlook in the incriminated 57

Min. Sc., 119 bb. 1-10. He sometimes seems afraid of his own tendency and puts in links to lessen the shock —as Schoenberg finds he has to do: "There was at hand from the start a sufficient amount of motivai forms and their derivatives, rather too much than too little. The task, therefore, was to retard the progress of the development in order to enable the average listener to keep in mind what preceded, so as to understand the consequences." (868, 74-6.) 59 Min. Sc., 389 bb. 4-5. 60 It is true that in our day, as in the eighteenth century, Shakespeare has been deemed an incompetent artist who did not know how to develop an M

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passages the preparation by means of the previous hectic pace —in Berlioz, namely, by the harsh progressions that scan Mephisto's dialogue with the princes of Hell. In other words, coherence is relative to the character and intensity of the context. Coherence is likewise a function of the length of line, which in Berlioz as we know is more akin to blank verse than to the couplet or ballad meter. His melodic wing span consequently often stretches beyond the usual limits of tonality and necessarily affects his harmony. As commentators remark, although Mozart's harmony flows more gracefully than that of Berlioz, "Mozart himself could not have dealt with Berlioz' [phrases] as he dealt with his own . . . The curve has altered."*1 Hence the modal or neomodal character of many Berliozian passages and his development of these subtler means of achieving harmonic coherence which were discussed in the last chapter. Whereas the main concern of the classical composer was to bind and brace his piece by key relationships, Berlioz often relied on other elements — timbre, rhythm, and melodic recall. He thus ushers in the last step in freeing form from the single criterion of tonality enharmonically defined; it is the step just preceding twentieth-century pantonality." All this augments rather than diminishes Berlioz' preoccupation with form.*3 It was no mere lip service to an ideal when he condemned shoddy construction even in Gluck and Weber, or when, during the composition of Les Troy ens, he wrote to a friend "I am now seeking for the form, without which music does not exist. . . . " * * In this lifelong search image and create logical structures —a regular Berlioz, in fact. See below, Subchapter 25. 81 H a d o w (350, II, 285). See also Constant Lambert: " W i t h Berlioz the harmonic thought is never allowed to cramp or dominate the thematic outline, and that is what his admirers mean when they claim that he is first and foremost a melodist . . . W h e n Berlioz uses a descending chromatic phrase in one of his themes he is not, like Delius, allowing the melodic line to follow meekly a harmonic sequence, nor like Strauss is he merely sliding from one position of a chord to another. H e is actually using each degree of the scale f o r its expressive significance." (1391, June 1929, j o j . ) e2 T h i s evolution was predicted, if not preached, b y Fétis in Paris as early as I8}2, possibly as a result of the vistas opened out to him b y Berlioz' first works. (99!, I. 3 2 4 ^ · ) 83 T h a t he was very critical of his own structure is shown b y the changes he made in passages of which w e have various versions (e.g., Herminie and the Fantastique, ist movement; R á k ó c z y manuscript and final text; as well as b y his discarding the Rob Roy and Tour de Nice overtures, from which he fashioned the Harold allegro and the Corsair. M S. W., 30. H e addresses the young Gounod on the same subject: " N o , m y dear Gounod, the faithful expression of feeling does not exclude musical form.

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Berlioz was bound to invent new forms — among others, the symphonic poem, which is found not in the Symphonie Fantastique as is sometimes said, but in the orchestral song La Captive. Berlioz moreover used three structural principles that later came to be recognized as founding new forms: the one designated < > , which Wagner adopted for several of his Preludes and which is originally found in the second movement of Harold in Italy; the device I have termed "thematic catalogue" first used in Romeo and again, as it were distributed, throughout the Damnation; and the allegro-juxtaposition form, frequently found in the overtures and dramatic symphonies." But Berlioz neither named nor systematized these devices. If he had composed ten symphonies on the idée fixe plan of his first two, he would certainly be known as an inventor, but it is noteworthy that he stopped when he had given two different models of the scheme. He retained only the free use of the leitmotif. Again, the Prologue of the Dramatic Symphony is a first sketch, both for Wagner's Prologue to the Ring, and for Berlioz' own practice in the Damnation of Faust, but in the last-named work the principle is preserved without re-employing a Prologue. It would seem as if this dislike of exact repetition marked the inventor, whereas frequent identical reproduction marks rather the exploiter — whence a possible inference as to misplaced credit. But credit is less important than results, and a glance at Berlioz' successors shows that his teachings in form were not lost. Strauss's Heldenleben and Don Quixote are closer in conception to Berlioz' first two symphonies than to Liszt's works. Liszt's own Christus and St. Elizabeth are closer to the Dramatic Symphony and the Dramatic Legend than to the symphonic poem. And we have seen that in the domain of staged opera Wagner and MousT h e shape of the dialogue given your characters was perhaps detrimental to the development of your melody . . . but surely your versifier would have been willing to give his thought another form, which it was y o u r duty to sketch f o r him. T h e business of the musician is before all things to make music. . . . In certain cases it may happen that the subject forces the composer to present in a kind of prelude ideas only half exposed, which he intends to develop; but then he must willy-nilly get round to developing them, for what must not be is that the hope of seeing a piece of music begin and end should be continually disappointed." ( M . M . , 268-9.) c ·"' Weingartner: " W h e n the older masters combined t w o or more themes simultaneously, it was usually in fugai form . . . It is in an entirely free form that Berlioz contrasts t w o themes with each other . . . a compositional technique that has become v e r y frequent since his day. W h a t fine use Liszt made of his predecessor's device in . . . Tasso . . . and how magnificently do the three main themes ring out at the end of the Prelude to Meistersinger!" (394, 2 0 0 - 1 . )

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sorgsky owe a good deal to Berlioz* form, without their own genius for modification being in the least impaired. Berlioz would have been the first to say that he had created nothing ex nihilo but had taken tradition at its farthest point and added to it in the immemorial way of "descent with modification." He was in this respect a traditionalist like Beethoven; like him he preferred form to be "a hidden presence," and he could have shown if need be that, the Dtmmarion of Faust was an offshoot of the Choral Ninth and Fidelio via the dramatic symphony.

18. Song in Time of Revolution October ¡846 to June 29, 1848

That singular Republic of 1848, which managed to shoot down, imprison, or deport all the real republicans, leaving at the head of affairs only royalists. — SAINTE-BEUVE i n

1869

THE Damnation of Faust was ready to be heard by the end of November 1846. T o a journalist, possibly one of the Escudier brothers, who published music as well as the weekly France Musicale, and who had turned suddenly favorable to Berlioz, the composer dashed off a typical preconcert note: DEAR FRIEND,

Here are three notices just as they come. I am groggy with making arrangements. W e rehearse all day today, but I shall try to go and see you about four o'clock. Yours . . , 1 T o d'Ortigue Berlioz also wrote, saying that if he were to quote anything it should be the verses: Nature immense, impénétrable et fière. The article moreover should not stress the daring of his enterprise, but should on the contrary say that this concert form ought to have been tried long since. The "daring" lay in the gigantic risk Berlioz was taking in the production at his own expense of a work which though not an opera was of comparable dimensions, and which was to provide the sole entertainment of the afternoon. He had hired the Opéra-comique — the only available place —for two Sundays a fortnight apart. The rehearsals were very satisfactory. The tenor Roger sang Faust in excellent style and the other soloists were adequate. Berlioz had a bad turn when it was announced that on the same day as his première the students of the Conservatoire were giving a concert for the benefit of flood victims. But the Comte de Montalivet, who was Minister of the Interior and who respected Berlioz, postponed the students' concert. For over a month the "Berlioz press" prepared the public. The Duc de Montpensier and his new duchess notified the composer that 1

308, Aug. 7, 1904, 252-3.

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they would attend, and the composer mustered his faithful: Gautier, Janin and the rest. But the public was not to be wooed. If anything was to take its mind off political agitation and resentment against every established thing, it must be novelties like the English troupe who, in flesh-colored tights, posed in protracted tableaux that the eager viewers agreed to call artistic.2 In the summer just past, two more attempts had been made on the life of Louis Philippe, bringing the total to seven; while the guerrilla in North Africa which was to be an outlet for restless nationalism remained inconclusive. Revolt was in fact brewing in various parts of Europe, much of it engineered by refugees in Paris. Prussian and Austrian Poland rose; Portugal was rent by civil war; and the Franco-British entente was broken, precisely by the success of the Duc de Montpensier in winning the Spanish princess. In Paris, business was in depression. "Money was hiding," as the animistic phrase has it. The flood victims were only a few of those suffering from want. High prices and layoffs had provoked a riot in that weathervane district, the Faubourg St. Antoine. N o masterpiece, were it ten times as irresistible as the Damnation 3 could overcome the fever of uncertainty, the self-centered fear now gripping the Paris bourgeois. Even if the citizen with money in his pocket had wanted to break the current of his gloomy thoughts, he would have turned away from Goethe, Berlioz, and Romanticism, and toward the cozier side of art —toward Scribe or Ponsard for drama, Auber or Clapisson for music.4 In all the arts, an instinctive regrouping had come about, vaguely known as the School of Common Sense. That the days of Shakespeare and Faust were far in the past, Berlioz could feel when he climbed the podium and bowed to a half empty hall. The performance naturally suffered, though two of the numbers were encored. Berlioz did not despair — yet, for he had a second chance on December 20. But the reviews were more sharply divided than before. Gautier after the dress rehearsal had set the seal on Berlioz' position as the one musician in the vanguard of French art: "With Hugo and Delacroix, he completes the trinity of Romanticism." 5 But the irritable Scudo at the 2

1/80,

3

345.

"The emotion . . . and the drama . . . are eminently human; and both are so brilliantly, so perfectly presented as to be absolutely irresistible." (1885: 556.) 4 Les diamants de la couronne and Gibby-la-Cornemuse by these respective masters were among the successes of the year 5 434, 144 and again 153 and 168.

5o6

Berlioz

Revue des Deux Mondes frothed at the mouth. In the lobby, Adam gloated over Berlioz' apparent defeat. Janin ended a truthful report of divided opinion with a superb: "I pity Berlioz and I envy him." * In the face of the disaster, the convinced admirers among professional musicians felt that they must mediate between Berlioz and the public. D'Ortigue, always precise, went into details: "Being wholly absorbed in his innovations, . . . M. Berlioz loses sight of his audience and goes beyond the bounds where their perceptions stop. M. Berlioz is of the stature of the great masters, and has gone farther than Mozart, Beethoven, and Weber, not because he is superior to them, but because in his hands art has taken a step forward . . . He will continue to fight the good fight, but there will always be a gulf between the way in which the mass of the public conceives of art — owing to the theories commonly taught — and the way M. Berlioz conceives it." T Before the next performance it started to snow, so that on December 20 the hall was only a quarter full. Those present formed such a select group that they were enchanted with the music, even though Roger declined to sing the Invocation to Nature.8 T o solace the composer, his admirers organized a banquet presided over by Baron Taylor, and had a gold medal struck in honor of the work. Offenbach made a speech in the name of German music, Osborne in the name of English. The romantic contrast between glory and wretchedness, greatness and misery, could not have been better contrived by fiction. Homage and failure greeted this work which was to be resurrected thirty years later as the productive mainstay of the Colonne repertory, and to be accepted without effort as "the masterpiece which is the summa of nineteenth-century French music." 9 Meantime Berlioz was financially ruined.10 In a letter to his sister Nanci he could but thinly cover up his profound depression, of which he later said that this indifference of the Parisian public had wounded him more deeply than any previous blow.11 T o insult and misrepresentation he had grown hardened; neglect was more galling. Nor could the investment of • 1386, q u o t e d in 269, 137. 7 269, 140. 8 Thirty-five y e a r s later, R o g e r c a n d i d l y admitted that " i n those d a y s " B e r l i o z ' m e l o d y did not seem m e l o d i c ; n o w it w a s "a revelation . . . I used t o sing u n d e r him, but I did not understand him." (34s, 190.) 9

J*/, Ï17-

T h e O p é r a - c o m i q u e being small and y i e l d i n g o n l y 6000 francs w h e n f u l l , B e r l i o z h a d d o u b l e d the price of tickets, f o r the cost of c o p y i n g and p e r f o r m i n g w o u l d t o g e t h e r e x c e e d the first d a y ' s returns. 11 Mem., II, 264. 10

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rime and energy be recouped by later concerts as he had done for earlier compositions: "There is no concert hall in Paris." This was now true, for the Opera was dead set against Berlioz and controlled the Italian theater, while the Conservatoire, as we know, had made a rule that no "outsider" could use its hall during the season." "Moreover the government is becoming economical in a fashion that was unthinkable five years ago. The Minister in whose jurisdiction the arts are placed cares about them rather less than he does about the grocery business. There is nothing to be done in this ruthless country and I can only hope to leave it as fast as possible . . . I am like a beast of prey, forced to seek my food afar: only barnyard fowl thrive on the manure heap. I have made up my mind. Despite the cold weather, I am going by land next month to St. Petersburg." " A feeling of resentment verging on sour grapes was not Berlioz' sole motive. St. Petersburg had been in his mind for two years past, and even before that time he had been attracted by what was reported of the success of his Requiem there.14 Vernet had visited Russia in 1840 and been well received, and more recently, Balzac had returned from his courting of his future wife, Mme. Hanska, and was extravagant in praise of the country's welcome to artists. "You will not be able," he told Berlioz, "to come back with less than 150,000 francs." " And as a sort of pledge for his prediction he offered Berlioz the loan of his fur coat. Before Berlioz could leave he must settle his new debts. Friends helped out: Berdn of the Débats advanced five thousand francs; Hetzel, the kind and intelligent publisher of Victor Hugo, a thousand; Adolphe Sax, twelve hundred. On the point of leaving, Berlioz had another gleam of hope that he might after all entrench himself in Paris. Pillet's management of the Opera was doomed, and a public scene by the power behind the throne, the singer Rosine Stoltz, hastened its end." The winning team for the new directorship was Duponchel, former director in the days of Benvenuto Cellini, and a mediocre writer named Nestor Roqueplan. This partnership, not as yet appointed, had backing from the Rothschilds as well as from the Débats. It could be inferred that Berlioz would be made conductor. This was in fact promised by the eager candidates but soon 12 M£., 167. 13 M.E., 168. 14

L.I., 193. Produced in 1839, by Romberg, it had earned 5000 francs for the impresario. A few years later the Imperial Chapel had commissioned Berlioz to prepare harmonizations for certain liturgical chants. 15 Mem., II, 268. 18 On being hissed she tore her handkerchief with her teeth, shouted defiance to the public, and stalked off. Returning, she met the applause given to a colleague by threatening her with upraised hand.

5o8

Berlioz

written off as a pre-election promise. Berlioz must leave France. In February 1847 he wrote to Balzac, taking him up on his offer of the coat, which was duly delivered." It must have been made of peau de chagrin if it fitted the thin musician after housing the rotund novelist. At any rate on St. Valentine's day Berlioz set off alone by way of Belgium and Germany. The comic papers signalized the departure of M. Berliozkoff in a bass drum drawn by four horses.18 The composer had no expectations on the scale that Balzac forecast and he meant to take every precaution against further loss. Accordingly, he stopped off at Berlin and obtained from the King a letter of introduction to his sister, the Tsarina.1" The trip thence was extremely uncomfortable and more than usually cold, especially from the Russian frontier onward, four days and nights by sleigh. A first concert was planned, prepared, and carried off with lightning speed within two weeks of Berlioz' arrival, that is to say on March 15. The Tsarina was present as well as the nobility and the representatives of the arts — a gala occasion which was also a memorable success: "Encores enough to make one dizzy. The program included the Roman Carnival Overture, Parts I and II of the Damnation, and the Funeral and Triumphal Symphony." 20 After shaking the hands of many new friends and drinking a bottle of beer, Berlioz inquired about the receipts: eighteen thousand francs — a clear profit of twelve thousand. "I unconsciously turned my face southwest . . . and murmured, 'Ah, my dear Parisians! ' My life was saved." A second concert met with equal success. The Tsarina and her sons (of whom the elder became Alexander II) showed the visitor marked attentions, gave him valuable gifts, and went wherever he performed. "If the Parisians chose to punish me for having composed my latest work, the Russians have amply made it up to me." 21 Four more days in a sleigh ("which shakes one up like shot in a bottle being scoured") brought Berlioz to Moscow, where the orchestra and 17

M.E., 170-1. T h i s insistence on the bass drum as a symbol shows to perfection how myths express subjective feeling through false objects. T h e users of the bass drum à outrance in nineteenth-century music are the French and Italian opera composers and its sole enemy in Paris was Berlioz. See Treatise and above. Subchapter 17. 18 Humboldt, w h o liked Berlioz, was apparently the go-between for this request, with which Frederick William complied in a facetious tone. ( ¿ 3 5 , II, 209.) 18

20

21

M.E., 174-5·

M . E . , 1 7 j . In a note of sardonic ambiguity, destined for the newspapers, he had announced his Faust as having just earned in Paris a unique reception. (98·)

Song in Time of Revolution

509

choruses were by no means so good as the picked German group in St. Petersburg. But the applause on April 10 and the profits that went with it were equally gratifying. "The Russian aristocracy has grown delirious over Faust. . . . While I am giving these concerts in Moscow . . . the Grand Theatre [in St. Petersburg] is rehearsing Romeo." 12 The return to the capital was slowed up by the spring thaw, but this delay only heightened the pleasure of finding on his return the large welltrained ensembles playing and singing Romeo. "It is imperially organized." He rehearsed them in sections as usual, and gave himself wholly to "the divine Shakespearean poem." The excitement of the performance and the warmth of the public response were too much for him. After many curtain calls, he retired to the green room where Ernst the violinist (who had played in the Harold symphony) found him dissolved in tears. " 'Nerves,' " said Ernst, " Ί know all about it.' And he let me weep like an hysterical girl for another 15 minutes." 23 Another strain on the thirtieth for a repeat performance was followed by a depressive reaction. He experienced one of his fits of loneliness in the midst of friends. He thought of Liszt, newly in love with the Princess Carolyne Sayn-Wittgenstein, who was temporarily in Russia, and wrote him a long letter for her to deliver by hand. "I think a great deal about you, and the opportunities of speaking of you here are many, for people love and admire you as much as I do. Don't you think you and I go around a good deal? Just now, I am sad, sad enough to die of it. I am having one of my bouts of isolation; and it is the playing of Romeo that brought it on. In the middle of the adagio I felt my heart contract, and here I am, caught by the evil for Lord knows how long. My wretched temperament! "But enough of this. I have played a deal of music here. . . . Now the King of Prussia has had me notified by Count Roeden that the Berlin Opera is at my disposal to put on Faust entire. So I'm going to Prussia, but my heart is not in it. Will I recover it? There I go lamenting again. What misery to be an electrical machine that can be electrified. The Princess tells me that you compose a great deal. When is your Sardanapalus due in Vienna? . . ,24 "Farewell. I embrace you. I should like to see you. The sun shines as in Italy — 34 degrees of heat [93.2o F.] — a torture. Come hither ice, fog, 22 23 24

M.E., 177. Mem., II, 292.

Apparently an Italian opera of Liszt's which was never produced. See ¿35·, II, 368.

5 io

Berlioz

insensibility! Farewell again, don't laugh at me: if you do I shall know it wherever you are." s Berlioz' sense of isolation, brought on by overwork or the aftermath of battle, was his old trouble, rooted farther back than adolescence; it was the passion for Estelle, for solitude in the fields, mingled with yearning for a love he never knew and was never to know. The absent Marie was not the one to make him feel that his real experiences were being shared. Worldly in a small-minded way — as her P.S.'s to some of Berlioz' letters attest M — she had ceased being either spirited or naive. Alone and brooding, Berlioz easily deluded himself into thinking that he loved one of his choristers, a modest young woman who lived by her needle and was betrothed by her family's will to a man on his way to Sweden. She took pity on the great artist in his distress. It was an innocent affair: they walked arm in arm along the Neva and talked — for she knew French fairly well — or Berlioz would sing to her. He knew she did not love him, but she spoke like Faust's Gretchen as she wondered what he could see in so ordinary a creature as herself, and the poetic and musical associations redoubled his grief masked as love. However much the mind might stand off and judge it, this was no trumped-up feeling on Berlioz* part: it was the imagination of love, out of which, for gifted and erotic but unsensual natures, all art springs. "There are so many sorts of love," Berlioz confided months later to a friend. "The kind I feel is the true, grand, poetic love. I have known it since the first time and nothing is more beautiful. With the love of art, there is no other divinising of the human heart. With it the world grows bright, horizons enlarge, all nature takes on color and vibrates in endless harmonies, and — one loves, that's all, one loves! " 27 From this first visit in 1847, Russia felt that Berlioz' music was pregnant and prophetic of the future and wanted to keep his scores at the Imperial Library. 28 But Berlioz had no copies and could not leave them. He did leave warm supporters, notably Vladimir Stassov, Alexis Lvov, 25

M . E . , 178-80. E.g., Certain biographers state that Marie did accompany Berlioz to Russia. T h e r e is no direct evidence for this and from the letters of this period it seems more likely that she met him in Berlin on his return. 27 M.E., 211. One need not go back to Dante's Vita Nuova for ascertaining the bond between love and art. W . J . T u r n e r opens his Orpheus, or The Music of the Future with the statement: " M u s i c is the imagination of love in sound. It is what man imagines of his life, and his life is love." (#99, 9.) Stendhal repeatedly expresses the same view. {1242, Ch. 16 and 9 3 / , passim.) 28 Moscow Gazette quoted in 345, 208. 28

Song in Time of Revolution

511

and Count Michael Wielhorsky, whose appreciation of his work had considerable effects on the national art. Berlioz on his side had received an unforgettable impression from the liturgical music of Bortniansky.2· On his way to answer the Prussian King's invitation, Berlioz stopped at Riga, where he gave a concert by arranging some of his scores for fifty musicians, playing even the Chorus of Sylphs for orchestra alone. The audience was sparse, for the population was at the docks along the river, watching and trading as eleven hundred ships unloaded grain. But in return for his pains he had "the great good fortune" of seeing Hamlet well performed. "I was again, as always, all stirred up over this marvel by the greatest genius who ever lived. The English are right to say that next to God it is Shakespeare who has created most. One ought not to allow his masterpieces to be shown before a haphazard gathering of dolts, half dolts, semi-literates, grammarians, schoolteachers, baby nurses, ladies of fashion, demi-mondaines, old crones, dandies, wheat brokers, horse traders and traveling salesmen . . . [even if] God has put them on earth in order to keep artists humble and clip the wings of their ambition."90 Four days later Berlioz was in Berlin assembling his forces for the Damnation. In two weeks all was ready, but it was June 19, the season was far advanced. The horse races had just begun, and the King used his privilege to request that the concert start at six. Half the audience therefore came an hour late. Still, despite this handicap and that of two inferior singers, several encores were called for." Frederick William asked him to Sans Souci; they talked where Voltaire had lived and Bach had played; walked in the gardens and parted pleased with each other. The King awarded Berlioz the Red Eagle, but the Berlin returns were slight. A truer compensation in artistic form roused Berlioz from his growing fatigue — "La Vestale entire, that is, as scored, without cuts. In spite of the [singers'] inadequacy it made — especially at the rehearsal —a profound impression. The last air, which is never sung in Paris, is sublime."82 In Paris, as Berlioz could see from the newspapers, the Opera after five months was still being tussled for. "In three days we overturn a dynasty, but it takes all this time to pass from Pillet to Coignard or some other. . . . In truth, it is everywhere the same. The King of Prussia has an Intendant 29

He wrote an article upon it in the Débats for Oct. 19, 1850, reviewed Lvov's history of the Russian chapel, added a biographical sketch (Soirées [21] Eves., 2 3 1 ) , and edited as well as performed a number of his works. See M.E., 308-9. 30 M.E., 184. 31 But not given, because Berlioz did not distinguish the words da capo (instead of bis) above the applause. 32 M.E., 189.

512

Berlioz

who in all matters goes against the public, the artists, the court, and the King himself. Yet the King keeps him, though Meyerbeer is giving up from discouragement." " When Berlioz reached the French capital on July 7, the new directors had been in office one week. Within a month, the pair with the Flaubertian names, Duponchel and Roqueplan, had forgotten all their pre-nuptial courting of the powers, including Berlioz and the Débats. But with the composer once more in residence the comic papers had really fresh material for their wit tinged with envy: "M. Berliozineff has been made a prince. . . . He has had his armorial bearings engraved on his guitar." " Berlioz quickly gauged the Opera situation and by mid-August sent a note to the new heads giving them back their latest word." He had released to Scribe full rights to the libretto on Lewis's Monk.3* He had also accepted a complex but apparently attractive offer to go to London. The musical businessmen, Marie and Léon Escudier, had acted as intermediaries between Antoine Jullien, a French impresario married to an English wife, and Berlioz. Jullien was to open a new opera company at Drury Lane, of which Berlioz was to be conductor. Out of his salary of forty thousand francs a year, Berlioz would pay four thousand to Escudier, plus ten per cent on any contracts for special concerts that Berlioz might give under Jullien's management. The high rates were due in part to the computation in pounds sterling (London was expensive) and in part to Jullien's views of big business in art, which he had hitherto made profitable. Berlioz wrote up his Russian and German trips for the Débats and looked forward to England. On the strength of his new engagement and in order to be in physical shape for it, Berlioz took a vacation; and since tangible success always put him in mind of his father, he went home to La Côte, taking with him his pale, blond little boy of thirteen. Berlioz did not manage to see Humbert Ferrand who despite his real affection could never bestir himself in time to meet his old friend. But Berlioz kept him informed of his doings and read with appreciation the ex-poet's gentle brochures on politics." 33

M . E . , 186. Meyerbeer had replaced Spontini as music director. 269, 163. " I n their reply, which has been preserved (Corresp., 4 7 ) they express appreciation for the "affectionate terms" of his disengagement notice. T h o u g h Berlioz wrote scornfully about the Paris situation to his intimates, he never abandoned diplomatic courtesy in the actual scrimmage. 39 It was later given to Gounod w h o produced La Nonne Sanglante without success in 1854. 37 Compte-rendu sur le Voyage en Sardaigne . . . par M. le Comte . . . de la Marmora, Paris. (See L.I., 196.) 34

Song in Time

of Revolution

513

La Côte had hardly changed in fifteen years, except that Dr. Berlioz was of a spectral thinness and near his end. His gastritis reduced him to an insufficient diet and to a steady course of opium. Partly deaf and very much alone, he was a pitiable old man of seventy-one. The sight of him shocked Hector, who nonetheless succeeded in enlivening him with anecdotes of his journeys, and even made him laugh. For young Louis, life in the open air with his father was a gleam of unimagined happiness. They romped together as if they had been brothers, and Hector himself was rejuvenated. But in the evening, he and the Doctor could only talk of the approaching end, or of the death, earlier, of those whom neither had seen at the last: Hector, his mother; Dr. Berlioz, his son Prosper. The old man was also likely to dwell on questions of inheritance and could not be turned from the subject. Berlioz left at the end of his fortnight knowing he would never see his beloved father again. The month of October was devoted to preparations for the London trip. Berlioz now had a faithful copyist and guardian of his mounting pile of music, Roquemont,38 from whom he could reliably order parts to be made, counted over, or dispatched. This aid lessened the necessity of carrying everything with him and it would be indispensable in Berlioz' new post abroad, where he would need the music of others. Before leaving, Berlioz had singers and instrumentists to engage, endless errands to run, and masses of proof to read. He found time to notice and encourage a young contralto, Mile. Charton, whom he did not know but in whose future he believed as soon as he heard her. She repaid him sixteen years later by creating the role of Dido in his Troy ens. But for the moment art in France seemed to him "dead, putrefying . . . The more I see of foreign nations, the less I love my native land. Forgive the blasphemy." " Sensing as he did the decay of an epoch and feeling inwardly chilled at the thought of his father, he preferred to make the journey to London in solitude. It required "a series of coups d'état" to obtain from Marie the right to go alone. Not that he had any intention of abandoning her or of taking up other attachments. He continued to support four people in two separate households, giving time to Harriet (whose apoplectic condition had become alarming) and to Marie and her mother. But he did not want to mar his first meetings with his English colleagues by letting Marie's heavy-handed ways overshadow his tact and savoir-faire. On his way to England, he accompanied Louis to his boarding school at Rouen, where 38

Berlioz thanks him feelingly in the Memoirs but spells his name indifferently Roquemont and Rocquemont, as do the other writers who speak of him. »L./., .97.

514 t w o good friends,

Berlioz Méreaux 4 0

and Baron de Montville, made his unhappy

youth a little less solitary. O n November 5, 1847, after an easy crossing, Berlioz arrived in London. He lodged with Jullien at 76 Harley Street and was aghast to discover the size of megalopolis. It took three quarters of an hour to g o from the house to D r u r y Lane where his orchestra (for the first time his) greeted him most cordially. H e knew a good many of the French and German players, and he found that his English was adequate to his needs. H e spoke with a relatively slight accent, but took a little time to catch all that was said to him. Rehearsals began for the first scheduled opera, Donizetti's inevitable Lucia. This was to break in the public gently. W h a t Berlioz looked forward to was the staging of Gluck's Iphigeneia in Tauris, Mozart, and possibly Spontini. Jullien also had the notion that Berlioz should flatter the British b y composing on " G o d Save the Queen" something like his H u n garian March. This absurd suggestion forecasts Jullien's approaching insanity. 41 Naturally, nothing came of this proposal, though Jullien's natural extravagance grew alarmingly. H e wanted a two-act ballet from Gautier at a thousand francs an act, and Berlioz had to arrange for it as well as for the choreographer and the music b y local talent. H e had to corral Mmes. Dorus-Gras and Barth-Hasselt w h o had been vaguely engaged. Despite the artist's businesslike catching up of the irresponsible businessman's errors, things went quickly downhill. It came out that Jullien had lost 40 Jean-Amédée Lefroid de Méreaux (1803-1874), son and grandson of musicians, was a pupil of Reicha and a well-known teacher of piano and theory. He had setded in Rouen after a brief but brilliant career on the concert stage. He published articles and piano etudes, edited the older masters of the keyboard, and made a piano arrangement of Berlioz' Enfance du Christ, about which see 96, 148-9 and M.C., 237. 41 Louis Antoine Jullien (originally Julien) was born in 1812, the son of a Swiss bandmaster. He studied three years at the Conservatoire, then became conductor-manager of dance concerts for which he composed quadrilles on popular tunes of the day. Insolvent by 1838, he left Paris for London, where he soon established popular promenade concerts at one shilling. His orchestra of nearly a hundred pieces was excellent, and from 1842 on he gave annual series, winter and summer, as well as toured the country, presenting a mixture of popular and classical music. T o draw the crowd he advertised "monster" shows on topical subjects and costumed himself gorgeously. His black hair and black moustache (a novelty), his velvet chair and jeweled baton, handed to him on a salver, were frequently caricatured, but they made him a national institution. Punch (just founded) dubbed him "The Möns." and Dickens and Thackeray wrote of him. When Melville arrived in England in 1849 he went to Jullien's concert the day after landing and greatly enjoyed himself. (Journal: 126s, 23.)

Song in Time of Revolution

515

fortune and credit before taking Drury Lane, so that he now cut all salaries by one third, which was a trifle since he did not pay them. Lucia, though excellently done, was only a moderate box-office success, and Balfe's new piece which followed was no hit.42 Linda di Chamounix was the next choice and by January 1848 Berlioz was "working like a dray horse," rehearsing all afternoon, conducting all night — a twelve-hour day. London, like Paris, was suffering an epidemic of midwinter grippe, which Berlioz caught. He "took as medicine the chores and the drafts of Drury Lane," 43 since the situation could be saved only by energy. Meantime, Jullien's advisers gathered and took counsel of Berlioz. He proposed to enlist public support by means of a striking artistic novelty, such as Gluck's Iphigenia in Tamis, and he explained its requirements. Jullien's response was: "There are helmets, we are saved!"44 Berlioz finally gave up by the end of January 1848, taking to his bed with a serious bronchitis. "They are playing Linda. . . . I have the good luck to be ill." " He recovered in time to put on the Marriage of Figaro in a manner to impress Wilhelm Ganz, but it did not draw." Berlioz had received altogether one month's salary; Jullien was bankrupt and planning to start again in New York.47 Berlioz' spirit was a prey to many dark thoughts. Mendelssohn had died the day before Berlioz landed, and his posthumous oratorio, Elijah, was being performed in his memory. "How wonderfully great and beautiful it is," wrote Berlioz. "We have all been deeply moved by the loss of this superior artist, whose death is a stout blow inflicted on our art." 48 And to Lvov in Russia: "I have just heard poor Mendelssohn's last oratorio. It is magnificently great and of an indescribable harmonic richness." 48 But the Antigone of Sophocles, given with Mendelssohn's incidental music, had failed. The perpetual need to overcome resistance, to persuade by will and convince by material gain, was depressing. In his fever and lassitude the musician thought of the superb concerts "imperially run" by the order of the Tsar, and he longed to be at last somewhere put in charge of what 42 F o r these facts see Flotow's Martha.

333,

287. Balfe's

Maid of Honor

was a resetting of

43 Corresp., 157. "Mem., II, 316. 45 Corresp., 164.

48 95f> 4· T h e young musician, later conductor of the N e w Philharmonic, had just come f r o m G e r m a n y to join his father, the last of this distinguished musical family f r o m Mainz. 47 H e staved in the United States from 1851 to 1854. 4S M.E., ¡05.

48

Corresp., 163.

516

Berlioz

he could do best — produce music. From France the news was disquieting. The republican banquets of December 1847 presaged trouble — or less likely, reform — which the concluding of peace in North Africa only postponed for a time. Other thoughts of Russia assailed Berlioz. He had written to his friend the cellist Tajan-Rogé at St. Petersburg enclosing a note for the little singer Berlioz had loved, feeling himself to be "a young fool of over forty," and he had received a reply — a last reply, full of good sense, honesty, and affection. "I am grateful to her," he wrote in thanking Rogé, "for reviving in me the pain I was trying to forget." 50 But brooding in bed was useless and was in fact a forbidden luxury, for Drury Lane being on the rocks, Berlioz had scheduled a concert of his own works for February 7. His new friend J . W. Davison, music critic of The Times and founder of The Musical World, was helping him to get on his feet and make his music known. The mission was in its third phase. T o help the concert, Berlioz asked Vigny for a letter of introduction to Count d'Orsay, with whom Vigny was on terms of close affection, and who could give Berlioz entree to the artistic circle of Lady Blessington. Berlioz was already in touch with Macready, who gave a dinner in his honor, and with theatrical writers and critics, thanks to whom Berlioz saw a good many plays.51 Sir Henry Taylor's Philip van Artevelde was the novelty of the season but Berlioz preferred Othello and the to him suggestively entitled New Way to Pay Old Debts. In answer to Berlioz* request Vigny wrote a very warm letter to d'Orsay who soon replied that Berlioz had quickly become one of theirs: "He is a friend of . . . all the shepherds of our time, society being composed only of those and of the numberless sheep." This esprit de corps had the useful result of making the critic of the Athenaeum, Chorley, change his mind about Berlioz' music and write of it pleasantly for the first time. London concertgoers had for five years past heard a few of Berlioz' overtures but this February concert was to be a full-dress presentation. The volatile Jullien, however, had tried a last stroke to recoup his fortunes. Taking with him Berlioz' best players he was touring the United Kingdom in a series of promenade concerts. The orchestral rump that was left had to be rehearsed five times and the chorus eighteen. In the end things went well enough, the public cheered, and the press was almost 50

M.E., 211. Macready had acted with Harriet Smithson in Paris twenty years earlier and Berlioz probably knew, as he stepped upon the stage of Drury Lane, that it was the spot where Harriet had made her London début at eighteen. 51

Song in Time of Revolution

517

entirely favorable. One of the converts was Edward Holmes, the friend of Keats and biographer of Mozart, who had come strongly prejudiced. The Times and the Illustrated London Nevis led the chorus of enthusiastic and discerning praise. "Jullien," said the latter journal "may be forgiven much for giving the London public a chance to hear Berlioz. . . . Had he been named Musical Director at Drury Lane and not merely chef d'orchestre, it would have been better for himself and better for the interests of Lyric Drama." 92 Once again honor was safe and intrinsic success achieved in the face of material loss: Berlioz began to plan a second concert; but Jullien had just wits enough left to appropriate the money of the first without paying anyone anything. The orchestra that Berlioz had trained was therefore disbanding. The music publisher Beale, it is true, was willing to issue a good many fragments and piano arrangements of Berlioz' work, but royalties would be distant and probably not large." The ancient Society of British Musicians, under the patronage of the Duke of Cambridge, gave Berlioz a testimonial dinner at which — against the usages of the society — a toast was drunk to the guest of honor. Berlioz replied in a manner which he says was contrary to his custom too, for "I was cool and self-possessed and was thus able to properly thank the public, the musicians, and the critics." M When Berlioz wrote this to Brandus, the French publisher who had taken over the Gazette Musicale, still another "Reform Banquet" had been planned and prohibited in Paris. The prohibition had been a declaration of war between the people and the government. The February Days (twenty-second to twenty-fourth) had begun to the cry of "Long Live Reform," Guizot was down, barricades were up, and the insurgents marched, with the troops, to the Tuileries. While the Chamber discussed a Regency of Louis-Philippe's grandsons under the Duchess of Orleans, a mob which included the Swiss painter Arnold Böcklin interrupted the proceedings. A provisional government headed by the poet Lamartine, the scientist Arago, and the political theorist Louis Blanc, was appointed by acclamation. The Republic of 1848 was born. " 3 / / , 88 and 90. " S u c h arrangements, by travestying Berlioz' whole conception of music, undoubtedly did much harm to his reputation in a century so pianistic as the nineteenth. H e himself always disliked these reductions, which neither Chopin's help nor Liszt's genius could render faithful. His embarrassed comments deserve to be read as a final demonstration of the essential difference between music conceived for orchestra and that for the piano. See M.E., 105; M.C., 73; 20~¡, I, 230 and 237. M M.E., 218.

518

Berlioz

For each section of society, reform means the reform of the abuses it feels most, and Berlioz naturally hoped for the end of monarchical interference in the arts: no more tax levies on concerts, no more censorship of songs, no more arbitrary disposal of the means of production. " I hope, in short, that we shall at last be free to be free — unless we are in for a new mystification." The silence of his French friends was alarming. "What's happened to M. Bertin?" Being an Orleanist, the Director of the Débats was rumored to be in hiding. But what could make Desmarest the cellist and Brandus the publisher keep mum? Berlioz begged Morel to tell him what had happened "to all our precious villains, as Shakespeare calls them." " B y the middle of March the answer was self-evident. Cultural activity had utterly ceased in France; it was "dead, rotted away, and buried." Berlioz must face the task of building himself a new position in England. Revolution was now aflame in Prussia, Austria, and the Rhineland; in Rome, Naples, Ireland and Bohemia. Short of Russia, there was no dwelling place for music on the Continent. Jullien had converted Drury Lane into an equestrian circus, and having no liquid assets feared no lawsuits. He had blithely defaulted on all his contracts. But Berlioz could not default on his four dependents in France and must use his pen to earn his living. H e proposed critical and travel articles to Davison, but as one can tell at a glance, The Times is not a French newspaper, which can accept casual copy from outsiders. Berlioz inquired of the new Minister of the Interior whether his one hundred and eighteen francs a month as curator of the Conservatoire Library would still be paid. He had no reply. Yet he found time to hear and comment enthusiastically on Mendelssohn's Italian symphony, which he much preferred to the Scotch — "fresh, lively, noble, and masterly . . . a superb piece." 56 This was given at a concert of the Philharmonic Society, which Berlioz' well-wishers would have liked to see extend a welcome to the French composer. But the board was conservative and cautious. The directors of Covent Garden, on the other hand, were interested in a Musical Shakespeare Night in which Berlioz' Tempest, Death of Ophelia, King Lear, and parts of Romeo would figure. But opposition developed: Berlioz was caught again between the equivalents of the Conservatoire and the Opera. 57 He worked at his piano arrangements for Beale and at a vocal version of the Apothéose from the 55 5β

Corresp., 165-6. M.E., 222; Corresp., 168.

57 H e was told b y Prince Albert's music director that everyone in London was delighted with Berlioz' presence except the native composers. (85, 647.)

Song in Time of Revolution

519

Funeral symphony, for the movement had aroused cheers at his concert and he was told that amateur singers throughout England would snap up a choral version. Beyond this, his only capital was himself, his past, and his achievements. Pondering them, he took out the two volumes of his Voyage Musical and set to work telling his life, filling in the gaps, beginning at the beginning — his birth forty-four years before, in another era of European massacre. His career might be over, but the artist's memoirs of his experiences might survive the flood and be of use. As he sketched in his Preface the circumstances under which these memoirs were being written, during the last week of March 1848, the tide of revolt touched London. The Chartists assembled to cries of "Down with the Ministry. . . . The Charter and No Surrender!" They planned another mass meeting, a petition and a march to Parliament. T o fend off revolution, 170,000 special constables were sworn in, one of whom was Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, nephew of the late Emperor. Troops were quartered in the houses and the Tower guns mounted. The Duke of Wellington was put in charge of all the government forces and a proclamation was issued against "assembly for disorderly purposes." "Time presses," wrote Berlioz. "Republicanism sweeps with its steamroller over all Europe. The art of music which for so long was everywhere dragging out its life is good and dead today. . . . England, where I now live, has shown me a noble and cordial hospitality, but at these first quakings of the continental thrones, swarms of bewildered artists seek asylum here. . . . Will the British capital provide subsistence for so many exiles? Will it lend an ear to their songs of sorrow amid the proud clamors of neighboring peoples which are crowning themselves kings? Will it resist such an example? Jam proximus ardet Ucalegon. Who knows what will have become of me in a few months — I have no assured means for myself and my family. Let us therefore make use of the flying minutes. . . ." 58 The moment was doubly bitter, for the financial needs of Harriet and Marie had brought the two women into a cruel tangle, after which Marie had decided to rejoin Berlioz in London. He could obtain money due him neither from Jullien (who was at last in debtor's prison) nor from the French vicomte who owed him five hundred francs. Worst of all, the Escudiers had been made bankrupt by the revolution and although "they cannot be compelled to pay me what they owe, I shall be compelled by the original contract to pay what I do not owe them." 59 He had to borrow '8 Mem., I, ii-iii. " M.E., 226.

5

J20

Berlioz

at revolutionary rates to provide for Harriet and Louis, while he and Marie moved to modest lodgings in Regent's Park. "I am convinced that I am J e trop in this world." 60 By sheer will he busied himself about another concert. French musicians were arriving in droves and they lent him their services. On June 29, at the Hanover Square Rooms, after eight months of virtually continuous overwork, he gave a brilliant concert which was worthily received and brought little. It was evident that musical London, like Paris, was intellectually ready to appreciate what was new, vigorous, and unconventional, but was not in any way organized to support it. Berlioz was like a poet producing a "little magazine," who prints what is later the great literature of the period, but cannot at the time sell it. The paying institutions in London were the two Italian theaters, which ran a handful of favorites by Bellini, Rossini, and Donizetti — and not their best works at that — and the orchestra and oratorio societies, monopolized by Handel, Mendelssohn, and their living imitators. As for Paris, it was swimming in blood. Three days before Berlioz' concert, from the twenty-third to the twenty-sixth of June, the unemployed in the national workshops — the original WPA — had risen in protest against the threatened cessation of their dole. Entrenched in the eastern part of the city, they faced the government like a foreign army and were treated as such. General Cavaignac brought reserves and battered down the barricades with field guns. It was civil war. The Archbishop of Paris was killed trying to stop it. The rebels finally surrendered, and with a savagery to which both sides had been led by equal fear, the government deported wholesale and without trial all the prisoners taken. Public feeling turned sharply in favor of strong rule and against all popular social aspirations. All parties, all citizens, were now legitimately afraid. Had Cavaignac not loyally believed in republican government, he could have made himself dictator; the situation was in the pre-Napoleonic stage of 1795, the pre-Cromwellian of 1651. Paris was a stricken field. This was the City of Light that Berlioz had loved, had made his name in, and was now compelled to return to. He entertained no illusions. In May, even before the second outbreak had attested France's social and political alienation from art, he had written to the architect Louis Due, his old companion of the Villa Medici, a letter which summed up the facts and reflected the many lights thrown upon them by Berlioz' mind: 80

Corresp., 172.

Song in Time of Revolution London

521 26 May

1848

M Y DEAR D U C :

Our picce (the Apothéose) has at last come out. It was thought necessary to tamper with my sub-title. I had written: "Composed for the inauguration of the Bastille Column," and farther down: "Dedicated to M. Due, architect of the Bastille Column." This made it clear why the column came into it at all and wherefore the dedication was appropriate. But since the last Chartist agitation, the London bourgeois has a deep dread of whatever is related from far or near to revolutions, and in consequence my publisher refused to consider any mention on the title page either of your monument or of those to whom it was put up. I have sought in vain an opportunity to send you the score, together with the Scotch airs you asked for. Instead, I send you the Apothéose by itself, for a package of the kind you request would cost a great deal. The Hungarian March for four hands has also been published by Beale, and the Chorus of Sylphs will appear shortly. Our piece would I think be quite impressive if sung by a large chorus and instrumented. I may have it performed in Paris if it becomes possible to give music there. Meanwhile you'll have to be content with the piano score. Speaking of Paris, the reproaches that my friends make me about my absence are scarcely founded if they think that my staying away is doing me harm. A man must have a tricolor flag over his eyes to fail to see that music in France is now dead, and that it is the last of the arts to which our rulers will pay attention. They tell me I am sulking at my country. I certainly do not sulk at it: that is putting it too mildly; I flee from it as one flees a barbaric shore when one is looking for civilization, and this I have done not merely since the Revolution. For a good while I have stifled in myself the love of France and uprooted from my heart the foolish habit of centering all my thoughts upon her. During the last seven years I have lived solely from what my works and concerts have earned me in foreign lands. Without Germany, Bohemia, Hungary, and especially Russia, I should have starved in France over and over again. Friends write to me of "positions" to take, of "posts to apply for." What position, what posts? There aren't any. Isn't Auber at the Conservatoire, Carafa at the Gymnase, Girard at the Opera? What else is there? Nothing. And the love of mediocrity — has that been swept out of French minds by the Revolution? Possibly, but in that case it will have been replaced by the love of worse men and things (if there is indeed anything worse than mediocrity). No, I have nothing to do in France, except cultivate the friendships that are dear to me. For my career I have attempted enough, suffered enough, waited enough. I shall not fulfill it there. In France I have undergone nothing but vexations more or less disguised; I have found only a stupid opposition because the national mind is stupid about the higher reaches of art and literature. I have an invincible and ever-growing contempt for those "French ideas" which other peoples do not even suspect. Under the previous government I found nothing but scorn and indifference; I shall now

Berlioz find nothing but grave preoccupations added to scorn and indifference. I wrote three times to Louis Philippe when he was King requesting an audience. I did not even receive a reply. I wrote to Ledru-Rollin recently and he was of the same politeness as the King. There is only one lyric theatre in Paris — the Opera, which is managed by a nitwit and closed to me. Don't you suppose that if Duponchel is dismissed, they will not find twenty others like him? Some day, perhaps, I shall be approached, when I shall be very old, very tired, and no longer good for anything. But at that time I may not have lost my memory, and this belated confidence in me — if it comes, will only be the more painful. I have therefore nothing better to do than what I am doing now. If I am a savage, I hold on to my freedom, I keep going as long as the earth will have me, as long as the woods have wild lire and deer; and if I often feel weary, and sleepless, suffer from cold, hunger and the insults of the pale-faces, at least I can dream alone above the waterfall and in the silent forest, worshipping nature and thanking God that he has left me the sense of her beauty. I saw Hamlet recently. . . . What a world is that masterpiece! And what ravages that fellow makes in one's heart and soul! Shakespeare meant to depict the nothingness of life, the vanity of human designs, the despotism of chance, and the indifference of Fate or God toward what we call virtue, crime, beauty, ugliness, love, hate, genius and folly. And he has cruelly succeeded. In the performance, this time, they had deigned to give us Hamlet as written, and almost uncut — an unusual thing in this country where one finds so many people who are superior to Shakespeare. . . . For that matter, they do the same to music: Costa has instrumented and corrected for Covent Garden Rossini's Barber of Seville and Mozart's Figaro and Don Giovanni.91 Here ends the message of explanation, expostulation, and resignation. But the writer must have been conscious of excessive and self-centered seriousness in addressing a friend to whom he says tu and whom he wished first of all to please by a dedication and a gift. So Berlioz adds a paragraph or two in a lighter vein: Let me tell you, by way of stopping this verbiage, that I am preparing a concert . . . for June 29. That is all my news. . . . I may sav, I miss our delightful, easy, unpretentious conversations at Mme. Vanderkelle's, and the fine wit and cultivated opinions with which M. de Montville flavors them, and your own enthusiastic shouts and leaps at whatever is beautiful, and your admiring words shot through puffs of tobacco (I mean smoke), and the reclining position of the ladies while we discuss. Only one thing has always shocked me in those gatherings — a dull and indecent thing which Mme. Vanderkelle does her best to conceal and yet fails to, a thing unworthy of a house like hers, and one that offends all good company. I mean her upright piano. No, madam, in a house apβ1 M.E., 227-31.

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pointed like yours, it is not permissible to sport such a cupboard; it is not permissible, in a choice circle such as your salon, to let an instrument like that be heard. It is indeed a crime of lèse-art. On this pun," I shake you all by the hand, and beg you — what was I going to beg you? Ah, yes, beg you not to let Due sing the Apothéose. A thousand heartfelt greetings. - H. Berlioz."

The Artist in Society Shot down in Vienna by Windischgrätz in December 1848 . . . Poor Becher! — BERLIOZ' n o t e o n his

friend's photograph 1

The man who had orchestrated the Rákóczy March and, previously, the "Marseillaise," meanwhile composing a Napoleonic Ode, a Funeral symphony, and a national Requiem, was certainly a man possessed of the common touch, as well as an artist sensitive to popular feeling. Berlioz had sought to take direct part in the July days of 1830, he had dedicated a song to Emmet, expressed sympathy with Menotti, and been caught by the ideas of Saint-Simon. In all his dealings with the sizable mobs who heard or performed him, moreover, he had quickly shown himself a leader. After his appearance in Hungary, the youth of Gyor sent him an engraved loving cup as to one who had helped to quicken their national aspirations, and a movement was subsequently set on foot in Hungary to cast Berlioz in the role of a champion of the national liberties. It was hoped he might use his renown to win concessions from Austria.* All this would lead one to suppose that when the Revolution of 1848 broke out in France, Berlioz would favor it, and that his dislike of politics, 62 93 1

Lèse-art = Ies arts = lézard (it is the crime of a reptile). M.E., 2 3 1 - 2 .

Alfred Julius Becher ( 1803-1848) was a composer and music critic of widely catholic taste, who wrote a biography of Jenny Lind and also edited the democratic journal Der Radikale during the stormy days of Vienna's revolution. Caught bearing arms when the city fell, he was court-martialed and shot on November 13, 1848 (not December, as Berlioz thought). On the photograph he had written "Remember from time to time, m y dear Berlioz, one of your sincerest admirers. February 27, 1846." 2 T h e Hungarian newspapers of the time, as reported by E . Haraszti. (57.2, 230.)

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born of experience with variously oppressive regimes, would vanish in the fresh breeze of liberty. For a brief moment he had a glimmer of hope; 3 but to imagine that this could last is to take a sentimental view of revolutions and to misunderstand the "extensive" considerations which, as early as 1832, kept Berlioz from partisanship.4 T h e first impact of the revolution was hardly calculated to reassure an artist. Although the provisional government included a poet and a man of science, all cultural activity in Paris immediately ceased, and men of all shades of opinion who lived by their art had to seek their living abroad. 5 In the second place, even f o r those who had the means to stay, the atmosphere was well-nigh unbearable. A day or two before Berlioz wrote his friend Louis Duc a long letter from London, an observer who was an intimate of the new government men such as Arago, Tocqueville, and Dc Broglie, was writing from the country to one of them: "What do vou do when you are not camping on the open squares of Paris? Everybody seems like a patient who can reasonably count only on two or three months more of life." 8 T h e truth is that even before the second outbreak in June, the spirit of 1848 had already impressed its disruptive character upon qualified observers, regardless of party. T h e initial success of the revolution had in fact been made possible by the general decline of authority and intellectual power which had been going on for about half a dozen years. 7 So that Berlioz was neither mistaken nor purely self-centered when he saw in the revolution not merely the end of a regime but the end of an epoch. Like many others — ranging from Renan and Gobineau to Leconte de Lisle and Baudelaire, he was ready to support a republic that could both proclaim 8

M.E., 219 and 22j. * T o his mother, from Rome, March 20, 1832: "As for my radical indifference to politics, it comes from a more extended sequence of ideas than you suppose, and so we won't refer to it again." A.R., 194. He gives glimpses of these ideas on pp. ijo, 172-188, 250, 262 and 347; L.I., 78, 90, 107-8 and 116; Corresp., 70, 89, 94. 'Besides Berlioz' enforced exile in London, where Chopin, Roger, Hallé, and other French musicians soon joined him, Sainte-Beuve and others had to find literary work in Belgium or Switzerland, or else be destitute. The poetess Desbordes-Valmore subsisted on charity; Musset's librarianship was abolished; Gautier's and Vernet's livelihood was curtailed and Adolphe Adam went bankrupt. The rest of Europe was soon affected. Verdi, who had just bought a house, saw his new opera fail at Trieste; the cessation of music in Germany killed off a fifty-year-old journal such as the Leipziger Allgemeine Zeitung, and from all parts exiles began to stream into England. 8 188, III, 208. 7 Sismondi placed the beginning of the decline around 1842.

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8

and defend new freedoms, and as we shall see he gave it a try. But his skepticism as to the outcome was soon verified by events. The explanation is not simply that Berlioz had reached mid-career and made a reputation with the aid of kings and princes, but that 1848 in France represents a new mode in revolutions, and one· inevitably inimical to culture as Berlioz understood it. If 1830 was a sixth and last attempt to entrench the liberal claims of 1789, the republicanism of 1848 was the first bid for the establishment of the populist, collectivist society which our century is still struggling about. We may therefore generalize and say that 1848 in France split the century in half, and by creating new conditions of life for artists wrecked the careers of all those who remained true to what Lionel Trilling aptly calls "the high and exigent culture" of the prepopulist era." Fairly soon after the establishment of the July Monarchy, it is true, Hugo, Gautier, Vigny, Berlioz, Delacroix and others began to complain of the government's indifference to art, and to groan at the public's neglect of their best efforts. Tracing the vicissitudes of Berlioz' career supplies the representative details of this uneasy relation. But it is important to remember that by and large the relation was one of indifference and not hostility, neglect and not persecution. Louis Philippe snubbed the Romantics and frowned on his son's patroning artists not because he feared their political opinions but because he knew that their innovations, daring, and love of glory went against the cautious moralism of the epoch —the moralism later named after Queen Victoria — which was simply revolution insurance bought by repressing the generous energies. The July Monarchy could accordingly commission a Requiem mass to celebrate a dead general, and a Funeral symphony to bury those who had put it into power, but at the sight of the works themselves it rightly felt — through that mysterious balance of conscious and unconscious forces we call a culture —that Berlioz and his peers spelled danger. Louis Philippe did not know as we do that the Requiem and the Symphony were born of Napoleonic visions; he probably did not read Balzac or the Charterhouse of Parma; but his instinct was sound in not vouchsafing an 8 Corresp., 166 and 170. As late as May 1848, he expressed himself as ready to undertake any task of musical reorganization in Paris if "by some impossible chance" he were considered the fit person. (90, 215.) The literary counterpart of Berlioz* feeling may be found in the pages of La Liberté de Penser, edited by Jules Simon, Renan, Baudelaire, Michelet, Quinet and others. Their hopes collapsed by the end of 1849. 9 Partisan Review, Aug. 1948, 888. In his admirable biography (1949), Mr. Herbert Weinstock ascribes to the revolution and consequent financial worries an effective part in hastening Chopin's death.

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answer to Berlioz, just as his Philippestine bourgeoisie was right to neglect Stendhal's novels. If then the Orleanist reign lives in history by the greatness of the men it overlooked, w h y did not its passing lead to their vindication? 10 W h y did Berlioz at once fear the evil of a worse mediocrity, and why instead of a paean of geniuses rejoicing, was there for nearly two years a Babylonian exile of artists? The answer lies in a number of inescapable truths which must be recognized before one can grasp the problem of the artist's relation to society. A revolution is — to use current cant — a society in crisis; but modern society since 1789 is in a state of perpetual crisis, of almost continuous revolution. W e saw how Berlioz' productive years were punctuated with riots, attempted assassinations, and repressive measures — all of which conditioned the development of his career and of his artistic output. What art can spring from or represent this chaos? And at the same time, how is it that Romanticism is the true culture of the French Revolution? Obviously the true culture of a revolution comes after the event, the culture makers being either opponents of, or, if indifferent, opposed by the revolutionary forces. In any case, the conditions of a going revolution are especially inimical to art: there is no wish, there is no preparation, and there is no money for art because, strictly speaking, there is no need for it. When art is consciously used by revolutionists as a means to prestige or propaganda, the result in the artist is even worse than when, as in 1848, it is treated with contempt. In a word, there can be no song in time of revolution. 11 This generality may be tested by reference to art and artists during the French Revolution, during the Napoleonic Wars — which outside France bore the character of revolution — and during the twentieth century, provided that one studies art with reference to an artistic and not a political criterion. 12 The question is not one of doctrine but of essence. The 10 Balzac: " I trust, f o r the sake of L o u i s Philippe the First, that posterity will say 'under V i c t o r H u g o ' s reign, under Lamartine, under Beranger, there w a s a king w h o took the name of L o u i s P h i l i p p e . ' " (1169, 286.) A d o l p h e B o s c h o t neglected the hint and entitled his second volume on Berlioz: " A R o m a n t i c U n d e r L o u i s Philippe." 11 O n e m a y take the seeming exception of the "Marseillaise" as indicative. Its maker, R o u g e t , w a s soon politically suspect and he had to wait thirty-eight years to be saved, accidentally, f r o m destitution. W h a t political revolutionists w a n t f r o m art is m o r e neutral w o r k like Cherubini's Salpêtre Républicain. (See

1303,

1584·) See a sketch of such a study in m y essays Of 1939/1965. 12

Human

Freedom,

N.

Y.

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principle is not that reactionaries love art more than radicals or vice versa, the principle is that art and politics, which concur in several important respects, differ in others that are decisive. The opening paragraph of Berlioz' letter to Due supplies a trivial but clear example. The composer had given his Apothéose a subtitle and dedication that bore a meaning only if taken together and that expressed his unaltered liberalism; but the publisher, acting wisely on political and commercial grounds, censored the words. One may say that a politically minded artist ought not to have mentioned revolutionary monuments in England in 1848. Quite so, but in that view the artist's desired political character becomes mere timeserving. Again, the composer had in this instance fashioned his statements as an artist, that is, he had made his words carry meaning. But politics and commerce care nothing about coherence, looking only to what they term practical results. Other, more momentous occasions are equally ruled by the highly inartistic element of chance. An opera of 1829 makes the fortune of a composer and a singer because its plot seems an allusion to current affairs." Fifteen years later, Berlioz had to justify himself to his backers in government circles and explain that the chorus by Halévy which he had conducted at a festival meant no anti-British feeling on his part. As far as he was concerned it was a good piece of music which happened to be about a king dead four hundred years before, but the politicians were thinking of the current Entente. From the point of view of politics, art is always irresponsible; from the point of view of art, politics is always irrelevant. Art is in fact self-contained relevance — not absolute, but carried to the highest degree. Every artistic element in a finished work has to fit though the heavens fall. If the work is also to fit a public occasion, it must do so fully and frankly, and not in the skittish fashion of a political person or platform. The history of politics is the history of inessentials raised to temporary significance. A Roman legion refused to fight under an excellent general because his name, Atrius Umber, was forbidding; and among us national leaders can keep their place only if they smile (in the democracies) or frown (in the dictatorships). All this is political fitness, that is fitness of the moment, and fitness of the unconsidered. Commercial fitness is one degree above, but still subject to irrelevance. When Berlioz' Les Troy ens was first produced, the Virgilian characters were at a disadvantage because a distributor of pencils had adopted a Roman-helmeted hero as his trade-mark. The bromidic part of the public was capable of only one association: "It's like seeing Mangin and his 13

Auber's Masaniello; see above Chapter 4.

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pencils on the stage!" What a Roman helmet has to do with lead pencils can never be explained, whereas the composer's connection with the Aeneid is intimate and clear; yet it is commercial fact that prevails and Berlioz who is, commercially speaking, in the wrong. Had he really wanted to succeed, he should at every point have taken care to ascertain public taste and prejudice as they affected the market of 1863, instead of starting blindly eight years before and writing a masterpiece. The artist's grievance naturally takes for granted the desirability of a certain kind of art and artist — the high art produced by the individual, self-aware, principled artist who is to the entertainer what the Hippocratic physician is to the quack. Both may have genuine gifts but they exercise them according to different ethics. And there lingers in the very civilization that prefers the quack a tradition of seeking the true healer. Now it is obvious that in its attitude to art a popular revolution combines the actual demands of both politics and commerce. The revolutionary doctrine is a shifting, uncertain, arbitrary thing," and the fact that the people are sovereign means also the enforcement of their legitimate tastes and prejudices. Even when these chance to be spontaneously fine and straightforward there is a natural tendency on the part of the people's leaders to show their worth by preferring and enforcing a conservative choice. The political liberal in art is usually unable to see above his own fences, and inclined to think that to see above them is to tear them down. It follows as the night the day that in times of liberal revolution high art suffers or ceases to be. Nor is this all. While the revolutionary situation confronts the artist with all the obstacles of politics and trade, it adds to these the impediments of war. W e can be as perceptive as we like later on about the merits of the glorious revolution of this or that date, but while it is going on, revolution is war. When the days of some unforgettable month are "over," they are not over but followed by a state of martial law, or by a sense of insecurity which generally leads to dictatorship. Life is precarious and thought at a standstill. The single law of politics at such times is: "Are you for or against?" and the single law of trade: "Only necessities are marketable." While the shots ring out the artist can hardly be said to be in his element. Beethoven had to take refuge in his brother's cellar when the French were "liberating" Vienna with bullets, but no one would say this was the ideal retreat for a symphonic composer. And for some time to come the new rulers have other things to think about than the living con14 Berlioz at twenty-eight characterized politics as "That tall skinny wench with shifty eyes, a pale face and a hard heart . . ." (A.R., 150.)

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dirions of that minority interest, Beethoven. There is in fact no such person, but only Herr Beethoven, that fellow John Milton, a certain Hector Berlioz. Government cannot see with the eyes of posterity and discern whom it should protect, nor does it care. Victor Hugo was a powerful advocate of the principles of 1848, but this did not keep Sobrier's mob from threatening his house. Sainte-Beuve was no menace to the Republic but he was saved from armed assault within the walls of the Institute only by the accidental intervention of Horace Vernet who commanded a company of National Guards and lifted the "siege." 15 It is necessary to dwell on particulars such as these because our usual reading of history as the interplay of forces or ideas casts a pall of abstraction over events and blurs their shape. We must see, as far as possible, both what the contemporaries vividly felt and what slowly emerges after study under the perspective of time. Thus the principles of 1789, revived and extended in 1848, may form the subject of our admiration without making us forget that on the spot much of what happened was meaningless chaos. W e may greatly value the historic effort without being committed to approving the deeds of a casual gang, heated with action and driven by inward fears to threaten a poet or destroy a work of art. Even in a Baudelaire the first impulse was to do a private job of killing his stepfather. Lesser minds are not thinking of great principles nor of the verdict of posterity; rather, they seem inclined to bayonet those who are. For quite apart from the political passion of the moment, there is in most men during revolution a strong urge to destroy, from "an envious kind of wrath" against intellect and its products. This explains the recurrence throughout history of iconoclastic movements — to loot the English monasteries because Henry VIII has made a religious revolution, or to smash the stained glass made by their own artisan ancestors because the Third Estate is in power. This might be called the Alaric Complex after the selfaware conqueror who said, "I feel something within that compels me to burn Rome." In the twentieth century the burning of books is doubtless one manifestation of the same desire, for in this and in the hunting down of intellectuals everywhere, the pretext of danger is obviously false. One has only to compare the armed power of the modern state with that of an individual writer or musician to see that the extermination of thinkers is for pleasure only — the addition of torture proves it. And the fact that nowadays not merely political thought but thought that abstains from politics is grounds for suspicion shows that the link between popular movements and iconoclasm is not accidental. 15

1212, XIII, 19 n.

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Of course, to say that the quiet thinker or the artist in his studio is no danger to the state is not to deny that a single man's intent — even his unconscious intent expressed in art — may prove a social force, and hence a cause of ultimate disturbance. Jesus, preaching love, brings a sword; and in the rhythm of a Beethoven scherzo there is as much aggression as in an armed assault. It was not simply association of ideas which made the Hungarian nationalists find Berlioz' music revolutionary. Romanticist art at large is implicit criticism of routine and convention — hence it is revolutionary. The response of first audiences whether to Beethoven or Berlioz or Delacroix or Blake shows how true this is: the work is rightly felt to be deliberately violent and new, and it rouses to anger. Yet this very fact defines the difference between revolution through art and simple iconoclasmi: the one is loose and chaotic; the other ordered and in the highest degree civilizing. And civilization in this sense is just as objectionable to the mass of men as throwing up barricades, for it spells change; which is why no man can give birth to a new idea or form of art without incurring penalties. Genius is a crime.1· For society has true interests to maintain — ease, stability, and the avoidance of risk — all of which are threatened by innovation. The creative artist thus belongs to a class apart, equidistant from the solid citizen and from the political rebel, because his outlook is opposed to the first and his method is opposed to the second. What happens to a Berlioz in a culture like Louis Philippe's we have seen: artist and society feel each other's aggression and fight it out. Inertia and insults, challenges and artistic shocks — these are what lie behind the threadbare terms Philistinism and épater le bourgeois. The swearing and cursing against the burgher-athand by Beethoven, Berlioz, Liszt, Flaubert, or Shaw are simply peacetime bombs and bayonets. But the artist, unlike the political rebel, inevitably fights single scout. He cannot in his own domain follow a social doctrine. This is not from lack of discipline but from a recognition that doctrines are least common denominators, vaguely expressed, whereas his task is to supply highest common multiples, the fullest, most precise expression of new thought in the medium which he commands. Hence the apparent lack of cohesion and mutual understanding among the artists of any generation.17 Since in civil peace and civil war alike, victory lies with the crowd, the 18

T h e sociologist Durkheim defines crime as "any act followed by a penalty, whether inflicted by law or by social forces." ( M é t h o d e sociologique, 80.) This is obviously interchangeable with the biographer's description of genius at work and what he incurs by it. "E.g., Delacroix, Stendhal, and Berlioz.

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artist can only expect defeat. In seemingly fortunate exceptions — Wagner's or Tennyson's — the defeat still takes place, by the crowd's perverting the thing said. Thus the creator is compelled from within to fulfìll his destiny and from without to suffer for his loyalty to fate. This is known as tragedy, and the prototype of the artistic creator is Prometheus. But in periods of social chaos, the chances of a five-act fulfillment are lessened. Milton was left unmolested by the "captain or knight-at-arms" whom he invoked, but Georg Büchner was hounded to death and Garcia Lorca causelessly murdered: it was pure luck that in 1848 Hugo and Wagner were spared instead of speared. As for the expectation of life under our improved totalitarian control, it is unnecessary to dwell on its precariousness or on the childish justification of rules of darkness: their only effect is to make the nineteenth century begin to glow like a Golden Age. In the light of the facts it is therefore visibly absurd to keep prattling about the divorce of the artist from society as if they had ever been married: they are and must remain at war. But a body politic that knows its best interests will allow the virus of art to circulate freely within its veins, as an inoculant. It may be objected that Hugo and Vigny and Sainte-Beuve and Berlioz were men and citizens as well as artists, and that as such they must bear the common responsibilities of men in society, especially since they were eager for a share in governmental patronage, social approval, and commercial success. If the regime was not to their liking, why did they not reform it? On what grounds could they claim both the right to criticize and the repose of a lofty isolation? T w o of the Romanticist poets at least, Hugo and Lamartine, sought to act as the conscience of the nation: why not Berlioz and Vigny? The question leads us deeper into the role and the nature of art by developing another aspect of its divergence from politics. When Berlioz expressed his disgust while himself maneuvering "politically" on behalf of some artistic project, it was neither innocence nor incapacity that prompted his abstention from politics. He knew the game and had a knack for the diplomacy required, but he scorned the objects for which the majority of men were striving and the motives that actuated them. In fact, he described politics very much in the terms used by one of his most politic contemporaries, soon to be Minister of Foreign Affairs under the Second Republic. 18 The artist's dislike of hypocrisy, of the boredom of 18

Tocqueville: " W h e n I think that [the men of the July Monarchy] are growing indignant at seeing the people violate the Constitution by doing for

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business, and of makeshifts chat end in futility, unfits him for what is falsely called "practical politics." " It is art, on the contrary, which seeks the permanently practical by disregarding the vanity and self-interest of the customer, the constituent, or the powers that be. For an artist to be also a political man, therefore, would require him to have two natures, two talents — which is not inconceivable — but which would no more establish a rule or a duty for artists than Byron's being a boxer and swimmer requires other poets to be athletic. It would also require him to have two lives, since both art and politics, when taken seriously, are bound to be full-time occupations. There is certainly no evidence that the attempt to straddle both has ever contributed to success in either: Hugo and Lamartine were not conspicuous successes as statesmen, and their verse, even in its popular aspects, did not depend for its quality upon an inside knowledge of public affairs. Was Böcklin a better painter or Wagner a more consummate musician for having taken part in riots? 20 Rioting only earned Courbet exile, that is, it cost him the means and peace of mind for making his last years productive. As for Berlioz' friend Becher, who took up the profession of revolutionist and died of it within a few months, he was a sheer loss which we can virtually measure in cultural terms. In short, the instinct which drives the artist to stick to his last a.id keep out of the highly technical make-believe of politics is a very useful protection, which incidentally gives him the right to keep ignorant politicians out of his technical concerns. The clinching argument is that this aloofness and even this contempt for governance does not in any way preclude sympathy with the general will nor response to the national temper. Berlioz is the best proof one could desire: his works for popular and national occasions have the ring of the genuine metal and transcend in their broad social sense all the party loyalties or doctrines that one might naively suppose prerequisite to composing the right notes. This is so true that in celebrating the centenary of 1848, France did not go back to the Saint-Simonian hymns of Félicien David, but performed the Funeral and Triumphal symphony and the Hymne à la France. Louis Napoleon precisely w h a t they themselves . . . proposed to him, I find it difficult to imagine a more noteworthy example of the variability of men and of the vanity of the great w o r d s Patriotism and Right under which petty passions are apt to cloak themselves." (1223, iji.) " A s G i d e says of another artist: " H e was apolitical because there is no politics without fraud." (1249, III, 338.) 20 W a g n e r ' s attempt at interfering with the conduct of foreign affairs when he finally became the favorite of a king only endangered his position and made him ridiculous.

Artist in Society

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At the time, it took another artist to perceive this. Then as now, "advanced" political thinkers were suspicious of intellectuals and wanted to expel them from the party of reform and deny them the future rewards. The issue was joined when George Sand refuted the arguments of Michel de Bourges, using Berlioz among others as a test case, and saying: "Maybe he is wicked enough to think in secret that mankind is not worth a chromatic scale . . . but you may be sure that one can think such things and still not be the enemy of man. . . . When we shall have to build the New City of Mind, rest assured that everyone of us will aid in proportion to his strength — Berlioz, who is very brave and proud, will come with a spade, I with a toothpick, the rest with their arms and will-power." n Now one reason, apart from genius, that Berlioz and his peers were able to achieve such a just expression of their times, even while fighting their times, is that they still lived and worked within the accepted order. In this regard as in others, 1848 marks the turning point, the watershed of the century. Before 1848 the majority of European artists belonged by birth or desire to the ruling class and remained part of it. They were born not only to property but to a social tradition; their families, as we saw, half supported them in the strange profession of art, and they themselves retained in their work and behavior the bourgeois virtues of sobriety, industry, orderliness, and self-respect. To this they added aristocratic aspirations to honors and riches for serving the nation through uncommon talents. Believing in genius and self-dedication, they had the consciousness of superiority and the tastes that go with it. And precisely because they lived in a world run by the bourgeoisie for gain and public plunder, they rejected that part of their own tradition and ideally took the side of the people: they were Tory Democrats besides being bourgeois and grands seigneurs.** After 1848 this peculiar threefold position became untenable. The class war that split France and spread to Central Europe showed that the people were moved by envy and hatred which, however understandable, were even poorer qualifications for ruling than bourgeois greed. What alienated men like Berlioz from the Republic that had promised liberty was that its doctrines remained dead letters while its performance showed lack 21

Revue des Deux Mondes, June 1835, 723. " F o r Berlioz' understanding of the poor, see L.I., 91; Soirées (18th) Eves., 201 as well as Grot., 10-12, 90-1, and his special sympathy with the humble, underpaid performers in his own art, passim. Nor had he any scorn for the underlying instincts of the crowd in matters of art: he merely thought those instincts perverted by commercial cynicism and vulgar fare. See Soirées (10th) and Mem., II, 226.

534 Berlioz of skill, absence of thought and want of self-discipline — the exact reverse of the artistic virtues.** Meanwhile fear of anarchy drove the worse elements of the former ruling classes to adopt dictatorship, chauvinism, and Realpolitik as stopgaps — brute force and vulgar expedients in place of law. Between anarchy and cynical demagogy, both hostile to intellect, the artists of Europe began their great retreat. They no longer hoped for the high places under state patronage nor even the middling bourgeois positions created by publishers and audience. The younger ones gradually withdrew into a state within a state: bohemia; 24 they lived, dressed, acted differently from the world, rejecting the symbols of respectability and taking up alcoholism, homosexuality, and physical abjection almost more in protest than from inclination. Ultimately they fled to places untouched by hard money and dress suits — whether tropic isles or the haunts of hoboes. It became the new sign of self-dedication to die in the asylum or the paupers' hospital. No matter what their individual fate might hold in store, these new generations of artists were bound to be antisocial, if only because they linked all that they saw triumphing — industry, nationalism, and democracy — with everything that was ugly, corrupt and brutish. Some turned accordingly against their immediate masters, confusing the original hopes of the Romantics with the reality that had to come to pass. Hence, paradoxically, the very success of a Berlioz with his Requiem or Festival works made him look as if he had pandered to democracy and mediocrity: within half a century after the Funeral symphony, the artistic eye had turned inward and was exclusively projecting on the screen of the imagination, not the mourning of France over the dead of 1830, but the woes of Pelléas and Mélisande.28 28 " A t the coming of liberty, equality, and fraternity I believed for a moment in my emancipation" — the speaker is Music, personified as a petitioner to the Minister — "but I was mistaken. W h e n the hour of liberation from slavery struck for the Negroes, I indulged in fresh hopes; 1 was again mistaken." (Soirées (10th) Eves., 119.) Just above this passage, he compares the inadequate plan for giving working-class children a free musical education (favored by Berlioz) with the futility of the National Workshops. 24 T h e earlier form of the differentiation was Dandyism, whose connotations give a fair index of the social descent between 1830 and 1890, between Byron and Verlaine. 25 Huysmans's hero Des Esseintes, in 1883: "Then . . . secular music is a promiscuous art which one ought to enjoy at home and alone, as one reads a book; [but] to taste it, he must needs have mixed with that inevitable public that crowds to theatres and besieges the Cirque d'Hiver where, under a broiling sun, in an atmosphere as muggy as a wash-house, you see a man with the look of a carpenter bawling . . . to the huge delight of the crowd. . . . H e

Artist m Society

535 In between, that is to say during the decades from 1850 to 1870 or from one civil war to another,28 was the arid period which the surviving Romantics, too far committed to change their outlook or mode of life, had to endure. It was the Era of Positivism (as Littré called it), of Materialism (as English science and German philosophy deemed it), of Realism (as literature recorded it). Realism was simply the concrete side of Romanticism — the substratum without the ideal, without the faith, and sometimes without the meaning. It produced an admirable literature of depiction and of implied criticism, and an equally admirable school of painting, from which Pre-Raphaelitism sprang in the very year 1848. Ultimately, it yielded in music — with an admixture of Romantic and symbolist elements — the operas of Wagner and the later Verdi. But in the workaday world, the change of temper only augmented the crassness that had in fact defeated the Romanticist hopes. The spirit (if it may be so called) of incredulous materialism, of pride in pettiness, of almost mindless selfindulgence, is enshrined in the pages of Flaubert's Education of the Feelings, which deals with this Great Divide even more thoroughly than Bovary." Baudelaire sums up the new order of things in a sentence: "The artist . . . found himself facing a society . . . absolutely fagged out and brutiñed, yet gluttonous, hating only imagination and loving only possession." 28 In short, before 1848 hope and struggle seemed still possible. A fine arc of energy had been described with its base in the last decade of the eighteenth century and its highest reach in the years 1827-1840. It sank into the ground in 1848. To say this is not to make a handful of artists and thinkers the only men who justified their existence during that half century, but had never had the courage to plunge into that bath of promiscuity in order to hear Berlioz, some fragments of whom had nevertheless won his admiration by their high-wrought passion and abundant fire. . . ." ( 1 2 6 3 , 317-8.) 24 In 1870, young Bizet writes in words echoing those of Berlioz: "Between the excesses of the reds and the whites, there will be no place for decent people. Music will have no future here. I shall have to go abroad — Italy, Eng-

land, or America." (.940, 76.) 27

Doudan calls 1848-1849, "the great winter of our century" (188, III, 234). For the revolutionary background of this disillusioned epoch see in UEducation Sentimentale Part III, Chapter I, which dramatizes all the conceivable plans propounded during the Republic's lifetime, and depicts popular agitation: " N o more Academies and Institutes; no more missions, no more Bachelors of Arts, down with University titles!" — " N o ! Let us keep them, but let them be conferred by universal suffrage, by the people, the only true judge!" T h e scene modulates to an attack on the rich, and closes, after passages of personal dialogue, with the account of a riot. ss

1049, 4 I 2 - 3·

536

Berlioz

merely to show the permissive character of those years. The artist's role as an upsetter, a ferment, a maker of revolutions without bloodshed, is clear; but this is only a phase in the life span of a masterpiece. There must come a time when the world says: "Yes, this poetry, this music, embodies a moment of the human spirit. Thus did our fathers live and feel; in this work we can see their humanity together with their uniqueness, and for us the spectacle is beauty." But with the break of 1848, this time of recognition was delayed, those who should have been willing disciples and grateful descendants turned blind and bitter, and we are only now beginning to see that the masters who wrought into shape the imaginings of that first half century — and did it more lastingly than the statesmen or financiers — had to have the courage of Titans to pursue their struggle into the darker time of their declining days; while those who followed under coercion of circumstances no longer permissive, could only save their small freedom by reducing their aims and foregoing part of their mission. The exclusive cultivation of the inner world is the refuge of the oppressed — so is the growing sense of the past — and we shall see that Berlioz himself after 1849 undergoes that subtle influence of time: his three great works of the last twenty years despite their continuing power, originality, and strength, deal perforce with no present occasion but with history or the comic spirit. The task of the artist, then, is to arrest life in its flow and cast it into forms resistant to time, for accomplishing which he must have security of life and limb, sustenance and public response. The last pair of requirements takes us from the politics to the economics of art. If artistic power is incompatible with political life, it may be said to be not so much in contradiction as at cross purposes with business. One need not bring up Scott's or Mark Twain's great bankruptcies to show the wasted energy of the artist in business. Berlioz' compulsory efforts as an impresario are ample proof of the fact. Nor has this generality much to do with the old confusion of ideas which implies that the artistic temperament is unbusinesslike: Berlioz and many other artists have been models of order and practicality. Their ill success came from not thinking day and night about what was salable and how to sell it.29 Society cannot do without Trade or Politics; hence these two interests are in the right just as much as Art. It is because everybody is in the right 29

A brilliant short statement on the contrast between artist and tradesman has been given by the distinguished American designer, W. A. Dwiggins, in "The Technique for Dealing with Artists." (/07J·, 83-100.)

Artist in Society

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that we witness a real drama. When narrating Berlioz's life one must take his point of view in order to show the spirit of the man and his work, but it would be possible and equally true to write a parallel account from the point of view of the publishers who wanted to sell his scores, the opera managers who went gray trying to part the public from its money, and the Ministers of State who dreamed of oubliettes when they saw Berlioz coming to ask for the sums due him — which they had already spent. For — it must be said again — it is of the essence of trade to make profits and of politics to balance budgets by cutting corners. In this triangular duel Art can claim only one slight superiority — it makes no false pretenses while the other two interests do. Opera houses and publishers pose as patrons of art; governments and nations want to claim the fruits of individual genius. Whole peoples have the audacity to say, "We have produced Shakespeare," (or Bach) and critics conclude, "The English are not musical, the Germans are;" — utterances so crude as to be downright indecent. Not even a Medici Pope or a Louis XIV can lay claim to have done much more for art than supply the materials and tolerate the workman. When Poussin was brought back from Rome to work at the Louvre against his will, all that absolute power could do was to see him safely home after he had suffered insults and frustration. The facts of Michelangelo's or Cellini's commissions are to the same effect, which is why Berlioz paraphrased them in his Benvenuto and his satirical novelettes. The historical truth is that there is not and there has never been a workable system of art patronage in European civilization, ancient or modern.80 Art exists on sufferance until it conquers through militant admiration,"1 after which it lingers on by a coalition between its true lovers and the parroting approval of the crowd. And this usually comes posthumously, for connoisseurs are grave robbers, esthetic necrophiles. In order to reach anything resembling the first stage, the living artist has to compromise 30 W e may think the Middle Ages an exception. Unfortunately not enough facts are available, but those at hand seem to show that pious bishops and fearsome barons were no better patrons than Renaissance cardinals and railroad magnates. The influence of a common religion no doubt helped to make "the public" accept original designs in art — though El Greco in a pious milieu did not find it so. In any case, the religious motive obscures the issue since it suggests that criticism may be silenced by consecrated use, not by quickened apprehension or respect for handiwork. One might as well instance secular occasions when patriotism gave popularity to an otherwise neglected artist — Beethoven after the Battle Symphony and Whitman after "O Captain! My Captain!" 31 E.g., the English, German, and French Romantics' "plugging" of Shakespeare, the Berlioz-Liszt-Wagner crusade for Beethoven.

538

Berlioz

with Trade, occasionally with Politics, and almost always with fashion, the really paying patron of art in our society being the passionate snob — C. Snobius Maecenas. This will continue until artists find an acceptable system of support enabling them to say "a plague on both your houses." Then, possibly, respect for the conditions and processes of artistic creation might grow, as all respect grows, in the face of independence, which is to say, of power. So far, none of these conditions, neither psychological nor practical, have even been studied. There exist, it is true, practical associations of artists, which from Berlioz' time to the present have seemed the only alternative to state patronage and commercial self-help. When he founded, with other musicians and with the aid of that most intelligent of men, Baron Taylor, the first Association of Musicians in France, Berlioz had in mind the cooperative idea, marketing in common without going through the ruinous middleman, and securing a public by a group appeal more impressive (and on the face of it less self-seeking) than that of the individual composer. W e shall see in the next chapter what obstacles such an association had to encounter. B y the end of the century it was still powerless to oppose officialdom.' 2 In time despair led to a second type of self-defense, on the tradeunion principle. As Berlioz pointed out, no help being likely to come from on high, nor from the scattered and uninformed public, musicians must help themselves.33 By propaganda in the press such as he could provide,84 and pressure upon the legislators, the ordinary orchestra player's miserable lot might at last be remedied. This has in fact happened, as a part of the general emancipation of labor through trade-union tactics. But success has been bought at a price. As in every contact of art with trade and with politics, contamination, not of morals but of art, has ensued; for in our unyielding social order the only w a y to fight exploitation and monopoly is to exploit and monopolize in return. By acting restrictively and coercively, musicians' unions have established their right to good wages and warded off wholesale liquidation in the face of a technology Berlioz could ,2

See Alfred Bruneau's dealings with opera managers in the nineties, at which rime he was put off with the disingenuous excuse that they were thinking of putting on Berlioz, now happily dead. (936·) 33 Soirées (10th) Eves., 121-2. u See the preface to the Grotesques de la Musique, in which to show the performer's plight he develops a sardonic account of the violin player's ruinous upkeep of his white tie. The preface is addressed to the personnel of the opera, who had so often played or sung for him gratis, and is signed, "your devoted comrade." He always felt solidarity with his fellows in both music and journalism, and belonged to their respective associations.

Artist

in

Society

539 only dream of." But in so doing they have necessarily trampled on the artistic principles of fitness and flexibility, to such an extent that a Berlioz or a Liszt, for all their devotion to the underpaid, might find it hard to choose the lesser evil. They would discover that the amateur musicians on whom they depended were now hampered at every turn by unions as well as by special combinations of professionals, and that in the scramble for "rights" the very thriving of one musical enterprise is now officially and unblushingly "viewed with alarm" by another group: a full circle to the days when Pillet, as manager of the Opera, could obtain a ministerial decree to close the Italian Theatre on his nights.3® Every step in the process is intelligible and worthy of approval, yet the results for art are no less damnable — as when one union of musicians threatens retaliatory measures against broadcasting by their transatlantic fellows; when the well-being of its members forbids them to cross the threshold of certain studios, or when they give up their essential character altogether by accepting payment for standing in the place of a conceivable musician who is not hired because he is not needed." It would be news if a musical union refused to play because the work of a master was being distorted or disarranged for commercial reasons. Union practices are of course no worse than the so-called understandings among radio and recording companies, which are rather misunderstandings of every cultural aim. When a conductor who "belongs" to Station RFD conducts by permission an orchestra that has a contract with 35

Berlioz' scientific imagination was at all times very lively. He called for the electric metronome and remote time-beater ten years before it was built; and he recurrently forecast the fact of directed aerial navigation, wireless telegraph, and other practical devices for travel and communication. (See Soirées, Grot., and Al em., passim.) 36 That was in the 1840's; here is the 1940's: " T h e . . . ban on foreign broadcasts . . . is a necessary measure due to present-day conditions in order to protect the employment of our musicians. . . . A n announcement by the State Department that the following programs were to be arranged (quote) opera from Italy, Russian Symphonies from Moscow, and French, British and La tin-American composers and orchestras (unquote) certainly gives us cause for alarm. Such a long-range program presents a definite threat to the American musicians' employment opportunities and would eventually lead to a general breakdown of social and economic standards." (The International Musician, vol. xliv, N o . 9, March 1946.) 37 "The theatrical committee reported on its review of the show Winter's Tale. Motion made and carried to classify same as a drama with music, stipulating the musical production scale and that a minimum of eight members and a conductor must be employed therefor." ( A l l e g r o , Feb. 1946.) Unavoidably, modern organizations in the interests of teachers and performers of music outnumber three to one those that protect composers. (132g, 1935.)

54-0

Berlioz

the PDQ network, the powerful intellects in charge cannot find a way to allow the orchestra's regular broadcast to take place. The art of music in all its branches must remain silent while announcers burble about the resumption next week of the great public service that "brings you Mozart through the courtesy" of a cheese or cosmetic. The fierce fight for property rights paradoxically leads to nonproduction. This same barrier, bottomed on indifference, has virtually stopped in this country the extension of the repertoire of music on discs, while the international exchange is so impeded by customs rules that it is a diplomatic tour de force to import sets of records made in such distant lands as France and England. When one adds to all this the increased costs of copying, printing, and distributing music, the taxes and licenses and fees which frequently make symphonic composers decline to be played — each performance being a luxury-offering to his pride — one is more than ever persuaded that Berlioz still belonged to the ages of faith in art.38 For although he lived in a country ruled first by a king and later by a dictator, he only had to endure insults, relative poverty, and misrepresentation. He was never instructed under pain of death how to make the melodic follow the party line. He enjoyed not only the friendship and respect of the truly great, who still formed a noble company throughout Europe, but also a free access to every part of that continent for the fulfillment of his mission. W e can measure from the Utopian aspect of these historical facts the degree to which our supercivilized forms of trade and politics have throttled art. Music is an excellent yardstick, involving as it does so many wills and interests, though other forms of artistic life today are likewise threatened with the same extinction. The substitute uses for talent, as in the motion-picture industry, all show the mark of the new "populist" culture, which is thin and sentimental rather than simple and massive, rigidly conventional rather than inventive and revolutionary. Were Berlioz alive now he would not find the means, and not a tithe of the understanding, which enabled him in spite of all odds to succeed. For financial reasons alone he could not afford to write for full orchestra, he therefore could not have tried out and codified the resources of that instrument. He would be reduced, like so many musicians today who want occasionally to hear what they compose, to the chamber ensemble or string quartet 38

" W h e n on April 21st, Dr. Vaughan Williams's new Sixth Symphony was performed at the Albert Hall, the composer himself received only ¿6H. £S of this came from the Albert Hall, £60 from the B.B.C, for the broadcast — yet the critics agree that the Sixth Symphony is probably his greatest work." (News-Letter from London, Apr. 30, 1948, p. 6.) As Dickens said: "Poetry costs money, cut it how you will."

Artist in Society

541

— media certainly capable of producing the sublimest works, but whose use under compulsion or as a pis aller is equally certainly opposed to the spirit of art. It would be but another compulsion added to the rest. In 1848, on the threshold of the hundred years that have brought about these world-wide paradoxes in the very name of freedom, popular government, and the extension of culture, Berlioz was returning to a blood-soaked Paris with little hope but with the same Socra tic determination to heed the daemon within.

19. Vision of a Virtuoso: Te Deum July 14, 1848 to May 9, ¡851

I am a composer and was born to be a kapellmeister . . . [the rest] is with me a side line. — MOZART in

1778

T H E C I T Y to which Berlioz returned on the doubly revolutionary date of July 14, 1848 was an intellectual desert and a visible shambles. The narrow crooked streets, which had made the raising of barricades easy, showed scars of the fighting, looting and arson. Violence had not quite ceased. "The people kill the poor young constables whenever they catch them alone." 1 The angel of liberty on Due's column, Place de la Bastille, had a bullet through its gilt body, and the Tuileries were a mass of litter.2 Of Berlioz' friends, many were abroad, others stayed with relatives in the country, still others were out of circulation as they made shift with menial jobs. Berlioz saw a pianist playing on the streets for pennies; painters served as crossing sweepers. "I am again living as when I was a medical student in the Latin Quarter, on 80 or 100 francs a month," wrote Berlioz to his brother-in-law. His only source of income was the Débats, for "nothing is left of what used to exist in the way of art . . . N o one even thinks of it or talks about i t . " 3 " W e attended the opening of the Opera," said Berlioz in his first feuilleton, "and some malicious wit suggested that the word should be taken in the sense of 'autopsy.' " 4

The Chamber did vote "aid" for the dispossessed and unemployed artists, but it was far short of adequate. "Besides, in order to economize, they take back with one hand what they give with the other. Thus, the committee 1

M.E., 241. Delacroix: "Disgusting devastation . . . everywhere the signs of degradation, and an evil smell . . . everywhere the portraits have been hacked to pieces." {¡82, II, 254, 269; see also 188, III, 214.) 3 M.E., 240. Among other disturbing changes, the publishing house of Schlesinger had passed into the hands of Brandus, who at first ignored Berlioz completely. (M.E., 219.) Maurice Schlesinger, incidentally, was the original of Arnoux in Flaubert's Education Sentimentale, and the publisher's wife actually the object of Flaubert's distant adoration — as transcribed in the novel. 4 1386, July 26, 1848. 2

Vision of a Virtuoso

543

on the Conservatoire proposed yesterday to abolish my post in the library and to divide my salary among the other employees."® It is true that Berlioz' office was a sinecure, but he himself was just proposing to the authorities that his status be changed. "It was not my doing if the Conservatoire failed to use my services more actively: the musical views of the previous Director [Cherubini] always kept me at arm's length . . . Yet I could, for instance, hold a chair of Instrumentation. This modern branch of the composer's studies is not taught anywhere, and general opinion has it that I possess the requisite knowledge and that I have even made contributions to it. I have moreover written a treatise on the subject which has been translated into the chief European languages." * The "Citizen Minister" of the Interior did not establish such a chair, but through the influence of Louis Blanc's brother Charles — an engraver and art critic who was the new Director of Fine Arts — Berlioz' post and salary were maintained. It was fortunate, for the newspapers had cut their rate of pay to half, and his expenses were increasing by reason of Harriet's worsened health. She was half paralyzed and must have constant attendance. Adèle's husband, the faithful and intelligent Marc Suat, lent Berlioz some money. At the same time, Adèle told her brother of her apprehension at their father's condition: he died a few days later, on the twenty-eighth. "The agony of the last days," she wrote again, "was dreadful. He looked like a galvanized corpse, shaking continually . . . and asking us for impossible things . . . Our caresses would calm him down . . . I held him in my arms with frenzy when he was at his worst. Nanci would run away in terror . . . He was shown your portrait and called you by name, and immediately asked for pen and paper . . . One day, seeing his eyes in search of something, I asked if he wanted anything. 'Nothing, daughter,' he said in the tenderest voice, Ί am looking for your eyes.' This fatherly word reduced us all to tears."T Berlioz could not go to La Côte until the following month. He did not see the long train of sincere mourners — patients and poor people — who followed the country doctor to his grave. Berlioz, still at work on the Death March for Hamlet which he had begun in London, could not help associating it with the death of his father, and consequently would never trust himself to play it. In these months an angry kind of worry over the ways and means to keep alive was his normal state. It would have been 6

M . E . , 240. M . E . , 2J9· T h i s statement exaggerated, or rather, anticipated, the actual translations of the w o r k . 'Mem., II, 3 2 0 - 1 . 9

544

Berlioz

infuriating to g o under (as did his friend and early benefactor De Pons w h o took poison) when so many idle and useless functionaries were managing to survive. "These people are our enemies — a thousand times more so than the wretches w h o kill on a barricade. . . . T h e only problem is f o r us to avoid dying and to take our time about it." 8 T h i s abstract fury masked affectionate apprehension about his friends in Vienna and the Germanies, and especially about Liszt. A s soon as Berlioz heard from Belloni, his friend's secretary, w h o was in Paris, he could write: "Everyone asked me about y o u in London, but I had absolutely no idea on what European barricade y o u stood. . . . So many bankers have failed that I v e r y much fear y o u have suffered losses. Farewell. I hope to see Belloni tomorrow and to make him talk about you. . . . Y o u r forever devoted: H . Berlioz." 8 Berlioz left for his birthplace on August i8 and stayed in Dauphiné until September io. T h e empty house and familiar horizons, the reunion w i t h his dearly loved Adèle and her kind husband opened up his heart. N a n c i came too and he melted to her also despite their mutually uncongenial ways. T h e subject of inheritance likewise had to be discussed. Each of their shares was worth about 130,000 francs, but since the whole consisted of real property it would be unwise to try to liquidate it at once w h e n the market was stagnant. T h e three nevertheless had to go to Les Jacques near Grenoble, to sort out personal effects, and it was there that looking across the river valley Berlioz thought again of his Estelle and decided to g o on a pilgrimage to the site of his ideal childhood love. T h e account of this visit, given in one of the best pages of the Memoirs, was doubtless written soon after the event. From his relatives Berlioz found out what was k n o w n of Estelle, now Mme. Fornier, a w i d o w of fifty with f o u r children, one of w h o m was finishing law school in the same class w i t h a y o u n g cousin of Berlioz'. Hector took what he termed "the strange liberty" of writing to her, excusing her in advance if she chose to "laugh at the g r o w n man's recollections as she had done at the child's worshiping." 10 He received no reply. In Paris, grimmer feelings were to be his lot. A b o u t the middle of October, Harriet suffered a fifth stroke — while Berlioz and her son were with her, fortunately — but when her doctor was out on call. "For t w o hours, Louis and I scoured the neighboring streets of Montmartre without M.E., 244. Delacroix, death of poor Chopin . . that beautiful soul burns 9 M.E., 245. The word 10 Mem., II, 330. 8

the following year: "After luncheon, I heard of the . What despicable rogues fill the market-place while out!" (182, I, 32$.) "forever" is in English.

SCHUMANN

SIDNEY L A N I E R

NIETZSCHE

LALO

FLAUBERT

BRUCKNER

4 L.

DAMROSCH

MOUSSORGSKY

Eminent

Berliozians:

"Berlioz

HUGO W O L F

1835-1890

. . . the veritable savior of o u r w o r l d

of

absolute music . . ." — WAGNER

(1850)

Vision of a Virtuoso

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finding any physician in. The poor woman was all this time unconscious and more like the dead than the living. Finally her own doctor arrived and bleeding brought her round. . . . One result, however, is that her speech is more impaired than before and it is almost impossible to understand her." 11 Berlioz accompanied his son back to Rouen and kept him informed of his mother's condition: "She is still in bed and under orders not to talk. The least emotion, too, would be fatal to her. So please do not write her a letter like your last one to me. It is distressful to see you giving yourself up to moping and idleness; you will be eighteen [in four years] without having any career to go into . . . You keep telling me that you want to be a sailor; you must want pretty badly to leave me behind, because once you are at sea God knows when I shall see you. If I were free and independent I should leave with you and we would seek our fortunes in India or elsewhere, but even to travel takes means. . . . And my career as a composer keeps me in France. I would have to give it up if I left the Old World for the New. I write to you as to a grown boy. You will think all this over and you will understand. For no matter what happens, I shall always be your best friend, the only one entirely devoted to you and full of unchangeable affection for you. I know you love me and that will make up to me for everything. . . . Tell me again about your teeth: have they been thoroughly cleaned? Farewell, dear child, I kiss you with all my soul." M The heartfelt attachment expressed in this letter — the first that remains of Berlioz' correspondence with his son — does not conceal a certain remorse which Berlioz doubtless felt at having left Louis for six or seven years alone with his mother, or still more alone in boarding school. The causes of the boy's melancholy indolence were perfectly evident to the father, who also sensed the child's desire to retaliate and "leave him behind." Not that Berlioz had abandoned his son; but in those years of travel to Moscow and back, and when Berlioz had come within sight of solid material success, he had been too preoccupied to be anything but deficient as a father. And those same years had transformed the winsome, "badly brought up" baby into a shy despairing adolescent. His "qualities of heart," said his aunt Nanci, were "of a rare sort and most endearing." And she lectured her brother trying to prove that a good heart was much better than a brilliant mind.13 •

M.E., 2JO.

12

·

M.E., 251-2.

· 13

M.E., 253.

54 6

Berlioz

Toward the end of October 1848 Berlioz, aided by Baron Taylor, prepared and led a concert for the benefit of the Musicians' Association. Organized under extreme difficulties, it was intended in part as an inducement to the new Republican leaders to think better of the arts. Four hundred and fifty performers were gathered in the theater of Louis X I V at Versailles, which the public had been admitted to only twice since its construction. The prices were moderate and the program was to suit all tastes without any condescension: Rossini, Meyerbeer, Gluck, Mozart, Beethoven, and three small works by Berlioz. Both orchestra and audience shunned elegance of dress and made up for this populist pride by showing pleasure a little rowdily. The event turned out badly for Berlioz, by reason — as always — of political interpretations. His willingness to make music "for the people" was felt to be ill-timed because everyone now predicted the coming of "an Emperor." Louis Napoleon had been elected to the Assembly by four districts, had had his election returns disputed, then validated, had shrewdly declined to take a seat that "might embarrass the government," but declared himself ready to follow the people's will. Whereupon he had been re-elected by five districts. The glorious associations of his name and the disgust felt at the Republic's squabbling incompetence made Bonaparte a likely winner of the presidency. At this date the Empire was not inevitable, yet it was widely spoken of as the next step,14 its presumed style and dignity contrasting with the bad manners that had, among other things, given offense at the Berlioz concert. On that occasion, it seems, "little old Marrast" the president of the Constituent Assembly, had slouched in the armchair of Louis X I V and had appeared, in his lemon-colored gloves, to be enjoying himself altogether too much. The Republic, though slow, was not ungrateful. It kept Berlioz in his Librarianship, paid the arrears of his salary, and added five hundred francs "to encourage him as a composer." Cavaignac, the republican soldier, was doing all he could to restore the popularity of the regime which the sabotage of the National Workshops and the bloodshed in June had nearly destroyed. The campaign for the presidency in December had been the last chance for staunch republicans and socialists to prove that the country deserved self-government. When that chance failed by producing instead a demagogue, all but a few felt that their hopes had been illu14 Doudan: " T o exchange K i n g Louis Philippe for the E m p e r o r Louis N a poleon is really too ridiculous a notion. T o wreck France during eight months in order to achieve this magnificent result is a deed fit to make us immortal in the eyes of H i s t o r y . " ( / 8 8 , III, 230.)

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sions, and that a true republic could only be the work of a later generation. In the interim between his Republican concert and Bonaparte's success, Berlioz summed up the situation for one of his Russian friends: "What changes since then [1847] in our unhappy Europe! What cries and crimes, what follies and blunders, and what cruel mystifications . . . Paris is still in a fever and has attacks of delirium tremens. To think of the peaceful works of the mind or to seek the beautiful in art and letters under such conditions is like trying to play billiards on a storm-tossed ship. . . ." " Berlioz worked nonetheless. In his reconquered Library at the Conservatoire, he went on with his Memoirs, parts of which might make salable articles. He had finished the Death March for Hamlet in late September and joined it to the "Death of Ophelia" and the "Religious Meditation" to form a volume which he entitled Tristia (after Ovid's "Sad Pieces"). It appropriately signalized for Berlioz a year of exile, defeat, and mourning. He had also revised La Captive, the melody that had charmed Rome seventeen years before, making it now into a miniature symphonic poem for voice and orchestra.1· These small but beautifully finished works once behind him, he could begin the new year with a fresh enterprise: a companion piece to his monumental Requiem in the form of an equally large-scale Te Deum. The germinal idea dated from the Italian notebooks of 1832, but only part of that inspiration had gone into the Funeral symphony. Berlioz' plan, it will be recalled, was to celebrate the nation's great dead with a vast symphony in seven movements. The idea did not recur to him now because of any similarity between the heroic first Napoleon and his nephew the President, elected in December 1848. Citizen Bonaparte had stumped the country like a vulgar politician, promising peace and plenty, and pretending attachment to republican institutions. The Berlioz Te Deum on the contrary was to be a religious and military fresco more closely related to the revolutionary era of which 1848 had revived certain aspects —war, grief, and the terror of divine justice. As for the political fact, Berlioz did desire an Emperor such as Napoleon to put an end to the "grotesque and disgusting farce" and "pretentious stupidities" of the Republic, yet he abstained from voting "so that I shall be sure not to have contributed to any catastrophe." " u

M.E., 257. It was first sung in this form by Pauline Viardot in London, at Berlioz' concert of June 29, 1848, and only subsequently published. 17 M.E., 255, 256. 14

548

Berlioz

Composing had to go on to an accompaniment of brain squeezing for the "relentless" newspapers. T h e Débats was publishing less and paying little — only eight francs a column, but the Gazette kept appearing weekly and paid by the line. Berlioz' printed remarks on the new operas were thus not so concisely witty as the comments in his letters: he could not afford it. "Meyerbeer," he informed Count Wielhorsky, "has begun rehearsing his Prophète; he is a very courageous man to risk launching a work of those dimensions at a time when riots or a change of government . . . can cut him short, however great his eloquence. Halévy has just won a tremendous success with his Val d'Andorre at the Opéra-Comique. It is really good. There are in his score some charming melodies and things of a high and just style. I said what I thought when I wrote of it. It is quite the other w a y with [Clapisson's] Jeanne la Folle: no ideas, no style; it's simply gross, dull, and flat. Y o u will wonder how grossness can combine with flatness. I do not know how the composer did it; it is one of his trade secrets." 18 A few months later, to Berlioz' delight, the second act of La Vestale was put on b y the Conservatoire, whose public was properly overwhelmed. 19 By that time (February 1849) Liszt was again in touch with Berlioz, exchanging confidences and even offering financial help which Berlioz did not have to accept. T h e pianist was himself going through a bad time as regards both money and personal relations.20 "I was much upset," Berlioz writes back, "as you can well imagine. But I know how energetic and decided you can be in crucial moments . . . Still, your project [to go to the United States] seems to me violent — to cross the Atlantic to make music for Yankees who just now think only of California gold! You are the best judge of the advisability of such a trip. As for what can be done here, I really don't know: it changes with the riot-meter. " T h e Italian Theatre flaps only one wing; the Opera never had any, but they say Le Prophète will supply the want of them. . . . W h e n the crowds w h o are coming to the Industrial Exhibition have gone, when the new Chamber is elected and seated, when the emotion caused by the premières of Le Prophète has calmed down, maybe y o u can try something. W e are all impatient to see you." 21 T h e reference to the several "first nights" of the new opera alludes to 18 19

M.E., 258. Corresp., 176.

20 T h e s e difficulties were connected with his establishment in W e i m a r , where he lived with the Princess Carolyne Sayn-Wittgenstein — of w h o m more later.

21

M.E., 260-1.

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the special effort Meyerbeer made just then to win over Berlioz by inviting him to a private rehearsal. At the same time, possibly at Meyerbeer's instigation, the Conservatoire asked that Berlioz allow something of his to be played at their concerts. The German composer whose mastery of the operatic world was unchallenged seemed eager to have the approval of a less variable judge than the public, and perhaps to share with Berlioz the artistic ground which Meyerbeer in his own mind knew that Berlioz occupied. At any rate, he addressed him as "Dear and Illustrious Master," and expressing his "love" and "fear" of him, invited him in successive messages to several of the rehearsals, signing the last note: "Your devoted and trembling Meyerbeer."22 The day before the occasion of this curious testimonial, two excerpts from the Damnation of Faust were given by the Conservatoire. This sudden reopening of a symphony society which had been closed to him since the early days of the Rob Roy overture (sixteen years) made Berlioz feel nervous about the outcome. The gracious invitation might prove another blow, especially since his erstwhile admirer Narcisse Girard, who had been eclipsed by Berlioz as conductor, would lead the orchestra. The players anyhow were very friendly, and as it turned out the audience also. The composer could feel that his success was like "the overturning of a barrier . . . If the other Great Walls of China that still hem me in . . . should likewise collapse, perhaps the music I have composed might receive the same welcome here as in the rest of Europe and I might be forgiven for being alive and French. Perhaps I might also produce new works, more important than those I have been engaged 11 23 __ on . . . Right or wrong, Berlioz felt that recognition on home ground was necessary to his career. "You cannot imagine," he wrote to Janin, "with what heartbreak I sit down to my task when I am convinced that my work will be well received only abroad." ** Though he kept counseling himself to be patient, he doubtless seemed to his friends impatient and certainly unresigned. Yet he had gauged the French temper accurately for a century to come, and he knew better than his friends the difference between working for a well-disposed steady audience and working in 22 235, II, 139-40. T h e conclusion of this note is as good as a self-portrait. It reads: "I love you enormously, as you know; but tonight I fear you even more than 1 love you, because of my wish that my score should make a good impression on you. A thousand greetings and a thousand thanks for having come to the rehearsal night before last." (Ibid., 140.)

23 24

Μ.E., 166.

Μ.E., 267.

Berlioz the void. It was not long after this artistic interregnum in Paris that for poignant practical reasons Berlioz denied himself the right to compose a symphony of which the ideas came to him in sleep on two successive nights." His phalanx of twelve hundred in the best days of the 1830's had not disappeared but they were discouraged too, and even more distraught. T h e continuity of mind and will which he could maintain through all vicissitudes could not be expected of them — it could not even be found among his enemies. Thus Fétis, who was present at the concert of April ι j , 1849, begged permission to produce Berlioz' symphonies in Brussels. "The man," wrote Berlioz to his sister, "who has written so much to prove that they are anything but music — what puppets! " 2 e T h e Te Detent was growing slowly amid the usual interruptions. Liszt had given up the trip to America and was planning to come to Paris instead, and join with Berlioz in a concert which could be linked with the much-touted Industrial Exhibition. Meanwhile Meyerbeer's advances constituted a diplomatic problem. Berlioz could not help seeing in him an ambiguous sort of well-wisher who exploited others' musical dramatic inventions without saying so,27 yet was not wholly ungrateful: in Berlin Meyerbeer had assisted him and later had been a prime mover in the presentation dinner after the Damnation of Faust. He was moreover a genuine musician whose artistic conscience was real as far as giving the operatic public full value for its support. But Meyerbeer was also an intriguer who 28 Mem., II, 349-50: " O n waking the next day I could recall almost the whole first movement . . . in A minor. I was going to start writing it down when I suddenly reflected: if I set down this movement, I shall be led to compose the rest. T h e expanding of my thought which is now usual with me may give this symphony a very large scope. I shall perhaps devote three or four months exclusively to the w o r k , during which I shall more or less give up mv feuilletons. M y income will suffer, and once the symphony is done 1 shall be weak enough to let it be copied . . . and performed . . . I shall lose money that I do not possess. . . ." A f t e r a second night's dreaming of the themes and forms, the project was set aside forever. " 'Coward!' some y o u n g fanatic will say . . . ' Y o u should have taken the risk, you should have written it and ruined yourself. One has no right to drive away a thought and annihilate a w o r k of art which begs to be born.' M y dear young man, you would be less severe if you had seen the spectacle then before my eyes [of Harriet's decline]. I did not flinch earlier, in the days when one could still hope from the consequences of a bold attempt. There was in the Paris of those days a select public . . . A n d m y wife, besides, was all alive and the readiest to encourage m y efforts." 2β M.E., 270. " T h e opinion of those competent to judge, f r o m César Cui to A r t h u r H e r v e y , supports the view that Meyerbeer drew heavily on Berlioz' melody, instrumentation, and dramatic conceptions. 7 1 2 , 251; 725, 48; 6-jj, 81.

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had "captured" the Opera and posted his henchmen — such as Girard and Alexandre — in key positions. According to an expressive exaggeration circulated by Heine, the musical boss had "bought his way for the next hundred years." 28 Berlioz' review of Le Prophète was therefore hard to write. On the surface a work of praise, with its few objections tactfully hedged about, it really expressed a very qualified approval of the opera. One has only to compare this cool judicial report with Berlioz' no less critical but thoroughly life-breathing studies of Gluck to assess the difference and to conclude — as against certain critics — that the art of Meyerbeer did not enthrall him.2" A letter to his sister shows the extent to which Berlioz felt constrained: "I am also free of my article on Le Prophète. . . . Meyerbeer has the good sense not to take amiss the four or five reservations I put into my ten columns of praise.10 I should have liked to spare him the pain . . . but there are certain things that must absolutely be said out loud. I cannot let anyone think that I approve or even condone the compromises which such a master makes in favor of the bad taste of a part of the public. . . . The score contains some very fine things side by side with feeble and detestable ones. But the splendor of the show will make everything pass muster." n Sincere even in his diplomacy, Meyerbeer chose to head the delegation which in July presented the medal struck in honor of the Damnation: it had been impossible during the two years since the banquet to find the gold with which to make it — a fortunate delay, for it brought the token to the composer after the success of the two excerpts at the Conservatoire instead of after the failure at the Opéra-Comique. But family concerns for the moment outweighed all else. Harriet had caught the cholera during the spring epidemic — Berlioz suffered only a bout of grippe — and he had nursed her during nights of continuous 28

1261, VI, 308; Mem., II, 347. Singers and others have since told how Meyerbeer's handsome gratuities would induce them to prolong the run of his works. The press was similarly taken care of. (770, III, 115.) This musical politics continued even after his death, one of his numerous secretaries, Johannes Weber, keeping up an insidious campaign against the works of rivals. 29 Mem., II, 346. The general view is reflected in young Bizet's enthusiasm: "Meyerbeer is the Michelangelo of music." (9730, 9.) Delacroix admired Couture in just the way Berlioz admired Meyerbeer. {¡82, I, 225.) 30 Ten columns was a trifle compared with Fétis's five successive articles in the Gazette. Some critics disliked the opera as being "theology set to music" but felt that it represented such a large investment that it could not be allowed to fail. 31 M.E., 269.

55 2

Berlioz

vomiting. N o w N a n c i developed an undiagnosed ailment w h i c h despite H e c t o r ' s less than c o m p l e t e a f f e c t i o n f o r her caused him deep uneasiness. It turned o u t t o be c a n c e r o f the breast, w h i c h carried her off a y e a r later and made o f B e r l i o z a c o n v i n c e d advocate of euthanasia. 32 Harriet at last r e c o v e r e d and seemed even in better health than before, t h o u g h still p a r a l y z e d and incoherent of speech. A s f o r Louis's plans, Berlioz f u r t h e r e d t h e m w i t h the help of the Bertins w h o put him in t o u c h w i t h a Captain P a g e , r e c e n t l y reduced t o half pay b y the Republic but still enthusiastic about the sea. S o m u c h so that Berlioz' o w n wanderlust revived: t o hear the sea! to travel! H e yearned t o leave Paris and smell again the poplar w o o d s along the A r n o , w h i c h a friend in the diplomatic service alluded t o in a letter; he w a n t e d to f o r g e t the feuilletons

("they

w i l l kill me in the e n d " ) and settle d o w n in solitude at Les Jacques, w h i c h w a s t o be his share o f the f a m i l y estate. H e planned a reunion in G r e n o b l e so that he m i g h t see N a n c i in her illness, take stock of the p r o p e r t y , and r e n e w acquaintance w i t h old friends of his mother's — "if any are l e f t "

33 :

in short he w a s alive w i t h o u t g o i n g emotion that was virtually objectless. In Paris, the "hair-raising c o m e d y " was g o i n g on: near-riots, provincial delegations dressed in the g a r b of 1793, and endless debate and gossip as t o the fidelity or the deep designs of the n e w Prince-President. T h e no less n e w A m e r i c a n President, G e n e r a l T a y l o r , was giving the deriders o f republics cause t o jeer w h e n the report of his inaugural quoted him as saying: " W e are at peace w i t h all the w o r l d and the rest of mankind." Elsewhere reaction was seeping back into p o w e r . B y treachery and savage f o r c e Austria, Italy, H u n g a r y , Bohemia, Prussia and Denmark w e r e w o n a n e w t o kings. Constitutions w e r e torn up and rebels indiscriminately shot. R i c h a r d W a g n e r , w h o had rioted and made speeches in Dresden, fled b e f o r e the e n e m y and took r e f u g e in Paris. H e arrived just in time t o see another insurrection fomented b y the n e w s that F r e n c h troops under O u d i n o t w e r e helping t o o v e r t h r o w Mazzini's republic in R o m e . President Bonaparte quelled the Paris republicans w h i l e his general chose J u l y 14 t o a n n o u n c e the reconquered sovereignty of Pius I X . W a g n e r ' s loss o f place and livelihood was s o m e w h a t compensated f o r 3"

" N o physician dared to have the humanity of putting an end to her agonv b y letting her breathe a phial of chloroform. It can be done to spare a patient the pain of a surgical operation lasting a quarter of a minute, but it is forbidden to deliver one from six months of torture. . . . T h e most horrible thing in this world for us sentient and conscious beings is inexorable pain without possible compensation and carried to the highest degree of intensity; and one must be barbarous or stupid or both to refrain from using the sure and gentle w a y available nowadays to put an end to this." (Mem., II, 333-4.) " M.E., 27Î-

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by a fine gesture of Liszt's, supported by Berlioz: Liszt was putting on Tannhäuser in Weimar and sent a long eulogy of the opera to Berlioz, who reproduced it in full in the Débats with a cordial introduction.34 Berlioz' trip to Dauphiné had to be given up: Harriet was too ill. And Nanci had gone to take the waters at La Mothe. When doctors send a patient to a watering place, it is generally because they are at their wits' end. . . . I cannot tell you, dear sister [this was to Adèle] what sad and deep thoughts bind us three to whatever is a reminder of our wonderful and excellent father. The memory of him will never leave me. The approaching anniversary of his death gave it fresh and painful force. I have his book,35 as you know, annotated by him, and I have just read it. His pencillings showed him pondering and correcting with great care, and I was struck afresh by the fine integrity with which he practiced medicine, as well as by his sagacious mind, which should have shone in a wider circle. But his ineffable goodness and the attentions he lavished on us children are far deeper motives for our regret. . . . I should like to see you both; give me at once some wholly truthful news of Nanci. I shall write to her soon. I have got back to my work (music, I mean). I am finishing, polishing, completing my new score. A sort of feverish impatience grips me because with regard to music I am still revolving a number of projects. And I want to set them down as soon as possible. This ardent occupation is the only one that can help me to repress a growing love of travel. I dream only of ships, seas, distant isles, adventurous explorations. My musical voyagings through Europe have only developed this half-buried instinct of old. I can see its futility, its childishness, but can do nothing about it. Were it not for my obligations here, I would again take a chance on productive tours in [Scandinavia] and in Russia, where I was so well received. Perhaps I may be able to go to Holland this winter: it's three steps away, thanks to the railroads. Travel on land is so easv and so cheap these days. . . No single document, perhaps, conveys so naturally the interlinked emotions, sensations, and intellectual interests to which Berlioz responded and 34

1)86, M a y 18, 1849. Berlioz w r o t e fifty lines of w a r m and g r a c e f u l e u l o g y , recalling Wagner's stay in Paris, his musical articles in French, and his subsequent removal to Dresden where his talents as poet and composer had met the success they deserved. One can measure the later W a g n e r i t e f r e n z y b y noting that the English translator of W a g n e r ' s Prose W o r k s finds this encomium inadequate and too clearly due to Berlioz' friendship f o r Liszt. (243, IH, 470-1.) 35 16η. Since its award of a prize b y the Montpellier A c a d e m y of Medicine, the w o r k had been favorably mentioned in the leading textbook on therapy. (307, 32s.) 38 M . E . , 279-80.

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Berlioz

out of which he achieved in his art a balance of contrary tensions. From the child's loving remembrance of one parent to the mountaineer's love of space and distance; from the concert-leader and organizer to the composer whose music wells up in him regardless of outward circumstance, we have here the compass of his tendencies accurately self-surveyed. Nor is it farfetched to see in the longing for ocean voyages and Pacific isles a first sign of the European artist's repudiation of industrial urban life, later acted out by Rimbaud, Gauguin and others. For Berlioz, of course, the ethical motive, which dated back to readings of Diderot and Bougainville, was just then reinforced by the sight of young Louis's curiously similar longings. During the first week of October 1849, the Te Deum for three choruses, organ, and orchestra was finished, and Berlioz had to begin devising an occasion for the usual testing by audition. He obtained an audience from the President of the Republic, but was preceded by a deputation of sixty long-winded provincials. He waited an hour and a half and got only excuses for his pains. N o t seeking a second chance, he determined to try emancipating himself and the art of music in France from dependence upon the state. The means was to be a Philharmonic Society, which he at once set about organizing. Dietsch, of the Opera, would conduct the chorus, many devoted friends would play for modest shares of the early profits, and the choice of pieces would be made by a representative committee. But the idea of a private person starting any such enterprise was too new in France: it lasted only eighteen months. Its cash reserves were inadequate, and Berlioz' connection with it was enough to consolidate a resourceful opposition. But it gave a dozen concerts, it publicized the idea that was too new, and it established the foundations upon which the later organizations of Pasdeloup, Colonne and Lamoureux were reared. By a just return, it was these orchestras that made known to the French the more accessible parts of Berlioz' concert works. Meantime an independent, unofficial society, neither limited in repertory like Seghers's "Saint Cecilia," nor politically doctrinaire like David's "Union," would satisfy the composer's undeviating musical ambition. What he called his "life sentence at hard labor," namely journalism, he knew to be the merest sideline. "Give me orchestras to lead," he promised, "give nie rehearsals to go through, let me stay eight or even ten hours on my feet, practicing with the chorus, singing their parts when they miss, while I beat time for the rest until my arm gets cramped and I spit blood; let me carry music desks, double basses,

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and harps; compel me to correct proofs during the night time, and I will do it. . . . I have done it and can do it again." " The Philharmonic Society received from the outset more spiritual than practical encouragement. There was a distinguished list of sponsors from the worlds of music and fashion. The press favored the plan without grasping its difficulties: "The society comes into being just at the right moment, in a musical twilight, when among artists and audiences alike the desire to act was succumbing to paralysis." " But the "action" came from Berlioz* will power and stayed there. For a year and a half he assumed the gigantic task of corralling and rehearsing the players, handling the publicity, watching the finances, soliciting aid, and arranging or composing music for the programs. In the flush of initial success he was a whirlwind of versatility and good humor; at its decline a year later he was sick to death. In between, the problem was threefold: finances, authority, and musical fare. The first concert on February 19, 1850 brought in four thousand francs and was hailed as a triumph. The net profit amounted to twenty-seven hundred francs, which had to be divided in equal shares among ninety instrumentists and one hundred and ten singers, plus three shares for the chorus master, Pierre Dietsch, and four shares for Berlioz as conductor and General Director. This meant that for three rehearsals and one concert, each performer received thirteen francs and the two leaders about fifty francs apiece. For such poor sums, the Society could not command prompt and faithful attendance at rehearsals, nor did its outlay secure anything but a very poor hall. What was even worse, the group was divided in allegiance: the singers — Opera people — "belonged" to Dietsch; the orchestra was devoted to Berlioz. This might have gradually been forgotten had not Dietsch fancied himself as a composer, and had an accident not brought the division to the surface.** At Angers, in mid-April 1850, a corps of troops marched in rhythm across a bridge and broke it. Hundreds of officers and men were drowned and the whole country was in mourning. The Philharmonic Society proposed to give a benefit for the victims' 37 Mem., II, 160; but note that the passage begins: "Let me be given scores to compose. . . . " [Italics added.] 38 269, 230. " P i e r r e Dietsch (1808-1865) will be remembered as choral conductor under Berlioz at the first performance of the Requiem in 1837, but much later he acquired a kind of ex post facto renown for having composed a Flying Dutchman opera on the text which he bought from Wagner. (1842.)

55 6

Berlioz

families at the Church of St. Eustache, and the question came up whether a mass by Dietsch (he had four on hand) or Berlioz' Requiem should be played. After some wrangling within the Committee, after Berlioz' offer to resign so as to let the benefit proceed, and after a protracted dispute between the singing and the playing members, the Requiem was given, under Berlioz' sole direction. It was an impressive performance which netted a large sum. Henceforth, Berlioz made every effort to find other modern music than his own to put on the program. Remembering his difficult beginnings he had provided in the statutes that each year the Society would play the work of a young Rome Prize composer after his return from Italy. None had yet been submitted. Berlioz' friend Morel, a founding member of the Society who had left to take up duties at Marseille, had an overture which was played. Then a rich amateur named Cohn proposed a work which he would pay to have performed. The Committee reserved the right to consider it, and ultimately had it played to a house full of M. Cohn's friends. Works by Weber, Halévy, Spohr, Léon Kreutzer, Mendelssohn, Gluck and Beethoven were passed on and put in rehearsal. An Italian prima donna named Frezzolini and loaded with jewels was exhibited as well as allowed to sing.40 But it was only too plain that apart from the great classics, the only music that drew the public and elicited important notice was Berlioz' own. During its short life, the Society accordingly played (besides the Requiem) two of the symphonies, parts of the Damnation and several of the small choral works, to which Berlioz had now added two: La Menace des Francs (March and Chorus) and the "Shepherds' Farewell," the first completed movement of the later Infant Christ Yet it was impossible for external and internal reasons to have the Philharmonic Society feature Berlioz alone. The fact was that in France certainly, and in Europe almost to the same extent, there was in 1850 no one else on whom to draw. It was indeed a twilight, and far from rejoicing at being facile princeps, Berlioz felt it with acute wretchedness. 40 Working by democratic committee meant that Berlioz' experienced judgment was often overruled, while at the same time outside pressure was centered on him in the belief that he was in sole charge. For example, the patron of Mile. Catinka Heinefetter had to be put off with tact and wit: " W e shall see if there is some way to use her talents on a later program and w e thank her meanwhile for her gracious offer. I was unable to attend her début but you were there and that is enough for me — but were you there? Best greetings."

(M.E., 287 and n.) 41

See below, Chapter 22.

Vision of a Virtuoso

557

41

" I am utterly sad — Spontini is dead." Lesueur, Chopin, Mendelssohn, and now Spontini. Schumann was entering his last decade in ill-health and mental darkness; Liszt was given over to conducting and virtuoso work and was so far only planning his symphonic poems; 4S while Wagner as far as anyone knew was still far from his true path. In the Débats, Berlioz wrote Spondni's obituary, and to his friend Morel he dropped a word about him that reveals the sense of void in which he felt himself working: "I had come to love him by dint of admiration." 44 One result of this situation was to help create the legend of Berlioz' egotistical scorn of his contemporaries and complacency about his own merits. He gave offense by his admiration of the great dead, for he seemed to claim kinship with them and so to reproach the living mediocrities who — to the onlooker — seemed just as good. N o public can understand why an artist who is conscious of great powers would enjoy feeling humble in the company of the mighty, nor has criticism yet taught the world to differentiate between an artist's impersonal egotism and the common brand of self-love. The world thinks that a Beethoven or a Berlioz, a Wagner or a Delacroix, should be ashamed to feel the reality of his genius, or should have at least the decency to say nothing about it.45 And yet we know that the Lord looked upon his handiwork and found it good, but we fail to draw the inference: the power to create implies the power to judge, and occasional failures of judgment in mortal creators prove nothing against the rule. Berlioz could see how the modern world was corrupting, or at least confusing the artist's proper self-regard: " T h e vanity of actors and authors," he wrote on New Year's Day 1851, "is no longer caused by love of fame, but by the crass love of money, by avarice and the passion for luxury, by insatiable material greed. They want hyperbolic praise because this alone stirs the crowd and leads it to this one or that. And they want the crowd because it alone brings money. "Hence today one no longer finds artists able to limit themselves to 42

M.E., 311. Wagner's report of what Berlioz said to Spontini on his deathbed is apocryphal since Spontini died in Italy. 43 With the exception of Prometheus, though even this did not reach final form until nine years later 44 M.E., 311. As Stendhal did for the musicians of 1820 one may list the composers who (besides those mentioned in the text) might reasonably claim attention in 1850: Auber, Adam, Carafa, Czerny, Draeseke, Flotow, Gade, Heller, Hiller, Kastner, Kittl, Lachner, Marschner, Moscheies, Nicolai, Pixis, Reber, Ries, Suppe, Verdi, Vesque de Püttlingen. 45 Delacroix in 1847: "I have been making some bitter reflections on the profession of artist; the isolation, the sacrifice of almost all the feelings that move the majority of men. . . ." (182, I, 178.)

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the making of a few polished, unlucrative works, preferring a moderate and painstaking output to the constant exploitation of their overworked minds. . . . They are forced . . . to draw upon everything and assimilate whatever is assimilable, like those infusoria called vortex, which create a whirlpool in front of their ever-open mouths so as to engulf every animalcule that comes near them. . . . Let us save time, for time is money, and money is everything." ** He could have added that the same barometer of public opinion was more and more decisive in the supposedly higher spheres. Spontini's death had left a vacancy at the Institute, and to fill it Berlioz was the logical candidate. He paid the necessary calls. At the first ballot a younger man of the theater, Ambroise Thomas, was elected by a majority of thirty. The remaining eight votes were split among Niedermeyer and Batton. Not a single vote was cast for Berlioz.47 While certain persons were trying to "dephilharmonize our society," that is, bring disunity into its ranks; and while "the rascally Italian press" (Scudo and Azevedo) were trying to chill the enthusiasm of the instrumentiste, Berlioz learned the truth about Nanci's desperate condition. He tried, in the teeth of hopelessness, to give her courage by chatty letters of Parisian doings: Hugo's salon was full of ugly old ladies, but at least there was no bad music served. Dumas had a daughter of nineteen, "too much like her father to be pretty, but whose somewhat gracile quadroon appearance . . . heightened by a sequin headdress, made her look like an odalisque from Madagascar. Farewell, poor dear sister. God grant that you may have read this letter to the end, and that it may have helped you forget your pain for two minutes. I shake your good Camille by the hand. Farewell again; I kiss you." 48 Then a month later, to Adèle: "Give me at least some news of yourself. Your silence is disturbing. I am afraid of your grief, though you must have suffered a thousand times more than I while watching the torture and agony of our poor dear just delivered. . . . Are you ill? In that case, let 44

1386, Jan. ι, 1851. Compare Delacroix again: " W h a t I saw yesterday augurs badly for the future of the French School. . . . T h e pygmies of today, I should say the insects, have neither true feeling nor the least real learning. . . . A stupid skill in handling is their highest goal." ( 1 8 2 , 1, 223.) 47 Those unfamiliar with French traditions may think this was a natural retort to the satirical shafts Berlioz had shot into the august body, but such was not the reason for his exclusion at this time. Most of the great men w h o have found their w a y into the A c a d e m y began b y attacking it and felt nb inconsistency in seeking admission to it — on the principle that the opposition may o c c u p y the place it has first bombarded. 18

M.E., 295-6.

Vision

of a Virtuoso

559

Suat write to me. Farewell, I kiss you. Poor sister! W e are now only two." In June 1850, news came that Balzac was back from his second Russian journey and married to his long-courted love, Mme. Hanska. Berlioz wrote to him immediately: "Since the eve of my trip to Russia, I have not seen you once, which makes three enormous years. Have you ever thought of the anguish that would be felt by certain passionate beings at seeing the features of their idol only in mirrors thrice removed? That is the way I feel not having seen you. . . . In less roundabout fashion, let me ask you when I can go and shake your hand and beg you to introduce to Mme. Balzac one of her most devoted servants."4* The simile of the mirrors betokened, among other things, Berlioz' physical weariness. He had constant stomach cramps, headaches, and the need of sleep. The pace he had set himself was, mutatis mutandis, the pace that Balzac had followed too, and that carried him off two months after Berlioz had greeted him — another void among the ranks of his peers. That winter of 1850, filled with the business of the Philharmonic, Berlioz' son set out on his apprentice voyage to the West Indies. The father was on tenterhooks until he received his first letter, from Haiti. It had taken fifty-three days, and thus began for Berlioz' overapprehensive nature a fresh source of torment. The letter reported good health, good spirits, and also the death of a friend in the new world, to whom Berlioz had recommended his son. This led Berlioz to review the losses by death which he had suffered for three years past, besides his father and sister: Balzac and Chopin, Mendelssohn and Spontini, Frédéric Soulié and numerous foreign musicians or patrons of music for whom Berlioz felt regard and gratitude — Alfred Becher and Count Batthiany, both shot, in Austria and in Hungary respectively; Prince Lichnowski, mobbed by peasants; and the oldest friend and patron of all, Augustin de Pons (he had lent the money for Berlioz' Mass of 1825) who being destitute had taken poison.60 Louis's return to France in the spring of 1851 dissipated some of Berlioz' gloom. The boy looked grown up and well, and both were pleased, for Louis had made the flattering discovery at Haiti and other ports of call that he was the son of a famous man on whose account he himself was readily invited. On his side the father found in his boy signs of maturing intelligence and responsibility. The second apprentice cruise would still have to be paid for, but after that the young sailor could support himself. 49

M.E.,

298-9.

M.E., 30J. Berlioz had tried to help the once wealthy De Pons by inserting notices of his musical qualifications in the Débats. 50

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Berlioz

Together they went to see Harriet who still lived in the house at Montmartre where Louis had been born. She could sit in the garden, see her boy during his shore leave and her husband when he had a free hour between rehearsals. T h e climb up the hill to her house was easier now that steps had been built and Berlioz came often, for she needed attentions that only he could interpret to her nurses: she spoke even less French than before, virtually none at all, and enunciated very imperfectly. During this period also Berlioz succeeded his good friend Bottée de Toulmon as Chief Librarian of the Conservatoire. This brought a slight increase in salary and an opportunity to add to the teaching resources of the library by creating a collection of instruments. A f e w weeks later, the Minister of Commerce appointed Berlioz to the jury which was to judge musical instruments at the forthcoming London Exhibition of 1851. Though this was everywhere hailed as a great honor, Berlioz foresaw the delicacy of the task ahead: " I am very much afraid . . . that there will be . . . a stormy contest between the instrument makers of Paris and those of Berlin. All are friends of mine and I shall be caught between hammer and anvil. But I am resolved to be a Minos worthy of such assizes and not to render Injustice. T h e Lord knows (or rather I wager that He does not yet know) where I shall find lodgings. . . . The Minister . . . cannot say whether the English management has kept a kennel for us in the Crystal Palace or elsewhere . . . But then the Minister is very young — only four days old." 81 A trip to England at this juncture of the Philharmonic's affairs was most opportune. Berlioz could leave the Society with honor instead of sinking with it, dragged down in part by the desire of some to make it pay at all costs." Berlioz' English friends expressed delight at the news of his mission and at the prospect of seeing him again, for as the Illustrated London Neivs had said, he was "an excellent classical scholar, a choice wit, and full of fine enthusiasm." 53 There were, in addition more than casual 51

M.E., 319-20. There is extant the draft of a note to Brandus, the music publisher, which shows to what unpleasantness the Society and its Director were exposed. After saying that the mere thought of Brandus's proposal (whatever it was) gave him nausea, Berlioz writes: " I will never consent to accept for the artists whom I direct what I would not accept for myself if the business regarded me alone. There is far less evil in material loss than in the confusion brought into the musical world and the public mind by turning a serious undertaking into a fashionable vulgarity; and it would be a libel on our players to imagine their feelings different from mine. If the thing comes up again, say that you did not dare to propose it to me. Ever yours . . ." (M.E., 323-4 and n.) 52

53

J " , 9°·

T e Deum

561

hints that a great musical project might be set on foot if he were in London to lead it: the score of the Te Deum was ready for performance if some great occasion, musical and national, should call for an original work.

Te Deum, Space and Counterpoint I write three lines to tell you that the Te Deum was performed today with magnificent precision. It was colossal, Babylonian,

Ninivite . . . yes, the Requiem has a twin . . . What a pity I am the author of it all. I could write a curious article about it. . . . This time it isn't a matter

of piccoli paesi, but of a scene from the

Apocalypse.

to Liszt on first hearing the work (1855)

— BERLIOZ

Conceiving music for occasions set in the midst of life, the young Berlioz had, on his return from Italy, imagined Bonaparte's victorious army poised on the crest of the divide, looking back downward upon the Italian plain in a farewell to its dead, and again downward as it crossed home soil to reach the capital and the celebration of its triumphs.1 Such was the "stage" imagined in 1832. As the traveler's impressions receded, the scheme changed to the more general celebration of all France's great men, and out of this came the Funeral and Triumphal symphony of 184ο.2 This left unused a number of ideas which in the ensuing nine years gathered to themselves fresh associations. We glimpse this fact through coincidences that Berlioz himself was probably unaware of, though their purport is confirmed by the score. The Te Deum is religious and military in a mood predominantly sober and meditative. It consists of seven choral numbers arranged as follows: an opening song of praise, the Te Deum properly so called, whose theme recurs as a leitmotif; the Hymn Tibi omnes; a Prayer (Dignare) which is introduced by a brief orchestral 1 Musical Notebook quoted in 308, 1906, 362. Berlioz had written a free verse stanza for one of the movements. 2 Written for the heroes of July, it will be remembered, but in the year of Napoleon's translation from St. Helena.

562 prelude of military character; prayer (Te ergo quaesumus)·, Judgment Day. For military there is a concluding March

Berlioz the Christe, rex gloriae; a second, individual then the Judex crederti — another vision of occasions only (and for orchestra alone) for the Presentation of the Colors.

This plan shows a significance beyond the Napoleonic; it links the Te Devm with the Requiem of 1837 and w e shall find that certain of the musical ideas go back as far as the Mass of 1825. Meantime, Berlioz had composed the Dead March for Hamlet — another military scene s — and had been led b y the revision of his Death of Ophelia and Méditation religieuse to the kindred atmospheres of death and prayer. Contemporary events, as w e saw, reinforced this complex of warlike, funereal, and doomsday feelings. If w e turn to the music w e discover a veritable netw o r k of associations w o r t h y of a study in the manner of John Livingston Lowes's Road to Xanadu or Newman's Unconscious Beethoven. T o point out the most obvious, the Hamlet March has a clear affinity with the first movement of the Funeral symphony, seeming a condensed and more intimate rendering of the same conception; and the military march which concludes the Te Deum bears a resemblance to the Apotheosis of the same earlier symphony, again more concise and more subtle. It is as if the years 1848-1849, during which Berlioz' affections were so often and so violently wrenched b y death, had reduced to quintessence ideas long held latent on these eternal woes. 4 T h e t w o pairs of parallels thus appear as first and second studies of familiar subjects. 5 A s for the continuity of Berlioz' religious thought, it is attested in the Te Deum b y the scale and dramatic form of the work, which is clearly designed to make it a companion piece to the Requiem. T h e r e are other links: the repetition of the same chant on the words Pieni sunt coeli in each score is undoubtedly purposeful; again in the Christe, rex of the later w o r k occurs a melody from the early Resurrexit which supplied 3 Berlioz prefixed to the score the words from Shakespeare which had first suggested a musical situation: " 'Let four captains bear Hamlet, like a soldier to the stage; . . . and, for his passage, The soldiers' music and the rites of war . . .' "; concluding with: " 'Go, bid the soldiers shoot.' A dead march . . ." * In the Hamlet March the instrumental use of the voices, labeled simply "Women and Men," and vocalizing a series of "Ah's" at intervals, is as original as it is moving. A t the end of the March, "after a terrific triple forte effect, there is a dead silence; then a long, deep, sustained note; then occur about twenty bars of the most hopelessly despairing music I have ever heard, and then the drums take up their dreadful figure, and so the whole march winds to a close." (Christopher Wilson in Shakespeare and Music, quoted in 310, 140.) Mr. Wilson can hear the despairing passage again, somewhat weakened, in the close Grieg gave to "Asa's Death" in his Peer Gynt suite. 5 Cf. Delacroix's Medea in 1838 and 1850.

Te Deum

563

parts of the Requiem. Finally, both Requiem and Te Deum, though relatively short, are "monumental" music designed to fill a cathedral vault; their conception is spatial as well as auditory,* which accounts for their uncommon requirements. For the Te Deum, Berlioz wants some hundred strings with the usual winds in proportion, two choruses of one hundred singers each, plus a third of six hundred choir boys.T But instead of the additional brass groups found in the Requiem, Berlioz here uses the organ as an antiphonal voice, never adjoining it to the orchestra but letting "Pope and Emperor" (as he said) dialogue from opposite ends of the nave.* In each of these twin religious works, our sense of scale is skillfully awakened and kept on the stretch by varying the distribution of forces (one number in each — the Sanctus and Te ergo respectively — is scored for tenor solo) as well as by contrasting the dynamics of successive sections, sometimes within a movement, at other times between a consecutive pair. Finally, in the Judex crederti, one of Berlioz* most powerful "monotonies," relieved by marvelous and hair-raising modulations, he combined the insistent effect he had obtained in the Requiem's limpid Offertory and the strenuous effect of the Lacrymosa. Throughout the later score, repeats or echoes of the solemn opening theme makes its solemnity prevail and give it a more pervasive unity than that of the RequiemAs for β

It will be remembered that in the Requiem the brass choirs are placed at the four corners of the orchestra (not the hall) to make the point of origin of sound act as a musical element. An interesting parallel, one century later, is provided by Egon Wellesz's definition of what he called the New Instrumentation in the 1920's: "The monumental style is like the new architecture — a projection out of space into Time, with a clear and distinct treatment of lines (Linienführung)" He goes on to find this "new classicism" in Busoni, upon whom, as we know, Berlioz' influence was great, (913, 13.) 7 Yet as Berlioz points out in a letter to Liszt, the composition of the orchestra is quite normal, only the voices are numerous, whence by reductions proportioned to a minimum of one hundred and thirty good voices, the work can be readily and adequately performed. (¿07, II, 37.) *In the Treatise, Berlioz had argued the inadvisability of ever uniting the sonorities of orchestra and organ. Other theorists and practitioners, such as Saint-Saëns and Vincent d'Indy, agree with him; though the remark has roused the ire of certain organists who display more heat than light in discussing the question. The distinguished performer, Mr. E. Power Biggs, for instance, curiously suggests that "it is just as well Berlioz was of this opinion, for any organ composition of his would have been pretty frightful." (76$, 221.) 9 The affinity of this theme both with plain song and with the contour of popular melodies such as those of the fifteenth-century masters (e.g., Dufay) has been remarked upon. The handling of the polyphony and piagai harmony in the Prelude again suggests Jannequin and the old French masters, whose revival came only twenty years after Berlioz wrote. The rhythmic subdeties, to be sure, are modern, but the archaism iust noted is intentionally carried out

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Berlioz

coherence, it is achieved in the Te Devm, as always in Berlioz, through fine adjustments between the close and the beginning of successive numbers. The whole work could be played with only two breaks. The "emotional schedule" is likewise fashioned for balance. The first hymn (Te Deunt) is a double fugue expressing the religious (and Romantic) contrast between man's wretchedness and God's infinite mercy. J o y and trembling alternate in many shades, until uncertainty is swept away in a resolving modulation which brings us to the second hymn, introduced by the organ. T h e children sing a Sanctus to the Lord in which the other voices soon join to proclaim the majesty and goodness of the Almighty. T h e orchestra closes on a return to the organ melody and prepares us for the "military" Prelude — a march in the ancient style, based on the Te Devm theme. " A miracle of genius" — says M. Boschot, whom it is a pleasure to quote in a moment of admiration — "this orchestral episode is not sixty measures long; it does not take three minutes to play; yet it suggests multiple visions, it evokes a throng of sentiments. One is tempted, in speaking of it, to compare it to some of those brief scenes in Shakespeare whose work so profoundly affected Berlioz." 10 The Dignare is a gentle prayer composed of long interlacing melodic lines, with the organ weaving in its quietest tones. Indeed throughout the work the organ is used with extreme moderation, both in amount of time and in the pulling of stops: flutes, trumpets, and Grand jeu are its usual limits, the Bombardes being reserved for the climax. The Christe, rex gloriae corresponds to the Rex tremendae majestatis of the Requiem and is the only movement which may be said greatly to surpass its prototype. In both, Berlioz was attempting the very perilous expression of "pomp and circumstance." If awe in the presence of the Almighty and his hosts is reserved for another moment, and the present feeling is only wonder and amaze, there must be in the music a mingling of spontaneous rejoicing with loud huzzas, and no striking of the deeper strains of adoration, since the praise is exclusively of surface and of show. In the Requiem, in the orchestration of both the "military" sections. It is as if we heard Berlioz' childhood memories of the First Empire, when the old bands still kept to

their ancien régime repertory.

10 26g, 219. W e are indebted for the preservation of this Prelude to the reverent spirit of the Russian Five, and particularly to Balakirev, who completed the German edition from the manuscript that Berlioz had presented to the St. Petersburg Library in 1862. In the French edition, Berlioz had discarded the Prelude because of modulations which his musical intimates found "suspect." (See letter to Liszt, 20J, II, 17.) T o our modern ears they sound unexceptionably fresh.

Te Deum

5

A b d o m i n a l pain gripped him so hard and so relentlessly

that he had to spend w h o l e days in bed, and he came to think that he m i g h t not live to finish his work. 5 3 N o r did he lack mental afflictions. L o u i s w a s still making himself a burden b y his free spending and his disinclination to g o o n w i t h any career. Nevertheless, b y January 1857 the first act of Les Troyens

was virtually

completed. In consequence, after fifteen years of straightforward enmity, Berlioz must once again be c o n c e r n e d w i t h an institution he despised: he w o u l d soon have a score designed f o r the stage, and the Opera's was the o n l y large stage available. B u t w h i l e he was rejuvenated b y

creation54

the Imperial theater was supersenile: it could not or w o u l d not even give William

Tell entire; and access to the ministerial controls was even more

52 pi, 461. Mérimée speaks of a similar prescription of "ether pearls" given him for the same purpose, as an antispasmodic. (218, II, 154.) ' 3 It inay be convenient to review the course of Berlioz' health. He started with a sound constitution, of the type called in his day "nervous" or "asthenic." Before the Italian journey, his father and other doctors recommended that he avoid stimulants (tea and coffee), heat, and overwork. W h e n Berlioz was ill it was with sore throat and fever, often as a result of worry and disappointment. By 1845, gastric pains became added symptoms of strain. Gastralgia was then the tautological name for what may have been anything from ulcers to cancer (see V i g n y and Delacroix, passim). Berlioz found in any case that diet had no effect on his condition, to which no clearer name has since been applied. Posthumous diagnoses by literary doctors have been numerous but they reflect musical superstitions rather than medical science. T h e best is perhaps Singer's (881, 35, 55, 71, 90, 92). Dr. Gould of Philadelphia diagnosed astigmatism, (Biographical Clinics, IV) as he did for every other ninetecnth-century notable; and the rest safely dabble in secondhand psychiatrics. (E.g., 34s.) 64 "I am aquiver from head to foot and from heart to brain with impatience, pain, enthusiasm, and superabundance of life . . . I cannot write my score fast enough. It requires a huge, a disastrous amount of time." ( T o Adèle: 9h 460.)

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remote than in the days of good King Louis-Philippe. Only, Napoleon's manners were better, and he took care to send Berlioz a medal for his part in making the Exhibition of 1855 a success. Despite the prospect of never hearing his Troyens live in sound, Berlioz worked on. Music was pouring out of him for several scenes at one time, out of sequence, the while he steadily furbished up the lines, withdrawing foolish concessions to current taste 55 and nourishing himself on Virgil and Shakespeare. "I am quite transported by some words of old Nestor in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida. I have just reread this amazing parody of the Iliad, where none the less Shakespeare makes Hector even greater than Homer did. Nestor says that Hector raising his sword aloft to spare the trembling Greeks as he sped through battle in his chariot made him think: Lo, Jupiter is yonder, dealing life! ** What a painting that would make! . . . God in heaven but it's beautiful. . . . I feel my heart will burst when I come across lines like that. . . ." " Each scene would be composed in the rough within a space of two or three days and then instrumented and polished during as many weeks. Being ill gave Berlioz an excuse not to be sociable, though his duties as critic brought on the periodic "calamity" of having to go to the Opera. The Italian Theater meanwhile teased him with hints that they might put on Benvenuto Cellini. Was it to purchase his good-will? In the houses of friends where he felt at home, there was always the danger of being involved in artistic discussions which just then Berlioz was not in the mood for. Thus at Mme. Viardot's (Pauline Garcia) he ran into Delacroix, old, nervous, and ailing like himself, and the two masters of Romanticism, differing on pinpoints, would end by annoying each other.88 Yet when the next Institute vacancy occurred among the painters, Berlioz urged Delacroix's election. It took place on January 10, 1857, at the ninth attempt. So few were left who had understood the message of the century in the thirties and persevered in giving it form! The neoclassical reaction was in full swing, aided by the vague political drift which likened Caesar and 55

A n excellent example of how a great mind can fall lower than a common man of "taste" — and can recover itself — is given in a note to the Princess: " I t struck me that Dido's dying allusion to the future supremacy of France in N o r t h A f r i c a was a piece of puerile chauvinism and that it was far more decent and dignified to keep Virgil's idea [the prophecy of Hannibal's descent on R o m e ] . " (S.W., 42.) M A c t I V , Sc. V , 191. 57 S . W . , 35-6. 118 182, II, 4 1 3 .

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Berlioz

Napoleon the First with the present incumbent. The narcotic playwright Ponsard was winning a reputation for depth and originality by lectures proving that Shakespeare lacked artistry. "Noodle!" exclaims Berlioz in his correspondence, "overripe cucumber! " 59 Music was still streaming "in floods." He timed the first act and found it ran one hour and ten minutes. This meant that "all the rest must be as compact as possible to keep the whole within reasonable proportions." 80 He would invite certain of his instrumentist friends and have them play some of the "solos" (i.e., outstanding melodic parts) while he accompanied them sketchily on the piano. "The Opera clarinetist (Leroy) is a first-rate virtuoso, but cold . . . My piano was a little low, so our two instruments were not in tune, the virtuoso phrased 'only approximately,' finding it very pretty — which made me devilishly mad. . . . What a torture approximation is in musical performance! Yet I think the young man will end by understanding his solo if I make him study it bar bybar. . . . " 8 1 This was the sublime scene without speech in Act I, where Andromache leading her orphaned son walks past the Trojan women to pray at the altar and receive Priam's blessing. Was it a good omen for such conceptions that the Parisians had taken a sudden liking for Weber, whose O ber on was filling the Théâtre Lyrique? 82 On first being told of the projected production, Berlioz had echoed Rossini's famous, "What? All of it?" and wound up thinking "Poor Weber!" But he had lent a hand at the rehearsals, and it now seemed that "the burghers are actually amazed to find they like this music which, although far from perfectly executed, is nevertheless better done than it would be at the Opéra-Comique and much better than at the Opera." 63 The old question whether the public likes what it gets or gets what it likes could be debated apropos of this musical surprise and Berlioz would have to make up his mind about it before venturing his Troy ens. He inclined to the view that the public was more often corrupted than corrupting.84 The love music which fills the fourth act was now complete and instrumented. The pillars of the edifice being in sight, the masses and proportions could be inferred. At a dinner given by Prince Jerome for Academicians, Berlioz had the pleasure of seeing his dear friend Vigny "S.W., 44. o° S.W., 46. «S.W., 47. "Directed by Léon Carvalho (né Carvaille) 1825-1897, of whom we shall hear again. 63 S.W., 51. "Mem., II, 226; Soirées (9th and 10th, passim)·, 93 and L.I., passim.

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again — for the last time — and of meeting Disraeli." A few weeks later at the Tuileries, he was presented to the Empress who charmed him by her classical knowledge (Mérimée had been her tutor) and by her great beauty. Berlioz spoke to her of his work and was graciously told he might read his poem to her.8· Nothing came of this purely imperial promise, but the idea remained with Berlioz of creating interest in his work by reading the poem. Moreover the experience of The Infant Christ had taught him the importance of prepared minds. He gave two readings of Les Troy ens — at the Bertins' and at his own house — which considerably impressed the listeners. This was in March 1857. The next month he conducted a concert for his favorite protégé, the composer and pianist Theodore Ritter — the son of Berlioz' friend Bennet. Berlioz admired the young man's musicianship, he was forming his taste, and he enjoyed in his company something like a father-and-son relation of the kind that poor Louis could not help denying him.87 Ritter showed his gratitude by making the piano reduction of Romeo and. Juliet — the best so far (according to Berlioz) of all the arrangements he so disliked. Paris was now as full of musicians as of writers and painters.88 A few 65

T o his nieces, Adèle's daughters, he writes that having five decorations to wear — two more than any other member of the Institute — his chest "resembles a hardware store" and makes a noise "like crockery in a high wind." (91, 462 and 472.) 66 "Heavens, but she is beautiful! If I had a Dido like her, my drama would be ruined: the pit would throw eggs at Aeneas for thinking even one minute of abandoning her." (S.W., 56.) 67 The boy was just seventeen. It was of him that Ernest Reyer said: "Berlioz never took pupils but the two of us consider ourselves his disciples." (çi, 454.) One may see the progress of Berlioz' affection for Theodore in the letters, beginning in April 1855 (Corresp224 and 230). For Ritter's talents see Débats (1856) passim and note Guizot's statement in 1862 that Ritter was "the great pianist of the day." (194a, 384.) A few years earlier, Berlioz had written to the youth: "My dear, very dear Theodore — Remember January 12, 1856. That is the day on which you began the study of great dramatic music and its marvels, the day you approached the sublime conceptions of Gluck. As for me, I shall never forget that your artistic instinct recognized at once and fervently adored his genius which was new to you. Yes, you may be assured in spite of all the half-passionate and half-learned critics that . . . there are two superior deities in our art: Beethoven and Gluck . . . and though the first is far above the other as a musician, there is so much of the one in the other that these two Jupiters make but one god. . . ." (Corresp., 233-4.) os See the first two chapters of Balzac's Cousin Pons, published in 1847 but dating back to 1844, in which the novelist generalizes about these conditions of musical and artistic life.

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years before, Zimmerman, who had retired from the concert platform, told Berlioz, "It is frightful! Everybody plays the piano nowadays, and plays it very well"; to which the composer had replied, "Yes, only the two of us are left who dorít play." " Now one could find as many as eight recitalists all striking their first chord simultaneously before as many audiences. In one of his reviews Berlioz gathers the names of one hundred and sixtythree performers who had just given or were on the point of giving recitals. One hundred and fifty he could arrange in riming couplets: the other thirteen had neither rime nor reason. It would soon be necessary to pass ordinances: " N o concerts given here," or "Commit no music on these premises." 70 Paris was as far as ever from Euphonia. "Nothing," he wrote to Morel on the subject now much in his thoughts, "will keep the public from going to the Opera — whence a complacent carelessness on the part of the management which is beyond belief. . . . You should hear the music that is occasionally played at Court. And now here is the poor King of Prussia who has lost his mind; I do not know whether his brother shares his feeling for art. The small German courts where music is really prized are not very wealthy, and Russia (like England) is monopolized by the Italians. There remains Queen Pomaré, but Tahiti is rather far away." 71 Berlioz had thought of giving the Damnation of Faust, "which is unknown in Paris," but he could find neither hall nor singers. Moreover Pasdeloup's expanding orchestra raided whatever instrumental talents might be momentarily unused.7- Berlioz could have gone to Sweden, from which an offer came, but he preferred to keep M.C., 6j-6. (April 7, 18J3.) Zimmerman died in October of that year. 1386, June 2, 1856. 71 Corresp., 250-1. The allusion is to the extravaganza Berlioz had written, ostensibly as a letter to the Tahitian Queen, after the Exhibition of 1855. It shows his curious knowledge of the South Sea islands and the native terminology, doubtless culled from a favorite book of travels. (Reprinted in Grot., 60-4.) Berlioz also wrote as a jeu d'esprit the words and music of a Salut Matinal in the "native tongue and music." This amusing album leaf was first sold to a South American amateur and is now in a private collection in Philadelphia. (28;, 221 n.) 72 Jules Pasdeloup (1819-1887) had been a drummer in Berlioz' Philharmonique and seeing both the merits and the defect of that enterprise, had begun his own by soliciting financial backing. He was thus able to put Seghers's Sainte-Cécile out of business and to remain the sole orchestra leader in Paris, despite his very inferior ability. He played chiefly the German classics (until 1870) and defended his interpretations by striking his chest and saying that a man who felt music as deeply as he did could not be wrong. Saint-Saëns ascribes Pasdeloup's success to the blurring acoustics of the Cirque d'Hiver and the lack of competition until Colonne came in the late seventies. 68

70

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working at his score. One event that gave him pleasure at the end of this season at the Institute was the award of the Rome Prize to a promising youth named Georges Bizet. It was now midsummer and the Baden concerts loomed. Berlioz and his wife went first to Plombières, and since the Emperor was not among the visitors, the town was quiet, propitious for country rambles and steady composing.™ After a month, the Festival brought him again into the freehanded, regal atmosphere of Bénazet's realm, where his old friends the musicians of Carlsruhe, and his German admirers — Princess Stephanie of Prussia, the Duchess of Baden, Countess Kalergi, and others — made him feel he had a place in their affections. This time they heard and applauded no less than five of his works, including the Judex crederti from the Te Deum. Between early September, when Berlioz returned to Paris and the end of November, the third act was composed, but in a growing musical isolation for its author. The Second Empire's honeymoon with art was over. Like other new regimes it had shown a few years' excited awareness, followed by a relapse which seems to say: "Whew! We've done our duty." u Berlioz' old friend d'Ortigue was now almost exclusively interested in his studies of plainsong, and shortly Liszt would also appear in Paris as the herald of an orthodox religious withdrawal from the world. Carvalho's Théâtre Lyrique had followed up Oberon with Euryanthe, which had fallen utterly flat, for reasons Berlioz could understand: "I don't believe that any one ever put on the stage comparable nonsense. It must be difficult to be so stupid. We all agree in praising the music . . ." Yet the failure made Berlioz "sad all over." 73 This feeling must have been aggravated by the rise of the Wagnerian crusade — an obvious answer to the prevailing platitude of Parisian offerings, but based on the principle of omne ignotum pro magnifico. Those who preached the new gospel knew at most the one opera produced in 73

Delacroix was there too, very ill also, but no record exists of their meeting which, given the size of the town, must have occurred. 74 Delacroix's biographer: "Within the Institute itself he remained as isolated as before; he was deliberately held at a distance and he suffered from it." (181, III, v.) T h e painter's own words are: "In making me an academician, they did not mean to make me a teacher at the School [Beaux-Arts], for this would spell danger in the eyes of our learned colleagues." (Ibid., 369.) A s for Rude, who had died in 1855, he had not even been admitted to the Institute, though encouraged by its members to stand so they could blackball him. (112η.) 75

Corresp., 245.

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Weimar — Tannhäuser — and unrevised at that. But the converts, who naturally included the best and liveliest minds, were full of doctrine and spoke with confidence of a new score "which would be still more stunning." Even the rumors uttered by Wagner's enemies helped, for thev roused men like Gautier, Reyer, and a little later Baudelaire, to defend with indignation the beauty and power of the fragments they knew. Gautier was asking for a "solemn test" of Tannhäuser at the Opera. This might prove either good or bad for Les Troy ens, but the proposal hardly respected the claim to the French public's attention that Berlioz had the right to exercise before anyone else. This unwitting injustice was at bottom due to cultural politics rather than to musical feeling. T o these half-informed devotees, Wagner was the dark horse who stood a better chance than the war-worn Berlioz to vindicate art against Philistinism.7" Besides, Wagner's campaign literature was more abundant, mysterious, and solemn. He was beginning to acquire the status of a national artist, interpreting the deep Germanic soul to the world — a close parallel to the Italians' conquest of French opera in the eighteenth century. Berlioz had already witnessed a recurrence of Italianism in the 1820's and had next endured Meyerbeer's monopoly. Having suffered a great deal from blind attack, he was by no means against seeing justice done to Wagner's works. He himself was eager to hear them. But Wagner's admirers were bent on creating still another monopoly, exclusive and doctrinaire, and on making Berlioz admit that in music as in industry the latest was the best. T o the Princess, he replied very philosophically about being pushed against his will (he might have added, 78

T h e men of letters took the lead: N e r v a l published his Souvenirs de 'Lohengrin,' Gautier his report of a pilgrimage to G e r m a n y where W a g n e r was the new unknown. W i t h i n a f e w years, groups were formed even in the provinces to discuss the new art in abstracto. Baudelaire's letter to W a g n e r after his first Paris concerts is typical of the mood the Zeitgeist induced: " Y o u are not the first man, sir, about w h o m I have had occasion to be pained and to blush for m y country. Finally, indignation prompted me to express m y gratitude to you; I said to myself: Ί want to single myself out from all these imbeciles. . . .' Y o u w o n me over immediately. W h a t I experienced is not to be described but if you are so good as not to laugh, I shall try to put it into words. First, it seemed to me that I already knew this music. Later on, thinking over it, I understood the cause of this mirage: it seemed then that this music was mine. . . . T o anyone but an intelligent man this would be a profoundly ridiculous remark, especially when said b y one who, like me, knows nothing about music. . . . I had begun to write a f e w meditations on the excerpts f r o m Tannhäuser and Lohengrin but I saw the impossibilitv of saying everything. A n d so I could go on forever . . . From the day I heard you, I tell myself, in bad moments, 'if I could only hear a little W a g n e r tonight.' T h e r e must be others like me. . . ." (Feb. 17, i860; 1401, N o v . 1922, 2 - 4 . )

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against chronological f a c t ) " into the conservative position: ". . . it is so easy to abstain from certain discussions and there are so many other points on which I have the good fortune to agree with you that I hope in future not to be drawn into such sanguinary debates." 78 T h e great work went on. "I go at it with a concentrated passion which seems to increase as I satisfy it." But it took a heavy physical toll requiring systematic rest. This did not keep Berlioz from assisting in the establishment of a Beethoven Music School — a private venture begun by the singer Louis Paulin, who tried to put into effect two new ideas: he asked Berlioz to teach Instrumentation; and in the manner of a modern collegiate music department he planned to have the students give a fortnightly concert free to the parents and friends of the school. In the end, Berlioz could not spare the time for the course, but he helped defend the new enterprise against the attacks of the monopolistic Conservatoire. The question of teaching carried Berlioz back many years, just at a time when his Brussels friend Samuel was complaining of the difficulties inherent in earning a living while doing "one's own work." Berlioz tried to cheer him by matching woes. "You give lessons; we receive them here, from every Tom, Dick, and Harry. . . . I should have answered you at once, but I was feverishly gripped by an impassioned scene in m y fifth act, which I really could not tear myself from. I finished it this morning and I breathe a little easier. "I wonder what I am about to undergo in the way of burning regrets and vexations when I have completed this huge musical and dramatic construction. The time is near. In two months it will be all done. Where shall I then find the theatrical manager, conductor, and singers that I need? 79 The new opera will lie there like Robinson Crusoe's canoe until the sea comes up to set it afloat — if there is such a thing as the sea for works of this nature. I am beginning to think that the sea is only a dream of shipbuilders." 80 In January 1858, Berlioz' disease held him bedridden.81 Liszt, he heard, 77 This fact being that Lohengrin and Tannhäuser, though new to Paris, were by this time nine and twelve years old respectively. Hence Liszt's symphonic poems and three works of Berlioz, were newer and "technologically" more up to date. 78 S.W., 59-60. 79 In the French theaters of Berlioz' day the composer, was not allowed to conduct his own scores. 80

93,

*5°·

Six months before he had told Adèle, who also suffered from neuralgia, that he was "really discouraged" by his ailment, "not because it is dangerous but because it torments me." (91, 749.) 81

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had again been ill. Meanwhile W a g n e r had come to Paris and had called. T h e object of his visit was to find an opening f o r any one of his operas at some official theater. H e and Berlioz agreed to meet again at Emile Ollivier's, the present Minister of Justice, w h o had just married Liszt's daughter Blandine (Cosima's elder sister) and was thus Wagner's patron in Paris. Berlioz returned Wagner's call, but their London entente was not easily resumed. Shortly after, Berlioz again read his poem before a cultivated gathering at the house of his fellow-academician, the architect Hittorf. 8 2 T h o u g h the result was not intended, such a reading could only set Berlioz and W a g n e r as runners in a race to reach the first vacant stage. Prince Jerome, always friendly to Berlioz, declared the Opera hopeless, impregnable." Meanwhile Liszt and his other son-in-law, Hans von Bülow, were doing all they could to take Berlioz into camp b y writing him long letters, putting excerpts from his works on their programs in G e r m a n y and thus trying to assign him his role as elder statesman in the Wagnerian movement. " T h e y o u n g man," wrote Berlioz to his son about Biilow, "is one of the most fervent disciples of the extravagant school k n o w n in G e r m a n y as the music of the future. T h e y will not give up their determination that I should be at their head as standard bearer. I say nothing, write nothing, and let them have their w a y . Sensible people will k n o w what to make of it all." M T h e r e is little doubt that if Berlioz had accepted this part of John the Baptist which the vounger men thrust upon him, he would not have been cast into the semi-obscurity of his last and immediately posthumous years. But he would also have been purchasing a position at the price of lost integrity. Besides, he was not an elder statesman or titular chief but an originator still, with energy f o r several bouts to come. Perhaps the y o u n g Wagnerians took it as a counteroffensive when Berlioz helped another German musician, H e n r y Litolff, to give concerts in Paris. T h e truth is that Berlioz sincerely admired Litolff's music, which was somewhat influenced b y his own; and that L i t o l f f , though opposing W a g n e r , was an old friend of Liszt's. H e was also a music publisher in Brunswick w h o on Berlioz' journeys there had been affable and helpful. Berlioz was paying 82 Jacques Hittorf[f] (1792-1867) was a good classical scholar and archeologist, who had helped to establish the fact of polychrome architecture among the ancient Greeks (1830). 83 For the first time in three years, a new work was being put on (Halévy's Magicienne) and everybody was buzzing about the great novelty in it, a chess-playing scene — the very epitome of what Berlioz would consider "antimusical." See the score, A c t II, p. 121 where on a rising scale "the chess box M appears" and pp. 124-32 for the game itself. Corresp., 258.

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a debt of gratitude — and most effectively, since the concerts were very successful. Toward the end of the same month (February 1858) all but the final scene of the gigantic Troy ens was finished. Berlioz gave another reading at his house, always noting the effect and the comments of his picked hearers.85 The day before he wrote to Samuel: "I have worked at the poem with extreme patience and will not have to make major changes. W h y should we not have patience? — I was reading yesterday in a Life of Virgil that he took eleven years to write the Aeneid, yet so unfinished did it seem to him that as he lay dying he ordered his heirs to burn it. . . . "I think you will be satisfied with my score. You can easily guess what the scenes of passion, of tenderness, or of nature, whether serene or stormy, must be like; but there are other scenes of which you cannot as yet have any idea . . . It no longer matters to me what happens to the work — if it is produced or not produced. My musical and Virgilian passion has been sated. . . ." Berlioz pushes this philosophic calm to the point where it passes into its negation: "Farewell, dear friend, Patience and Perseverence! I may even add, Indifference: what matters anything?" 8 ® But this skeptical question is itself open to doubt: "You know my Pyrrhonism," he tells the Princess, "I believe in nothing; that is to say I believe that I believe in nothing. Wherefore I believe in something. Just see what words are good for and where logic takes you! Nothing is real but feelings and passions. Another absurdity I am saying! What of pain, and death, and fools . . . and a thousand other too real realities? I wish you would ask Liszt to be good enough to compliment Mme. Milde for me on the way she played Alceste. . . ."87 Pyrrhonism and Perseverance in Berlioz only seemed to cancel each other; as he practiced them they really created fruitful tension while protecting the will with a Stoic's buckler — as in Marcus Aurelius. So we must not misread Berlioz when he stops working and tries to give an account of himself to the Princess. A born letter-writer always adapts his epistle to its reader, and Berlioz being particularly adept at this adjustment, his letters enable us to infer what hers were like.88 Full of extra85

During the whole year past he had taken advice when it seemed fit: " L e g o u v é made f o u r important comments whose aptness I perceived and acted upon." (çi, 467.) A t one of these hearings Baron T a y l o r , onetime manager of the Théâtre Français, said that there was nothing equal to the poem since Quinault's Amiide, which G l u c k had set. 86 87 ! !

93, 2 5°· S. W., jo. T w o are preserved in 2 3 5 , II, 304-7 and 1401, M a y 1930.

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vagant praise, of prying curiosity, and also of mystical moralizing about duties that he understood quite as well as she — though differently — the Princess acted as a dispenser of rather enervating good will. Berlioz appears much more lively and free in his letters to Liszt, Bennet, Louis or Adèle. These and his feuilletons prove that when gastric pain did not pin him to his bed, his energy was unabated. He had been thinking, among other things, of "an exhibition of my whole output in ten concerts" — a project to be undertaken only after the present score was done. Meanwhile he had innumerable offers — to conduct for five months in New York, Philadelphia, and Boston for twenty thousand dollars; to inaugurate a new concert hall in London; to celebrate a royal wedding in Sweden. He must also busy himself about numerous concerts of his works given without him in Vienna and elsewhere, but which required scores, biographical notices, and injunctions to managers. Early in April 1858 he has so much to attend to that every morning he makes a list of tasks and errands and despite steady going never reaches the end by nightfall.89 He was enlisting his people for the Baden Festival at which the first four parts of Romeo were to be given. He was also planning a direct appeal to the Emperor to bespeak his interest in Les Troy ens. The letter asking for an audience and stating the motive was respectful without flattery. The tone was not that of a courtier, but of a proud warrior who has served the state and is conscious of his title of nobility; hence when Berlioz showed the draft to the Comte de Morny, illegitimate half brother of the Emperor, the count found it "rather unsuitable." 90 Another half-recognized genius, meanwhile, had been compelled to leave Paris after a similarly fruitless attempt. Wagner had found that Ollivier's influence was less than sufficient to swing open the doors of the Opera."1 Although a member of the legislature, Ollivier and especially his circle, which included his wife's mother, Comtesse d'Agoult, were considered to be in the opposition, virtually republicans. It looked as if to conquer Paris Wagner must begin the slow way, by concerts such as Berlioz had been giving these thirty years past. And even when the combination of political pull and public concerts made the Opera yield to 89 90

P', 77°·

Mem., II, 374. Berlioz did not let the document go to waste. He printed it in full in the Memoirs (Ibid., and preceding page). Students of comparative history may like to compare it with the text of Prokoviev's letter of submission to his government, reprinted in the pamphlet On Soviet Music (American Russian Institute, Hollywood, 1948). See also 1393, 1948, 209. 91 It was not only from Berlioz that the Emperor at this time wanted an "economical opera." (pi, 767.)

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Tannhäuser, it was to be another defeat, a prelude to the blackest days from which, as Biilow said, only the miracle of King Ludwig's intervention saved the composer "at the eleventh hour." n The composer's lot in nineteenth-century Paris was indeed constant despite surface variations. "You wish to know," Berlioz replied about this time to a would-be biographer, "the causes of the opposition I have encountered in Paris for 25 years. There are many . . . [but] the principal one lies in the antagonism between my musical thought and that of the great majority of the Paris public. A host of people are bound to consider me crazy since I hold them to be children or simpletons. Any music which deviates from the little path where the makers of comic operas trot back and forth is necessarily . . . the music of a lunatic. Beethoven's masterpiece, the Ninth symphony, and his colossal piano sonatas, are still for these people the music of a lunatic. "In the next place I had against me the instructors at the Conservatoire, led by Cherubini and Fétis, whom my heterodoxy in matters of harmony and rhythm had wounded in their self-esteem and shocked in their convictions. . . . One must also add among my opponents the devotees of the sensualist Italian school, whose doctrines I used to attack and whose gods I have blasphemed. . . . Today I am more cautious. I still abhor, as formerly, these works which the crowd proclaims to be masterpieces of dramatic music. . . . Only, I have the strength of mind to say nothing.'"" Berlioz had before this summed up his career in an unpremeditated epigram when, in a scribbled answer to a German inquiry for his vita, he had slipped in: "On my return from Italy I began my Thirty Years' War against the routineers, the professors, and the tone-deaf." " In the spring of 1858 this war seemed to have reached its Peace of Westphalia; he wrote the last bar line of Les Troy ens on April seventh, confident that "Come what may, disappointments or tribulations, nothing can prevent the work from being in existence." M » 1 7 * 186. M

Mem., II, 355-Ó (dated M a y 15, 1858). * * ( i 4 8 . ) T h i s sentence was later paraphrased b y a critic w h o wrote of "Berlioz' life-long fight against the public, the parlor song, and the cost of living." (416, II.) 68 Mem., II, J55.

*32

Berlioz

Berlioz, Poet and Dramatist Whatever its fate, I am perfectly happy to have undertaken and finished it. The thing is solid and great and, despite the apparent complexity of the means, quite simple. — BERLIOZ to the Princess and the

Emperor, 1859)

respectively

( 1858—

Les Troy ens is a monumental score in a different sense from that in which the adjective has hitherto been used in these pages. That is, the work is not designed for a great mass of performers nor for a national ceremony focusing simple emotions. It is monumental in being the longest of Berlioz' dramatic works, the most varied and grandiose in subject matter, as well as the model of the epic style in music drama. Though in his letters to friends Berlioz kept referring to his first or third or fifth act, he was not fashioning an opera as the term was then understood. He hoped indeed that some Opera stage would produce the work. But actually poem and score carried forward the principle of construction first shown in Benvenuto Cellini, the principle which underlies the Damnation of Faust, the Berlioz principle, in short, of choosing musical situations and linking them by the shortest path of recitative. Between larger sections there are no links. The hearer must make the mental jump with the composer. For instance near the end of Act IV in Les Troyens we hear from Aeneas that he is bent on leaving Carthage and has told Dido of his decision. The next scene is a brief and vain imploration on Dido's part. The next shows Dido bidding her sister recall the Trojans. Since we have already witnessed Aeneas's inner conflict, and since we are about to see Dido's despair and death, there is no need to show or talk about the fleet's departure: we are interested solely in its effect. In Les Troyens even more than in Benvenuto, Berlioz took into account the spectator's interest in décor, pageantry, and impersonation. He needed no theory to tell him what was composable, and he kept stagecraft in mind as a test for exclusion — to bar what would be dull or difficult to show, not to include what people were accustomed to seeing.1 The result is a number 1 E.g., his self-searching about the appearance of the shades to Aeneas — doubtless inspired by the scene in Richard III (S.W., 54). W e must remember that in 3 j years' critical attendance at the opera Berlioz had acquired a very

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of striking novelties, an effect of pace achieved by concision and variety, and — for those who cannot hear as well as they can see — some puzzling moments. After a modern production in Great Britain, a critic who is rather less than partial to Berlioz raised doubts about the form as presupposing "that acquaintance with the story which was all but universal among educated people of Berlioz' day but is now considerably rarer." 2 This is to flatter Berlioz' contemporaries; the fault if any, lies in Berlioz' assuming, as was his wont, a flexible imagination working on a background of legend. He had seen this unchanging assumption of his succeed in The Infant Christ. But it is equally true that one need not "know his Virgil" in order to follow Les Troyens. That Troy fell to the Greeks and that Aeneas abandoned Dido is really all the information one requires — provided that operatic habit has not developed in the beholder an unmusical demand for minute particulars of plot. The characteristic involvements of ordinary opera — its absurd wrangling and legal technicalities — are absent from Berlioz' Troyens. For this reason, as the same observer admits, Les Troyens is "not so difficult to follow as are the changing fortunes of the gold in the Ring."3 This is because Les Troyens seeks to impart neither metaphysics nor the details of a legend, but only its psychological and emotional substance: "The great human interest of Les Troyens makes it an opera for others besides musicians — contrary again . . . to received opinions." 4 The work fulfills the intention Berlioz expressed to Samuel: "At least I will have shown what I conceive can be done on an antique subject broadly treated." 5 These facts of conception and construction explain why Berlioz apprehended on music's behalf any return to the "antique recitation of the chorus" in Greek tragedy. He gave no special name to the form by which he meant to improve upon current opera while avoiding the theoretical error of the "artwork of the future." But when seventy years later Stravinsky called his own Oedipus Rex an opera oratorio, musicology came to recognize the long tradition of those who had sought to liberate dramatic precise knowledge of the stage. Besides, he had more than once helped put on Weber, Gluck, and Spontini.

-6S9, M· 3

For an example of operatic legalism in the Ring, take: "Wotan, while striking Hunding dead with a lightning glance, reflects that he has loyally fulfilled his promise to Fricka, which is told us by means of the leitmotif The Treaty, which, it will be remembered, applies to every pact and contract of any kind whatsoever." (834, 380.) 4 5

6S9, 848. 93, *50·

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music from tutelage to Continuity in word or action. Before both Stravinsky and Berlioz, Bach and Handel tended to treat oratorio dramatically like opera, or opera discursively like oratorio. Between Berlioz and Stravinsky the great links are Saint-Saëns's Samson and Delilah, Moussorgsky's Boris, and Busoni's Faust, influenced respectively by Les Troy ens, Cellini and the Damnation of Faust.* Berlioz' lifelong striving to fuse the religious, symphonic, and operatic traditions has been amply shown earlier; that he found the suitable flexible form is becoming more and more obvious, even though certain critics may need a kind of "control experiment" to see it. Thus when L'Etifance du Christ was adapted to the Brussels stage by Kufferath, a reviewer wrote: "Seeing the success of this brilliant performance, one begins to wonder if it does not contain a new formula for the lyric drama; if, instead of presenting us with works that give the continuous development of a dramatic action — so often with unavoidable longueurs — it would not be preferable to show us a few brief tableaux of concentrated musical essence, more or less connected with each other, as M. Debussy in effect has done in 'Pelléas and Mélisande.' " [Italics added.]7 One more witness, this time to the distinctive technique that Berlioz employed in order to give unity to his outwardly discontinuous form, will enable us to follow more critically the contents of Les Troy ens. Coupling that work with the Damnation of Faust after having conducted both, Halm remarks: "Berlioz was also a dramatist in this sense that he knew how to impart to action — here the Trojans' departure — the value of a musical consummation. But I call it his special dramatic gift that the drama comes out of the parts and not out of the plot: the ideal momentum of the whole proceeds from the power of the music, without which the matter of the play does not exist. Berlioz has thus created a genuine music drama, as against a merely sound-matched [vertönten] spectacle, or a merely literary play 'set to music.' " 8 The unity and coherence of Les Troy ens are to be looked for, then, in the music first and next in the "parts," that is in the consistency of the β

Bach, it has been pointed out, differentiates in his Passions not only his protagonists but his mobs, and Handel's oratorios stand "on the dividing line between stage and concert room, concert room and consecrated edifice." (796, 867.) It is worth noting that even before the twentieth-century radio versions of Berlioz' Benvenuto Cellini and Les Troy ens, the second part of the latter "opera" had been given as "oratorio" in an arrangement by E. H. Krebiehl ( N e w York, Chickering Hall, Feb. 26, 1887). 7 8

594, Z67. 570, 100.

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dramatic roles. Three stand out: Aeneas, who has a share in the whole action, Cassandra who dominates the first drama, and Dido who dominates the second. The hero links the two parts, but the second heroine remains after Aeneas's flight, concluding the epic in an individual tragedy that matches the collective tragedy of Troy's downfall. Thematically — aside from more fugitive recalls — the Trojan March leads the listener through the entire score by the dozen allusions to it in varied moods from the tragic to the triumphant. Owing to the ingrained habits of producers and actors, Berlioz in 1863 had to divide his work into two "operas" — The Taking of Troy and The Trojans at Carthage. But however "serialized," whether on successive evenings or before and after the interval of dinner, the work is and remains one.8 The major change of place and the shift of interest from Cassandra to Dido only heighten our sense of the vastness of the action. We are no longer in the theater but witnessing a Mediterranean epic, the two heroines serving to mark a change of place and on two counts averting monotony. Each towers above Aeneas because each chooses death, whereas his fate, though noble, is less than tragic. He can therefore be shown in a kind of secondary role, central but subordinate, and perfect equilibrium results for the ear as well as the mind. So much for the protagonists, only two of whom Berlioz found readyfashioned by Virgil: Cassandra is the composer's creation from the merest hint.10 T o turn Books II and IV of the Aeneid into a pair of consecutive tragedies and maintain the pathos of a people in exile was no less a feat of creation, and it must be examined in detail for any understanding of Berlioz' art at its maturest. The first tragedy grows from the conflict between Cassandra's prophetic fears and the indifference of the Trojans. We hear the Trojan crowd singing their relief at the armistice after ten years of war. While they go on to shout rather vulgarly in C major, and superstitiously avoid the spot where Achilles camped ("It's in Virgil . . . but he didn't turn the Trojan people into a bunch of Gascons" " ) , shepherds pipe a plaintive melody. Cassandra utters her premonitions, her doomed love for Coraebus, and the fate of her city. Tragic self-awareness is the mark of her soul. Coraebus enters, tries to reassure her in an andante whose calm melody sings the peace and beauty of their homeland. Then comes a conventional al9

To use two different singers for the same Aeneas — as was done in one production — is an absurdity which stultifies the conception. 10 Aeneid, III, 183-8. 11 5 . IF., 30. The Gascons are proverbially considered braggarts.

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legro, in which Berlioz chose to use still another modified form of the idée fixe of his first symphony.12 Cassandra begs her lover to flee. He refuses, and they plight their troth resolved to die together. We next see the Trojans assembled to sacrifice to the gods. The national march and hymn that form the chief leitmotif of the score resounds for the first time, sung by priests and people.13 The modulations of the choral phrase — C major, C minor, D flat major, A flat major — all within eight measures, impart to it an austerity which is heightened by the steadily consonant harmony of the parts and the timbre of the trombones. After this we have the lively contrast of the cestus fighters' procession, and immediately again the religious mood, now changed from nation to person and from grandeur to sublimity: it is Andromache's scene and Berlioz' invention. Brief phrases by the chorus usher in the speechless pantomime of the mother and son: Hector's widow, holding Astyanax by the hand, both clad in the white mourning of the ancicnts, lay their offering on the altar; the child is blessed by Priam; she lowers her veil and they walk away. As they accomplish this simple rite, out of the muted orchestra arises that unforgettable, heartrending clarinet melody which Berlioz wanted to hear and rehearse by himself.14 "This scene," he knew, "will be one of the most difficult. . . for it must move the imagination through sound, and the usual operagoer is likely to find it "undramatic" if not disturbing. Not knowing "what to make of it," he concludes that it is a longueur. The producer usually forestalls him and cuts it, for Andromache does not ap pear again, why should she exist at all — a useless super on the payroll? Yet Berlioz' conception, poignantly brief, limns the irrevocable woes of war with greater force and finality than the loudest lament that could be said or sung. Aeneas breaks in with the news of Laocoön's death. The priest and his two sons have perished in the grip of the serpents for having struck with 12 Undoubtedly in the belief that Les Troy ens was to be his last work and as a means of closing the cycle of his melodic thought. 13 T o see how this marching hymn generates the theme of the Marche Troyenne proper, compare in the piano score p. 47 bb. 6-7 and p. 109 bb. 8-9. Berlioz later arranged the March as a concert piece, which must on no account be tacked on to the end of A c t I V as some impresarios like to do. 14 In Lesueur's teachings about ancient Greek music, the significance of "hypocritic pantomime" played a large role, which Berlioz certainly remembered here. Wagner drew his views from elsewhere, so that one historian of the dance was far astray when in speaking of the Wagnerian synthesis he writes: "Some time later Berlioz understood very well the Wagnerian genre of 'hypocritical pantomime' — a strict correspondence between music and the artist's body, where orchestration gives its sound to physical movement." {1094a, 262.)

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a javelin at the wooden horse, which is now ordered brought in. Cassandra's reiterated warning fails on deaf ears; everyone looks upon the occasion as festive. The people's rejoicing, her terror, the aimless excitement of a crowd, its confusion, and the pomp of a processional now mingle in one of Berlioz' superb crescendos. By dividing his orchestra, distributing smaller groups (horns, tubas, trumpets, harps, and voices) backstage or within the wings, and by coordinating their parts with the remaining voices, strings, woodwinds, and brass in a manner not to be foreseen from the initial fragments, Berlioz creates a uniquely powerful finale.15 His sense of the simultaneity of life had not deserted him just because his subject was classical: Cassandra bewails, the people glee, the cortege advances, the Trojan March breaks out in triumphal tones, and the very vibration of life seems to enwrap these mutually independent projections of being.14 These beings move as well as live, while Berlioz adroitly keeps the improbable horse from holding the stage. During Cassandra's passionate declamation, the cortege has steadily crossed over behind her and the crowd, and disappeared to the dwindling strains of the March. The curtain falls on an allegro agitato for orchestra alone, following and reinforcing Cassandra's somber intimation of the presence of death. The drama then leaps forward straight into the heart of prophecy fulfilled. Aeneas, characteristically asleep while Troy burns, as someone has said, tosses fitfully to the sounds of distant fighting. Hostis habet muros: the Greeks are conquering. Strings and woodwinds quiver and moan and are momentarily topped by trumpet calls. Aeneas's son runs past. Suddenly the shade of Hector appears. Menacing horns, drums, and pizzicato basses materialize the ghost. Aeneas wakes. The dead hero instructs the living to escape and to found a new city on Italian soil. Pantheus enters wounded and reports the storming of the palace, the death of Priam. Other warriors come and rush off again to the fight with the cry of despair: "The hope of the vanquished is to give up hope." In a cinematic twinkling we are at the temple of Vesta where the Trojan women are praying. Preceded by her "theme" in the strings, 15

Or rather, he matches, in an entirely different atmosphere the great finale Benvenuto. " T h o s e who know the March only from records, and thus incline to treat it as conventional, can never feel the same after hearing it in its multiple contexts, of which the one described above is the most compelling. A critic writing of the 1921 Paris revival speaks of the "mysterious depths" of the March, which suggest the feeling that "the music itself has become conscious of tragedy." {654, 22J.)

of

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Cassandra appears and in a sublime recitative urges the women to die rather than yield. T h e y sing a chorus built on a scale which Berlioz thought peculiarly suited to render desolation.17 Again subdividing his forces, he manages to express all at once the gloom, cowardice, false hope, and incredulousness of the women, in a masterly ensemble dominated by Cassandra's sudden turns from anger to compassion. As they take the oath of death, "the music seems charged with electricity. It feels as if a thundercloud full of lightning were darkening the scene with an awful shadow." 19 T h e last moments have brought in Greek chieftains who threaten the women and shout for booty. Cassandra stabs herself and with a Berliozian simplicity of phrase hands her dagger to another: "Take it, pain is naught." T h e women stab their breasts or leap off the parapet as the dying Cassandra invokes a resurrected T r o y by calling "Aeneas! Italy!" Thus ends the first tragedy. 19 Its sequel takes us to Carthage, the sole musico-dramatic substance to fill the gap being a short orchestral lamento comparable to the preludes that have become familiar since Wagner and Verdi. Solemn chords going from D minor to F major introduce a broad violin phrase that suggests the hopeless calm of old grief. It is interrupted by long chromatic scales in the strings. A second phrase, related to the first, but in the minor, reminds us of the theme of Cassandra's love scene, but it is saddened by the grim insistence of the bass. T h e lamento ends in solemn broken accents. 20 B y contrast, our first sight of Carthage is one of gladness. T h e people are lauding Queen Dido in a chorus which demonstrates again Berlioz' ability to write noble popular chants. It is the seventh anniversary of the pilgrims' landing as exiles from Tyre, and abundance has rewarded their toil. T h e dialogue between Dido and her people, though it employs the classic form of recitative and air, gives us a grandiose conception of what a nation is; it unfolds the variety within collective feeling, and by means 17 Especially through the harmonies it engenders: the insistent recurrence of the G — D flat suggesting the strangeness of disaster.

">428, 305-6.

10 It is obviously too short to fill a whole evening, and too well contrived not to seem suspensive and unsatisfactory as a drama by itself. Hence the serializing on successive nights is a fatal mistake, even though to an audience familiar with the entire work the playing of this first part in concert form would be quite acceptable. W h e n Les Troy ens à Carthage is given alone, a narrator aided by choral and orchestral effects behind the scenes, recites in a few stanzas the substance of the preceding tragedy. T h e device shows again the kinship of Berlioz' work with dramatic oratorio, and his variation of his own "prologue" scheme in the dramatic symphony.

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of a superb parade of builders, sailors, and farmers, it expresses the dignity of labor. From the lightsome opening through the Tyrian national hymn to Dido's chant récitatif, and finally to the rhythmical and melodic inventions of the workers' praise, there is enough musical substance to outfit three ordinary operas. A charming orchestral prelude of a dozen measures takes us from the nation to the person. Dido, left alone with her sister Anna, confesses to a strange sadness — another form of the vague des passions treated in the Fantastique first movement.21 Dido is lovesick ahead of any tangible cause. It is Anna who puts a name to her feelings. They sing together, on a theme introduced a moment earlier, a "song presaging love." The destined object of that love appears almost at once, or rather, the strains of the Trojan March, keyed to sadness, evoke for us the storm-tossed exiles. Dido recalls her own tribulations in a superb monologue with dissonant accompaniment: "Wandering o'er the seas," and gives the newcomers audience. The boy Ascanius begs hospitality and in a few measures sums up the ruin of Ilion. But at this juncture, news comes of an enemy army threatening Carthage from the south. Aeneas, who has so far hung back, discloses himself appareled in rich armor and offers to lead the troops against the invader. Dido accepts and in another of Berlioz' astonishingly rapid musical asides, confesses to her sister a nascent admiration for the warrior. This most conventionally "dramatic" scene ends with a military finale in which Aeneas's farewell to his son strikes a religious note. For the loves of Dido and Aeneas which form the subject of the next movement, Berlioz followed the same principle as in Romeo and Juliet. A purely symphonic interlude entitled "Royal Hunt and Storm" (by now quite familiar to concert audiences) takes the place of duets and declarations.22 Virgil, of course, had shown the way. Venus causes Dido and her guest to be separated from their retinue by a storm, during which they take shelter in a cave and consummate their union. Berlioz' brief orchestral 21

It may be worth recalling that Chateaubriand's phrase, which helped Berlioz formulate the inspiration of his first symphony, occurs in the same section of the book as the passage on Dido. (1243, II, 265 and 291.) See also I, 199 n. for Chateaubriand's discussion of the Iliad and Aeneid in relation to modern feeling. 22 Recordings 1465-6. In a so-called "revised edition" of the piano score, issued by Berlioz' own publisher after his death, this scene is placed after the scene by the sea which should follow it. This makes nonsense out of both Virgil and Berlioz, as do most of the arrangements by other hands from 1863 to the present. In the several opera "guides," naturally, these aberrations are followed, so that the nomenclature by acts is by now an intricate mess. (E.g.,

I3S 7·)

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piece in two moods attains the acme of perfection and conciseness. It is built on a pastoral theme f o r woodwinds; any imitation of nature it may suggest comes out of ornaments derived from this theme, or from rhythms used in the familiar way, to interrupt a slow calm melody by rapid scales or persistent figures. T h e beautiful horn calls which emerge toward the middle and blend at the close with a return to the original theme lead to "a succession of exquisitely wrought details" which Mr. B. H . Haggin finds "of a startlingly intense loveliness." 23 T h e y prepare us for Berlioz' ampler expression, in the next scene, of love acknowledged and satisfied — Blake's "lineaments of gratified desire." T h e music for this second love scene came "in a flood" as soon as Berlioz had made up his canvas, and it is an unbroken series of masterpieces.24 W e are in the queen's gardens by the sea, at twilight. T h e lovers and their suite are gathered for the royal entertainment but dramatic tension subsists between the principals: how strong and of what sort is the passion which has united them b y accident? A reprise of the Carthaginian hymn introduces Dido, after which the prevailing mood is established: it is amorous and redolent of nature in serenity. T o please Aeneas there are games and dances followed by a pantomime of Nubian slaves. T h e first and third ballets are extraordinary — the first quite casting Salome's Dance into the shade for seductiveness, and the third giving the quintessence (instead of the chemical flavor) of orientalism in music.25 23 1393, Aug. 24, 1946. For staging, Berlioz directs that woodland nymphs and satyrs occupy the time with their classical gambols — or such of them as may be made public. The principals are seen for a brief moment during the storm, and the nymphs and fauns utter cries in concert with the orchestra as the brook swells and branches catch fire. In proof of his suggestion that the direct heir of Gluck is Berlioz and not Wagner, Mr. Alfred Einstein has called this Royal Hunt and Storm "the last descriptive ballet" modeled after Gluck, (pjo, 192-3.) This linkage is not without plausibility, yet it overlooks the significant difference that Berlioz' interlude is neither meant nor fit to be danced — the ballet music is still to come. Rather, this single instance shows what Berlioz could do in the way of using fire, water, caves, and wildlife during an orchestral scene. A t the same time, concert experience shows that this piece of music can stand by itself. As such, it is far closer to Debussy's Afternoon of a Faun than to the ballets of Gluck, with their repeats for dancing. 24 The songs of Narbal and Anna with which this part begins were cut after the première and are still usually omitted. Yet both are musically worthy, and were it not for the impatience of the public to get on with the love story they might well be retained. Artistically, they provide a certain matter-offactness which serves to heighten the enchantment to follow. 28 It makes use of four contraltos to psalmody a couplet in Arabic during the dance. In the Royal Hunt, as before in the Hatnlet March and the Damna-

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Dido then asks for a "country song," which Iopas sings. She interrupts him and asks Aeneas to continue the story of his wanderings. As Aeneas tells the queen that the chaste Andromache has yielded to Pyrrhus, Dido — herself long faithful to her husband's memory — has a magnificent exclamation showing that her last remorse is gone. This leads to the wonderful quintet of which, as Newman truly says, "a man needs to have lived long and to have suffered much to compass a beauty so wistful and so touched with all the humanities." 28 Night has fallen. The voices of the lovers and their kin have been joined by two others to form the equally celebrated septet, which a small chorus hidden in the darkness echoes softly. Here occurs that miracle of subtle and simple orchestration in which the periodic stroke of the bass drum pianissimo joins with a low F in the strings to punctuate the repeated C's of the flutes, clarinets, and horns — also pianissimo.27 As the plangent Mediterranean beats upon the shore, the royal pair are left alone for the duet that follows after a charming orchestral modulation,28 which changes the intensity but not the character of this continuously voluptuous scene. The words of the duet are those that Berlioz "pilfered" and adapted from The Merchant of Venice — "In such a night as this . . . " — the idea having no doubt occurred to him because Shakespeare goes on: "In such a night stood Dido with a willow in her hand upon the wild sea banks. . . . " 2 9 Musically we are at the high point of the scene and of the drama. These pages stand comparison with any love music ever penned. "Once before," to quote Newman again, "in a wonderful passage . . . in Romeo and Juliet, Berlioz had sounded this note of a love so vast that the heart becomes almost still under the pressure of it; but here the note is at once more prolonged and more profound." 80 It is love made to seem infinite tion of Faust, Berlioz' fondness for this form of vocal obligate found wellmotivated occasions. 26 666, (June 19). 27 Harmonically, this pedal, as Koechlin has pointed out, is the one used again so effectively by Ravel in his Habanera. (451, 178. ) 28 From F to G flat major: earlier, the pedal of C (dominant of F ) hinted several times of its rise bv a semitone to D flat, which now becomes the dominant of the new kev. 29 A c t V , Sc. 1, 9^11. 80 666, (June 19). Mr. Newman wrote after the 1921 revival in Paris, which was far from perfect. In Gide's Journal for that year we find an instructive report from his sound and well-trained judgment: "I remembered my rapture of fifteen years ago, . . . when Delna had the role of Dido in Les Troyevs à Carthage, of which the first act has become the third in this hybrid performance. All that is left is conventional, dull, tiresome. (I am not speaking

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b y association w i t h the breadth of the physical universe. T h e feeling — and therefore the musical g e r m — l a y buried f a r back in Berlioz' Italian days w h e n he had w e p t o v e r his V i r g i l and improvised wild chants to his guitar. F i v e years later in the thick of the Paris struggle, he could still relive it as he thought of Liszt's grand passion f o r the Comtesse d ' A g o u l t running its course in the selfsame setting. 31 T h e n f o r t w e n t y years the music of that sea and that imagined love lay dormant, at last to come to life anew, taking the f o r m successively of small black marks on paper, of dominant pedals, and of the w h o l e apparatus of gut and w o o d and brass b y w h i c h miraculously spirit m a y speak to spirit. T h e sudden clangor of a shield struck twice breaks the spell. In a moonbeam an apparition in the shape of M e r c u r y recalls Aeneas to his mission w i t h the name " I t a l y ! " g r a v e l y repeated. Still in darkness, w e n o w have glimpses of the T r o j a n c a m p and the ships at anchor. Sentries pass and repass. A y o u n g sailor, homesick f o r the w o o d s and the folk he has left behind, sings a song of the lulling sea to w h i c h he is destined. " I thought of y o u , dear Louis, in composing it."

32

T h e modal melodv, accompanied

b y a delicate mixture of strings and woodwinds, m i g h t — a s Mr. Capell put it — " b e easily taken f o r G l i n k a or even M o u s s o r g s k y . "

33

T h e b o y falls asleep b e f o r e he ends his plaint but the orchestra prolongs the r h y t h m of the sea. A b o v e it one hears mysterious voices calling " I t a l y ! " T h e T r o j a n captains express superstitious alarm but Aeneas seems not to heed. N e i t h e r do t w o sentries w h o , on a three-beat march instrumented in a w a y to suggest idle contentment, express their distaste f o r further adventure and their satisfaction with the f o o d and the w o m e n of Carthage. T h i s interlude of l o w c o m e d y offends certain connoisseurs of the grand style, "as i f , " said Berlioz, "Don

Giovanni

w e r e not an admirable example

of mixed genres . . . and as if Shakespeare had never written."

34

F r o m this point f o r w a r d , the tragic figures hurtle to their fate. Aeneas of the musical text, but of the execution.) A much too large orchestra covers the insufficient voices. Impossible to feel the slightest emotion. . . ." (1249, II, 267-8.) 31 T o her in 1837 Berlioz unknowingly wrote his mise en scène of 1857: " W h e n you are in Naples and Liszt feels the need of a great emotion . . . let him some evening climb Mount Pausilippo and, from the top of that hill dear to Virgil, let him listen to the infinite arpeggios of the sea, while the sun . . . drops slowly behind Cape Miscno, coloring with its last ravs the pale olive trees of Nisida —there is a concert worthy of you and of him . . ." ( A . R . , 343·) 32

Corresp., 260. 19. 34 Note in the score, and L.I., 248. Berlioz was also interested in the problem of musical form which this dialogue presented. 33

658,

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tells in monologue his decision to leave. His noble, somewhat stiff recitative, accompanied in canonic imitation, modulates and turns into a heartrending andante in which the pain of leaving, and worse, of leave-taking, is unsurpassably rendered. The ensuing allegro di bravura shortly develops into the somber dissonant dialogue which he holds with the shades of Priam, Coraebus, Hector, and Cassandra. The remarkable harmonic expressiveness of this passage was, at the time of composition, absolutely new. The recall of the Trojan March, supported by a chorus of soldiers and sailors, leads after a stirring sequence on "Italy!" to Aeneas's great cry of despair and resolution: "For the death of a hero, I am unfaithful to thee!"" Apprised in her palace of these preparations for flight, Dido appears and after a few breathless questions turns from apprehension to indignation and to anger. Aeneas is weakening, when the distant march theme recalls him to duty. Dido lays her curse upon him as he leaves, and the march soars victoriously. We next find the queen in the mood of repentance and humiliation. She is begging Anna to delay the Trojans' departure. When it is clear that she cannot change her fate, she orders her funeral pyre, and reaching a new height of unresigned forsakenness, she declaims the tremendous recitative, accompanied by string tremolos and scanned by menacing phrases on the bass clarinet: "I am about to die, engulfed in my infinite grief." She then bids farewell to her city. As the clarinet, now plaintive, follows her voice, the horns at intervals softly toll her doom. Dido weaves into her Adieu the earlier love theme, which the violas turn to melancholy. When she has done, the priests of Pluto invoke the gods of the nether world to wreak vengeance on the fugitive Trojans. Dido mounts the pyre and stabs herself with Aeneas's sword. Her people rush forward around her. On the verge of death she is given the power of prophecy. She calls out the name Hannibal, but in the last instant foresees the destruction of Carthage and the glory of Rome. The Trojan March rings out majestic, transfigured by the bright sonority of the harps, and it covers the bitter queen's dying oath of hatred. In a distant haze, while the chorus of priests and people vows eternal enmity to Rome, a vision of the Capitol glows with the word Roma on its pediment. *

*

#

' Both at the beginning and near the end, the m a j o r heightens the melancholy of the preceding minor. [This scene, superbly sung b y M . G e o r g e s T h i l l on an old-fashioned record ( 1 4 6 η ) , has not yet reappeared on the long-playing kind. 1969]

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Even if indications in words could approximate musical effect, no summary of so vast an epic could exhaust its contents. If one is among those who do not respond to Berlioz' Euripidean conception of life, one should discard the tragedy entire rather than try to pick and choose salvageable bits. If one does respond, one will perhaps take on trust Sir Donald Tovey's dictum that Les Troy ens is "one of the most gigantic and convincing masterpieces of music drama." 34 One can then begin to classify one's impressions of its power — from drama to poetry to music — for Les Troy ens is emphatically one of those works which have to be thoroughly known to be enjoyed throughout; its beauties do not take possession of the mind all at once but require to be re-cognized.3T That seasoned critic of music and drama, the late James Agate, recommends that one listen to Berlioz first with one's ear rather than one's mind,38 but since Les Troy ens is still inaccessible to hearers, and since operagoers are accustomed to mastering a "book," they may legitimately put themselves in a receptive mood by seeing Berlioz at his task of poetlibrettist, finding the words for his purposed presentment. He started, to be sure, from the Aeneid, which he knew as few scholars have known it, in the way of an artist whose own experiences of love, landscape, and sound have encrusted the text from the age of twelve.8® But apart from the skillful choice and translation of a number of Virgilian lines, Berlioz had to modernize the expression of feeling while retaining the epic quality of distance;10 and finally he had, for musical reasons, to invent. In the Taking of Troy especially, Berlioz' handiwork is extensive: not alone the figure of Cassandra but the prodigious last scene of her expostulation with the Trojan women and invocation of a resurrected patria in Italy is a piece of true poetry — of making. In any art this power to conceive is of course the supreme test. We are 36

590, 89. In a brilliant paragraph on Molière's Misanthrope, Courteline has shown how "ineffective" the work is for the casual unprepared listener, and whv the very density of the genius embodied in the work repels anyone "who does not know the piece by heart." (1070, VIII, 83.) 38 Quoted in iy¡4 (194s) 191. 38 " W h a t a great composer Virgil is, what a melodist and harmonist too!" (Corresp., 215.) Compare De Quincey: " V e r y few writers of any country have approached to Virgil in the art of co?nposition, however low we may be disposed to rank him . . . in the unequal contest with the sublimities of the Christian Literature." (Letters to a Young Man, no. I V . ) 40 Grout, who calls Les Troy ens "the most important French opera of the 19th century," asserts categorically: "here is the unique opera in which the epic has been successfully dramatized. . . . The word 'unique' is used advisedly." (722, 319 and 320 and n.) 37

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used to judging the various grades of executive ability —how well the artist does any particularly fine or difficult thing —but that he should think of doing other, unheard-of things, this is what separates the Shakespeares and Beethovens from the rest. In Berlioz' Troy ens the presence of this faculty is everywhere. His Cassandra and Dido rank with the greatest of poetic creations, distinct from all models and from each other in the constant play of mood within passion. Their words modulate as swiftly and aptly as the music, and Berlioz emerges as a dramatic psychologist who equals Mozart and holds his own with every first-rank librettist. In the broader groupings Berlioz renders with seemingly no effort the antique fact and the modern atmosphere arising from the contrast between outer and inner life. Open the first scene at Troy and read the rapid exposition which in twenty-five lines gives us the background of the war and leads us to expect the monstrous horse.41 After it comes Cassandra's tragic introspection — twenty lines of slower, nobler rhythm, but skillfully broken. Lastly (some ninety lines) the dialogue between her and Coraebus ranging from prophecy to love, fear of death, and a Nietzschean amor fati. In one hundred and thirty-five lines the act is over, two characters have been drawn, and the double conflict of individuals and peoples set in motion against a background of natural beauty. Nor does this pace slacken except for the ceremonial and love scenes of the Trojans at Carthage 41 Here is a prosaic translation: General Chorus. After ten years within our walls, oh, how good to breathe the pure air of the fields, which the noise of batde no longer disturbs. Dialoguing Chorus. (Young boys run about.) What wreckage —an arrow head! — Here's a helmet. And here two javelins. See this enormous shield; it would hold up a man on the water. What cowards those Greeks are! A Soldier. Do you know whose tent was on this spot? Chorus. No, tell us, whose? Soldier. Achilles'. Chorus. Merciful gods! Soldier. Stay, valiant troop! Achilles is dead. You can see his tomb — there it is. (Three shepherds who stood on it flee in terror.) Chorus. T i s true. Of that murderous fiend Paris freed us. Do you know the wooden horse that the Greeks built before leaving for Aulis? That huge horse in honor of Pallas? In its vast entrails a battalion could stand. Well, they are tearing down the walls and tonight we'll drag it into town. They say the king will look into it. — But where is it now? On the banks of the Scamander. Let's go see it at once. Let's go! Let's go! The horse, the horse! Exeunt in disorder. 42 The quietness of these later scenes is only another argument for not dividing the work: we are quite ready for oases of calm in acts III and IV,

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Berlioz seemed t o think that it w a s only w h e n he came to compose the Damnation

of Faust that, being on his travels, he had first ventured to

v e r s i f y f o r himself." H e had apparently forgotten that as early as the Francs-Juges

opera of 1824-1830 he had substituted for the lazy Ferrand,

and that since then he had taken a hand in every one of his major texts, helping Deschamps w i t h Romeo of Benvenuto,

and Juliet, writing and rewriting parts

and at last showing himself a really accomplished poet in

the "Invocation t o N a t u r e " of Faust. A b o u t the same time he replaced the " u n k n o w n tongue" of his chorus of shades in Lélio w i t h the eight lines used in the 1855 version; 4 4 he was writing VEnfance

du Christ f r o m be-

ginning to end; and immediately after its performance was starting w o r k on Les Troy ens. H e appreciated the difficulty of tackling an antique subject in a modern tongue, especially in French, w h o s e poetic diction had but recently reacted against the emptiness of the neoclassical idiom. T h e dangers were: to fall back into it, like Ponsard, or to overdo the opposite, like any burlesquing parodist. It cannot be said that Berlioz w h o l l y escaped the first evil, of frigid inversions echoed f r o m Racine and Voltaire. W i t h V i r g i l before him and the military p o m p of antiquity to reproduce in verse, Berlioz lacked the freedom that was his in dealing with Faust and w i t h the Jesus story. But f o r the most part the verbal tension of Les Troy ens keeps high and steady, the diction is clear and simple, stiff at its worst, never flaccid. A n d in the garden scenes, the religious episodes, the dialogue of the sentries, and the moments of passion, Berlioz finds accents that are purely his own, phrases that, original or translations, show the natural poet. Cassandra's Tiens!

La douleur

n'est

rien has been quoted; many

of

Dido's and Aeneas's replies deserve to be. F o r the passage in which Aeneas on his w a y to w a r takes leave of his son, Berlioz wrote music at once martial and religious and Aeneas's speech has the same inflections: D'autres t'enseigneront, enfant, l'art d'etre heureux, Je ne t'apprendrai, moi, que la vertu guerrière Et le respect des dieux. . . . but if this calm comes at the beginning of a drama — which it does when Part II is given by itself — our interest flags and we impute to Berlioz the error of his improvers. M.E., i j i (to his father). 44 T h e y begin, Hugo-like, with a touch presaging Baudelaire: Froid de la mort, froid de la tombe, Bruit éternel des pas du temps, Noir chaos où l'espoir succombe, Quand donc finirez vous? Vivants!

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Later, Aeneas s allusion to Dido's grief as cette douleur indignée is a marvelous touch," as is the sequence of spectral orders from die heroic dead: Il faut vivre et partir . . . il faut partir et vaincre . . . il faut vaincre et fonder. . . . The last act, Dido's imprecations and grief, is thickly studded with verbal felicities, from Errante sur tes pas, which translates the Latin, to Adieu, fière cité which shows how the note of nobility combines with the simple and modern: ma carrière est finte.4* Berlioz moreover had a natural turn for the eclogues in short lines, of which the sailor boy's songVallon sonore Où dès Τ aurore Je m'en allais chantant is but one example.47 He always maintained that long lines are fatal to melody — even to his long sweeping melodies — and that the timidity which kept poets from mixing their rhythms or timing their speech made prose acceptable as a text for music, provided the word-cadences were well contrived.48 Trusting himself to use this freedom, Berlioz, it might be thought, should have avoided those repetitions of words which are supposed to make opera ridiculous and which many people think Wagner's system eliminates. But here again, Berlioz took the logical and unemphatic course. He avoided excessive repetitions, knowing on the one hand that musical development always outruns verbal utterance, and that if choruses are given words to sing they may as well repeat them during the maintenance of the mood; and knowing on the other hand that to repeat, in modera45

Indignée does not mean "indignant" but wounded by outrage, "unworthed." 48 The parallel with La Fontaine's words on the "proud city," from the same Virgilian source, is interesting; see Fable I of Bk. II. As for Dido's declaration that her destiny is done, it is surely an echo of "Othello's occupation's gone." 47 Besides the pastoral, O blonde Cérès, which suggests Hugo, Berlioz was to write another, just asflawless,and which makes one think of Verlaine: it is the Nuit paisible et sereine! La lune, douce reine . . . of the nocturne in Beatrice and Benedict. 48 He had himself set prose to music on two occasions. It remained for Alfred Bruneau to do it on a large scale in his operas adapted from Zola. On Berlioz' interest in giving measure and rhythm to words, read his essay in Grot., 217224. See also: A.R., 142, and L.I., 58, no, 112-4; his inquiries into elision in Latin verse (151), and his concern over the use of the watchword "ItalieΓ — "which sounds so poorly compared to Italiam with its accent on the second syllable." (S.W., 28.)

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don, words that are sung is by no means as silly as it seems on paper.4* Wagner took the course of banning repetition and, as Van Dieren showed, had to sneak it back in by using variants and synonyms."0 The musician in truth cannot get away from the fact that "I love you" takes but an instant to say, and a love scene at least a few minutes to develop. Art seems to counsel mixing the repetitions and the synonyms to a point just short of satiety. What does deserve censure is Berlioz* occasional neglect of prosody in choral ensembles. Though he was attentive and even meticulous about such blemishes, they are found here and there in some of his great works — notably the Requiem, the Damnation, and Les Troy ens.51 Since the fault was not due to carelessness, it can only be ascribed to an unwillingness to change the musical inflection for the verbal after failing to find an alternative. In other words, when it came to a choice Berlioz preferred musical precision to literary." We have further evidence of this in the questions he put to himself after he had plotted his drama and written out the words of his two heroines' tragic moments. The "psychology," as we should say today, had yet to be worked out in the minute detail that only music can render: "There are accents to be found, pauses to be determined, inflexions to be seized on . . . " 6 8 And later on, with Dido's final lines before him: "Is it a violent imprecation? Is it a tense concentrated fury? If poor Rachel were not dead I might go and ask her. You are probably thinking that it is much too kind of me to worry in this way about veracious expression — it will be always true enough for the public. T o be sure; but what about us?" M Nowhere better than in this score, perhaps, can the relation of music to drama be studied, for it is exhibited here under all its aspects. At no time was Berlioz more outspoken in his hatred of illustrative music,™ and if he gave his "Royal Hunt" the title of descriptive symphony, we must 49 Saint-Saëns shared this view and Sternfeld made a similar point about Berlioz' mysterious vocables in the "Pandemonium" of the Damnation: they look absurd and sing well. (f8o, 491.) » · > / , 155-8. 51 E.g., in Part I, the octet and chorus that follows Aeneas's recitative about Laocoön. 52 He is explicit about this as regards translated texts. 104.) 53 S.W., 26. M T o Hans von Bülow, Corresp., 255. 55 See above, Chapter 7; A Trav., 225 ff.; and S.W., 8j on Haydn's Creation, quoted in Subchapter 26.

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cake the words as a mere aid to operagoers and find elsewhere the formal cause of the piece. In Virgil's fifty lines, a few indications define the atmosphere of the scene — a cave, thunder, shrieking naiads.9* The occasion of the love-making is the hunt, but this in Virgil comes before the storm, and the mention of love is at once followed by an agitated digression on Rumor. The musician, not aiming at narration, has no use for this pattern. He simply creates a sylvan atmosphere (string and woodwind melodies, flute ornaments) and limits himself to the musical contrast of slow-fast-slow. In the dynamic middle portion of the intermezzo he joins the "storm" and the "hunt" by means of rhythmic figures and horn and trumpet calls. The sounds themselves dictate their place and connection, and the return to the quiet first theme, in conjunction with the "hunt" call in augmentation, is a musical idea which neither Virgil nor any other litérary craftsman could tolerate." Berlioz does not even think of paralleling a program by employing a "cave" theme or a motif for watersprites: the fitting of instrumental music to scene or action is purely ideal: their connotations coincide and that is all. Where Berlioz is completely at one with Virgil is in considering the storm not only the cloak but also the symbol of passion. In dramatic moments that issue in words, Berlioz takes advantage of other devices for making music signify. The chaos of human wills is rendered in the polyphonic downfall of Troy, when the women call on Pluto in a tremendous phrase linked to Cassandra's fanatical cries of "Hector! Priam! King! Father! Lover! I join y o u ! " " Elsewhere, subtle differences of rhythm and line serve to distinguish the several trades — builders, sailors, and farmers — who form a continuous cortege. At other times a series of dissonances — sparingly used before and after — helps to make us accept the supernatural commands which compel Aeneas to leave. T . S. Wotton has suggested that the weakness of Aeneas's character, already present in Virgil, is aggravated in Les Troy ens by Berlioz' lack of sympathy with the inconstant lover. This may be true. One feels that Berlioz in his place would have found a way to set Rome on foot and return. Still, in his version Berlioz generally manages to transmute the pious warrior's priggishness into heroism, and through both words and music he keeps before us the epic duty of founding Rome: the birth of a 69

Book IV, 117-72. For other examples, see the opening movements of Le Sacre du Printemps and La Mer. 68 "Her character combines Sophocles and Shakespeare, and her utterance resounds with Wagnerian passion." (Kurt Mey: 4η8, 346.) 5T

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people is a greater thing than happiness. W e sense this, for instance, in the accompaniment to

Spectres inexorables! Je sws barbare, ingrat; vous Vordonnez, grands dieux! Et fimmole Didon en détournant les yeux . . . this being at once followed by the stirring rhythm of alert and departure that we have heard before. There is no repetition of effect: the discreet use and perpetual variation of the March theme preserves its dramatic value to the very end. We hear only four measures of it when Dido succeeds in breaking down Aeneas's resolution; she at once exclaims: "You start with joy at this triumphal song" — and gives her soul to hate. Melody again serves a dramatic conception in the ensuing scene where Dido's resolve gives birth to fresh love-music by the simple device of joining to Anna's anxious supplication an allusion to her being beloved. As for the catastrophe, it has often been called an anticipation of Wagner. Brünnhilde, like Dido, ends her life and grief on a funeral pyre. But no two ways of rendering that quietus could be more different than those of the two composers. Sir Hamilton Harty, who first conducted Les Troy ens in England, justly remarks that "most of [Dido's] final scene is written in low, indistinct accents, as if she were revolving in her own mind all the circle of her weariness and sorrow and was almost dead to the world and its considerations. Her final words, 'Thus it befits a Queen to go down to the grave' could not be more dejected and spiritless. There is no musical satisfaction here — and yet, regarded from another, and I think a higher, point of view, her end is a thousand times more touching and more noble than Brünnhilde's. . . . The Trojans is full of instances of definite and obvious refusal on the part of Berlioz to make a conventionally satisfying musical effect at the expense of real living truth." se It is an open question, of course, what one means by "musically satisfying." Tradition or habit has certainly something to do with one's verdict, as Van Dieren implies when he says that Les Troy ens shows Berlioz to be "the one composer of his time who could write for the voice without ever sacrificing anything of his dramatic intentions." 00 These judgments have 59

p i , 17-18. ¡26, 28. V a n Dieren makes his choice of traditions clear b y adding: " O f this w o r k one might say that he has actually achieved in it all that W a g n e r tried to do, while leaving undone all that has rightly provoked the severest censure of the Wagnerian manner." {Ibid.) A n American critic, M r . Herbert F . Peyser, adds (without approving Berlioz' style): "it is curious, for that matter, h o w much kinship some of this music has with the Ring." ( N. V. Times, Jan. ι, 1939.) 60

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151

value as reminders that there is more than one way of composing music drama. Berlioz chose the nonillustrative, nonsystematized; preferred melody to leitmotives and chant récitatif to semispoken declamation;· 1 and achieved his effect by intense, discontinuous scenes instead of protracted symphonic movements. "Precisely because Berlioz is of a different kind from Wagner and Meyerbeer, the originality of his style . . . marks a milestone in the history of art . . . and whoever considers himself musically educated should, indeed must, come to know Les Troy ens" e2 The Preface to Les Troy ens bids all future producers perform the work as written. This has never been done." In his lifetime Berlioz had to split the work unevenly in two. Revivals in Carlsruhe and Paris in the nineties, and again in Paris, Odessa, and Berlin in the early twenties, were somewhat more respectful, though cuts were made, scenes inverted, and — an amazing thing for a work deemed too long — music added. Everywhere the mise en scène is improved upon by the super-Berlioz on hand.®4 At Manchester a few years later, Sir Hamilton Harty gave the work in concert form, which pleased his well-trained Berlioz following but bewildered the critics up from London. Finally in 1934—1935, Erik Chisholm gave a careful performance at Glasgow —the one that "convinced" Sir Donald Tovey — since which time the work in whole or in part has been repeated in England and, under Sir Thomas Beecham, broadcast from time to time. A reviewer has exclaimed: "I cannot understand whv Berlioz' Les Troy ens has never made itself a place in the operatic repertory." And he detailed the beauties which exist in the score "contrary to public opinion." 83 T o the student of Berlioz, this class of remark is at first amusing, then quite annoying. Another critic quoted earlier did not see why Benvenuto Cellini was neglected; certain Paris critics could not see why Berlioz' symphonies, when Weingartner brought them from Berlin, were not 61

Romain Rolland: " H o w much more beautiful, it seems to me, is Berlioz' chant récitatif, with its long and sinuous lines, than the Wagnerian declamation which, apart from the moments of climax where it flows in broad and strong phrases, is limited to the quasi-notation of speech inflections that jar unpleasandy with the admirable symphony in the orchestra." (504, 40.) 62 63

'3Π, 61.

The nearest thing to it was Kufferaths production at the Théâtre de la Monnaie, Brussels, in 1906. [On Sept. 1, 1968 Colin Davis gave at the Albert Hall the first complete playing of the score.] 64 For the Berlin Opera Dr. Julius Kapp made a version ("frei bearbeitet") which brings the whole within four hours' playing time. How this was staged may be inferred from Dr. Hugo Leichtentritt's report about the "orchestral music of the nocturnal [sic] storm." (1391, 1930, 748.) 85 The (London) Spectator, July 11, 1947, 45.

15 2

Berlioz

oftener on their home programs. In N e w York, Richard Goldman wondered why the Funeral symphony had been left unplayed for so long; the reception of the Requiem recordings drew the same kind of contrite amazement. The gloss on all these experiences is quite simple: Berlioz' music is imperfectly known though much talked about; the sincere critic who formerly ignored or dismissed Berlioz has a sudden revelation; and the revelation is nothing more nor less than a good performance in full.8® For the seeker of such a revelation, Les Troyens must be accorded a special place in the body of Berlioz' work; for experience shows that its architecture can boast of one feature that has often served listeners as a gateway toward understanding Berlioz' music at large — Tovev's illumination is typical.67 Differing from the common traditions of opera (including the Wagnerian), Les Troyens enlightens the musically observant listener by exemplifying Berlioz' conception of a music appropriate to a visible drama yet at the same time independent of it, self-sufficient. He who hears the work and studies his sensations discovers this special property and comes to agree that Berlioz' music is neither illustrative, nor literary, nor in want of stage events to throw light on its bearing: it is dramatic in and per se — as these pages have tried to show at every possible juncture of art and technique.88 But this is not all. Les Troyens makes the observer also aware that when applied to music, the term "dramatic" actually refers to a quality of the texture, rather than to any correspondence with a play, acted or imagined. As the analysis of the "Royal Hunt and Storm" demonstrates, a truly independent music cannot parallel the form of an action — of a drama as we use the word in literature. It is this healthy divergence which allows us to call Les Troyens a musical epic without thereby contradicting its dramatic character. In literature, we rightly think of drama as a close involvement of persons whose motives are unintelligible without words. Hence music can never by itself present a drama: it cannot particularize, nor break up its substance into representations of figures in conflict. The epic, on the contrary, is like music in giving sharp expression to broad 6,5

See Mr. Virgil Thomson's provocative discussion of this point. (521.) E.g., Albert Schweitzer, Subchapter 24, and 3/9, 7 1 ·

If the essay on Berlioz' Harold symphony can be taken as representing Liszt's best thought, it would seem that his intention was as far f r o m propping up music b y program as it was from making poetry and music run in harness à la W a g n e r : Liszt is in fact taking Berlioz' precepts as his own. F o r a discussion of the essay, see Raabe, 994a, II, 175-86. 81 780, 136. A theorist of F o r m in Music confirms this estimate: ¡}26a, 255. 42 719, 225.

Wagner

and

\Vagnerism

199

poems, and if some of them are formally somewhat incoherent it is the fault of the composer, not of the form, and certainly not the outcome of the employment of a literary programme. Similarly . . . in Berlioz . . . his intention was not, like that of Wagner, to use music as a means to a literary or dramatic end, but, on the contrary, to compel literary ideas to subserve a musical end, which is a very different thing; and so far from allowing foreign elements belonging to the other arts to intrude into the domain of music, he rather extended the boundaries of music in such a way and to such an extent that it was able to express, free and unaided, many conceptions which had hitherto been considered exclusively literary or pictorial, but were, as he conclusively showed, equally suited to musical realization. In a word, the art of Berlioz represents an extension of the frontiers of music. . . .·* Liszt's way, it is obvious, was closer to that of Berlioz and farther from Wagner's. The wonder is then that like certain others, he abandoned Berlioz' side to support Wagner's opposite system. The alchemy of human relations cannot be fully explained, though certain elements can be enumerated. One lies in the question itself: Wagner had a system, Berlioz refused to make up one. And men feel that a movement, a party, needs a platform. Equally potent was the fact that Berlioz' compositional technique was, compared to Wagner's, a mystery. Berlioz' scores are hard to read aright, as all admit, and it is noteworthy that Liszt was most enthusiastic about those he had professionally worked at.*4 Add to this the greater accessibility of Wagner's spirit — sensual, unaristocratic, prolix, and ready to give the expected dramatic and musical satisfactions — and it is easy to see why Wagner, coming after Berlioz, seemed at once a relief and a culmination. At first, as we saw, Liszt and his young followers wanted to establish a John-the-Baptist relation between Berlioz and their musical Messiah. When Berlioz refused the role for reasons which he understood better than they but declined to enlarge upon, there was nothing to do but drop him. A letter of Bülow's to Pohl makes this explicit: "With one breath to work for God, Son, and Holy Ghost won't do. No one so far has managed to work for more than one great man at a time . . . it blurs the vision and disturbs the public. Our active enthusiasm for the Trinity cannot be effective all at once. This unity in trinity is the business of posterity to grasp . . . Wagner and Liszt stand at this moment closer to us. I shall play excerpts from Berlioz in my concerts, Bronsart also: that is quite sufficient. . . 719, "4-6· The piano transcriptions of the first two symphonies, and of one overture, and the conducting of Benvenuto Cellini. "October 1, 1861 (174, 170.) m

64

200

Berlioz

Nationalism aiding this shift in party line, the earlier enthusiasm for Berlioz in Germany tended to cool off, and the vivid sense of his tremendous effort was temporarily obscured.6® All was laid at the feet of the new conqueror. Under the spell of the strong man, Bülow was undone and lived to make everything over to new uses — his wife to Wagner, the "3 B's" to Brahms, the Eroica to Bismarck, the Bach Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue to his own lust for useless ornamentation — even though only the wife was his to reassign. At the same time, a predictable turn in the whole cultural kaleidoscope had helped to eclipse Berlioz — as is shown by the evolution of Nietzsche's opinions. In the mid-1860's Nietzsche belonged to a small group of musical amateurs who played the piano scores of Benvenuto Cellini and L'Enfance du Christ for their pleasure. Nietzsche went so far as to compose a Mystery of Saint Silvester in imitation of Berlioz' religious style, and he was twitted by his friends about his passion for the great Hector. But within ten years Wagner was the living idol whose truth was marching on. T h e reason was, he seemed to be liquidating Romanticism while retaining its technical gains. After another decade, that is, after the opening of Bayreuth, Nietzsche had been disillusioned and was attacking Wagner with a fury that has been thought personal and pathological. Yet stripped of its polemical garb, the critique brings one back, quite simply, to the initial divergence between Berlioz and Wagner. Nietzsche calls for a truce to sensuality and a return to a clear, Mediterranean music, filled with wit and the tragic sense of life. Nietzsche's favorite critic is by now Stendhal, and Berlioz' music fulfills Stendhal's prescription: energy without wallowing in sense. Nietzsche recognized this at once on the belated appearance of Bizet: "Hurray, old friend. Again something good to know — an opera by Georges Bizet (who is he?) Carmen . . . a genuine French talent of the comic opera kind, not at all led astray by Wagner. On the contrary, a true pupil of Berlioz." 07 It was now the 1880's and the men of the 1830's seemed far in the past. The romantic period was "prewar" and Berlioz' legend was dim. While 64

It revived in the decade following Berlioz' death. Bülow himself began with his Celli?ii performances of 1879. (See his letters from 1877 on.) It was then Cornelius cried: "Los von Wagner!" and that Liszt is said to have experienced his new change of heart. A third crop of enthusiasts — Motti, W o l f , Weingartner, Mahler and Nikisch — produced Berlioz with a success w hich led directly to the publication in Germany of a "complete" edition of the scores and writings. β7 Τ ο Peter Gast, N o v . 28, 1881: 221, II (2) 387. For the supporting views of a great Nietzsche authority on these personal and artistic relations, see Andler, Nietzsche, Sa Vie et Sa Pensée, vol. II, Paris, 1921, pp. 65, 266 ff., 280 ff.

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and

Wagnerism

201

Nietzsche was leaping ahead into post-Wagnerism, all the Symbolist esthetes were learning music out of Wagner's book. This had begun with Baudelaire and Nerval and it was to continue through Mallarmé and Valéry.®8 A few who knew their Berlioz, and had seen him in the flesh, like the excellent scholar Richard Pohl, remembered their first love and stated it in superlatives, but with the characteristic proviso, "always excepting Richard Wagner." " In one sense, Wagner deserved this priority. Berlioz had taught the creators and had shaped the molds from which all the castings of the century would come, but Wagner had accomplished the greatest educational feat of the age. He had taught an immense number of people to enjoy truly symphonic music at the theater; he had ingrained and made respectable the now universal habit of programmatizing music through a literal ascription of themes to ideas and objects; he had caught and fertilized the imagination of innumerable painters, architects, sculptors, idlers, engineers, and literary men who would otherwise have scorned and neglected music; he had entangled philosophy and social theory so thoroughly with music that the succeeding generation had to say in protest that music was absolutely meaningless and unrelated to life; and he had managed to earn credit for being the first to dramatize the symphony by a miraculous transubstantiation of opera into music drama. In so doing, it is true, he had thrown not only Berlioz and Weber but Mozart and Gluck into the shade; for he had taken Meyerbeer's public right out of the Paris Opera and magnetically drawn it to Bayreuth, whence they had returned to capture Paris, La Scala, New York, and Covent Garden. People soon learned to pronounce German names and to hum the Siegfried horn call with such conviction that during subse™ Not only the leaders, but almost the entire Symbolist generation in France were Wagnerites. Gide is the one notable exception, perhaps because he was independently a musician. In 1908 he wrote: " M y passionate aversion has grown steadily since my childhood. This amazing genius does not exalt so much as he crushes. He permitted a large number of snobs, of literary people, and of fools to think that they loved music, and a few artists to think that genius can be acquired." (1249,1, 225.) es $52. Saint-Saëns pointed out that in France about the same time "Berlioz is being protected by his worst enemies, who uphold him only on condition of perpetually sacrificing him to the God whose priests they are. Berlioz is never spoken of nowadays without Wagner's being immediately mentioned, and they are invariably compared on the principle that Berlioz may well be right but Wagner cannot ever be wrong." (1388, Oct. 5, 1884.) As for England, Havergal Brian has testified that Franz Hueffer and Edward Dannreuther's "project to belittle Berlioz and then by comparison to belaud Wagner was only too successful." (324, 209.)

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quent wars they began to imagine the actual notes of music to be politically culpable. More than this, Wagner reinforced by his natural sensuality and by the rhythm and subject of his Liebestod the great movement for sexual liberation that began in the sixties. Now that the reform has been accepted we need not be so spellbound by a passionate act which requires one hundred and ten men to perform, but in the days when Aubrey Beardsley put its eroticism on paper, Wagner justly ranked with Swinburne and Havelock Ellis as a pioneer in human hygiene. Finally, Wagner clamped down upon all the arts the demagogic habit of justifying themselves through cosmic doctrines and teachable systems. Since his day, artists have become intolerable and incompetent pedants or — in opposition — ill-natured mutes. In short Wagner, coming after Berlioz, not concurrently with him, summed up an epoch as different from the preceding as it is from ours. He belongs, with Marx and Darwin, as one of the promoters of "Progress," "Realism," and survival by force. Their era, begun in 1859 with the Origin of Species, the Critique of Political Economy and Tristan, could only be an alien world for Berlioz. T o him pragmatic flexibility, the plurality of arts, individuals, and styles was the desired norm. He did not want to teach anybody any doctrine, still less to pose as an omnicompetent oracle. Because his first care was music and art, he had fought the Italian monopoly and taught all Europe the merits of Beethoven, Weber, Mozart, and Gluck — and even the value of certain Italian masterpieces. Through the symphonic revolution embodied in his own works, he had given the new generation the seminal ideas they could find nowhere else, and now in Les Troy ens he had shaped a work that made grand opera seem the bourgeois pastime that it was. It was then that Wagner, like a Ben Jonson to his Shakespeare, an indefatigable bricklayer to a master goldsmith, came with his cohorts and his genius to inaugurate still another era of musical autocracy.70 In that era, Berlioz, aged fifty-seven, lived the last ten years of his life and produced the last and lightest of his great works, the comedy, Beatrice and Benedict. 70 If this seems le mot injuste, think of Jonson as the man w h o wished that Shakespeare "had blotted a thousand lines" and yet was irresistibly compelled to admire his art; as the man who, b y demanding that the stage should present life realistically, put Shakespeare somewhat on the defensive and made him sa ν — through the chorus of H e n r y V — that a history play was not meant to show events but to stimulate the spectator's imagination. ( 3 2 4 , 454.) A n d Jonson, too, was the slow, self-made craftsman w h o became the greatest figure of Shakespeare's age and the next by being "the learned p l a g i a r y " of his peers. (Dryden's phrase. )

25. Prospero s Farewell: Beatrice and Benedict September

i860

to August 13, 1862

Beatrice Benedick piques, coquetting. —THOMAS

HARDY

Les Troy ens being no nearer production, Berlioz drew satisfaction from the understanding he had just reached with Bénazet, to substitute a text of his own for the unarousing work of Plouvier. Berlioz' new subject was his old one of 1833 — Much Ado About Nothing — the last shoot on the tree that the Italian skies had first brought to blossom three decades earlier. Berlioz had then made a sketch of the musical situations suggested by Shakespeare's comedy. He had now but to revise, versify, and compose it. His own work, as usual, gave him happiness, health and gaiety. "It looks as if my disease were wearing itself out," he writes to Louis, who had also complained of stomach trouble. "I feel stronger since I no longer take medicines, and I have been working so hard that the occupation itself helps to cure me. I can scarcely keep up with the music of my little opera, so rapidly do the pieces come to me. Each wants precedence and sometimes I begin a fresh one before the previous is done." 1 As if to reward neglect, Les Troy ens now seemed to be on the way to being staged. A friend who remained anonymous guaranteed Carvalho fifty thousand francs to put on the work. The press announced the fact in late October i860. Commenting upon it, Berlioz told Ferrand: "It's a good deal, but it isn't everything. So much is needed for a musical epic on that scale." 2 Nor was it entirely a question of money. Carvalho was back at the Lyrique, and full of enthusiasm after having obtained official status and the means of building a new theater,3 but the musical personnel was inadequate. If Berlioz wanted to see his Trojans properly acted and sung 1 Corresp., 270. Scholarship: "During the last twenty years of his life, Berlioz's creative powers were at an ebb. T h e recognition of this fact, combined with his increasing illness and loneliness, made him an unhappy man." ( 1 3 3 ; , 71.)

2 3

L.I., 21$.

On the bank of the Seine opposite the Châtelet. T h e theater subsequently became the Opéra-Comique and later still the Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt.

204

Berlioz

he must obtain a ukase to have it done at the Opera. But that inevitable and narrow gate was now blocked by Tannhäuser, whose endless rehearsals were to cost, together with settings, one hundred and sixty thousand francs. Wagner had entered like a prince, ahead of all other pending claimants and with all his special conditions agreed to in advance. This very expenditure of funds and good will made any repetition of it unlikely in the near future, despite the plausible reasoning that the Wagner precedent should also serve a native composer who was no longer young or unknown. Yet Berlioz' friends urged him to argue this precedent. The influential Comte [now Duc] de Morny, still ciose to the Emperor, had known about the Trojavs for three years, but in the interim he had become a supporter and indeed a collaborator of Offenbach's: it would be useless to approach a rival poet. T h e new Minister of Fine Arts, Count Walewsky, might he less partial, so Berlioz gave the minister's secretary yet another copy of his work. "Everything comes to him who waits," he reflected; "if we could only live to be 200, if we could stay young, intelligent, and strong during that couple of centuries, we men of ideas — men of fixed ideas occasionally; and if meanwhile the others died at 30 or 40 no cleverer than they were at birth — then, then, the obstacles in our path would be child's p l a y . " 4 Unfortunately, many of the people in their forties seemed livelier than ever, and stupider. There was a redoubled lust for spiritual messages, not from contemporaries but from the departed. These came through the legs of Empire tables, or rather, Second Empire tables, and therefore not legs but limbs. Berlioz took ironic notice of this in an essay on Beethoven's "fourth manner" — the style of those compositions received through the medium of furniture, that is, the furniture of mediums: The spirit of Beethoven inhabits Saturn or one of its rings, for Mozart, as everyone knows, occupies Jupiter. . . . Last Monday, a medium who is very familiar with the great man . . . laid hands on his deal table to fetch Beethoven for a chat. . . . These wretched spirits, you must admit, are very obliging. In his earthly life Beethoven would not have bothered to step from Vienna's Carinthian gate to the Palace doors, even if the Austrian Emperor had bidden him; yet now he quits Saturn . . . to join anyone who owns a deal table. What a change death brings about in one's character! . . . Beethoven comes and says through the legs of the table, "Here I am." T h e medium asks the composer quite casually to dictate a new sonata. T h e spirit needs no urging; the table starts romping. The work is taken 4

1386,

N o v . 24, i860.

Prospero'í Fareivell

205

down . . . Beethoven goes home. T h e medium and a dozen startled witnesses go to the piano and play the sonata . . . , which is no half-hearted platitude but a complete, full-strength platitude, an absurdity. A f t e r this experience, how can you believe in absolute beauty? I think w e are bound to infer that beauty and ugliness not being universal, many productions of the human mind which are admired on earth would be despised in the world of spirits; and I believe (as I suspected before) that many operas which are applauded daily here below might be hissed on Saturn or Jupiter. . . . This view is not calculated to encourage great craftsmen. Several of them, overwhelmed b y the discovery, are said to have fallen ill and to be on the verge of passing into the spirit state. Happily that state will last them a good while."1 When he wrote this moralizing fantasy, Berlioz was feeling buoyed up by work on his new score, but the N e w Year 1861 brought harassment. An unexplained inflammation of the left eye and cheek was a mere nuisance, but Marie's ailing condition grew worse, and Louis's perturbations cast a pall on the helpless father's mind. T h e young man had passed both his examinations; he was now a captain and had at once obtained a berth which would pay him eighteen hundred francs a year. Y e t he still needed money, and suddenly he felt a raging impatience to get on faster — doubtless from guilt at being dependent. Berlioz had to rehearse for him his own arduous beginnings and show the young officer that he was relatively fortunate. But sound reasoning, as Berlioz knew, hardly touches feelings like those Louis suffered from. T h e new-made captain, it appeared, wanted to be married — not to anyone he could name but in general, just like the sad youth in Hamerton who, "without having as yet any particular lady in view, expressed a determination to marry." 9 Berlioz with his t w o unhappy experiences of matrimony, tried to dissuade his son b y sketching the despair, exasperation, and anxieties of marriage under adverse conditions. H e was brief and kind on the subject, but Louis felt attacked, or else he misunderstood, and he replied in wounding words which Berlioz begged him to moderate in future. T h e boy also spoke of nightmares connected with boarding operations and dating back to his service in the Baltic. Clearly, Louis nursed a sense of wrong which from time to time burst through his love for his father, and demanded from him a special pity. All this Berlioz could easily read between the lines: in the paragraph following his "knife thrusts," the wretched boy wanted to know w h y the newspapers did not more often speak of his father. 7 Berlioz had no re5

6 7

A Trav.,

88-90.

Corresp.,

270-4.

The Intellectual Life, Part VII, Chapter 1.

2 o6

Berlioz

course but to be patient and try to soothe the intelligent and affectionate child who had too soon become a flayed spirit. For a month Berlioz had not been able to touch his score. Besides illness and worry he was swamped with concerts and reviews. Death too was at work and required notice from the survivors. Scribe, Murger, and Guinot in the world of letters; Berlioz' old friend Chélard, the loyal and affectionate Weimar musician; 8 Simon, w h o had also studied with Lesueur; Mme. Lesueur herself — with each extinction part of Berlioz* known world was disappearing; and for a man who lives not in himself alone, who is therefore especially vulnerable to treading down b y the hungry generations, it was needful to have the protection of fame — to become at the right moment a Grand Old Man and assume the detachmcnt of that role. For Berlioz the very reverse was happening. As is clear from the Tannhäuser episode, Berlioz' most intimate friends — the Princess, Ferrand, the Massarts and the Damckes —were exacerbating his sense of injury. These last especially, being strongly anti-Wagnerian, aggravated Berlioz' concern over the effect of the new work and deepened his distress at Liszt's apparent desertion. T h e old friend and fellow warrior w h o had been unable to go to Baden was coming to Paris to see Wagner through the probable ordeal. Franz and Hector would have to meet: what could they say to each other? T h e y were too intelligent and too well bred not to understand that no one's rights had been violated — Liszt had not taken an oath of eternal allegiance to Berlioz — but the emotional assumptions of a quarter century cannot be forgotten in a twelvemonth. T o drown out thoughts of self, Berlioz would ask Mme. Massart to play him Beethoven sonatas. But the return to futilities in speech was upsetting. H e felt dizzy: " N e v e r did I have so many windmills to tilt at as this year. I am surrounded by lunatics." ' For a while Liszt deemed it best not to come after all, thinking perhaps to avoid painful meetings. Berlioz now faced another stretch of proofreading. He had undertaken to publish the vocal score of Les Troy ens at his own expense, being determined to hear his Cassandra and Dido and having to be ready f o r any opportunity. So many times before in his career will power and persistence had breached stone walls, success had so often come against all probability, that there was no point in being reasonable. F o r the sake of his music drama Berlioz also kept his "armed position" at the Débats. " S o many rascals would annihilate me if they were not afraid. And yet my 8

See Chélard's letter of Nov. 15, 1843. (¿3J, II, 205-6.)

' Corresp., 277.

Prospero's

Farewell

207

head is full of ideas and projected works that I cannot undertake because of that slavery." 10 While time dribbled through one's fingers, moreover, one had to wait upon the private secretaries of the great and chat with Emperors and Ministers about the weather or the latest financial suicide. For an artist is expected "to die with a gentle noise under the feet of these pachyderms." 1 1 On March thirteenth and eighteenth, 1861, the Tannhäuser performances, with attendant riots, took place. It was then Berlioz wrote the two private letters referred to in the previous chapter. Liszt finally came to Paris and dined with d'Ortigue at Berlioz' house. It was a doubly glum and embarrassing occasion. Berlioz spoke in a low voice, looking as if overborne by cheerlessness. "His whole being seems hovering over the grave." Possibly Berlioz was mourning the end of a long and disinterested friendship dedicated to the twin powers of love and music. The next month, the Conservatoire orchestra played two excerpts from the Damnation of Faust to a delighted house. Obviously Berlioz' name could still muster out his concert public; it was even growing, though meagerly fed on scraps. T o play fragments cost nothing — "hence they do it," 12 as Berlioz remarked, thinking of what the true presentation of a complete work of art requires in brains and cash. Les Troyens, without changing its character, was daily becoming more impossible. At a musicale given by Edouard Bertin, several scenes from the drama were sung with piano accompaniment before a choice and presumably influential gathering. More articles appeared. But the Opera, recovering from Tannhäuser, shied away from a new risk. It proposed instead to revive "Berlioz' Freischütz" or even better — since Berlioz had shown Carvalho how to make Gluck pay — it would engage Berlioz to help produce Alceste. There seems to have been a vague expectation that if Berlioz were allowed to do something at the Opera, he would be "taken care of," he would swallow the score of Les Troyens and no one would ever mention it again. Freischütz rehearsals actually started, Berlioz giving himself without stint, as usual, like one of his own enthusiasts in the Evenings with the Orchestra. But after a month the idea was dropped and Alceste reverted to. Berlioz had to withdraw when he found that far from being asked to restore the work as he had done for Orpheus, he was expected to arrange it in accord10 11

Corresp., 274. Corresp., 281.

12 Corresp., 275. Orchestra parts, beautifully engraved on fine rag stock, still cost in the neighborhood of six cents apiece, and once bought there was no further expense.

Berlioz

2o8

ance with the "desires" of the Of>era subscribers. He declined.13 Walewski, whose word might ordain Les Troyens, was annoyed at Berlioz' refusal to tamper with Alceste, but Berlioz was adamant. Meanwhile, Alphonse Royer, director of the Opera had "accepted" Les Troyens, reluctantly, under pressure from still other forces. But when it came to the point of setting a date, he seized on every excuse: the work was expensive; the five sets, mid-stage curtain, and processional costumes could not be dug out of the lumber room. Then the novelty of a double tragedy, each part requiring a pair of first-rate singers, was a dreaded obstacle. The first pair would grumble at not coming on again. Besides, the work was long; there would have to be cuts. If only the composer would consent to . . . And to clinch the matter, it was known that Gounod and Gevaert were each at work on something — something which being only rumored, not even written, obviously looked greener than any completed score presenting definite problems. Understandably, Berlioz was becoming nervous about the excess of advance publicity that his work was receiving. The history of Benvenuto was repeating itself. Too high expectations might prepare a letdown, and simultaneously too many near-acceptances would brand the work as unmanageable." He decided for the second time to let the matter rest. "I no longer run at Fortune's heels. I stay in bed and await it there." 15 On August 6, Berlioz arrived in Baden ready to rehearse the Tuba mirum and Offertory of his Requiem — "to cheer up the gamblers," as he told the Princess 16 — in reality for his own pleasure. Pieces by Verdi, Halévy, and Donizetti, together with Harold in Italy, completed the program. His symphony Berlioz "heard for the first time as I want it to be," and after eight rehearsals the Requiem numbers went well.17 In Paris again by the fall, Berlioz heard a conclave of amateur singing groups perform, among other pieces, his unimportant Temple Universel. Earlier in the year it had been sung in London in two languages simultaneously,18 and Berlioz had been tempted to go and see his many English friends. He decided against it on account of expense. The possibility of a 13 14

122.

R u m o r had it that the w o r k called for twenty-two singers (actuallv nine) and that it required eight hours to play (actuallv four and a half). 15

16 17

L.I., 227. S.W., 120. L.I., 233.

18 See the letter to C. A . B a r r y in which, forty years later, Augus: Manns tried to recall the circumstances of that occasion. ( 2 1 2 . )

Prospero's

Farewell

209

year's visit to the "Disunited States" — his own words, for the Civil War had begun — he also put off, foreseeing complications of all sorts, and surmising that the Opera would take his departure as a pretext for canceling its uncomfortable "acceptance" of Les Troy ens. Then, still in Paris, where he had made fruitless efforts to help Ferrand publish a book, Berlioz received from Louis the worst blow yet dealt in the boy's fitful correspondence. The father had heard nothing for two months, and what he now heard was reproaches couched in the tone of irony, coupled with the news that Louis was married and had a child — or possibly children: on this point the letter was confused. Berlioz rose to the challenge, not of the boy, but of the situation. If I did not know what a bad influence sorrow can exert on even the best characters, I should be by way of answering you with home truths. You have wounded me to the heart, most cruelly, and in cold blood — as appears from your careful choice of words. But I excuse you and embrace you. In spite of all, you are not a bad son. If someone who knew nothing about us were to read you, he might believe that I was "without real affection" for you; that people say you are "not my son"; that I "could if I would" find you "a better position" . . . and that I "humiliated you" by comparing you to some hero or other of Béranger's to whom you allude. I must say, frankly and without recrimination, that you have gone too far and made me suffer a pain as yet unknown to me. . . . Ah, my poor dear Louis, it wasn't right. Don't you worry about your tailor's bill. It will be paid on demand. If you want to have it off your mind sooner, give me the man's address and I will go settle it. It is true that I thought you younger than you actually are, but is this reason enough to impute it to me as a crime that I have no memory for dates? Do I know at what age my father, mother, sisters, and brother died? No. But can you infer from this that I did not love them? Really! And I see that I sound as if I were justifying myself. Once again I tell you that unhappiness has made you speak as in delirium, and that is why I can but love and pity you all the more. . . . Only tell me clearly what I can do and I will do it. . . . Farewell, dear friend, dear son, dear unhappy boy whose misery comes from you and not from me. I kiss you with all my heart and hope for news of you by the next mail." Berlioz had yielded at last in the matter of Alceste. Pauline Viardot was singing the role, which therefore had to be transposed throughout, but she sang it nobly; and by consenting to be involved Berlioz was able to prevent all other alterations. He enjoined the rest of the singers to "keep their embroidering to themselves." Still, the transposition of the soprano part gave Berlioz "shudders of indignation," for although certain airs lost little, "the ,,J

Corresp., 284-j.

2 IO

Berlioz

effect of others was weakened, not to say destroyed; the orchestration became flaccid and dull, and the sequence of modulations was no longer Gluck's." 20 At the same time, Berlioz' study of the score as well as of operas on the same subject by Lulli, Handel, and others, furnished him with the matter for no less than seven articles, published in the fall of 1861. 21 In effect, "his" Alceste was very successful and Count Walewski, mollified, offered Berlioz the royalties usually given only to authors of new works. It was a sardonic comment on the timeliness of Berlioz' musical philosophy that the only exertion that brought him easy and prolonged returns was the work he most abhorred — the "arranging" of Weber and Gluck. On each occasion his consent had been given only in order to forestall worse evils, but this preventive medicine was still bitter. He could contrast with this unhappy compromise the integrity that was his when he acted freely, not under, but above Carvalho and Bénazet. The hours left over during these last months of 1861 went into making progress with the score of Beatrice and Benedict. It had grown (as usual) from one to two acts and was nearly done. The subject and the expected audience both called for light, gay, romanesque, and restful music, which Berlioz miraculously found it in his heart to write despite the plagues of Paris, his constrained home life, and the anguish about Louis. Since the exchange of complaint and expostulation, no news. January 1862 brought none. On March 2, Berlioz wrote to Morel at Marseille, who had so devotedly acted in loco parentis: "Could you be good enough to give me some news of Louis? Has he left for India? As I foresaw, he has not dropped me a single line. I cannot tell you anything that you haven't already guessed, but I confess this new grief is among the most poignant I have ever experienced. "I write to you athwart one of those abominable reviews of the kind which it is impossible to do right. I am trying to hold up our unhappy Gounod who has had a fiasco worse than any yet seen. There is nothing in his score, nothing at all.22 How can I hold up what has neither bone nor sinew? Still, I have got to find something to praise. . . . And it's his third fiasco at the Opera. Well, he's headed for a fourth. N o one can write 2U

A Trav., 207. 1386, Oct. 12, 15, 20, 24; N o v . 6, 23; Dec. 8. A short account had preceded these on Mar. 26, the whole being revised for A Travers Chants, 1 3 4 - 2 : : . Euripides's Alcestis also conies into the discussion. 22 The Queen of Skeba. Berlioz' article appeared in the Débats for March 8, 1862. 21

Prosperous Farewell

211

dozens of operas — not great operas. Paisiello wrote 170, but of what sort? And where are they now?" 23 Come to think of it, where were anybody's operas? Except for the directing activity, from time to time, of a Berlioz, Liszt, or Wagner, no one kept up the cult and tradition of the great dramatic masterpieces." The current output had no connection with either masterpieces or drama, and even Gounod's failure was a bad sign, for obviously the Opera director would be twice as timid as before and poorer still in pocket. The one going concern was Offenbach's Orpheus in Heil which still played to full houses after more than four hundred showings. This parody had been given fresh point by Berlioz' revival of Gluck three years before, and thanks to its cynical and sensual mockery of grandeur, it had introduced the henpecked Orpheus and ridiculous Jove to every capital in Europe. While such parasitism flourished, every antique subject — especially antique costume — was ruined for at least ten years. In this state of the public temper a Beethoven program was hissed at the Conservatoire. The Fidelio overture, though played with incomparable verve, was barely applauded.15 Berlioz could almost believe he was dreaming and that the screen of history was unrolling backwards. He philosophized with his characteristic willingness to face facts: "Nothing is sillier than death unless it be life, for what is the use of life? Oh, you will say, don't bore us again with your Shakespearean quotations and sepulchral philosophy: life is for the writing of comic operas." 24 This sally introduced The Jeweler of Saint fames, a comic opera and thus a justification of life, though stillborn from natural causes. Fortunately another offspring, far more eugenic, was in existence and Berlioz had begun to conduct private rehearsals for its première the following August: Beatrice and Benedict was finished and Baden would have its play. At home, Berlioz was teaching the singers to speak. "It is infuriating to hear lines uttered contrary to sense, but by dint of making the actors parrot after me, I believe I shall succeed in making them talk like men." 27 T o Louis meanwhile, Berlioz expressed his firm determination not to undertake any other work. 23

Corresp., 286. T h e full text of the letter is restored in ij·, 710. Grout, at the end of his Short History of Opera: " T h e thought of so much buried beauty is saddening, f o r it is buried f o r the most part beyond recall, with even less hope of resurrection than old poems or old paintings. . . . " (722, II, S 3 6 . ) 25 1386, Feb. 16, 1862. 24

26

ijg6, Feb. 27, 1862.

L.Ì.,

234.

2 12

Berlioz

For Louis had at last written from Algeria. He was chastened and well, and Berlioz overlooked the wretchedness his long silence had caused him. "All is well — except me who have again spent 30 hours of agony in bed." n In such bad health it was doubly distracting to have to move — and to move twice within a few weeks — but this was made unavoidable by the discovery that the apartment house rue de Calais was on the point of collapsing. Extensive repairs proceeded floor by floor and drove Berlioz out with his papers, manuscripts, proofs, books, and other tools of the man of thought. This contretemps gave added charm to the prospect which arose of being elected Permanent Secretary of the Institute, a post which carries official quarters.2* Halévy had died at Nice and the committee put Berlioz fourth on their list of nominees. He received fourteen votes but Beulé was chosen by nineteen. Rumor had it that the objectionable Mme. Berlioz precluded her husband's election. T w o months later she no longer stood in the way: " I write you just a few lines in my desolation. My wife has just died, in an instant, struck down by cardiac failure. The fearful loneliness I feel at this sudden and violent parting cannot be told. Forgive my not writing at greater length." 30 Marie Recio Berlioz, who had barely turned forty-eight, had been chronically ill and subject to heart attacks for several years. She and her husband had been spending the day with friends in the country when death occurred without warning on Friday June thirteenth. Berlioz' efforts to be the first to reach her mother failed, and the poor woman, apprehensive at their lateness in returning, arrived to find her daughter dead. Berlioz declined the offers of his nieces and of Louis to come and comfort him. ". . . it is better for me to be left to myself." 3 1 After a few days, Berlioz' mother-in-law returned to Paris and he decided to continue living under the same roof. He did hope that Louis would go to Baden in August and meet him there, the young man's "family" not having been mentioned again, and having had, indeed, either a casual or an imaginary existence. "In the intervals of my work," pleaded Berlioz, "you would be my companion; I would introduce you to my friends, in a word you would be with me. . . . Of course I am rather nervous at bringing you into a gambling town, but if you give me your 28

Corresp., 287. There are other residences open to Members of the Institute, one of which Delacroix made persistent and vain efforts to secure. The present holder [1948] of the Secretary's quarters is M. Boschot, which tends to prove that as regards emoluments it is better to write about the great than to be great. 30 To Ferrand: L.I., 234-5. 31 Corresp., 288. 29

Prosperò1 s Farewell

213

word of honor not to risk a single florin, I shall trust you and shall resign myself to the pain of separation when you have to go . . ." M T o Berlioz' surprise Louis, disregarding his father's choice of solitude, came at once to Paris and spent an all-too-short week that both enjoyed. After it, Berlioz wrote: "I find it so restful to chat with you. Yes, I agree that it was good, at night, to know that you were here, close by. But don't let the thought upset you. I would rather look on the fact that your new position is going to better your lot. You won't be making those endless trips that take you so far from me . . . W e shall see each other offener. . . . "I had a letter from Baden this morning, telling me that the choruses now know their parts by heart and are found very effective. The manager is 'sure of a great success' —as if he knew the rest of the score! Everything in this world is ruled by preconceived ideas. Yesterday we began the actual staging in the Opéra-Comique, with every one present, for a change. . . ." " The Princess, by one of her messages of comfort, brought Berlioz' thoughts back to himself: "Your letter made me almost happy for a few hours, but such clearing of the skies is of short duration. . . . Like you I have one of the three theological virtues — charity — but not, as you know, the other two. . . . The insoluble riddle of the world, the existence of evil and pain, the mad fury of the human race, its stupid ferocity, which it vents, everywhere and at all times, upon the most innocent people and often on itself, have reduced me to the state of spiritless and desperate resignation which may be supposed to exist in a scorpion surrounded by live coals. The utmost I can do is not to sting myself to death. . . . "You wonder how it is that you did not know of the existence of my two-act opera for Baden. It must be that I haven't written to you for a long time. . . . The intervals [of illness] during its composition were so long that on first rehearsing I became acquainted with music which I had lost all memory of. . . . I have my work cut out for me teaching the orchestra, for the thing is a caprice written with the point of a needle and it requires an extremely delicate performance. Farewell, dear Princess, I shall keep you informed." " At the new grave, which he frequently visited, Berlioz meditated on his lost loves from Estelle onwards; on his son whom he too seldom saw, on Liszt now twice remote. The mother of the late Mme. Berlioz had be32

Corresp., 289.

53

Corresp., 290.

34

S.W., 121.

2 14

Berlioz

come a second mother to her son-in-law — or rather the first real one. H e valued her affectionate care and she adored him, yet she could hardly be the domestic companion he had always sought. Blake happy with his unlettered wife, Heine with his grisette Mathilde, seemed to have found gladness and devoted affection at the expense of a communion of minds. Liszt, on the other hand, after his liaison with Mme. d'Agoult, followed by some casual affairs, had allied himself to another woman of intellect whose tastes and activities were not always in tune with his. Berlioz had married an actress and then a singer 3 5 — the first a finer-grained person than the second, but one w h o had returned his love too late. His second wife, of greater pretensions than merits, had embittered many a moment and alienated some of his friends. Was Berlioz a poor judge of womankind and doomed to the pangs of misprized love? Doubtless, as he made the lovers say in the verses of his Shakespearean comedy — Love is a will o' the wisp which cometh none knows whence; It flashes then disappears That it may lead our souls astray, It draws to him the fool and drives him mad. Yet like them he concluded: T i s better, after all, to be fools than clods Let us adore, whatever says the world, Let us taste folly for a day, let us love. 36 But Berlioz' management of his feelings could not follow so simple a rule, complicated as they were by his genius for dramatization, that is to say, his desire to objectify his sensations, to see them have shape outside himself, and finally by his tenacious memory. Like the pursuer of the Well-Beloved in Hardy's parable, who finds himself in a similar situation, Berlioz "was wretched for hours. Yet he would not have stood in the ranks of an imaginative profession if he had not been at the mercy of every haunting fancy that can beset man. It was in his weaknesses as a citizen and a national unit that his strength lay as an artist . . . But he was paying dearly enough f o r his Liliths . . . What had he done to be tormented 35 Like César F r a n c k and Rossini respectively. V e r d i also took an artist into the home — Giuseppina Strepponi ( w h o m Berlioz greatly admired) —and proved in this regard the most fortunate musician of his time. 38 A c t II, Sc. 15, duettino of Beatrice and Benedict. W r i t i n g at this time to his niece Josephine Suat about her sister, Berlioz, stays consistent, in more prosaic words: " 1 am much relieved that N a n c i turned down the suitor she disliked. One must not in such a serious matter allow oneself to be influenced bv anybody or anything." (p/, 170.)

Prosperous Farewell

215

like this? The Beloved . . . had taken up her abode in the living representative of the dead. . . ." Later on, Hardy's artist-hero has a malignant fever from which he recovers with a very strange result: "He became clearly aware of what this was. The artistic sense had left him, and he could no longer attach a definite sentiment to images of beauty recalled from the past." [Italics added.]37 In Berlioz as in other artists, it is more than the common accident which makes their "imagination of love" seize upon a fit person or an unfit. The man of imagination may be taking an unfair advantage of the object of his choice, yet the likely mishap is not wholly chargeable to him, for his very faculties exert an attraction often lasting into old age. Berlioz' spiritual energy certainly did so with precisely this result. At the cemetery Berlioz met a young woman of twenty-six, Amélie, whose last name is not known. Sharing kindred sorrows they came to talk, to meet, finally to love each other — though in different ways. Unlike Hardy's protagonist, Berlioz had not lost the power to create nor to idealize fervently, and he loved Amélie in the way that Disraeli at the same age loved the frivolous Lady Bradford; 38 Amélie loved like a Bettina to his G >ethe, though without the éclat of a great estate to cast glory on the relation. The affair could have none but an inward significance. They wrote letters; they were happy in a melancholy way for a space, though having agreed to meet no more. Then the letters stopped. Amélie too had died. After a time, Berlioz experienced other love imaginings, still more distant and chimerical, until the last concentration of his desire to love on the aged and uncomprehending Estelle. But this is to anticipate. Meanwhile he worked. T o coincide with the première at Baden, Berlioz had planned to issue another volume of music criticism. This would present the best version of his many reviews of Beethoven's sonatas and symphonies, of his articles on Gluck, Mozart, Weber, and Wagner; and of essays on religious music and other technical subjects, interspersed with shorter and gayer pieces to relieve the intensity. For the collection he had found the poetic play on words A Travers Chants, which appropriately suggested the long traverse he had taken through the realms of song: portions of the book dated back to his early feuilletons of the thirties. But the brief double motto already mentioned expressed in six words 37

The Well-Beloved, London, 1922, 101 and 209. Disraeli wrote her eleven hundred letters in eight years, but she found "embarrassing" the impassioned attentions which her far more intelligent sister, Lady Chesterfield, might have welcomed. 36

2 16

Berlioz

his view of the journey's end —"Love's labor's lost" because (as in the Trojan tragedy) "the enemy holds the walls." 39 On J u l y 26, 1862 before leaving Paris, he invited the press and the musical world to a private dress rehearsal of Beatrice and Benedict. T w o weeks later, alone in Baden f o r the opening, he climbed the podium in such pain that he could hardly hold himself upright. 40 Beautifully staged and played, the exquisite w o r k was greeted with re-echoing applause. T h e "nocturne" concluding the first act was overpowering, magical. T h e composer-conductor was called back again and again. A n d he had besides, in his pocket, a letter from Amélie — a true love letter, as Legouvé testifies. But the consciousness of his age and exhaustion was f o r the moment too great — yet not conclusive. H e was not moribund enough to be reconciled to life, though the vital energies were at dead center. So for the time being the success of his last score, his last poem, his last reciprocated love, and his last homage in prose to the great dead, seemed disembodied, too far away f o r him to grasp and call his own.

The Shakespearean Berlioz I have now done everything I had to do. — B E R L I O Z to his son, on completing Beatrice and Benedict "Berlioz," said a critic after the Paris revival of Beatrice, "worn down b y fatigue and w o r r y , and in the grip of one of those amours de tête which caused him so much unhappiness . . . Berlioz obviously wanted to divert himself a little and to give proof that noise was not the mainstay of his art. Such proofs he had already put in evidence twenty times, but the world refused to credit i t . " 1 T h e conjecture about Berlioz' desire for diversion is doubtless accurate: the composer himself has told us how one of the most enchanting pages of his score was sketched during a colleague's speech at the Institute. He adds that artists have "a fund of natural impressions, which rearise from 30

See above, Subchapter 22. Readers of Turgenev's S?noke will remember that the novel opens in BadenBaden, with a description of the promenade in front of the "Conversation." The date given, it so happens, is that of the day after the première of Beatrice and Benedict, August 10, 1862. 40

X

S4*, 83·

Beatrice and Benedict

217

1

their souk of their own accord, anywhere." The impressions which came forth as music when he worked at his little comedy he organized around the familiar plot involving the two Shakespearean characters named in the title.* From the remainder of Much Ado he also borrowed the names of Hero and Claudio, but made them simply sentimental foils to the bickering pair. In addition, for the sake of musical humor, Berlioz created the figure of the grotesque Capellmeister, Somarone, meaning donkey, beast of burden. The dialogue, spoken throughout, makes frequent use of Shakespeare,4 and the poem, in Berlioz' purest and simplest vein, is well-nigh faultless. In adopting the traditional alternation of song and speech it is as if Berlioz had wanted to re-emphasize, besides his kinship with Shakespeare, his undeviating principle that music should express none but musical situations. Beatrice and Benedict is once again a discontinuity of occasions brought about by words and allowing symphonic music full sway. Berlioz had shown in Benvenuto and Les Troy ens how he conceived the broadening of the Italian tragicomedy and the antique tragedy. In Beatrice he took up French comic opera, seemingly staying within its tradition but by musical inventiveness new-modeling it.8 With this score, the cycle of innovation begun by Berlioz upon the symphony, opera, oratorio, and cantata, was closed. Under his hand each had acquired flexibility from crossing with elements from the others; and, responding to the needs of subject and mood, music was now free. The mood of Beatrice and Benedict, like that of Stevenson's "Young Man with the Cream Tarts," is one of mockery. The well-known overture presents and develops two of the main melodies of the work and establishes the recurring contrast between lively coquetry and gentle melancholy — the melancholy of humor. The instrumentation is filigree work,* tonal pointillism which acts upon lis like champagne and prepares us for a 2 Mem., II, 388. Shakespeare: "Our poesy is as a gum which oozes from whence 'tis nourished." ( T i m o n , I, i, 21-22.) 3 Berlioz doubtless did not know that the earliest English references to Much Ado, including one in the handwriting of Charles I, call the play Benedick

and Beatrice, (mo, 4

110-1.)

T h e recitatives found in some German piano scores were composed by Felix Motd for his revival of the work in the nineties. s Lostalot: " A s for his ideas, no one can reproach him with having borrowed them. . . . Artists of his rank cannot simply let themselves go; they insist on a rationale for their verve and they make it pass the test of an artistry of which they are at once the masters and the slaves." (542, 83.) β Hence the unsuitability of the modern arrangement for brass band, which by thickening the texture and slowing the tempo destroys the work. Compare recordings 1410 and 1409.

2 18

Berlioz

drama that occurs in fantasy: its reality is at one remove, like a romance painted on a bright screen. Shakespeare and Berlioz now collaborate: the people of Messina are singing their liberation from the Moors, and riming "glory" with "victory" — which is more inevitable in French than in English. Beatrice interrupts them with a comment precisely on this literary subject: "Terrible rimes!" says she, "but what can you expect after a war." She goes on to speak of Benedict, whose bullying masculinity she satirizes. But the people break in again to dance a catchy Sicilienne (the native dance) full of delightful Berliozian details. We next are shown Hero's joy at the return of her lover Claudio, and in further contrast with Beatrice's sharpness of tongue we hear of Benedict's stern celibacy· The three characters are thus quickly established. As Benedict enters, a teasing duet with Beatrice begins, to an orchestral accompaniment which musically combines their ironic give-and-take and the love that hides beneath. At its conclusion Don Pedro and Claudio come to rally Benedict, who protests despite the irresistibly nuptial atmosphere: the court musicians are about to rehearse their parts for the wedding of Claudio and Hero. For this, Somarone has composed an Epithalame grotesque — a fugue which the pedantic maestro explains: "The word 'fugue' means 'flight'; I have made a fugue on a double subject — two themes — so that the two lovers shall think of the flight of time." Being a poor conductor, say the stage directions, he leads "with all sorts of exaggerated gestures." 7 But the fugue manages to be at once charming and smile-provoking. Not at all grotesque in the sense of the Benvenuto "King Midas" scene, it belongs, like the later drinking song, to the realm of musical humor, a genre more often spoken of than found, since music lends itself more naturally to wit. The juxtaposition of the two kinds in Beatrice and Benedict makes the distinction evident. After the fugue, Claudio and his prince carry out the Shakespearean plot to make Benedict fall in love. This he does as soon as they have gone, singing a lively rondo to notify himself of the fact. Twilight has now fallen and Claudio's lovelorn fiancée, Hero, is strolling in the gardens with her maid Ursula. Their dialogue introduces the nocturne-duet which is the richest jewel of the score: Nuit paisible et sereine. Hearing its first performance, Gounod was overwhelmed by its perfection: "Here is all that the silence of night and the serenity of nature may do to imbue the soul with tenderness and reverie. The orchestra utters 7

G er. ed., XX, i j ι.

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219

divine murmurings that find a place within this admirable landscape without taking anything away from the delicious cantilena of the voices: it is absolutely beautiful and perfect; it is immortal like the sweetest and deepest things ever written by the great masters."8 The scene and the act end with a slow "pantomime" between the two women as the "divine murmurings" subside — the long holds on flute and clarinet, the melancholy horn phrases, and above the pizzicato basses, the tight tremolo of upper strings which seems "like the shadowy hum of invisible wings." * A modified reprise of the Sicilienne serves as prelude to the second act, which resumes the preparations for the feast. Soldiers offstage call for Syracusan wine, caterers pass to and fro, and Somarone improvises above their din the verses of a drinking song in which he is joined by the chorus. But he and the rest disappear as Beatrice, still fighting her love, sings a recitative and aria of traditional form and Mozartian insight: Beatrice is haughty from nobleness and formal from excess of self-respect. Hero arrives just as her cousin's heart begins to soften; their song is again a contrast, to which is added that of the distant marriage procession. The rest of the women take up the Bridal Hymn. Now Benedict too is at hand, and like Beatrice ready to confess his love — if only to take it back the moment after. But the procession has caught up with them: a vocal trio for the women gives us as many views of love and marriage and leads to a Wedding March in steadily increasing animation. On top of this Beatrice and Benedict plight their troth in a fully developed symphonic scherzo-duettino. With the words: "A truce today, tomorrow we shall be foes again," e finita la commedia. For inexplicable reasons, or rather for the good old reason that every new work of Berlioz' surprises by a new style, not to say by more fresh ideas than the mind can assimilate at once, the French critics at Baden were rather baffled by the score. They felt that around the obviously fine blooms lay "a good deal of underbrush." They added that Berlioz' sense of humor in dialogue was often crude, not up to his original, and they quoted as proof passages from the book which turned out to be direct translations from Shakespeare. The poet-composer took all this quite philosophically· Had he lived thirty years more he would have seen the Paris revival demonstrate again that Time and Repetition are the great music teachers.10 It was discovered *99>, H. 45 "· '· " S4*> 84· " ' " T h e second performance," wrote a critic in 1890, " w o n over those w h o still objected at the first." (542, 83.)

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at this time that "from the technical point of view, Beatrice and Benedict is an exquisite work. It is rich in graceful melodies . . . and art shines throughout — an intimate and discreet art, an art of precision and elegance. . . . Berlioz is in truth the most intellectual of all the masters, and it passes understanding w h y he is not defended by all those who attach importance to refinements of technique. . . . This wire-drawn style is the very essence of Berlioz' genius." 11 N o t long after, Shaw wanted D ' O y l y Carte to produce the w o r k 1 2 and Motti actually did so. Since then, though performances have been few, criticism has caught up with Berlioz' technical originality and mastery of his theme: " T h e score is all too short for my taste," writes a judge who is usually hard to please; "it is bewitching in its variety and full of a fantasy worthy of Shakespeare . . . a unique combination of laughing verve, wit, and tenderness." 1S T h e name of Shakespeare has occurred more than once throughout this book, and not solely because Berlioz was reading or quoting him. T h e lifelong study of the poet-dramatist by the music-dramatist had, we know, a philosophic and spiritual significance, and the esthetic likeness between the t w o has not escaped certain critics from Jules David in 1 8 3 4 " to the contemporary writer just quoted. Plainly, from the time of the Eight Scenes from Faust, which bear Shakespearean mottoes, to Beatrice and Benedict and the final page of the Memoirs which ends with "Life's but a walking shadow," Shakespeare's work served Berlioz through life as a scripture — a book of devotions." SV, 83· #79, II, 39. H e linked Cornelius's Barber of Bagdad in the same suggestion, and had earlier called, in vain, for Benvenuto Cellini. 13 Masson: 289, 188. "I believe," says Mr. Meyerstein, "or rather prophesy, that w e are in the presence of an operatic work of Berlioz that . . . will yet hold its o w n triumphantly and survive the mutability of musical fashions." (1948: 4η$, loo.) [1963: " T h e most perfect example of its genre after Mozart." OS'6)] 14 "Berlioz has undertaken the glorious task of incorporating into music the genius and p o w e r of Shakespeare." (Revue du progrès social, Dec. 1834, quoted in 2ff/, 0 See Jonson's Timber (1641). T h e modern English poet George Barker calls Shakespeare "unsound, turgid, and incomplete" (1393, 1942. 500); Mr. Cleanth Brooks compares him unfavorably with Donne as a lyricist ( T h e WellWrought Urn, 219-20), and Mr. John Crowe Ransom describes him as "the most inaccurate of all the poets," though without attaching blame to the "slashing carelessness of grammatical logic" and failure to develop his multitude of figures. (American Scholar, 1942, 60.) 21 From The Conquest of Granada, "Defense of the Epilogue."

Beatrice and Benedict

22

3

power of the music with all its flaws has had to be acknowledged. For Berlioz too there has been a reversal of opinion on details formerly thought settled beyond appeal: his crudities have turned into subtleties, his noise into melody, his harmonic ignorance into bold forecasting of methods now current. Since from the beginning critics faced the necessity of accounting for Berlioz' baffling power, there grew up the hypothesis (still in the textbooks) of a volcanic genius, imperfectly educated, in whose work fine inspirations abound, though always in an aura of sulphur and brimstone. Thus the eighteenth century was wont to write about Shakespeare's wild untutored genius, regret that he "wanted art," and deplore his taste for the macabre." The parallel, let it be said again, does not mean that Shakespeare and Berlioz are identical or interchangeable, but that their respective works may be usefully compared as cultural phenomena. W e may liken them as "makers of great imperfect dramas," of "flawed masterpieces" — the term does not matter so long as we use it to trace indicative consequences. Can it be simple coincidence, for example, that it was through reiterated performance, instigated by great actors or great conductors,28 that both Shakespeare and Berlioz finally found fit critics? Again, by an involvement which only strengthens the bond between the pair, it was the men of Berlioz' own time who forced the last step in Shakespeare's canonization. Scott, Lamb, Hazlitt, Coleridge, Goethe, Herder, and Berlioz himself had to combat their fathers' diffidence, and argue much as is done right here.24 It was they who destroyed the "clumsy genius" hypothesis and made 22 Dr. Johnson, w h o truly admired Shakespeare, thought the tragedies inferior to the comedies and declared one could not read six lines without stumbling upon a fault. (Boswell's Johnson: Autumn 1769.) " Boswell affirms that Garrick was the real resuscitator of the Shakespeare repertory as a whole. ( Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, N . Y., 1936, 207 n. ) For the succession of conductors from Motti to H a r t y , Berlioz was similarly a "vehicle," and an incitement to cut, alter, arrange and edit. Hazlitt had to prove that not all Shakespeare's effects were achieved by supernatural means (12;7, IX, 4 1 ) — c o m p a r e Berlioz the fantastic; H o l c r o f t had to dispute the generality that Shakespeare excels only in sudden bursts of passion (Memoirs, 267). Wieland who wanted to translate him was met with a " W h v do it?" Herder had to write an essay explaining Shakespeare and explaining the necessity f o r the essay; while Schiller, aroused, had to studv the works a good w hile before liking them. In France, Berlioz' generation had to neutralize the belief derived from Voltaire, that Shakespeare's tragedies were "monstrous farces" with here and there a redeeming moment of great beauty. This sacrosanct "taste" Lessing broke down and replaced by one closer to Shakespeare's own, that is, inferred from his works and presented as tenable. In short, as Goethe put it, "a great many gifted men labored long to show him in a good light." (Poetry and Truth, II, 40.)

224

Berlioz

good in its place the assertion that in Shakespeare "the form [is] equally admirable with the matter, and the judgment of the great poet not less deserving of our wonder than his genius." 25 A good many other critical facts connecting Berlioz with the ''Shakespearean mode," and still others corroborating the reality of what has here been called " G o t h i c " texture, could be adduced, but the reader will prefer to draw them from his own experience.2® T h e notion will have justified its use pragmatically if it suggests a w a y of understanding the artistic life and afterfame of such men as Rabelais, Rembrandt, Bach, or Delacroix. 27 A s regards Berlioz, certainly, w e need a principle by which to reconcile the many discrepant opinions still found in books. T h e y vary from the view that might be termed the "golden thread" hypothesis — that is, seeing a vein of natural genius but overlaid with rubbish 24 — to the troubled feeling that despite innumerable wonders, Berlioz' art is mysteriously unsatisfying. 2 ® W h e n this greater concession is made b y a sensitive judge, it is of course not enough to murmur "Shakespearean" and hope to suspend criticism. Rather, "Shakespearean" has to be extended to mean something more than " G o t h i c , " and include the peculiar property of dramatic form. For it can be shown that the combination of a rugged, uneven artistry with objective drama accounts historically for much of the resistance to Berlioz. It accounts f o r the paradox that he is known at once for his wire-drawn refinements and f o r being "absolutely devoid of taste." 30 N o one can repeat f o r him the excuse which has served for Shakespeare, that he deliberately composed his works in layers of increasing fineness corresponding to social gradations — puns for the pit and philosophy f o r the earls. T h e cliché is almost certainly false for Shakespeare too. W h a t w e have in both instances is the state of mind of the dramatist working at an "open" form, which demands fine tooling close by relaxed effort, a will25 28

Coleridge, Shakespeare, Ch. 5.

Pope may in fact have been the first to compare Shakespeare with Gothic buildings: see above, Chapter 10. In recent times Hardy used the same analogy to defend his own poetic technique. 27 See especially Forkel's life of Bach (1803), which started the work of rehabilitation. 28

28 30

E.g., Percy Buck in A Small History of Music. E.g., J. H. Elliott (372).

Cf.: "Shakespeare often writes so ill that you hesitate to believe he could ever write supremely well." (Henley: 679, 101.) Yet one keeps reversing one's view of particulars. T h e lines, for instance, in which Laertes stops his tears with the absurd reflection that the drowned Ophelia has only too much water already, seemed utterly in character as the part was played in Sir Laurence Olivier's screen version.

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ingness to let a flat motive do duty side by side with concise harmony or delicate orchestration.'1 Only by abdicating one kind of sophisticated taste does the finished work approximate the reality sought for. It is this ultimate naturalism which is both Berlioz' strength and his weakness. It is this which makes him arduous or puzzling: one has to seek. And since it is his fundamental outlook on the world which makes him a naturalist of this type, we are not wrong to feel that he is unsatisfying — his naturalism being but the outward expression of his pessimism.32 Yet "unsatisfying" need not mean unsatisfactory. The beholder seeking for Berlioz' reasons and for Berlioz' order is not in the end disappointed. When close scrutiny has done with these rugged, resistant, and intermittently glowing works, it must confess that the idea of correcting or improving or de-blemishing them is untenable. Somehow (as Schumann said) the whole thing "has an air," an inevitability of its own. Again, when the noble, moving or delicate passages have led us to assimilate the rest, we find everywhere the same passionate desire to achieve exhaustive expression, the same disinclination to linger or repeat, and the same richness of invention and suggestion pressing as it were behind the externally dull or flat design.33 The four adjectives by which Scott Fitzgerald summed up his judgment of Shakespeare will therefore serve anyone who knows his Berlioz well: "whetting, frustrating, surprising, and gratifying." 44 The different degrees in which these qualities attract or repel determine the feeling one experiences on hearing Berlioz' several scores. It is a fact that musicians of similar rank have expressed widely different preferences among them. Brahms thought The Injant Christ Berlioz' masterpiece; 31

B y inversion it would seem plausible to reconsider the stereotype of Shakespeare as a careless writer, for w e know full well h o w Berlioz polished and revised scores that have been judged careless. W h y suppose that Shakespeare alone among writers could reach the sublime as the pen runs? Does not Jonsonof-the-blotter himself speak in his Memorial Verses of Shakespeare's " s w e a t " and "true-filed lines"? 32 N e e d it be said that it is a Shakespearean pessimism, grounded in a similar view of noble-ignoble man? Berlioz writes in 1866 about the Austro-Prussian W a r : " Y e s , let us talk of these hundreds of thousands of idiots w h o disembowel, knife, and blast one another to bits, and die in mud and blood. . . . H o w I should like to see a small planet, of only 300 miles' circumference, come and graze our o w n at the time of a big battle and bring to reason b y crushing them all these little monsters w h o are massacring one another. W h a t a deserved puree! It is then that Nature's indifference would seem sublime —just as it happened to certain antediluvian animals." ( S . J f . , 1 7 9 - 8 0 . ) £.£., the melodic fragment of the opening of the Corsair overture, which sets off the fine orchestral harmony and irritates us into anticipation of the tender adagio. 34 Note-Books, printed in 1081, 176.

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Wagner chose the Funeral symphony; Liszt adored Benvenuto; and Mendelssohn could truly admire only the songs. What is more, the opinions given by capable scholars show that every one of Berlioz' dozen great works appears to some as his greatest, while the rest are unhesitatingly dismissed as inferior. It is clear that if each man's negative vote were accepted, this would make a clean sweep of Berlioz' music, and conversely that if we add together the same men's positive votes, they validate the bulk of the composer's output — which may be another way of saying that Berlioz' range extends on every side beyond the sensibility of his judges.35 One perfection at least must be granted the creator of such works — that of being inexhaustible by any single mind. And this in turn explains the situation which has been erroneously thought peculiar to Berlioz, but which is merely characteristic of his kind, that of not being finally placed. While we wait, it must be set down as a statistical fact that nine tenths of all the music Berlioz wrote has evoked the highest possible praise of those who know. Their consensus is distributive, as for Shakespeare — a con-sensus rather than a unanimity, but it is emphatic and unmistakable.3® Shakespeare remains Shakespeare and Berlioz, Berlioz — in spite of all similarities; for the common points define a common type of art and not a reincarnation of souls. But if art has links with both the culture and the self, it is to be expected that kindred species of art and of character will intertwine. In history as in music everything repeats, though in altered form, and the critical question always is: What have we here — the same (essence)? — or difference (accident)? The nineteenth century bears a likeness to the sixteenth, Berlioz' work to Shakespeare's, why not also the man to the man? Any answer involves a risk, but when we consider how Shakespeare seemed to find himself in Montaigne, and how it took a second Romantic period to turn both into great world figures, we are tempted to attach diagnostic importance to Berlioz' feeling of kinship with Shakespeare. "I have to keep consoling myself . . ." he says, "for not having known Virgil, whom I should have so much loved, and 35

John Morley on Edmund Burke: "It is one of the signs of Burke's singular and varied eminence that hardly any two people agree precisely which of his works to mark as the masterpiece." Encyclopaedia Britannica, 14th ed., I V , 416. 36 An amusing series could be made of articles bearing some form of the title "Berlioz T o d a y , " in which every ten years since the composer's death some critic declares him finally done with. For a sketch of Berlioz' afterfame in various countries, see Supplement 1.

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G l u c k , and Beethoven, and Shakespeare — w h o might have loved me. (But in truth I am not in the least c o n s o l e d . ) " " Berlioz found an uncommon number of

his sensations and impulses put into w o r d s

by

Shakespeare. H e f o u n d the same intensity of feeling, the same "rush of metaphor," and "lucid confusion" answering to his own. H e shared also the fierce pleasure in seeing nature dwarf the individual, mixed with great tenderness, humor, and compassion for men. Unwittingly, too — if The Tempest

is in truth Shakespeare's last w o r d — both men ended on

the same note of half-melancholy fantasy. Beatrice and Benedict

skims

lightly over the conflict between sweet purity and Calibanism, and uses grotesque humor, airy figures, and festive pageantry to half-conceal the purblindness of evil. From the composer's artistic serenity w e can infer little as to his day-to-day disposition, but w e k n o w that after his Shakespearean comedy Berlioz had said farewell to his art, meaning to live, like a Stratfordian, on his patrimony and his accumulated earnings from the stage. 37

Mem., II, 422.

26. Empire and Industry: Les Grotesques

August 1862 to January 18 6η

Faced with the penny paper, everyone trembled . . . the musician for his opera, the painter for his canvas. . . . The 1830 renaissance had created in France a great public . . . : the penny paper lowered this intellectual level . . . by making the smile of Mr. Worldly Wiseman the arbiter of French taste. — E . a n d J . DE GONCOURT

(i860 and 1868)

T o SAY THAT AFTER Beatrice and Benedict Berlioz retired is true of him as a creator. "I am eager," he wrote Ferrand, "to cut the bonds that attach me to art, so as to be able to say to Death, 'at your service.' " 1 He was weary and ill, but life and will power were not yet spent and he had not abdicated as man, critic, or musician. Indeed he was in these final years to experience his most resplendent defeat and his most gruelling victories. Tragic completeness demanded both, and only after tasting all the joys and miseries of action could it be said of him as of Nelson that "his death is not untimely whose work is done." By 1862 the Second Empire had been in existence ten years and seemed flourishing in the thick of its special atmosphere. It had won a part of this reward by conscious effort, but the rest had come as a gift — the natural product of a new phase in the onward march of industry and democracy. The Paris that Berlioz returned to after the première of Beatrice in Baden was spiritually as different from the Paris that had heard the Symphonie Fantastique as the streets of that epoch were different from the new boulevards cut by Baron Haussmann. The Baron, also a graduate of the Conservatoire, had ideas on the grand scale like Berlioz, but working as he did in the tangible medium of cobblestones, his plans met more easily with official favor: the new Paris would glorify the regime and facilitate the mowing down of possible insurgents. For now of course the only acceptable revolution was the industrial. The Second Empire 1

LJ.,

238.

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229

bore the emblem of the bee like the original Napoleon, but its motive power was a steam-driven substitute: the very word industry had changed meaning. The imperial tone also was a dubious hybrid, like the operas of Meyerbeer, like the mind of Louis Napoleon. Canny but not a great diplomat, warlike but not a warrior, jealous of his power but careless in its delegation, ruled by the consort he deceived, frivolous and apprehensive all at once, the Emperor was a living example of what happens to the heirs of genius when underbred and born out of time. It was only during his reign, out of the century following Waterloo, that France resumed the practice of national wars, and neither he nor the nation could manage them. It was only since his reign that it would have been conceivable for the titled leader of fashion — Eugénie — to give her favorite shade of red the name of a pointless and un-Napoleonic victory: it was peace and dishonorable bargaining that had added Nice and Savoy to the territory of France. The decadence of mind which had begun after 1848 became oppressive after 1852 and well-nigh unbearable in the sixties. Machine industry fostered its characteristic social revolution, by which the lower middle class is perpetually extended yet never wholly acclimated, consisting as it does of those who know enough to want more but do not know enough to want the right things —"the generation born and bred in the backshop, reared on small tricks and frauds . . . on bad atmosphere and bad blood." 2 These were the potential mass men whom Flaubert insulted generically and vocally from the terrace of his house on the Seine as boatloads of them plied up and down in Sunday excursions. They were the indestructible butt of his anger in Madame Bovary, published and censured at law in 1857; they were the multitudinous sitters for the portrait of the druggist in the novel, which has made Homais the name of a cultural phenomenon. In the arts, this new class had its counterpart in Bohemia — "a new race of intellects without ancestry, without mental luggage, without homeland in the past, free from any tradition . . . Bohemia brought the sharp demands of practical life into the pursuit of its aims: its appetites held its principles by the throat."8 The outlet for these nipping, eager talents was the penny paper, offspring of Girardin's La Presse* and 2

C o n c o u r t : 1251, 163. 140. One step higher, Sainte-Beuve observed that the generation of Taine, w h o was just leaving the E c o l e Normale in 1 8 5 1 , seemed unpleasantly "bookish, absolutist, hurrying f o r w a r d its r a w intellect and tracking down ideas in the fashion of science." ( 1 2 1 2 , V i l i , 79.) 4 See above, Chapter 15. 3

Ibid.,

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progenitor of yellow journalism. By the time that Berlioz retired as critic on the Journal des Débats in 1864, the intellectual press he had been bred to and had helped make famous was already an anachronism. Not that newspapers as yet enjoyed the huge circulations we now expect — the London Times's 51,600 in 1860 was considered a record — but the style and contents of the new sheets were showing the effect of vulgarization. Invective itself became coarser and duller, and the careers of a Berlioz or a Delacroix ended in volleys of personal insults. In the realm of physical things, rapid expansion was setting new standards of judgment by touch and quantity. The evidence of things unseen paled before those yearly tables showing always more mileage, more tons of coal, more bales of cotton. Between Berlioz* first and second visit to Russia, twenty years apart, European railroads had extended their network fivefold, and the mode of travel which had proved a wonderful conquest of mind as far as the Russian frontier was now a common carrier all the way to St. Petersburg. Comfort subtly usurped the place of pleasure — a passive for an active thing. As the scale of success rose in these goods, so did the scale of required success in things of the spirit — a play or opera had to run hundreds instead of dozens of nights to be even noticed; it had to be played in six European capitals instead of one. Mankind had entered the age of numbers in which unity is necessarily the least, and as a consequence, while the channels of communication become clogged with things, the power of attention dwindles under an excess of stimuli. Repetition ranks as the chief intellectual force. Delacroix, also reading Taine in 1858, feels that here is "another of those who want to say everything, after which he says it all over again." 5 In a word, the aristocratic ideal was dead, and what replaced it was not so much the reign of democratic equality as the pressure of all to reach and to enforce identity. "There are epochs," wrote Baudelaire with some irony, "when the techniques of art are sufficiently numerous, perfected, and cheap for everyone to acquire them in roughly equal amounts." 8 At first the tendency had seemed like a new wave of enlightenment, fulfilling the humanitarianism shared by Lamennais, Carrel, or Louis Blanc — clerical, liberal, and socialist alike. But there came a period of glut and apathy, as of the boa constrictor after an indigestible meal, and by the mid-sixties we find the men of three generations (Zola, Doudan, SainteBeuve) noting "a kind of general intimidation of the human spirit. . . . As time goes on, Mind becomes more cotton-woolly and insipid. 1

182, III, 207-8.

'1049, 202.

Berlioz imagined b y Daumier (c. 1856) " H e had the beak of an eagle and the mane of a lion and the strange aspect of an heraldic animal." — BARBEY

D'AUREVILLY

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1

This can be seen in things both large and small. Only the abnormal has any life in it." β This last remark helps to explain why Les Fleurs du Mal and Salammbô, Hugo's Les Misérables and Renan's Life of Jesus caused such perturbations. Nothing less than shock could distract the public of the sixties from the color of Eugénie's crinoline or the equally factitious bustle of the stock exchange. Even the expedition to Mexico and the World's Fair of 1867 fell upon dulled senses. In this Empire, quite unworthy of any Tacitus, would Berlioz and' his Trojans produce the kind of explosion, of vengeful satisfaction which the separately oppressed master spirits required? Baudelaire, who was not so sure a critic of music as he was of poetry and painting, preached Wagner, quite understandably, side by side with Delacroix and Hugo: Fart romantique was for him the repository of true glory, of protest and assertion by genius. But the one romantic composer who by chronological and intrinsic right should have occupied the open place in this French triad was obscured by the uniqueness of his own art and the evolution of his mind. The subject of Les Troy ens falsely suggested a neoclassicism in the style of Ponsard or of the painter Cabanel. Besides, who had heard the music? Tout Paris thought it knew all about it and fashioned a queer reputation for it sight unseen. So dark is die day for spiritually kindred contemporaries when the national circulation of ideas is stopped by a repressive government riding high upon a giddily prosperous public. Flaubert could at least write and swear in peace, at home; he could publish and be read without his detractors' making it an auto-da-fé. Nor did he need the intelligent aid of a hundred men and the expenditure of a quarter million francs to exist as an artist. But without that prodigal prince, Bénazet, Berlioz' musical life would have been limited to occasional fragments at the Conservatoire or at Pasdeloup's Cirque d'Hiver.* Bénazet's faith was such a tonic that when Berlioz returned to Paris in the fall of 1862, he expanded Beatrice and Benedict, adding the trio and chorus now found in the second act. This done, he wanted, like his own 7 Sainte-Beuve m a y have been thinking of the ridiculous outcry made in i860 in Passy, a wealthy suburb, w h e n the district was assigned the number 13. T h e offending digits w e r e transferred to the Gobelins, where the population was too poor to object. 8 1212, X I , 1 1 4 and 224 η. F o r Zola see La Tribune, N o v . 29, 1868, and f o r Doudan, 188, III, 4 1 1 and I V , 30 ff. * E v e n so this amounted to rather more than has been done f o r most twentieth-century innovators in music: e.g., V a n Dieren, Carl Ruggles, E d g a r d Varese.

Berlioz Dido, to signalize in words the termination of his career. He wrote to the Princess toward the end of September: "Yesterday I set down the last orchestral note with which I shall ever blot a sheet of paper. No more of thaï. Othello's occupation's gone. [In English.]" 10 From this resignation a great artistic experience roused him: the reading of Flaubert's new novel, Salammbô. The book pleased Berlioz by its mixture of elevation and irony, by its antique setting and plastic prose. He thought for a moment of making it into music; 11 but he stuck to his resolve, urging Reyer to try his hand instead.12 Besides Salammbô1 s superficial similarity of setting with Les Troyens, which might be dangerous in the eyes of a skittish public, Berlioz feared that any new undertaking would seem quixotic in view of his unplayed score. He contented himself with writing Flaubert an enthusiastic letter and helping out the sale of the book with notices in the Débats.™ At the Opera another coup d'état had taken place. Emile Perrin was the new director and his predecessor's promises were so much wind. True, the Opéra-Comique was toying with the idea of producing Beatrice and Benedict; foreign orchestras were playing Berlioz' symphonies of thirty years before; and in Paris, the first thought of a new but ephemeral society was to ask Berlioz to conduct two concerts, mainly of his own works. In March, moreover, the Conservatoire gave the nocturne of Beatrice and its cool impressionism stirred the audience to a vociferous da capo. But these were "victories without sequels, which exhaust an artist and discourage him as much as a defeat." 14 10 S . W . , 116-7. A t that very time, Liszt was writing to Brendel: "Berlioz was so good as to send me the printed piano score of his opera Les Troyens. Although for Berlioz' works piano editions are plainly a deception, yet a cursory reading through Les Troyens has made an uncommonly powerful impression on me. One cannot deny that there is enormous power in it, and it certainly is not wanting in delicacy — I might also say subtlety — of feeling." {204, II, 7.) 11 T h e "symphonic" passage in which the roar of the lions is heard above the human cries and confusion has since been called "analogous" to the close of the Lacrymosa of Berlioz' Requie?n. (611.) " R e y e r ' s Salammbô was produced in Brussels in 1890 and in Paris in 1892. The subject also attracted Moussorgsky, who in 1867 began a setting of which ten numbers in piano-vocal score were published in 1939. 13 1386, Dec. 23, 1862. He said among other things that so far he had read the book "only twice." Parisian opinion found the novel difficult and strange, on the principle that whatever could not happen on the Boulevards must lack reality. So good a judge as Mérimée said: ". . . it is perfectly crazy . . . but after all there is talent in it." (218, II, 211.) Flaubert had his fingers rapped by authoritative pedants, but he knew his subject and crushed their knuckles with the finality of a sledge hammer. See the correspondence — including, alas, a foolish note from Sainte-Beuve — which is reprinted at the end of any good 14 edition of Salammbô. j'42, 82.

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Not from vanity, which Berlioz had long outgrown as one outgrows the thrill of seeing oneself in print, but for the sake of rounding out his musical life, it was imperative that he should make every effort to see his Virgilian score produced on home ground. Beatrice could not supply that sizable effect, that variety of means, and that serious public test which Berlioz* sense of form about his career made him desire. Accordingly, as he wrote to Davison on February 5, 1863, "if within a week the Minister does not put Les Troy ens in rehearsal, I'll give in to Carvalho's urging and start getting ready for production at the Théâtre-Lyrique, risking fate in December. For three years I have been kept dangling at the Opera, and I want to hear and see my great musical affair before I die. . . . I live like a man who will die any minute, who no longer believes in anything, and yet who acts as if he believed in everything." 1 5 Earlier, Berlioz had accepted a call to direct The Infant Christ for the Strasbourg festival in June, 1 " and meanwhile he was apprised that the Grand Duchess of Weimar would like to produce Beatrice for her birthday. 17 He accepted again, and on March 30 set out for the old city where he had experienced so many artistic emotions. Physical pain beset him but as he told Ferrand, he "had no time for it." 18 Seven years had gone by since Weimar's last "Berlioz W e e k " ; Liszt and the Princess were no longer there to greet him, and the crowd of intelligent youth, now staider and less free, had also scattered. From Rome, where his friends no longer sought marriage but surcease from care and the consolations of faith, Liszt would soon send a copy of the Faust symphony, just published and dedicated to Berlioz. 1 ® A f t e r a first reading the recipient wrote to the Princess: "It is a great w o r k . " 2 0 But in Weimar Berlioz had also heard a fine performance of Tannhäuser and had 15 83, 173. For form's sake, Berlioz had written on January 10 to the new director of the Opera, Emile Perrin, to remind him of Les Troyens' existence. (/40, printed in 91, 163-4.) 1,1 The "tradition" thus established has lasted to this day. Like Manchester, Munich, Carlsruhe, and Glasgow, Strasbourg is a "Berlioz city." T o this fact we owe the critical and directorial work of such eminent Berliozians as Albert Schweitzer, Abbé Hoch, and Charles Münch. 17 As Liszt's correspondence with Grand Duke Charles Alexander shows, the Duchess — and the town of Weimar — remained devotees of Berlioz until long after his death. As late as 1883, there was discussion of the sum to be sent for Berlioz' statue in Paris. (208a, 200 ff.) 18 L.Ì., 244. 19 Liszt's pupil and early biographer, Lina Ramann, ascribes the inspiration of Liszt's masterpiece to the influence of Berlioz* technique and principles. (99s, I, Ch. 8.) It is certainly true that in the sixties Liszt was scanning again Berlioz' Fantastique and Faust and making fresh piano transcriptions of parts of those 20 works. (994a, II, 271-2.) S.W., 126.

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at once written: "It contains some truly beautiful things, in the last act especially. It is profoundly melancholy in tone and in the grand style, but why then is it necessary — no, there would be too much to say. Farewell." 21 His own little work pleased the distinguished audience. N o applause was allowed because of the presence of the Ducal Highnesses, but they bade the composer to their box and fed him the most delicate flattery. Later, the artists and other celebrities from nearby centers gave Berlioz a banquet at which his praises were sung. A second performance brought enthusiasm to a peak and Berlioz was asked to give a reading (faute de mieux) of his Troyens poem before the sovereigns and their guests. Housed by his faithful admirer and translator Richard Pohl, Berlioz was resting agreeably on his laurels when an invitation came from Prince Hohenzollern-Hechingen, now moved to Löwenberg in Silesia, who desired an all-Berlioz concert under the master's hand. The Prince had himself arranged the program and begun rehearsing. Neither man had forgotten the time twenty years earlier when at Hechingen proper, Berlioz had arranged without fee and for a minute orchestra a concert of his then unknown works. N o w the Prince could put sixty men at Berlioz* disposal and, matching the artist's earlier care and thoughtfulness, he prepared for the composer the most exquisite pleasure in his career. When Berlioz arrived he found a small concert room of excellent acoustics, which connected with greenrooms, a musical library and an apartment for the visiting artist. A t four each day they come into my study to tell me the orchestra is assembled. I open a double door and find half a hundred players seated and already in tune. They rise as I step to the podium. I lift my baton, give the first beat, and we're on our way . . . If you can believe it, at the first rehearsal they went through the finale of Harold without a mistake, the adagio from Romeo and Juliet without missing an accent. . . . Seifriz, the capellmeister, told me after this [in French]: "Sir, when we listen this piece we ever in tears." Do you know, dear friends, what touches me most in these marks of affection? It is the discovery that I must be dead. So much has happened in 20 years which I have the impudence to call progress: I am played almost everywhere [in Germany]. . . . My Corsair Overture is widely played though I myself have heard it only once. The others, Lear and Benvenuto Cellini, are often given and they are just the ones least known in Paris. Day before yesterday (laugh or smile if you like) I found myself unable to hold back a tear in conducting the King Lear . . . I was thinking that perhaps Father Shakespeare would not curse me for having made his old 21

T o Morel, Apr. 7, 1863. (Bibl. Conserv., partly quoted in 298, 325.)

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235 British King and his sweet Cordelia speak in those strains. I had forgotten the work since writing it at Nice in 1831. . . . There being no harpist here, one was bidden to come 300 miles from Weimar. . . . The Prince is kept in bed by the gout . . . so during meals he writes me pencilled notes which are brought to me and which I must answer between fruit and dessert (for there is no cheese here) 0 . . . He knows everything I have written in prose and music. This morning he said, "Come and let me embrace you: I have just read your analysis of the Pastoral Symphony. . . . " 2 8 But I am exhausted. This is because a theatre orchestra is a slave stuck in a cave, whereas a concert orchestra is a king on his throne; and then these great symphonic passions upset me a good deal more than the make-believe sentiments of Beatrice. The events and emotions of this Löwenberg visit bear the stamp of a valedictory. After the last concert on April 20, the Prince awarded Berlioz the Hohenzollern Cross as to a captain commanding troops; an officer climbed the stage and affixed the medal in military fashion. The next day, the Prince being still bedridden, Berlioz read Les Troy ens before a small company gathered near the patient, who at the end called Berlioz to him. kissed him and said: "You are going back to France: to those who love you, say I love them."25 Not long after, the Prince died, his orchestra scattered, and the name Hohenzollern attached to other deeds. But one of the visitors to Löwenberg during Berlioz' concerts had been Dr. Leopold Damrosch, who had moreover played under the composer at Weimar and who, on emigrating to the United States in the seventies, brought with him an orchestral tradition that contributed not a little to America's musical awakening. Somewhat prematurely, no doubt, the elder Damrosch gave Berlioz' great concert works in this country.2* On a lesser scale his sons maintained Berlioz on the programs through the world's Wagnerian period, down to the present when others were ready to enlarge the repertory. On April 24, Berlioz was in Strasbourg to start chorus and orchestra on their studies of The Infant Christ, and four days later he was back in Paris. The first news he heard was that difficulties were brewing with regard to Les Troy ens. "When I turn my back, nothing goes right." 27 -- A s regrettable a lack, for a Dauphinois, as the absence of mountains in Paris. Obviously in A Travers Chants, which Berlioz must have just given him. 24 Corresp., 297-9. 25 L.I., 248. 26 See Supplement 1. 27 L.Ì., 246; Wellington agreed: "Our generals are really heroes when I am on the spot to direct them, but when I am obliged to quit them they are children." ( 1 1 4 Ì , 200.) 23

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Nor had the previous half year been without disquiet of the familiar kind. Louis had impulsively thrown up his land post in the merchant marine and come to Paris without means or purpose. His father's pleasure in seeing him was naturally mixed with the worst apprehensions. Slowly, Berlioz persuaded the " b o y " of twenty-eight to resume his career. By March Louis was in Mexico, having signed on a ship with the promise of being master of his own vessel at the first opportunity. By sympathetic identification Berlioz had also been shocked by the sudden death of Liszt's daughter, Mme. Emile Ollivier. And his own romance with Amélie was over, though he did not yet know of her death — "a love which came to me smiling, which I did not seek, and which I even resisted for a time. But the isolation I live in, and the imperious, destroying desire for affection overcame me. I let myself be loved, and then loved in return, far more than I should. A voluntary break became necessary, compulsory, complete, without compensation — absolute as death. That's all. I recover little by little. . . ." 2 8 Humbert Ferrand to whom he wrote these words was himself in wretched health and spirits. After a long period of intermittent correspondence, the two men had resumed their steady exchange, commenting upon one another's works and days, and matching philosophies like the aged Jefferson and John Adams. Ferrand's letters must have been still more confiding than Berlioz' for we find the latter excusing himself in case he seemed too reserved. Berlioz repeats that Humbert's letter has done him good, but that its praise is excessive; the sight of Ferrand's handwriting has made him happy the whole day, but "I can not so well as you express certain feelings we share in common; yet I feel them, too, do believe it. Moreover, I dare not yield myself too much. . . . " 29 Without any break in friendship, there had been a contrary motion in their development as characters, Ferrand growing more direct about the simplicities of life as Berlioz came to cover them with stoicism. The erstwhile poet was at this time half-paralyzed and greatly impoverished. He was easily distraught, and Berlioz expressed regret at causing him needless anxiety by reporting the musical goings-on in Paris. "Do not be at the pains to send me extended comments. . . . Writing must be for you as my feuilletons are to me . . . Miseris sucurrere disco. It is enough if I have drawn your mind for a few moments away from your sufferings. "At last Carvalho and I are harnessed to this huge affair of the Trojans. 28

L.I., 141-2.

- 9 L.I., 2 1 9 and passim.

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Three days ago I read the piece to the assembled personnel of the ThéâtreLyrique and the chorus rehearsals are about to begin. The negotiations with Mme. Charton-Demeur are concluded; she is engaged to sing Dido. . . . But I had to consent to letting the work be cut down to the last three acts only; they will be re-divided into five and preceded by a prologue which I have just written, the theatre being neither large enough nor rich enough to put on The Fall of Troy " 30 Five months from the date of this letter, five years after the completion of the work, which is to say in December 1863, the mutilated Troy ens was to have its première. But the half year's preparation for it was neither easy nor pleasant. Carvalho had banked on a subsidy of one hundred thousand francs from the Ministry of Fine Arts, which had been promised but not paid. Berlioz had to join in the campaign to get it. Then the contralto playing Dido's sister Anna turned out to be "non-music incarnate." S1 She had a superb voice and face but Berlioz had to teach her the part one note at a time. Dido, on the other hand, was enamored of her role but terrified by its scope and power. She had bouts of weeping and the composer had to reassure her. There was agitation backstage as well. T o damp the extravagance of meddlers, Berlioz applied to Flaubert for an opinion on the Carthaginian costumes.32 This was a pleasure to both men, but since the capital on hand was barely enough, recourse was finally had to the ready-made. The publisher Choudens, speculating on success, bought the score outright for fifteen thousand francs (with Benvenuto thrown in). This was exactly twenty times the amount paid for the Damnation of Faust, but there was in this liberality a hidden joker which the composer could not foresee and which his admirers have not been able to circumvent.33 10

L.I., 2jo-1. » L.I., 254. 32 p / , 166. Flaubert insisted on being the one who should call on the other, and henceforth referred in letters to his "great friend Berlioz.'' 33 T h e fact is that despite the contract Choudens never published either full score. After Berlioz' death, suit was brought by the heirs against the publisher, who managed to make a scapegoat of the Conservatoire as depositary of the autograph. T h e court enjoined publication (see full report in but this was carried out in a peculiarly French fashion: the score was engraved and printed but not put on sale, except to opera houses who agree to buy or rent parts. The rights have long since fallen into the public domain, but by the comity of publishers no one else has brought out a rival edition. (This is true of other operatic scores by French composers, which are monopolized beyond all legal terms.) If one goes into Choudens's shop and so much as inquires about the full score one is treated with suspicion amounting to rudeness. It is only fair to add that by 1923 the firm did issue their Fantaisie pour orchestre on Les Troy ens, for

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Meantime Berlioz had been at Strasbourg for the Rhineland Festival and returned. "I am back . . . , ground to powder, deeply moved.34 L'Enfance du Christ, performed before a veritable people made a profound impression. T h e hall had been built ad hoc on Place Kléber and held 8500 persons, yet everyone could hear. T h e y wept and applauded, to the point of interrupting several numbers . . . You cannot imagine the effect of the final mystic chorus: it was the religious ecstasy which I had dreamed of and felt in composing it. A n a cappella group of 200 men and 250 voung women had rehearsed it for three months and they did not drop an eighth of a tone. . . . Carvalho's enthusiasm for Les Troyens is growing. T h e year began well: will it end the same way? Make a wish!" 35 T h e following month, when Berlioz had begun to expect a rather lonely three weeks in Baden (Beatrice to be played twice) Louis arrived from Mexico. T h e y decided to go together and even planned Louis's return after a forthcoming cruise so that he might hear Les Troyens. While at Marseille Louis had gone to concerts and operas and now his interest in music, amateur though he was, partook of the intense ambivalent love he which potpourri they were willing to make all arrangements with "cinemas, casinos, music halls, concerts and beer gardens. (Plate No. 2674, Bibl. Nat. Fol. V m 2 1150(2).) [The new English edition is about to issue the work in two volumes ( 1969).] 34 At the international festivities following the concert, Berlioz made a brief speech — the only one whose text has been preserved of the many he made in thirty years of public life: Sir: My colleagues and I were happy to accept the invitation of the City of Strasbourg, and we regret only that we could not do more to second your noble enterprise. You have rightly said, Sir, that under the influence of music, the soul is uplifted, the mind broadens, civilization progresses, and national hatreds dwindle. See how France and Germany mingle on this day: the love of art brings them together and this worthy love will do more for their complete union than the wonderful Rhine bridge and other modes of rapid transport in use between the two countries. The great poet has told us that The man that hath no music in himself, N o r is not moved with concord of sweet sounds Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils. . . . Let no such man be trusted. N o doubt Shakespeare has used here of the freedom to exaggerate which is granted to poets. Yet observation shows that even if his assertion is excessive when applied to individuals, it is much less so as regards nations; one must acknowledge today that where music stops there barbarism begins. I give you the great civilized city of Strasbourg, the great civilized cities of France and Germany — which have joined together for the accomplishment of this magnificent festival. (72.) [These remarks were repeated the next day, and translated into German, for the inauguration of the bridge at Kehll.] 35 L.I., 25.-3.

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bore his father. The sight of Baden, its fashions, women, and wealth, and above all the response of an audience of habitués to his father's work, acted upon the son as glory does upon a possessive mistress. The Paris season at the Lyrique began very poorly on September 1 with the Marriage of Figaro. Money grew scarcer, which pinched still more the staging of Berlioz' work, but it was too late to cry halt. Rehearsals of innumerable "sections" went on daily, in a milieu Berlioz grew to dislike more and more.3* The creaky machinery for which his work had in fact not been conceived irritated him in every fiber. "What a collection of tricks and traps! Benches that collapse amid supposititious flames; cupboards in which handsome youths are folded up once each way and then turn out to be empty; thunder that rolls deliberately, like a mayor in his scarf of office walking down the town hall steps; Albanian pirates, old Turks who can't walk, and old choristers who can't sing. Alas! concerts are a thing of the past; the theatre has swallowed up everything." ST These autumn months also swallowed up friends, artists, notables. On August 13, Delacroix died, shrouded in that semi-neglect, semi-recognition characteristic of the epoch.38 Similarly misknown, Vigny, the affectionate friend and admired poet, who had been the godfather, as it were, of Benvenuto Cellini, also died obscurely in his retreat. Then one of the two librettists of the same work, Léon de Wailly, a friend to both Vigny and Berlioz, died too. And lastly, the ever warm and cheerful Horace Vernet, who ended as he began, painting Napoleons and helping artists greater than he. Carvalho's next productions, meant to recoup the losses incurred over Mozart, were Weber's Oberon and Bizet's first opera, The Pearl Fishers — both failures. Berlioz, who could tell a real musician by ear, tried to minimize Bizet's fiasco in the eyes of the public by a review in which he not only praised the young musician's merits but gave a prescient indication of his characteristic genius.39 3

*Bruneau's description of the w a y Carvalho directed, without plan, by sudden inspiration mixed with back chat, shows what must have profoundly repelled Berlioz, whose notion of art was not improvisation but order. (936, 29.) 37

269, 585. T h e historian of Impressionism, Mr. John Rewald, writes: "Delacroix's isolation had increased during the last years of his life . . . T h e old and lonely painter closed his eyes at the very moment when many of those who . . . had benefited from his liberating influence were beginning to rally around Manet, a man of their own time." ( / / i f , 77.) 39 Excerpts from the article are in M . M . , 343-5, and see below next Subchapter. 38

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After this third bad investment, Carvalho's bank balance was seriously nicked and he became intransigent with Berlioz. The composer could not have the quite reasonable orchestra originally called for. H e who thought he had "set down his last orchestral note" now had to reinstrument parts of his work. H e had moreover composed a Prelude to replace the first " d a y " of his epic action: Les Troy ens was being whittled down to the size of a stock-company budget. And not only whittled down, but puttied up. T h e know-it-all office staff led by Carvalho wanted words removed, measures added or cut to help an exit, not to mention other details to be altered for strong but incommunicable reasons. Berlioz changed none of the parts but granted the cuts and patiently argued the existence and attributes of the Roman gods.40 Carvalho's last imposition was to set the opening date a month early — avowedly to start the intake of cash as soon as possible. A t the dress rehearsal on November 2 the preparation was visibly inadequate. Though some passages were magnificently sung — which stirred not Berlioz alone to deep feeling — many others required constant aid from the prompter. N o r had unity of presentation been achieved. The clumsy scenery on which the producer counted so heavily made the show last from eight o'clock to half past twelve. On the opening night, one of the intermissions lasted fifty-five minutes though nothing in the way of effect justified such a wait. Again, the actors forgot their parts, lost their place, floundered about; their costumes (it is said) made them selfconscious. T h e fact was that the music was as new to them as that of Benvenuto and the Damnation had been two and three decades before. 41 Thirteen years later at Bayreuth, the Ring made a similar impression of disorder and incompetence, but here in 1863 there was no backing to sustain the piece through a bad start: it must make its own way. T h e public was bewildered too, except at three or four places where the feeling expressed was so simple and the music so well performed that it carried immediately. T h e septet was encored. But the "Royal Hunt and Storm" was taken as an affront: it was symphonic music, no action goes 40

Carvalho is speaking: " D o you want to do me another favor?" Berlioz: "What now?" "Let us omit Mercury; his wings at head and foot will cause laughter. N o one has ever seen wings except at the shoulders." "So, human figures have been seen wearing wings at the shoulders? I never knew it, but no matter. . . . Since Mercury is not often seen in the streets of Paris, let us suppress Mercury." (Mem., II, 378.) This was the critique of Flaubert's Saiantmbô in a new guise. 41 See above the tenors Duprez (Chapter 1 1 ) and Roger (Subchapter 17).

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with it on the stage, therefore it was too long (it lasts under six minutes).42 The sailor's melancholy song was also too novel to be understood. Debussy had only been born the year before and the Russian school would not be heard in Paris for half a century. As for the sentries' dialogue, its imputation that quartered troops enjoy idleness, women, and good food shocked the pure taste of Paris. For opera, such naturalism was only a shade less objectionable than the statement in Benvenuto that at dawn in the country roosters crow. In spite of these grave blemishes, when the curtain fell Berlioz' name was acclaimed, with one loud hiss to keep him from becoming conceited. The press the next day — barring a half dozen free lances — was respectful and even laudatory. Some had been deeply moved; others were beginning to understand; and as a group they felt the futility of further battle. Even the acrimonious Scudo was hushed, recognizing Berlioz' artistic power, misdirected though he felt it to be.43 At bottom everyone knew that the Romanticist generation was depleted enough to give no more trouble, and that Berlioz as its musical representative could safely be paid the nextto-last honors. It was the funny papers and the pamphleteers who made the most of the occasion. They were bidding for that cynical laughter of which the Goncourts speak, and they descended to the coarsest personalities. One journalist described the burial of the Trojans at Père Lachaise; others combined their recollections of Wagner with the popular idea of Berlioz to caricature them as Beethoven's sons now spawning further abortions, Tannhäuser and Les Troy ens. Even Offenbach, for all his admiration of Berlioz, could not resist composing a parody, Il signor fagotto.** The curious fact was that Les Troy ens rescued Carvalho from his risky ventures in Mozart, Weber, and Bizet. The public came to hear Berlioz only twenty-two times, but it paid the boosted prices so readily that the 42

In the Reirue Germanique, Bertrand defended this and other parts of the work like a loyal member of the opposition: "One whole act is pure symphonic music; I do not like this symphony, but I find that people mock the author's very conception; I should rather thank him for it, so highly do I esteem the free invention of forms." Earlier, the critic spoke of Berlioz' having "long and bitterly expiated the crime of starting a musical revolution alone," and then made him out to be "a good deal responsible for Wagner." ( 6 5 - 8 . ) 43 '3?1> Nov. 15, 1863. 44 His excuse must be that like Carvalho he had to keep a theater going, whose public he had accustomed to this sort of fare. Out of one hundred and one operettas produced at the Bouffes in six and a half years, thirty-five were by Offenbach. But in other ways Offenbach had long been a champion of Berlioz: he had among other things ridiculed the idea that any other French musician could be his rival.

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composer's share, amounting to fifty thousand francs, freed him from his drudgery at the Débats: he asked to be relieved in December 1863, his last word having been written in support of one who was to continue a part of his own work, Georges Bizet. T o be sure, the last twenty-one performances gave the public no adequate idea of Berlioz' Troy ens — hardly of the contents of the first night, let alone of the entire work. For Carvalho's single thought was cut, cut, cut. T h e sailor's song, Dido's imprecations in the last act, the Hunt and Storm, the Nubian dance, the sentries' dialogue, the workmen's processional and four other vocal numbers — in all ten large omissions were made in three fifths of the "gigantic and [otherwise] convincing music drama." Even so, the run did not end because of slackening demand. T h e singers gave out first, for business reasons. Mme. Charton-Demeur had accepted a reduced salary for Berlioz' sake,45 and was booked for other engagements. Others followed and were replaced by poor understudies whom Berlioz rehearsed in vain. T h e orchestra relaxed its tempi, and the chorus, preoccupied with a new piece, could be heard in this one only intermittently — like the voices in Shakespeare's magic isle.4® Still, most of the younger musicians came and Meyerbeer was present night after night, "for my pleasure," said he, "and my instruction." 47 One evening quite early, Berlioz was in the pit with a friend who observed the seats filling up and said: " T h e y are coming." T o which the composer dryly replied, "Yes, but I am going." He had, happily, moments of musical satisfaction. "It is beautiful, beautiful," he murmured at certain passages, and sometimes he wept silently. A t other times, disgust at the old practices which he knew so well got the better of him. W h a t Choudens was publishing was not the full score mentioned in the agreement, but a hacked-up vocal score matching the current production. 48 A few pieces were issued separately. " Y o u can buy 45 He had helped her at the beginning of her career around 18j 1. (See Chapter 18 above.) 4* This effect of overwork motivated the original tradition of the Paris Opera, which has always been to play only three nights a week and rehearse only four days. But the musical result is no better and the "majestic slowness" of the establishment is a byword. 47 26p, 593. There were other touching results Berlioz did not know, such as that Corot had become a devotee; he knew the score by heart, and sang it at his easel when he could not have his neighbor, Mme. Charton-Demeur, singing the airs for him. (28j, 299 n.) 48 There are numerous states of the published vocal score, all exccpt that which bears Berlioz' notes for producers being extremely imperfect. Even the order of scenes and acts is chaotic and absurd. The version that Berlioz himself

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243 bits of me for ten cents, as you do at a butcher's stall . . . Ah! Trade and Art are mortal enemies." Besides, as he candidly told the Princess, the continuing stream of insults and mean-spirited jokes pierced his revivified sensibility: "Hard as I try, I am wounded by them, and ashamed of being wounded." " He was moreover distressed that some of his old friends had not come, notably Pauline Viardot, who may have been piqued at not being given the role of Dido. He had not had a free hand, naturally, and could not satisfy everyone. Roger, who had gradually come to appreciate Berlioz' melody, was hurt at not being asked to sing Aeneas — though he had lost one arm and his singing voice — but he did attend and he wrote a warm letter to the composer. The finest testimonial, however, came from abroad —a sober, subtle, competent and reassuring message from the musician Daussoigne-Méhul, formerly professor at the Paris Conservatoire, then living in Liège and speaking with the accents of posterity: From the depths of my lair, whence 1 occasionally cast a glance on the men and things of our age, I have glanced at everything that the Paris press, big and little, has had to say about your Troy ens. For my part — and I can only speak on the strength of the glorious precedents you have set — I put little faith in the praises of most reviewers and even less in their censure. . . . We Parisians, who pretend to lead the world in all things, actually rise up in arms against every innovation in the fine arts. Let an artist's eagle eye gaze steadily at the sun and seek to deflect one of its rays for the benefit of all — directly you see the inhabitants of the new Athens hide their heads like owls ana curse the light that makes them blink. . . . We must deplore the evil result of so damnable a habit, for it might well be (sucn cases are not unknown) that a devout artist who should aspire to modify the conditions of his art would grow discouraged and give up his effort on the verge of its fulfillment. Of course you, my dear Berlioz, you who have fought victoriously for a quarter century, you will make light of all these stupidities. . . . With the help of routine and imitation we should still today be writing the music of LuDy, Rameau, or Philidor! . . . All honor, then, to the men of genius who have enlarged our horizons. So forge ahead, Berlioz, and do for our nephews supervised having had a very limited printing, he knew it would soon be unprocurable. Hence his complaint here and in the Memoirs at Choudens's breach of contract. 49 S.W., 129. One Albert Wolff called on the French to kill Berlioz by ridicule and urged the composer to busy himself about ordering his tombstone: such were the witticisms published in Paris and reported to Berlioz by sadistic friends. Incredible as it may seem, this same W o l f f later blamed his contemporaries for having "vilified Berlioz' genius." 288.)

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what others did for us. Music was born yesterday and art is boundless. . . . Courage! Germany awaits you and France will perhaps honor your fame in 1964. Does this not suffice for a man of spirit? 50 The last word on the partial staging of his music drama must be left to Berlioz himself, speaking in gratitude to his chief encourager, the Princess: " Y o u were not there, nor Liszt either . . . But let me now put myself at your feet, take both your hands in mine, and thank you with all my heart . . . for your sympathetic words, your unforgetting friendship, your flights of soul, and your harmonic vibrating to the distant echoes of our work. Again my thanks, dear intelligence, believe in the deep and grateful feelings of your devoted Berlioz." 51 On December 20 all was over in Paris, but an English manager was interested, an English edition of the score had been arranged for, and Berlioz' ducal patrons at Weimar, besides sending congratulations, had ordered one of the scenes from the omitted Part I to be played at their theater. From St. Petersburg, Alexis Lvov also wrote, telling the sad news that he had lost his hearing and urging Berlioz to compose a new work for the stage.52 A Polish lady, unknown to the composer, sent him a bronze vase filled with flowers; and Auguste Barbier, the friend of Roman days, co-librettist of Benvenuto and now an extinct poet, dashed off a warm note beginning "Well-roared, lion!" 5 3 Berlioz was far from cold to so much personal good will, but he was once more alone. Louis, who had gone to every performance measuring the applause, had sailed again. Without the hurly-burly of public and private attentions Berlioz would have felt even more deserted. For the truth was that despite his resolve, music still held him thrall. It stopped his physical pain and restored his zest for life, his oneness of being. When Ferrand chose to write words for the processional in Gluck's Alceste, Berlioz sought out the original score and would not let the poet change a single note: "On such perfectly pure and beautiful music the words must fit like a drapery by Phidias on his nude statue. T r y again patiently and you will find the right thing." 54 50

97 > 16-17·

" S . W . , 132. T h i s acknowledgment may possibly account for the amazing assertion of one scholar, that the Princess was the author of Berlioz' poem. (Eckart's Cosima Wagner: 947, 112—3.) 52 L.I., 264. Berlioz thanks his W e i m a r patrons and gives an account of the Paris performances in a letter the following year. ( 1 0 3 . ) II, 212. 54 L.I., 264.

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These passionate accents show us a Berlioz who might have called himself, like Hokusai in another art, "an old man crazy about music." Here lay the wonder and the tragedy. When Berlioz was busied with music he felt his expenditure of will to be self-justifying, soothing in its very tussle with the plastic material. But the work once finished, he was impelled not so much to exhibit it as to bring it conclusively to life by performance. In so doing his will struck other wills; his expense of energy was no longer selfless; it became ignoble, nauseating — and pain and pessimism returned. The conditions once afforded him by Prince Hohenzollern should have been regularly at his disposal, for like the poet's imagined hero His thoughts are so much higher than his state That like a mountain hanging o'er a hut They chill and darken it.55 Thus when the post of conductor fell vacant at the Conservatoire, Berlioz, though turned sixty, put his name down among the candidates. In a sense the place was due him: for experience, reputation, and mastery he ranked first in the world. But he was considered too old — and too new —a possible danger to the gently ossifying tradition. Seeing this, Berlioz supported George Hainl, who was appointed and immediately called for excerpts of Romeo and. Juliet. Lack of time postponed the concert, but Berlioz turned over all his musical scores and parts to the Society, knowing it and them in good hands. In the spring of 1864, Pasdeloup played without permission the Trojans septet; and shortly afterwards, with greater courtesy, the Conservatoire obtained a warm reception for the Flight into Egypt. Berlioz' "indefinite leave" from the Débats being now a definite retirement56 he had time to rest and contemplate — or so it seemed. But first he had to undergo in real life one of those Shakespearean scenes apparently reserved for the supremely conscious. A notice from the burial ground where Harriet lay informed him that either a transfer of her remains or a new lease would have to be made. Not imagining what it implied, he chose the transfer to the plot where Marie was buried, and where he expected to lie also. At the St. Vincent cemetery, Yorick's men opened not only the grave but the coffin as well, to convey the ashes in a different container. Berlioz, required by law to be present, had to endure the sight, noise, and other horrors of the operation, arriving shattered at the vault in Montmartre. He did not even yet know that Amélie whom he had met here lay buried, perhaps nearby. "Thomas Lovell Beddoes: "A Lofty Mind, fragment" (1238, 318). D 'Ortigue and later Ernest Rey er succeeded him.

56

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Toward the end of April, Berlioz was to dine with Meyerbeer — a late beginning of the social relations that the German composer had been circuitously seeking for thirty-five years. The meeting was put off. On May 2 Meyerbeer died. Symbolic as it may have seemed to Berlioz, it was for the musical world the greatest commotion of the year. Rossini is said to have burst into tears. The funeral was that of a prince — indeed finer than that of some princes, for although, like Don John of Austria, Meyerbeer was borne slowly across France, it was not done in secret, the corpse carried piecemeal by mules: Meyerbeer's return to Berlin was a public procession punctuated by speeches and performances of the master's own works. The common feeling was that the realm of music had lost its sovereign. Berlioz, Liszt, and Wagner were not to be mentioned in the same breath. Berlioz could deem it a private compensation that his protégé Theodore Ritter was playing in a fortnightly series the five concertos of Beethoven, accompanied by "a delightful orchestra . . . I go and hear those marvels. Our Harold has again been given with success in New York . . . what can be the matter with those Americans? " 6 7 Hearing music, however, had to be paid for by enduring the increased ugliness and noise of the city. Berlioz longed at times to be with Ferrand. "Voice and look have a certain power that paper lacks. Have you at least some flowers and new shoots outside your window? I have nothing but walls opposite mine. . . . Fortunately I also have close neighbors who are literate musicians and full of kindness toward me. I often spend the evening there. They allow me to lie on a couch and listen to conversation without taking part in it. Rarely do any bores come. When this occurs it is understood that I may leave without a word." 58 Through the summer there was blessed calm. The only news was that Scudo of the Revue des Deux Mondes had gone insane. In August, when Louis came back from Mexico, he, his father and Stephen Heller took an excursion into the country outside Paris. At the close of day, finding a moonlit sky, they decided to return on foot. The sights of nature opened the sluices of the two musicians' hearts; they sang and wept, to the uneasy surprise of the young sailor. Yet Louis was beginning to give his father more unmixed satisfaction. "He is a good young fellow, whose heart and mind have developed late but abundantly." 59 His visits were nec57 L.I., 268. It was first performed by Theodore Thomas's orchestra the previous year, on May 9, 1863. T h e Philharmonic Society, then in its 39th season, did not play Harold in Italy until 1880, but the overtures and symphonies occasionally figured in its programs. {1333, Appendix.) 18 L.Ì., 269. bS L.I., 269.

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essarily short and the moment of separation never grew easier for Berlioz. He varied his evening visits to the Damckes with longer ones to Spontini's widow and sister-in-law who resided in the Château de la Muette in Passy. On other days he went to the cemetery ("I know people there") or reread his favorite works — Virgil, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Molière, La Fontaine, Bernardin St. Pierre. He even took walks "into the vicinity of lyric theatres, so as to have the pleasure of not going in." After Louis's departure of mid-August 1864 Berlioz yielded to a longing for the Dauphiné: Paris was in bloom and this made all the more enticing a sight of real country and of his sweet young nieces. Just before he left, he found he had been raised in rank within the Legion of Honor, twentyfive years after his first decoration. Legouvé had shared in the promotion, and they exchanged congratulations together with news of their respective ailments. At the official dinner, Mérimée shook Berlioz' hand, and with his usual cryptic raillery said: "This delay proves that I have never been Prime Minister."61 The stay in Dauphiné had a soothing effect, though it began with the shock of seeing Adèle's portrait and the discovery that her daughters were inevitably and healthily beginning to forget her loss. Being the stranger and unoccupied, Berlioz could only live by recollecting. Just as his impulse to art had been remembered emotion, his life was now wholly memory, for there was nothing to drain off the reservoir. It overflowed and covered everything — place, persons, ideas — obliterating time. It reached farther and farther back, mirroring the vision, the name, the valley home of Estelle, to whom —as Boschot curiously notes — Berlioz returned in a regular cycle of sixteen years." Berlioz decided to make a pilgrimage. Meylan revisited was like a balm. Those mountains "composed" in the same sense that his feelings constituted his life. Not to act on the renewed impulse was impossible. He drafted a letter to his Stella Montis, more formal than the one which had been left unanswered in 1848, and having ascertained her address in Lyon, called. She received him, an aged lady of nearly seventy. The interview narrated in the Epilogue to the Memoirs was outwardly calm and of significance (at first) only to Berlioz. Mme. 60 41

Corresp., 308. Corresp., 307. T h e

meaning is, " o r else y o u w o u l d have had the honor sooner" — an example of true raillery, b y the w a y , which consists in hiding a delicate compliment under what seems an insult or a piece of egotism. 42 1816, 1832, 1848, 1864. Since childhood Berlioz had actually seen her only for an instant in 1832.

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Fornier was a simple good woman who was naturally amazed that an old gentleman, member of the Institute and wearing the rosette of the Legion of Honor, should be moved to such a visit by a childhood memory that she hardly shared. No doubt she had vaguely heard of Dante and of the poetic tradition, born in that same South, from which the Vita Nuova and the Paradiso sprang. But she could not be expected to feel the unspoken parallel. Besides, the modern world cast its black-coated literalism over the scene, since which even wiser heads than hers have failed to see that Berlioz' pragmatic testing of his love-illusion was an act of supreme faith comparable to the realization of his creative dreams. His understanding of the position, long before Freud, was perfectly clear and open: "She has no active recollections; she thinks . . . that my imagination is at work . . . and she never questions the conviction that what is imagined is false. But perhaps, unknown to herself, she is coming to feel that the other one [Berlioz as a child in love with her] is in control, and will remain master until the end, for he is not false but real. . . . And perhaps some day she will secretly admit to herself that it would be a pity not to have been loved so well." 83 She had indeed the grace to speak of him and her as "two children who had long known each other" (unless this should be Berlioz unconsciously supplying the fit phrase) and she accorded him permission to write. The remainder of the idyll is well known: she would not at first reply to his quite controlled effusions, then she tried to persuade "the other one" that they were really strangers, whom age and retirement from active life must keep from being anything else. This, said Berlioz, was a "masterpiece of grim reasonableness." 64 But he quietly pressed his claims and she did not rebuff him. Toward the end of the year he received from her newly married son and daughter-in-law a delightful visit in which he was affectionately scolded. He charmcd them in return, and insensibly was established as part of their family circle. The next spring, he obtained Estelle's photograph; after this their regular correspondence was interrupted by only one rebuke on her part. He next visited her in Geneva, where she had removed, and again a second time — in answer to a confidence that she was in financial difficulties. Being still anxious about Louis, he was unable to help her immediately. Six months after this she lost one of her sons, and Berlioz went to condole with her. It was the last visit. When he went again to Dauphiné in August 1863 for a celebration in his honor, he was 83 64

S.W., 151. Mem., II, 411.

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virtually dying and lacked the strength to make the side trip. In his will he left her an annuity." We return from our anticipatory glance to the fall of 1864 and find Berlioz again in Paris, where news awaited him that Beatrice was being produced at Stuttgart. At Passy on November 4, a surprise party was given him to commemorate the première of Les Troy ens. Gounod sang the love duet with Mme. Banderali, and by himself Hylas's reverie. The next month the Viennese celebrated Berlioz' sixty-first birthday with a concert of excerpts from the Damnation. Between times Liszt had come to Paris, and by avoiding the subject of music the two friends recaptured their old intimacy. The elder was moreover surrounded by affectionate friends who did their best to busy his mind and fill his heart. At the Château de la Muette, where he had read Les Troy ens, the Spontini-Erard family asked him to read Othello. "I gave myself to it as if I had been all alone. There were only six people present and they all wept splendidly. Heavens! what a shattering revelation of the human heart! . . . And to think that a creature of our own species wrote it." " Through the winter, Berlioz read proof on his Memoirs, which he had definitely ended on January 1, 1865. At the printshop his pale face, "carved as in marble, but reflecting every shade of thought" βτ and surmounted still by abundant hair, all white, arrested every glance. His nervous accurate step and firm voice had the imposing air and aloof dignity that Balzac assigns, through the person of Marshal Hulot, to the survivors of the great age.08 Like the Marshal, Berlioz expected to die at any moment. He supervised the printing of Ferrand's words for Gluck's March from Alceste; he gave up for the second time the Baden conductorship; he sorted his papers. But spring came and Louis returned. This was revigorating and Berlioz went to St. Nazaire to meet him. As master-on-probation, Louis had saved his ship in a severe storm and had been congratulated upon his making port at Martinique. His promo65 T w e n t y years later, Estelle's niece testified that this legacy "lightened the last days of a woman who had suffered grievous misfortune." (308, Dec. 13, 1903.) 66 L.I., 274 and S. W7., 154. It is very likely that the walls which echoed Berlioz' voice in these readings are now in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. T h e paneling of two apartments from the Château de la Muette were acquired in 1924. 67 689, 185. T h e author of this verbal portrait used to meet Berlioz at the press as well as at the house of friends. His estimate of Berlioz' character and music alike is very searching and has been undeservedly overlooked. 68 La Cousine Bette, Chapter 31.

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tion to full rank was n o w a mere formality. Y e t all was not well. Dissatisfied with life at sea, oddly lacking in self-confidence despite his ability and experience, wishing to marry (again? or for the first time?) the thirtyyear-old captain needed fatherly help in money and advice. He had to be reasoned with, too, being in one of his shamefaced obstinate moods. W h e n he sailed again, Berlioz was at once saddened and relieved. In August, Berlioz revisited his nieces as well as Grenoble and La Còte — three weeks of restful coddling. H e was only occasionally ill b y day, y e t could sleep only with the aid of laudanum and this he dare not use too frequently.8® In the autumn at the Institute, the customary eulogy was delivered upon the departed Meyerbeer b y Berlioz' successful rival for the post of Secretary. T h e assemblage was informed that Meyerbeer was a supreme artist whose influence on the age surpassed that of either B y r o n or Chateaubriand. This, said the speaker, was because eclecticism was the mark of nineteenth-century art. H e mentioned as a sign of virtue the fact that Meyerbeer never hesitated to make large outlays of money to insure his fame. Berlioz, w h o had attended the rehearsals of the posthumous L'Africaine — a financial success despite its unfinished and incoherent state — could be glad that he had neither to review the work nor to eulogize the great eclectic. T h o u g h Berlioz himself was no longer a threat to Parisian music makers, he continued to be mocked and attacked, usually when news came of his being played in Russia, Denmark, Germany or the United States. A t a Pasdeloup performance of the Francs-Juges overture, four thousand people cheered, but the hissing contingent was there too. Outside, indignant y o u n g men stopped him on the street and begged to shake his hand: " A strange experience — and it's you, m y dear Humbert, w h o caused me to write that thing 37 years ago!" 7 0 T h e rest kept saying that such music ought to be prohibited. 71 Berlioz saw to this prohibition himself: eoS.W.,

166. T h i s recalls R e d o n and other y o u n g painters w h o in Delacroix's last years used t o g o and w a t c h h i m paint f r o m outside his w i n d o w . A m o n g the musicians of the same g e n e r a t i o n , H e n r i M a r é c h a l tells h o w Berlioz seemed to him and his f e l l o w students " m y s t e r i o u s , enigmatic . . . a Sphinx awaiting O e d i p u s . If w e r e a d his scores, t h e y w e r e so m u c h at variance w i t h o u r teachers' v i e w s t h a t the m o s t o p e n m i n d e d w e r e disconcerted. . . . T o find o u t his true meani n g w e a t t e n d e d Pasdeloup's c o n c e r t s . . . and there w e p u t on a c o u n t e r d e m o n s t r a t i o n against those w h o hissed . . . " ( 3 Í 7 , 294.) 7 1 Jan G o r d o n , the E n g l i s h painter, recalls that o n seeing his first Cezanne he said t o h i m s e l f : " O n e cannot c o m p o s e p i c t u r e s like that! I do not r e m e m b e r h o w m a n y y e a r s it n e e d e d t o a w a k e n m y appreciation . . . N o w I cannot imagine h o w I e v e r f o u n d it dull, f o r in spite o f the f a c t that it is h a r d l y a masterpiece, t h e r e is m a g i c in it." (1083, 28.) 70

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when the singer of Dido was approached for a revival of Les Troy ens, Berlioz begged her to refuse. He did not want to undergo "a new assassination" — an allusion not to the insults of the press but to the shabby means at Carvalho's disposal. "Why, for heaven's sake, mayn't I be left alone?"72 It was asking too much. Even the Sultan of Egypt was after him, to know the reason why the Treatise on Instrumentation could not be made the official plan for reorganizing that country's military bands. A stubborn secretary had to be shown that the work taught the use but not the playing of instruments. The New Year (1866) brought a proposal from the Opera that Berlioz direct a production of Gluck's Arrnide. Berlioz' triumph of seven years before when he had directed Orpheus had not been forgotten. He accepted the new task, counting on the help of Saint-Saëns and feeling rejuvenated at the thought of real music. At the same time his stipend as Librarian of the Conservatoire, which had been reduced at the coup d'état, was now doubled. "Quite so!" exclaimed Berlioz to the Princess, "if one could only live to be 200, one would ultimately grow rich, learned, famous, and — who knows? — young besides."Ts This Shavian hypothesis was offset by the fact that death was still busy. Scudo was dead, and, closer to Berlioz, Vincent Wallace and Ferrand's brother. Berlioz became, if possible, more of a Shakespearean pessimist than ever; he quoted from Hamlet so often that his friends, the M assarts, urged him to give a reading of it to their circle: the wife knew the play, but to the rest it was simply a name before which one gravely and ignorantiy bowed. Berlioz could hardly credit it: "Not to know Hamlet at the age of 45 or 50 — it is like having lived all one's years in a coal mine! " 74 The reading took nearly five hours, for he would make no cuts. On another occasion he read Coriolanus, yet these tasks did not fatigue him, rather the reverse. About this time also, he met again in Paris the English composer Balfe, whose Maid of Honor Berlioz had directed for Jullien, and who had meantime "discovered" Shakespeare and become an enthusiast.75 Equally exciting was the fact that Joachim was in Paris and playing Beethoven's chamber music. Berlioz heard the "Archduke" trio, the Quartet, Op. 59 No. 2, and a number of the violin sonatas. Besides these pleasures there were interesting chores. For one thing the Memoirs took a long time to produce because of a printers' strike.7· For 73 71 75 •'Est., 27. S . W . , 176. L.I., 286. Corresp., 319. "Berlioz refers to the need of overseeing all details himself. ( S . W . , 156.) His care in the organization of his book is shown in the erratum referring to the place of the Macbeth epigraph, which occurs in French (with an English title) at the head of the Memoirs, and in English (with a French title) at the end.

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another, Ernest Reyer, who had replaced Berlioz at Baden and wanted to continue the Berlioz tradition, would call on him for help in program making. And finally the house of Choudens, who had bought Les Troy ens, had begun their delaying tactics and Berlioz tried to bring them to book. He had several reasons for wanting the work published: the artist wants his latest great work to make its way; he was rightly suspicious of arrangers, and he wanted to supplement the inscription to Virgil with a dedicatory epistle to the Princess.7' His correspondence with her continued to be fairly active for a man whose waking hours were subject to paralyzing pain. She kept badgering him affectionately and inquisitively, and he remained warm while sidestepping her traps.78 Like others of his friends, she did not wholly understand him, but knowing perhaps that she was thoroughly understood, she felt something akin to fear. When Liszt took holy orders in April 1865, she begged Berlioz not to make fun — as if his response to this foreseeable step could have been other than one of respectful regret. Had not Berlioz lived in long intimacy with the devout d'Ortigue? Apropos of Liszt again, she finally went too far. He had come to Paris in March to oversee the performance of his Graner Mass at St. Eustache — a work which Berlioz found antithetical to all his own principles, the "negation of art." Indeed, the work was designed to signalize Liszt's conversion by a change of views with regard to expressiveness. Though Berlioz may have been blind to its musical merits, he was at least consistent with himself.79 By temperament, we know, he was repelled by a certain kind of religious mood which to others is the only one they recognize. Liszt, with the ardor of a neophyte, attempted to justify his work to Berlioz by a demonstration at the piano before a group of their friends. Berlioz remained unconvinced. Rather than argue against his old companion, he left. 80 On this, a little 77

None of the scorcs in print carries this dedication, which must be read in 5. IV., 162-5. Berlioz rewrote the text several times; each time, he refers to the work not as an opera but as either Les Troy ens, or "a large lyrical composition." T h e final subtitle is Poème Lyrique [One copy, in private hands, bears the dedication.] 76 T h e Princess had received an advance copy of the posthumous Memoirs containing a few of Berlioz' letters to Estelle. He had asked the latter's permission before sending the book, as well as before printing the letters. VVhereupon the Princess wrote a letter to Estelle, asking Berlioz to deliver it. This he tactfully declined to do. (S.IF., 174.) 79 A t a commemorative concert at St. Eustache in 1936 both Berlioz' Te Deum and Liszt's Graner Mass were given in one afternoon. 80 Scholarship: "Berlioz turned over his column in the Débats to d'Ortigue who shared his adverse opinion." (Editor of the S . W . collection, 177 n.) Berlioz, it will be remembered, had resigned more than two years before, and d'Ortigue had been the regular music critic of the Débats since then.

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later, the Princess chided him in terms that elicited a forthright reply: "You propound in regard to music a paradoxical theory of 'ancestors' and 'descendants' which, if you will allow me to say so, is at once palpably absurd and a libel against me. It is as if you accused me with philosophic calm of being a liar and a thief. This made me indignant. I admire with passion many works by the descendants and I heartily detest many illustrious ancestors given over to what is false or ugly. . . . Times, periods, nationalities are all one to me, and nothing would be easier for me than to prove it. But let us drop these arbitrary systems designed to forward a special cause — one might as well dispute about theology. "You have the kindness to wonder what I am doing, thinking, reading . . ." 8 1 This was the only time that Berlioz asserted, indirectly but unmistakably, his priority in the musical leadership of the century, and he did this not because his claim was being challenged — he had made no claim — but because the doctrine of "ancestors and descendants" was being used to dispose cavalierly of the one claim he did make about his music, the claim implicit in any work of art that it shall be judged for what it brings of new joy. The Princess, who had prodded Berlioz on the subject even earlier, can hardly have appreciated at its true worth the reticence he assured her of: "Not one word in my Memoirs' account of the last ten years has to do with Wagner, Liszt, or the Music of the Future." ** Berlioz was determined to let the future take care of itself — and of him. Though the two younger men were flushed with the hope of belated success — Tristan had just been produced — and their forgetfulness was therefore understandable, they could not expect Berlioz to blot his perfectly good memory of the chronology. We may be sure that he grasped the relation between his thirty years of singlehanded innovation and their relatively recent burst of "futurist" music.83 If modern musicologists find 81

S . W . , 178-9. S.H 7 ., 161; May 11, i86j. T h e two references to Wagner go back to the 1840's and are altogether friendly: Mem., II, 66-7 and 312. 83 Consider the chronology: Berlioz Liszt Wagner 1830— Symphonie Fantastique Works for Piano The Fairies, an opera ( 1 8 3 3 ) (Romeo and Juliet Bonn Cantata Rienzi (finished in 1 4 0 ~ [Funeral Symphony (1845) Paris, 1840) 1850— Te Deum ist Symphonic Lohengrin Poem (Berg(finished 1848) symphonie) i 8 6 0 - Les Troy ens 12 th Symphonic Tristan Poem (Die Ideale) (finished 1859) 82

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that Berlioz' works were an "inexhaustible quarry" from which these two and others were to draw their materials,** it may be supposed that Berlioz' ear detected the exploitation too. He said nothing until the roles began to be depicted in reverse, and then only because the allegation made him out "a liar and a thief." The rehearsals of Armide showed how long it takes for posterity to get a clear notion of anything into its collective head. Gluck had been dead some eighty years, yet nearly everywhere his masterpiece was "blasphemed, insulted, disembowelled, resisted, and libeled — and by everybody: singers, managers, conductors and publishers." 85 With music, aural tradition is everything: no one reads or heeds. "It is amazing to see the prima donna [Mme. Charton-Demeur] fumble around in these sublimities, the light of her understanding brightening up gradually." 86 In the midst of this conquest over darkness, the Opera decided to halt production. N o one came to the rescue of Berlioz and Saint-Saëns, neither of them having the kind of position which exerts the force of "It isn't done." The musical world seemed in all ways singularly uncouth. When in April 1866 Pasdeloup again played the septet from Les Troy ens to a cheering multitude, no one thought of sending Berlioz a seat. Hearing of the concert by chance he bought his own, and once there was forced to rise and take repeated bows. The next day, he received from a group of musicians a letter identical in wording with a passage he had written in the Evening with the Orchestra to praise Spontini's Cortez.8T That same month, The Flight into Egypt was given at the Conservatoire. The process of excerpting and serving up a "chef's special" had begun. It was touching and willful and amounted also to a "negation of art." Whv create "one work" only to have it broken up again and the fragments worn thin by repetition out of context?88 The answer was always the same one of cultural incapacity, not to say contrariness. After this relatively quiet period ending with the spring of 1866, Berlioz' musical concerns upsurged again. First he became Curator of the Instrument Collection at the Conservatoire, replacing Clapisson, though without stipend. In the two years of his tenure, Berlioz was to acquire ten 84

P. G. Clapp (421, Dec. 12, 1944). L.I., 292. Ibid. 87 Soirées (13th) Eves., 160. 88 Wagner experienced the same discomfiture when his purposely operatic movements were boiled down to concert form and size. 85

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pieces for the collection, and equally important, to reorganize both the Library and the Collection so as to make them actually serve the needs of students.8* Then in midsummer, the Opera drew forth Alceste from its cache and again Berlioz agreed to direct it. On top of this a Belgian competition for religious music took him to Louvain, where he helped choose one of sixty masses. After a trip to Dauphiné and a few pleasant hours with Estelle, he came back for the opening of Alceste. It was a gala occasion. Fétis wrote to Berlioz: "You have fully entered into the mind of the great composer . . . In such an interpretation as yours, one discerns not only great musicianship but the skill of the poet and the philosopher." 90 Berlioz replied: "Your letter made me very glad . . . If anything could restore to me a courage which I no longer need, it would be your approval. I defend our gods." The gossamer irony of this message duly answered Fétis's variable attitude during four decades. Fétis had often considered Berlioz' musicianship finer than his soul; others felt the reverse and a few saw the balance of skill and soul. Now he came round too: in the end they all seemed to come round — after Berlioz had worn them down by avalanches of proof. From Vienna, where twenty years before the Damnation of Faust had been called a travesty, there now came an invitation to hear it entire. It would be rehearsed before his arrival, would he direct the Generalprobe and the performances? As Berlioz was rejoicing at the prospect, a sudden stroke carried off Joseph d'Ortigue. It was a bitter blow: his most faithful, understanding, and competent critic, who had always praised and blamed him with perfect freedom, with whom he could disagree about sacred music and yet treat as an equal in criticism, was gone — and gone in the same breath the companion of forty years whom he loved like a brother. Only a short while before, d'Ortigue had urged that Berlioz be commissioned to compose a symphony for the opening of the Exhibition in 1867. "Berlioz would give us a companion piece to his [Triumphal] symphony " 9 F r o m Berlioz' reports to the Minister of Fine Arts, Prodhomme concludes that "Berlioz' conception of a music Library was v e r y modern and practical . . . his views have not even n o w [ 1 9 1 3 ] fully prevailed. H i s good sense saw the dangers to which valuable documents are liable in show cases, and the distinction to be d r a w n between a Library and a Museum. . . . H e had always in mind the double duty of the Librarian as Keeper of documents and servant of readers." (57p, 805.) One m a y compare this with the inaccurate estimate of Berlioz' librarianship b y his enemv and late successor J. B. W e c k e r l i n (pop, xxiii). 90 269,636.

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of 1840, that is to say, another masterpiece."*1 It was d'Ortigue's last effort in behalf of art." T h e rehearsals in Vienna proved almost too much for Berlioz. The strain of thirty hours by railway, the barrier of language and the excitement at rehearsing for the first time in thirteen years the whole of a work which the Parisians had doomed to extinction and which was returning to life of itself, made Berlioz irritable and even inadequate on the podium. He knew it and gave up the idea of conducting, saying "I am sick unto death." The performance, he felt, brought him the greatest triumph of his career. He was recalled eleven times, banqueted and toasted: "Glory to the man who has opened new ways to our art . . . who has fought dullness since the very morrow of Beethoven's death . . . I drink to the genius of Hector Berlioz." 93 This was Herbeck, Master of the Imperial Chapel. Cornelius also was there, his faith undimmed: " T o thee, knightly singer, great and daring artist, blessed with the spirit's fire, all German hearts must bring a tribute of adoration. . . . " 94 This recognition, not of one work but of a life's work, was most welcome, most necessary to his peace of mind, for his diminishing strength let him sink into abysses of discouragement. Despite the tributes from younger men, even in France, he felt cut off and would say to himself: "It is somehow not right: I did not do what ought to have been done." 95 Seeing his creation and feeling in every fiber how much he had put of himself into it, how much he had sacrificed for it, even to the sacrifice of his home and health and his son's happiness, he was wracked by the agony of selfdoubting which is the traditional lot of martyrs, philosophers, and saints. Yet as soon as Berlioz heard his music again it spoke to his spirit — as it does to ours — of precisely the vibrant life he buried within it. He knew his work was both beautiful and solid, blemishes included. He should have steadily remembered that, as Maclean puts it, "the works were indubitably there."98 But Berlioz had not the good fortune of being a thorough monomaniac. His obsessional dream, necessary for all creation, ceased when that function was accomplished, leaving in charge the critical intellect. This told him plainly that despite an enormous deal of launching his music caught on, as we say, only in fragments. True, he knew that 91

186. Berlioz was represented at the concert of the Exposition by his Hymne

92

la France of 1844. (See below, Chapter 27.) 93

1406, Jan. 1867, 16. T h e original is in verse, reprinted in 354, 371.

94

95 96

3*7, 294· 394, 127·

à

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Gluck and Weber survived mainly because he and a few others kept pushing hard, but this comparison brought no comfort; it told rather against a whole species of music to which his own belonged. With his quick insight into public psychology, he could tell that the growth of a Wagnerian cult did not so much raise a rival as confound a tradition.97 Berlioz had faced rivals all his life — Rossini, Meyerbeer, Mendelssohn, Schumann, even Félicien David, had certainly competed with him for public attention. But none of these could destroy him: the contrast was always clear cut and even Berlioz* exclusion or dismissal was undamaging. But with the rise of Lisztian Wagnerism, which was widely supposed to be the consequence of Berlioz' own handiwork, he was as it were kidnaped and made away with, the clinching fact being that the music of the future — evolutionary and prophetic — set Wagner atop a pyramid of musical dinosaurs whom it declared extinct: Gluck, Mozart, Beethoven, Weber — and Berlioz. Only a godlike conceit could have ignored the evil omen. Berlioz had discouraged all advances to form a "school" around him; he hated coteries and slogans. Once he had given up his posts of critic and conductor to Reyer, he had no favors to dispense nor power to share. He wanted admiration to come from independent minds — as it did from Saint-Saëns, Gounod, Cornelius, Reyer, Bizet, Pohl, Massenet, Moussorgsky, and others. But critics would not have it so. He was regimented against his will. When Hanslick turned against the new music, he repudiated Berlioz and Wagner in one breath, as one tendency. Other wise heads described the pair as the offspring of Beethoven's demented latter years. An artificial neoclassicism was in the making which felt compelled to lump all the recent past in one reprobation. This could not down Wagner, who was new, operatic, and buoyed up by system. But Berlioz' music was exposed bare and defenseless. How could its maker know that within fifty or sixty years, the succession of artistic "isms" pushing one another into limbo would become so commonplace and dull that uncankered minds would begin again to approach music and the other arts without apparatus or jargon, preferring to draw their own inferences in freedom? Meantime it was 1867. Gluck was succumbing at the Opera under the productive pressure of Ambroise Thomas, just as the Wagnerians were sapping the reputation of Meyerbeer. This would leave, a decade hence, 97 This was evident in the Parisian caricature showing Les Troy em as a grown bov asking his nurse to let him see his little brother Tannhäuser. (Charivari, N o v . 2J, 1863.)

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two admissible styles — the light French and the heavy German; for Verdi had not yet rearisen from the ashes of his Italian output and revivified the native school. Given Berlioz' position in art and in history, there was only one thing for him to do: undertake a new campaign, preferably in Germany, with his finest and least-known music. T o this resolution, momentarily blurred by the death of the great painter and Gluck worshiper, Ingres, Berlioz gave his mind as the new year began.

Berlioz the Critic T h e voice of the critic has but a feeble echo. T h e reverberation of a beautiful score is more powerful than all our phraseology. — B E R L I O Z in

1846

When Berlioz acknowledged the toasts of his Viennese friends at the banquet of 1866, he had every reason to think this would be the last occasion of its kind, and he took the opportunity to speak to his fellow musicians of his career as critic. He told of having recently given up journalism and of the long drudgery he had endured in its service. He said that only necessity had made him a regular reviewer and that it had always gone against his grain to cast blame on others' work. He felt he had no critical "felonies" on his conscience and trusted that his occasional severity had been of the sort that does not crush talent but spurs it to follow a better road.1 Later comers have sometimes doubted Berlioz' statements that he hated his job of reviewing; his criticism is so full of zest that they feel he must have enjoyed writing what gives so much pleasure in the reading. Hence, they argue, his distaste was affected. 2 But to those who know his character, 1

Report in Signale, Jan. 1867, 16. 6η, 8. In his introduction to the English version of the Evenings with the Orchestra, M r . N e w m a n makes much of an apparent contradiction in Berlioz' report on the beginnings of his career in letters. " H e would have us believe," says M r . N e w m a n , "that he was forced to become a writer f o r the press. 'Fatality!' he cries in his Memoirs; Ί became a critic; I had to write feuilletons.' A n d he proceeds to tell us how his friend Humbert Ferrand suggested that he should undertake the musical criticism of Le Correspondant. T h e truth is that it was he himself w h o in 1828 asked Ferrand for a letter of introduction . . . with a view to becoming the musical critic of that journal." (P. xi.) T h e r e is 2

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methods of work, and musical mission, it is clear that this imputation is gratuitous: once again Berlioz' self-knowledge and sincerity withstand the closest scrutiny. It is true that like all great wits he delighted in his own quips and epigrams, that as a literary artist he enjoyed telling good stories in good prose, and that as a musician the publication of his ideas gave him strength and satisfaction. But there is every difference (as his too-ready disbelievers should know) between writing for self-expression under an inner necessity and writing for a livelihood under the pressure of a deadline.8 It is surely to Berlioz' credit that he made his innumerable columns on routine subjects so readable and so meaty, whence it becomes something of an outrage to make this conscientiousness the ground for doubting the author's feelings about doing journeyman work. From the beginning to the end of his life the burden of a feuilleton never grew lighter, rather the reverse: "It sometimes takes me four days now," he wrote in 1861 to Ferrand; 4 and his account of staring at a piece of paper, writing and crossing out and rewriting, is borne out by surviving manuscripts.5 It would obviously have been much pleasanter for him to keep his witticisms and stories for friends at his fireside, instead of attending piano recitals and operettas; and if in leafing through the tremendous bulk of his uncollected reviews we come upon pieces of wisdom or gaiety that we think he must have been glad to set down, all we have a right to infer is that being a man of thought, Berlioz could link his stored-up reflections to the doings of the latest prima donna or teacher of harmony. He himself indicated the varied substance of his writings when he chose as the subtitle of his last collected volume: "Etudes Musicales, Adorations, Boutades et Critiques." " This was the A Travers Chants of 1862. It contains the final version of the great essays on Beethoven, Gluck, and Weber —the "studies" which were also "adorations." The of course no inconsistency in Berlioz' saying that Ferrand made the first suggestion and that he himself asked this same friend f o r a letter of introduction to an editor. A s f o r the first point, it is inexact to say that Berlioz " w o u l d have us believe" that in taking up journalism he was somehow coerced or b r o w beaten. H e did it willingly, of course, and at first cheerfully, but the task became a drudgery. Mr. N e w m a n himself tells us w h y in the next paragraph: music did not pay and "Berlioz could make both ends meet only by writing for a number of papers." 3 Meredith: " N o slavery is comparable to the chains of hired journalism." (1214, 65.) N o r must w e forget that for Berlioz writing entailed endless hours of listening. 4 L.I., 2 z j ; see also pp. 250, 253, S.M 7 ., 20, 67, 176, and Corresp., 274. 5 See 70. "Composing music," he says in the Memoirs (I, 1 1 7 ) "is f o r me a natural function; writing prose is toil." β Boutades = sallies.

Berlioz rest comprises reviews of concerts by Wagner, Reber, and Heller; the essay on Euripides's Alcestis; two or three brilliant fantasias on musical manners and practices; the superb report on Concert Pitch, an article on Religious Music and some half dozen "sallies," of which the last, entitled "The Lapdog School of Singing," is curiously placed at the very end, as if perversely meant to be an anticlimax. Contrariwise, the Grotesques, published in 1859, begin with some hundred pages of anecdotes and trivia that hardly prepare us for the sustained and moving writing of the latter half. One might therefore say of the three volumes fashioned by Berlioz' own hand that A Travers Chants could stand a little pruning, or at least rearrangement; that the unevenness of the Grotesques could be repaired by simple division; and that the Evenings with the Orchestra is perfect. 7 Berlioz had planned to bring out two other collections under the respective titles Les Musiciens et la Musique and Historiettes et Scènes Musicales." This last remained a project, but the first came out posthumously, though with no likelihood that the contents were Berlioz' choice. If his entire journalistic output were to be reprinted, there would be matter for some twenty-five volumes French size — ten of our usual octavos, out of which possibly half would possess intrinsic or historic value. The discourse on "Imitation in Music," for example, belongs to the first category; the Biography of Beethoven, to the second.9 Much of this sound prose, as we saw above, would consist of asides upon art, social conditions, cultural history, as well as upon criticism itself, for like a Sainte-Beuve or a Hazlitt, Berlioz saw art as continuous with life and human character. Had he been free of the need to write for money he might have kept these reflections for Note Books, Table Talk, or a Journal. One would then have read more indulgently after his death what he put into his columns fresh from the mint.10 Barring a modicum of human error, his treatment of whatever he touched follows and illustrates the three great principles of the true critic: intellectual integrity, technical competence, and exact expression. A critic 7

Berlioz had an exact notion of their relative importance. He knew that the Evenings was "one w o r k " — "which I took infinite pains to write in French: what an infernally difficult tongue!" (M.C., 30.) Of the Grotesques he says, perhaps too modestly: " T h e y comprise the groans and growls hitherto scattered in a host of feuilletons, nothing more." (S.lf 7 ., 92.) 8 8

'3'4, I, 2 34·

Jan. ι and 8, 1837; I J T J (1829) Nos. 22, 23, and 31. If one imagines the forthright criticism and unconventional philosophy of Delacroix's Journal being published bit by bit over 40 years, one may form some idea both of Berlioz' audacity and of the antagonism it was bound to arouse. See Monselet: 373, 348 ff. 10

'398,

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born, Berlioz could not brook any interference with the act of judgment; every other emotion must yield to the esthetic: "You find it quite natural," he exclaims, "that one should not admire those who do not admire us, and conversely. But that is dreadful! It amounts to the utter denial of art. I can no more prevent myself from admiring a sublime work by my greatest enemy than from loathing the nonsense of my most intimate friend." 1 1 And practice followed precept: he praised Mendelssohn whom he knew to dislike his own works. This might be thought the effect of an exceptional friendship contracted in youth. But about the same time Berlioz was certainly no friend of Cherubini's, yet his praise of that master's dramatic works is steadily intelligent and sincere. The same relation obtains with regard to Italian music, and notably about Rossini, whom Berlioz censured for explicit reasons while praising William Tell, Comte Ory, and The Barber of Seville. Heller testifies that on hearing this lastnamed score, Berlioz could not restrain his tears of joy, despite all the malicious nonsense that the "gay fat man" (Rossini) continued to circulate about his admirer.12 It is also proper to recall that none of Wagner's teasing or attacks made Berlioz deviate in his public judgment, which was consistent not only with itself from 1841 to 1863, but with Berlioz' other expressed opinions regarding the elements of dramatic music. One test of a critic's powers is of course his capacity to discover new talents, and this duty becomes even more exacting when the critic is himself a creator, since the production of strong original work presupposes a certain blindness to other possible modes of creation. Of the new musicians who came to Berlioz' attention, he seems not to have missed a single one: in France — David, Gounod, Saint-Saëns, Reyer, Bizet and Massenet; u in Germany — besides Mendelssohn and Wagner, Berlioz saw at once the merits of Cornelius, Joachim, and Brahms; among the Russians, he discerned Glinka first and later, as we shall see, The Five. His judgment of performance, whether vocal or instrumental, was equally prophetic, 11

S . W . , 141. Shaw, also speaking of himself, defines the critic in virtually identical terms, and elsewhere adds: " W h e n my critical mood is at its height, personal feeling is not the word: it is passion: the passion for artistic perfection. . . . Let all young artists look to it, and pay no heed to the idiots who declare that criticism should be free from personal feeling. The true critic, I repeat is the man who becomes your personal enemy on the sole provocation of a bad performance, and will only be appeased by good performances." (120η, 107-8.) 12 Letter to Hanslick, reprinted in 502, 424. 13 H e owed his Rome Prize in large part to Berlioz — and on hearing of this embraced him. (977, 35.) As for César Franck, he made his debut as composer while Berlioz was out of the country (1846) but received Berlioz' high praise

as a pianist. (1398, Mar. 31, 1839.)

2Ó2

Berlioz

and a long list could be made of the men and women who had their superior ability first signalized in the Débats Long after his death, a letter of Berlioz' came to light which shows how and why in his last days as reviewer, far from assuming the infallibility of an old judge, he continued to regard his critical functions critically. The letter, dated March 28, 1863, is addressed to Marmontel, Professor at the Conservatoire, and concerns Bizet's Pearl Fishers: I have had until now neither time nor strength to open the manuscript that you entrusted to me, and I should apologize for this if you did not already know that the facts are so. But I promise you to get at it soon and to deal with your friend otherwise than cavalierly. Just think of it! I have his work by me; I will have read it — read it by reading it — and for once I shall be writing with a full knowledge of the case. If comjosers only knew with what casualness, or in what somnolent states we icensed critics listen to their works, they would call us b — d s and it would be perfectly fair. But suppose I dislike this score. You will then take pity on my predicament since it will involve a young artist who is dear to your kindly heart. W h y come to me, who am a musician — not any old musician, but one whose preferences have warped his judgment? Do you think it quite honest on the part of a combatant to present the work of a colleague? The critic may so easily be dense and the work good. I entertain a vigorous hate against certain kinds of music which are none the less healthy, and I have had to reverse many a decision in which I proved a foolish judge. 1 hope for love of you that these three acts will please me. But don't go hanging yourself, nor let the author do the same, if they bore me: it won't prove a thing. Weber said Beethoven was mad. The art of music changes, and that too is a necessity.15

Í

The allusion to Beethoven reminds us that there was critical genius in Berlioz' proclaiming his greatness in the Paris of 1827, particularly when this admiration included the Ninth Symphony and the late quartets. Neither Schubert, Weber, nor Wagner went so far so soon. But Berlioz' prescience is made all the more remarkable by his anticipation of the twentieth-century judgment that among Beethoven's works the late piano sonatas and quartets hold perhaps a higher rank than the symphonies.16 Berlioz' fondness for chamber music has been justly recognized by the II T o cite at random: Parish-Alvars, Ernst, Laub, Lübeck, Reichardt and Stockhausen, besides Zani de Ferranti, Louis Moreau Gottschalk and SaintSaëns as pianists, Pauline Viardot, Charton (-Demeur), and others whom we 15 have met on previous pages. 123,140-1. 16 Berlioz said this on numerous occasions: " T h e great sonatas of Beethoven •will serve as a yardstick to measure the development of our musical intelli-

gence." ( A Trav., 67.)

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well-known British authority on the genre " — a genre which the composer, despite his supposed mania for huge ensembles, did his best to acclimate and encourage in France." These many impeccable judgments certainly owed much to Berlioz* pragmatic relativism, which was but the intellectual counterpart of his dramatic sense. He could see how the artistic object looked from various points of view, he liked this variety (short of flat contradiction) and he had a range of discernment which kept him from the critic's worst fault — that of believing perfection marred by unacceptable detail. Thus in his analysis of Beethoven's symphonies, Berlioz points out chords or progressions that strike him as flaws or whims. But his lifelong conviction about Beethoven was that "the man had everything, and we — have nothing." 18 The reader will also have noted how accurately Berlioz places Giuck far below Beethoven as a musician, while at the same time maintaining that Gluck's creations are perfect in their kind.20 A final test of acumen in the creator-critic is his opinion of his own work: we have already seen what a balanced judgment Berlioz rendered upon himself in the Memoirs. It remains, after a century of scribbling by others, "immeasurably the finest criticism" of Berlioz' music ever written; 21 to which one might add that the composer's choice among his own scores never mistakes trifles for masterpieces, and that he keeps a nice balance between liking movements of his that glow with inspiration and those that shine by virtue of technical imagination. If only because they have given rise to many misstatements, Berlioz' lacks and limitations as a critic deserve a separate summary. He had, it is said, no historical sense and thus failed to appreciate the older masters. He is similarly supposed to have rejected all Italian music because he hated that of his own day. The facts are otherwise. Berlioz was one of Mozart's 17

W . W . Cobbett. A f t e r testifying to Berlioz' enthusiasm for the (British) Beethoven Quartet Society, Cobbett goes on: " H e wrote so admirably about music that I am tempted to quote once more, etc. . . ." (1297,1, 123.) 18 T o Morel in 1855: " I hear you're writing a quintet. Good! M a y that difficult genre flourish in France!" (Corresp., 224.) From the thirties to his death, Berlioz had frequent sessions of chamber music at his own house. See his letters, passim. 10

S02, 424. E.g., the comment to Ferrand about the March from Alceste: " Y o u must know that in spots the tenor part is very badly written . . . hardly any pupil would dare show his teacher such an awkward harmony exercise. . . . But the bass, the harmony, and the melody sublimise everything." (L.I., 266.) 21 W . H. Meilers: 3η2, 122. 20

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most clear-sighted and fervent admirers, as is proved not only by his praise of Don Giovanni, Idomeneo, The Magic Flute, and the three great symphonies, but by the fact that upon such a work as Die Entführung Berlioz' criticism and Mozart's own judgment independently concur.22 As for Berlioz' total rejection of Italian opera, it too is a myth: we have just seen his attitude toward Cherubini and Rossini; his mature opinion of Bellini is full of warmth and would be endorsed by any fair judge; and his respect for Verdi as a great craftsman speaks for itself.23 Of the earlier Italian masters, he knew more than is generally supposed, having a special fondness for Marcello and having arrived by himself at the modern view that Piccinni's "system" did not differ so greatly from Gluck's as the eighteenth-century polemic about the rivals would suggest. With regard to Palestrina, Berlioz' objections to the Improperia need not be shared to be understood and justly represented.24 Berlioz felt that the absence of rhythm — and therefore of melody in the modern sense — combined with a steadily consonant harmony, made them something less than works of art. This did not keep Berlioz from putting Palestrina's madrigals on his programs. Of the "ancients" this leaves Bach, Handel, and Haydn. Of Bach, Berlioz heard but little in Paris. In Berlin, the Saint Matthew Passion impressed him by its dramatic power and harmonic richness, though its esthetic principles — the necessarily limited vocal "orchestration" and the continuo (played on a piano) — struck him as monotonous.25 Late in Berlioz' life, Saint-Saëns played him some of the clavier works, which moved Berlioz deeply and completely won him over to Bach.26 Handel, again, Berlioz knew only through bad and dull performances, the kind Shaw was to call "in-churchy," and the music struck him as for the most part pedestrian. Now and then an air or chorus elicited his praise. If one adds to this Berlioz' view of Purcell and his choice among the works of Lully and Rameau, one can see that the dramatic composers of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries spoke least vividly to their nineteenth-century descendant. It is a clear deficiency, all the more notc22

A Trav., pp. 250-4, and Mozart's Letters judgments of Mozart's lesser works, see 86η. 23 24

S.W., ii 4 .

(219,

III, 1 1 4 5 - 6 ) . For Berlioz'

It may be relevant to add that the correct text of these works was not available until 1919. N o r , of course, did Berlioz know the then buried music of the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century French masters, with whom he had certain points in common. -5 Mem., II, 120-1. 29 502, 425·

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worthy that certain modem critics have found Berlioz' harmony akin to Purcell's and his dramatic sense related to Handel's! " We may regret as students of cultural change that Berlioz did not investigate his temperamental indifference to these composers. But it was not his business, and from the point of view of ethical criticism we can only commend him for not wasting his time in spinning rationalizations in the void. True criticism, regardless of its conclusions, must spring from love — passion for the object presented or, in censure, passion for the object aimed at and missed. The critical relation does not obtain when the artist's very purpose seems to the critic futile, or remains a mystery — which incidentally explains much of the foolish writing about Berlioz' own music. As his treatment of Haydn shows, competence in the juridical sense requires something more than familiarity. Berlioz knew Haydn's oratorios and some of the symphonies, but he disliked the descriptive element in the former, 18 and what he took to be the affected naïveté of the latter. Hence he refrained from elaborate analysis and used as a safety valve occasional sallies in private letters: . . Haydn's Creation is a work that has always been deeply antipathetic to me — I make this confession to you regardless —. His lowing herds, his buzzing flies, his light in C major which dazzles like a patent lamp, and then his Adam, Uriel, and Gabriel, the flute solos and all the goody-goodiness of it exasperate me and make me want to commit mayhem. The English love their pudding well covered with a layer of fat: I loathe it, and it is just this sort of fat which envelops the musical pudding of old man Haydn. Naïveté is a fine thing, but it ought not to be overdone. . . . Don't scold me, beat me, or hush me up: I desist of my own accord . . . But see the influence of good health: I utter blasphemies: I must be well." M Having let off steam and been "pardoned" by his correspondent, Berlioz' natural sobriety regains the upper hand and gives us a clue to his considered (historical) belief: "May I say 'the good Haydn,' seeing that Horace said 'sometimes good Homer nods'? Well, the good burgher style of treating great poetic subjects prevailed almost everywhere in Europe when Haydn wrote, and his temperament moreover led in the 27

Romain Rolland, 1003, 109; Ernest Walker, 604, 104. When dealing with musical imitation, Berlioz opposed Beethoven to Haydn's "system" (see above Chapter 7), though he did not know that Beethoven would have agreed with his opinion of these two works of Haydn's. (1021, II, 120.) 29 S.W., 85-6. 28

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same direction. He was a great simple musician and simply a great musician . . . It is said that after the taking of Vienna by the French, he made a delightful remark to some officers who came to see him: 'And so, gentlemen, you have deigned to call upon a poor man of genius like me?' Yet 1 prefer . . . Mozart's reply to the Archduke who greeted him after The Marriage of Figaro with the silly comment: 'There are certainly a great many notes in your score, my dear Mozart.' — 'Not one too many, my lord.' " » This preference not only attests Berlioz* feeling that quiet self-assurance is more modest than proclaimed humility; it also acknowledges limits to the mind's powers of assimilation and thus lessens the harm of any deficiency by making it explicit. He says elsewhere: "If I weren't myself guilty of the same fault as regards other masters, . . . I should say that Wagner is wrong not to see in our puritanical Mendelssohn a fine and rich personality. When a master is a master, and when this master has always and in all ways honored and respected art, one must honor and respect him too, whatever be the divergence between the path we follow and that which he has elected . . . But no one is perfect." " This conscientious relativism, as we shall see, does end by yielding a view of "the object as it really is." But the music critic faces a special difficulty in that he deals with an elusive object and he therefore requires a special art, of which it was said on an earlier page that only a scant half dozen men besides Berlioz have attained mastery. Berlioz' disciple Ernest Reyer points out wherein the difficulty and the art reside, when he asks: "Why write from Cairo to Paris that the romance of Rhadames [in A'ida] is in B-flat and that the song of Termuthis . . . returns in G-flat minor? Isn't it to dip a dull pen into the inkpot and say nothing with it? " 32 How then can Reyer say that Berlioz "wrote some admirable essays in this [technical] genre upon the art of Spontini, Gluck, and Beethoven?"83 The answer is that technical detail can achieve significance. Analysing, for example, the transition from the Scherzo to the Finale in Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, Berlioz writes: The motive of the scherzo reappears in pizzicato; silence gains little by little; one hears only a few notes plucked on the violins and the strange little duckings of the bassoons playing their high A flat, closely brushed by the G, which is the octave of the ground note in the chord of the dominant ninth. Then, breaking the cadence, the strings gently take up with the bow the chord of A flat and doze off on that held note. The 30 32 S.W., 89-90. 9 9 7 , 194-5. 31 33 20η, II, 32. 99η, 194-

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timpani alone maintain the rhythm by light strokes with sponge-headed sticks — a dim pattern above the general stagnation of the rest of the orchestra. These drum notes are C's; the key of the piece is C minor, although the long-sustained chord of A flat in the other instruments seems to introduce a new tonality; yet the isolated C's of the timpani tend to preserve the feeling of the original key. The ear is still uncertain, not knowing the outcome of this harmonic mystery, when the dull pulsations on the arums, increasing in intensity, join with the violins (which have now re-entered and changed the harmony) to give the chord of the dominant seventh — G , B, D, F — in the midst or which the drums roll their stubborn tonic C. Thereupon the whole orchestra, aided by the trombones which have not yet been heard, bursts in the major mode on the theme of a triumphal march and the finale begins." Commenting on this passage, a modern theorist bids us "notice how exactly the above lines describe what takes place and how truly they convey the effect produced. The description is a model of soberness. It does not contain a single epithet, allusion, or simile introduced for the deliberate purpose of suggesting ideas or emotions. Strip it of technicalities or suppose it read by someone who does not know what such terms as C, G , pizzicato or ground note or dominant ninth mean and its significance will remain." S5 As Mr. Calvocoressi implies, technical words are just as extraneous to the music as a list of metaphors, synecdoches, or chiasmuses would be to a poem. But the one or the other, if properly set in simple prose description, may so to speak lead us into the neighborhood of the real object and induce a state of mind favorable for beholding it. This it does by singling out features and relations that we should attend to, hasty conclusions we should avoid, and possible ones we may wish to attain in emulation of him who has pondered their premises. Knowing that not everyone's imagination can be reached through the same set of words, Berlioz blended in his analyses the technical, the poetical, the abstract, and the humorous, never overindulging in any one rhetoric. The result is that his essays hardly date, even though music criticism — at least in newspapers — now avoids technicalities, and though epithets and metaphors have changed many times since Berlioz. One element in his work that makes it perennially effective is that pace and form follow contents in such a way that our instinctive responses aid our understanding. "His literary articles are built almost like symphonic movements, with changes of rhythm, repetitions, and cadences. One could often put at the top of a page: allegro or andante or even scherzo." 38 :>4

3r A Trav., 35-6. 'Calvocoressi: 776, 127-8. A . Hallays, Preface to M . M . , viii-Lx. A good example of such an article is Grot., 237-46 on the death of Sontag. 30

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In his short biographies, Berlioz naturally uses a purely literary form — as old as Plutarch and as difficult as a lyric — and in still other pieces, reportorial or fictional, he shows again that he natively possessed the dramatist's eye and ear. This is unusual enough in criticism to warrant the reader's being cautioned. For example, in the often-quoted review of William Tell, Berlioz says of the trio in the second act that he refuses to do a piece of dissection; "I can only shout with the crowd: 'Beautiful! Superb! Admirable! Heartrending!'" 3 7 He is acting as spokesman for "the crowd" as much as for himself, but from the choice, precisely, of their words we may infer a hair's breadth of reserve in his judgment; so that it is a serious error to take the review as "an expression not so much of admiration as of wild enthusiasm." 38 Berlioz' enthusiasm was often intense but, as regards music, never wild. In this very essay, after quoting the crowd's exclamations he coolly advises us to keep a few superlatives in store for the finale. This he describes vividly and exclaims again "Ah! it is sublime! " but follows it with: " N o w to catch our breath! " The subtle shift in tone, twice repeated, is possibly more evident in French, but it is enough to invalidate any estimate of the review as "hyperbole." 39 The four articles of which it is composed form on the contrary a self-possessed effort to correct an earlier, quite partial statement, while maintaining and developing certain technical arguments against Rossini's method. One has only to read Berlioz on Gluck or Beethoven to see that when he actually felt hyperbolic he was not in the habit of dramatizing the crowd or stage-managing his epithets. Like most writers, Berlioz reached lucidity only at the end of laborious effort, and he was never satisfied with his handling of words: "As for my style, if I may be said to have one, it is that of a writer who seeks the word capable of rendering what he feels without ever being able to find it. I am too eager; I have tried to calm my violent efforts and have not succeeded, which gives to my prose the air of a limping, drunken walk." The reason Berlioz judged so harshly the result of his tussle with words was that ideas came to him in abundance and with great speed — just as they did when he composed music. But the technique of sorting and ordering them gave him much less pleasure when he was fashioning prose, because the product was in a sense not a new creation. It merely stated what he knew and what he felt everybody ought to know. 37

¡398 (1834) 343. 1025·, 147-8.

38 39 40

Ibid. S.W., 144. This was written in 1864, after he had left the Débats.

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Still, his writings in all genres show what Pascal sought in every book — a man, not an author. And put side by side, his art in both kinds of composition reveals one and the same spirit. The unflagging motion, multiplicity of ideas, rapid transitions, lightness, and transparency of the music are found again in the prose. Take as an example a casual sentence at the tail end of a scribbled note relating a professional disappointment (the French is needed to show the lightning turn of mind): "Nous restons [ceux]. . . . qui n'ont ni places, ni argent, ni honneur, ni cordon, excepté le cordon de leur portier — qu'ils seront même obligés de voler le jour où ils voudront se pendre."41 The pivotal word is cordon, meaning both the scarf of a medal and the bell pull in a porter's lodge — a double meaning which, stumbled on at the end of an ordinary enumeration, sets up a series of flashes — the bell pull, the use to which a rope can be put, eventual suicide, and the need of the destitute to steal even the means of ending their distress — five ideas fused in nineteen words. The vision is overcharged, if you like, dramatic certainly, but in any case glowing with the potency of the perceiver. Flaubert, who had treasured his few interviews with Berlioz in 1863, was struck again by the force of the artist's personality when ten years after his death the first collection of his letters was issued.42 "There was a man!" Flaubert tells Maupassant, and he repeats his enthusiasm to Edmond de Goncourt, Mme. Régnier and other correspondents.4* Flaubert kept marveling at the completeness of Berlioz' presentment of his mind and fate in this day-to-day spontaneous record: "It beats Balzac!" 44 Undoubtedly, if one sign of genius is the free and abundant association of ideas, then these letters afford a daily proof of genius. Berlioz' mind does not run in grooves: it cuts its own; though as a stylist Berlioz does not always coin phrases in the obvious sense, he often reshapes the known to fix the unnamed. For example, to describe the mixed noises of a large audience roused to a frenzy of mixed delight and abhorrence, he takes the phrase for earthquake (tremblement de terre) and turns it into the perfectly clear and useful tremblement de salle. The same power of analogy accounts for the love of puns — in him and others. It is surely no accident that electrical intellects such as Shake41

T o Fiorentino, his fellow music critic: 86, 414. This was the inaccurate and bowdlerized Correspondance Inédite of 1879. Of this same volume, Zola wrote: " I have just read a book which has moved me deeply . . . [ A s a critic] Berlioz might keep saying, 'white,' people read 'black.' T h i s is the astonishing thing . . . which always happens when a thorough artist addresses himself to the stupid multitude." (691, 3 2 0 - 1 . ) 43 4 4 192, V , 363-6. / ^ , V , 364. 42

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speare, Rabelais, and Swift reveled in the juxtaposition of the remote through sound. The practice may seem subversive of order and decency, but in its higher reaches the verbal modulation becomes wit and poetry. Notice how economically, in the article on Fidelio which so rejoiced Wagner, Berlioz gives us together with his judgment an insight into the psychology of musical hearing: "The public, charmed though it be by this graceful andante, is left agape as a result of not getting with it their final allegro, their cadence, their lash of the whip — come to think of it, why not give them a lash of the whip?" 4 5 And still more epigrammatically, in defense of one of Bellini's "most touching inspirations — on danse làdessus. Mais quoi! On danse sur tout. On fait tout sur tout." 46 Clear marks of temperament as these sallies are, it would be wrong to take them for principles and to derive from them Berlioz' philosophy of criticism — much more to infer either a systematic scorn for the public or a character of scratchy malignity.47 These cullings merely illustrate a verbal technique appropriate to a flashing vision. Taken as wholes, Berlioz' essays and letters show an unforced tendency to balance opposite considerations, and a care for precise wording that seems even more indispensable to the critic than to the scholar. Berlioz may have thought he was overeager in his search for the right word, but his readers can only feel grateful for the success of his quest. Nowhere in his writings does one stumble upon contradiction between the evidence and the verdict, or suddenly lose view of the object in the critic's murkiness of mind or speech. T o put the same virtue affirmatively, Berlioz understood and observed the laws of criticism and was that rare thing, an ethical critic.48 At a time, for example, when doctrines of race were being elaborated with a great show of scientific approval, Berlioz could quickly disentangle the fact from the fiction, while holding the scales equal between two friends, one recently dead: Wilhelm von Lenz, the living, had argued 45 48

A Trav., 76. A Trav., 340.

47 A s late as 1866, that is after all his personal disappointments, he writes to a y o u n g musician: " I regret to see you preoccupied, like the Paris managers, with fears as to the public's tastes. It is from perpetually trembling at the thought of its habits and lack of education that one gives eternal lease to prejudice and routine. I think it would be better to break once f o r all with cowardice and not even seem to believe in the reality of i?nprudence. But then y o u must let the public hear only things of beauty irresistibly performed." (j>j, 258.) 48 A w a r e of the usual malpractice, he imagined a "Penal Code for A r t , " applicable to both performers and critics. (Grot., 2 7 5 - 6 . )

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that Mendelssohn's music "could not become the property of the whole world" because of the "Hebraic element discernible in his thought." Berlioz "begs leave to dispute this opinion, which other critics have previously uttered. . . . Is there not a certain prejudice in this manner of judging a great composer, and would M. de Lenz have written those words had he been ignorant of the fact that the composer of St. Paul and Elijah was a descendant of the celebrated Israelite, Moses Mendelssohn? I can with difficulty believe it. 'The psalmodies of the synagogue,' he goes on to say, 'are elements one finds again in Mendelssohn's music.' Now, it is hard to see how these psalmodies can have influenced the musical style of Felix Mendelssohn since he never professed the Jewish religion. Everyone knows that he was a Lutheran, and an earnest, fervent Lutheran at that. Moreover, what music is there which can ever become 'the property of the whole world without distinction of time or place?' None, assuredly. The works of the great German masters such as Gluck, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, who all belonged to the Catholic, that is 'universal' religion, will no more attain to this status than the music of others, however beautiful, living, solid or powerful it may be." 48 It was not merely because Berlioz was free from the common prejudices of race and nation that he was able to reduce Lenz's plausibility to naught, but because he invariably asked himself, "What must one know in order to make this particular statement?" Nine tenths of all published criticism is worthless just because of the fatal gap between data and conclusion, or alternatively, the hopeless amalgam of incompatible ideas. Berlioz was a great critic because he had the power to Associate the ready-made as freely as he associated the remote — the power which makes the difference, between, say, a telephone exchange and a clothesline. The critics of any art could in effect study their craft in the pages where Berlioz conducts not a technical but an intellectual analysis. Platitudinous as it may seem, the true critic must respect the facts, imply nothing absurd, and say just what he intends. If this is so, what do we make of the many statements that Berlioz being French, we can hardly expect important music from him? w Or that since he wrote chiefly for full orchestra, he "cannot have felt the beauty of chamber music"; and because he disliked vocal fugues in quick time, he had "a rooted objection to contrapuntal treatment?"51 Yet these are the calm utterances of leading critics — misleading, rather — 49 50 51

Soirées

(2nd Epilogue) Eves., 305-6. S so, 163; and again, 3Í0, 291. Respectively 775, j 6 and 776, 38.

ιηι

Berlioz

who not infrequently assume towards Berlioz a superior moral tone in proportion to the gravity not of his, but of their offenses.52 Judging from the results, apparently few critics of Berlioz can read, and many are dazzled out of their sober senses by the strong personality they are tackling. The problem is not simply one of factual error. All men are fallible and the most conscientious work is pitted with mistakes. But there is a way of doing everything, including the committing of errors, and the critical way safeguards both critic and reader by disclosing what is assumed and separating this from what is known. That is the true meaning of "seeing the object as it really is." In so defining criticism, Matthew Arnold did not imagine that the critic could usurp the place of Divinity and furnish an absolute description of the work of art. He meant that the true critic would be free from conventional attitudes and would escape vulgar pitfalls. He would judge with his eye on the object and, allowing for his personal equation, take open risks — as when Berlioz suggested that the allegro of the Seventh Symphony was a kind of peasant dance. The academic Grove, thinking conventionally, berated Berlioz for this "outrageous proposal" which for him was incompatible with the august image he had formed of Beethoven. But a modern scholar has vindicated Berlioz by showing the thematic connection with Celtic folk tunes.53 " N o n e has been more frequently culpable, and with less excuse, than the late Sir Donald Tovey — in spite of his great competence and great gifts. Almost all his articles on Berlioz reveal, side by side with a just appreciation, a critical license which should rather be called licentiousness. Writing of the Romeo and Juliet symphony, for instance, Tovey says that Berlioz did not make it an opera because he was too impatient to set the words. Evidence for this? — none. Evidence for Berlioz' lack of industry in general? — none. But the impression given of Berlioz the Headlong is clear. Tovey goes on to assert that at the joining of the fast and slow tunes in the Ball scene, Berlioz proudly writes "réunion des deux thèmes" and that in the preceding section the slow tune "depicts Romeo's growing love for Juliet." Then harking back to the imputation of impatience, he retracts it in a footnote saying Les Troyens is a genuine, monumental, and convincing music drama, and he condones his own error with the words "You never know where you are with Berlioz." ( jpo, 89 and n.) This was the chance to be decently egotistical and to say: "/ never know where / am." Of what use is the critic to his readers if he does not know or does not say that (a) the slow tune does not depict "growing love" nor anything else — the movement as a whole being marked Tristesse; and (b) the note in the score on the reunion of themes was no source of pride to Berlioz, who was as familiar with the device as with the five lines of the staff; it was a necessary indication for inept conductors. Tovey's "criticism" simply throws back upon his subject in the form of a vague odium the uncertainty of a judgment couched in irresponsible words. " 8 9 7 , 2 55·

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The lesson is plain, even though not every object of critical study is as many-faceted, subtle, and startling as Berlioz. T o see the object as it really is requires, in addition to a gift for the material medium of the art, a passion for correct identification. This in turn calls for minute, searching, artistic documenting of one's impressions," and (since these are multitudinous) long meditation about their net effect. This is far from the procedure of ordinary judges who are struck by a fact and who let fly a plausible broadside almost in one instant. Consider by way of contrast, how much quiet thought, following upon enjoyment, went into this portrait of a favorite author by which Berlioz introduces a musical subject: There once was a man of great wit, very good natured and very gay, but whose sensibility was so fine that by dint of having his heart chilled and bruised by the world around him, he became at last melancholy. A great defect spoiled all his extraordinary qualities: he was a jester, indeed such a jester as no one ever was after or before him. He made fun of everyone if not of everything — of philosophers and lovers and scientists and ignoramuses; of pious people and impious; of old men and young men and sick men; of doctors (especially of doctors), of fathers, children, and innocent virgins; of guilty women; of lords and burghers and actors and poets; of his enemies, of his friends, and finally of himself. Musicians only seem to have escaped — do not ask me how — his indefatigable raillery. It is inconceivable that after castigating so many people, the excellent fellow I speak of was never once assassinated. After his death, it is true, the people would have liked nothing better than to drag his body through the mud, but his wife somehow managed to appease them by throwing money from the window of the mortuary chamber. Though he was but the son of an upholsterer, he had had a good classical education and he wrote in verse and prose in remarkable fashion. So steadily was this remarked that after 150 years of deep thought the Parisians decided to erect in his honor a bronze statue bearing the titles of his works. An excellent idea, but those in charge of glorifying the man of letters proved somewhat lacking in knowledge of their own letters and engraved the name of one of the masterpieces as UAvarre. . . The superintendent of works had to have the inscription scraped down during the night. This was a just return of fate; for you, illustrious scoffer, once made fun of a man who begged to be employed as Corrector of Signs and Inscriptions in Paris, and now in the nineteenth century you are put down, in Paris, as the author of UAvarre. 54 Berlioz regretted even an incautious word, written after thirty years' absence, concerning the gardens of the Vatican: " Y o u were right to make fun of me: it will teach me to speak only of what I know thoroughly." ( S . W . ,

118.) r5

' The Miser,

which should read:

L'Avare.

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This misanthrope — who would have guessed it? — was named Poquelin de Molière, and here is my excuse for speaking of him now. The lash of this incorrigible lasher of foibles never fell (as I said) on the shoulders of musicians. Yet by an ironic turn of fate, many musicians have seemed bent on, I will not say, defacing, but dressing up, prettifying, his creations. . . . One of these ungrateful men went to work at Molière's expense with such energy and success as have not, fortunately, been equalled since. His name was Mozart . . . and thus came into being the Don Giovanni whose counterglory has for many years cast a kind of shade on the glory of Don Juan,5® "Grot.,

190-2.

27. Holy Russia and Giddy France: 33 Melodies January if, ι86η to February 14, 1868 Berlioz was planning a final mission to Germany, it was to combat with music the darkness he felt closing in. From his point of view, the music of the future was retrograde, the music of Ambroise Thomas stationary, the tomfooleries of Offenbach decadent. For the past half dozen years he had felt that art had taken refuge among the "new peoples" — in the United States and Russia.1 In Europe, it lay in hiding (in the realms of Bohemia and little coteries) or it wore a disguise. Saint-Saëns, the most gifted of the younger musicians, was making his way with difficulty. Gounod, born to be a hyphen, was working on a Romeo and Juliet opera as he had worked on Faust — diluting and sugaring up the master's inspirations and spoiling the taste for the stronger originals. W H E N EARLY IN 1 8 6 7

In the outer world, science excepted, everything seemed to stifle the forms of life that Berlioz stood for.2 The strong men, Bismarck, Napoleon III, Francis Joseph — drew to themselves the attention which for half a century had been monopolized by men of thought. Napoleon's Mexican expedition (in which Louis Berlioz as captain of a transport was now involved) excited more public interest than Cyrus Field's laying an ocean cable. Scientific achievements were fast becoming a drug on the market. You could see a whole buildingful for one franc at the Great Exhibition in Paris that very summer; and even if the new Paris Guide had been composed by literary masters, the crowds behaved childishly, 1 2

93, 258·

Berlioz w a s not nostalgic about olden times, on the c o n t r a r y : " I admire our civilization more and more, w i t h its post, telegraph, steam, and electricity — slaves to the human will, w h i c h permit the more rapid transmission of thought." 2 7 7 . ) But he wished that a w a y w e r e also f o u n d f o r keeping the thought f r o m being so generally dull and unhappy,

(L.I.,

{ibid.)

2 76

Berlioz

possessively, destructively. A wave of primitivism, senseless and aggressive, seemed to sweep over France.* Berlioz left. At Cologne, where he arrived by the end of February, his stout old friend Ferdinand Hiller had made everything ready. A room was reserved near the hall so that Berlioz could spend as many hours as possible reclining ("for I am one of the most horizontal men alive") and the rehearsals were so far advanced that Berlioz found the conducting easy and pleasant. The audience warmly applauded, from Beatrice, Hero's nocturne and the whole of Harold in Italy. The excellence of this execution, together with the revival of the Damnation at Vienna and the demand for a new edition of the Requiem by his Milan publisher, made Berlioz "almost quite happy." 4 He came back to find Paris turning itself inside out for the Exhibition, in which, as a member of the Institute he was tediously involved." One hundred and four cantatas had been written for the competition which he and his confreres were to judge. They sat and listened. Berlioz made a successful plea for choosing the work of Saint-Saëns, and he ran to the young man's house to be the first with the news. "At last our musical world has done a sensible thing! It has given me fresh strength. I could not have written you [Ferrand] such a long letter without this joy." β Berlioz had other, remoter pleasures through hearsay: Cosima Liszt wrote to him that Romeo and Juliet, conducted by her husband Bülow, had been well received in Basel. From Copenhagen he had warm reports of The Infant Christ. And Louis, from Mexico, expressed passionate interest in the echoes of his father's success. Meanwhile Gounod's Roméo et Juliette had met with fair response, and the composer, who had discreetly failed to invite Berlioz to either rehearsals or première, took the first chance to seek him out at the Institute and give him a filial embrace. 3 It was only two years before that the whole country had taken up the meaningless cry "Hey! Lambert!" to which the answer ran "Yes, it's Lambert! " '86, 615. 5 T h e arts at this Exhibition were chiefly in the hands of Berlioz' old enemies. That is w h y in the famous Paris-Guide issued for the occasion, there is no mention of him. Roqueplan wrote on the theater (I, 803 ff.), giving most of his article to Meyerbeer and Gounod. T h e essay "Bals et Concerts" in the second volume is by Champfleury, who systematically scorned the older generation (including Flaubert) in the name of Realism. Oddly enough, the great exile Hugo had been reinstated by the censorship in an effort of the Govern ment to prove itself more liberal: Hernant was revived in June, Hugo wrote the introduction to the Paris-Guide — and politics once again decided what artists might and might not exist. • L . / . , 305.

Russia and France

τη η

"I cannot imagine why," remarked Berlioz with his magnanimous candori By the late spring Berlioz was deeply worried at the lack of news from Louis. He lived torn between recollections of his son's childhood and anxieties as to his future. As he had written some months before, "My dear Louis — if I did not have you! Just remember that I loved you even when you were little. And it was so difficult for me to love little children! There was something about you that drew me. Afterwards it grew less, in your middling years when you did not know what you were about. But it has since come back, enhanced, and I love you as you know that I do, and it will only increase more and more." 8 This was the truth mingled with the thin self-deception of guilt about those middle years, for which Berlioz was about to pay a greater price than even the Lord's vengeance is said to exact. Towards the end of June a few intimates invited Berlioz to a morning reception in the studio of the Marquis Visconti. On the richly hung wall of the room they had put Berlioz' portrait, decorated with leaves and flowers. On the other walls placards bore the names of his great works. Theodore Ritter, Stephen Heller, Ernest Reyer, the M assarts, and the Damckes, who were the orime movers, would greet the master with music, and in front of other guests present him with personal tokens and remembrances. The appointed hour came for the surprise party but Berlioz did not appear. Ritter was sent to find him. Berlioz, sensing something strange in his household — with good reason, as events proved — had decided to stay at home. With Ritter's arrival at the house there began a series of rash though well-meant attempts to continue hiding the truth in hopes of salvaging the party. First, Berlioz' mother-in-law admitted that something was wrong, saying that their neighbor Damcke had suffered a grievous personal loss. Berlioz at once left with Ritter to seek Damcke. He, knowing the real facts, played up to the deception by promising Berlioz a full account later. The three men now left for the Marquis's studio, but the conspiracy was doomed: a few steps away from the door an acquaintance came up to Berlioz offering condolences on the death of Louis, news of which was in the papers. Louis had died of yellow fever in Havana on June 5, aged thirty-three.® Berlioz reached home and collapsed. Reyer 7

Berlioz' Romeo and Jtdiet had made impression which he later recorded in an viii-ix). His first work in Rome was an returned after twenty years. s Corresp.y ιζη. 9 The last of one Berlioz line unbroken

on the young Gounod an undying autobiographical fragment (see L.I., opera on that subject, to which he

for three centuries.

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who stayed with him tells of his ceaselessly repeating: "It was for me to die." Callers found him lying mute, his head turned to the wall. A week afterwards, he went to his office in the Library of the Conservatoire, drew out all the letters, notices, diplomas, decorations, batons, wreaths and other memorials of his career and, aided by his clerk, watched them burn. He could not sleep; even large doses of laudanum brought no relief. He walked in a daze which his friends hardly knew whether to ascribe to grief or to the half-effective narcotic. His Hymne à la France, sung at the Exhibition, made a deep impression which they wished to tell him of. 10 He no longer cared. Business slowly drew him out, for Louis's affairs had to be wound up with his employers, and just then Ferrand, who had no son but a protégé of doubtful character, applied for help in an emergency. Berlioz ran at once to the Emperor's favorite legal counsel, who held the composer in high esteem, received advice and transmitted it. But Ferrand as was his custom made no reply, which compelled Berlioz to write twice more. By this time Berlioz was in bad shape, and his doctor sent him to take the waters of Néris. He took five baths before the local physician decided that they were contra-indicated. He predicted laryngitis, which duly ensued, and bundled Berlioz into a train bound for Dauphiné, where his nieces nursed him back to health. He recovered his voice, though when the throat affection left, the intestinal returned. He went several times to see Estelle, who had just lost a son also. On the ninth of September they met for the last time. T w o days later the elder of his nieces was married and insisted on her uncle's being a witness. The groom was "charming in every way, otherwise I would not have witnessed the least little bit" wrote Berlioz with a momentary flash of gaiety. 11 From all over the county the Berlioz family, numbering thirty-two, had gathered. " W e were all there but one, alas! It was the oldest whom I most enjoyed seeing again —my uncle the colonel, aged 84." 12 The Marmion uncle who had dazzled young Hector with firsthand accounts of Napoleon, who had sung and fiddled for him, who had flirted with Estelle, who had initiated the young medical-musical student into Parisian fashions, who had tried to find the famous conductorcomposer amid the crowds of the Crystal Palace — he and these multiple selves were face to face again. " W e wept. . . . He seemed as if ashamed to be still alive: I am much more ashamed." 13 10

70.2,4.

11

• Corresp., 338.

*

· Corresp., 339.

1J

13

Ibid.

Russia and France

279

Hardly had Berlioz returned to Paris, his German mission lost, when the Grand Duchess Helen of Russia began a campaign of her own to have him come and direct five concerts in St. Petersburg. "I have done a reckless thing. . . . She coaxed and flattered me so, herself and through her officers, that after consulting several of my friends I accepted." The terms were as flattering as the insistence: Berlioz was to receive fifteen thousand francs and his expenses. He was to lodge at her palace and have the use of a carriage, to make his own programs and receive help at rehearsals. "At least if I die of it, I shall know it was worth it." 14 At the same moment Steinway, on his own account or in partnership with other impresarios, wanted Berlioz to come to New York at a fee of twenty thousand dollars." When he met with steadfast refusal, "this good man was so angry that he had a bronze bust made of me . . . to put in a hall which he has just built . . . You see that everything comes to him who waits — who waits long enough to be practically good for nothing." 19 Musical visitors from everywhere — from Italy, Bo'ito, from America, Theodore Thomas, who was given a mint copy of the Requiem — hardly made life sweeter. The very endearments which the young and pretty singer, Adelina Patti, lavished on Berlioz in public emphasized his weariness, though he retorted with puns sufficiently potent. News of a brilliant concert of his works at Meiningeri roused him but little. The paradox of eternal youth wearing out its bodily shell struck him afresh when he saw the Princess's daughter: "I found her so changed — there's Life for you! " 17 And its purpose? "Absurdity now seems to me man's natural element, and death the noble goal of his mission."18 When 14 15

Corresp., 339; LJ., 310.

This mention of Steinway is made on the strength of high probability. T h e records of the firm, kindly consulted by the present Theodore Steinway, show no direct offer to Berlioz. Y e t the original Steinweg had heard and seen the composer in Brunswick, was a manufacturer of pianos, as Berlioz says (Est., 47), had just finished building a new concert hall in N e w York (1866), and in other ways fits the circumstantial account given by Berlioz. 14 L.I., 3 1 1 . Berlioz' bust ( b y Perraud) is still in Steinway Hall, N e w York, and in the concert advertisements of Steinway pianos the interesting letter he wrote on September 25, 1867: "Messrs. Steinway and Sons: I have heard the magnificent pianos which you manufacture. Allow me to compliment you on their excellence. . . . Their tone is splendid and truly noble. Moreover you have found the secret of reducing to an imperceptible point the disagreeable harmony of the minor seventh, which hitherto was audible on the eighth and ninth vibration of the longer strings, thus making their sounds cacophonous. Like so many of your other improvements, this marks a great step forward in piano making, and one for which every artist and amateur of delicate ear will owe you a debt of gratitude. Please believe, etc." ( 1 4 1 . ) 17 18 S . W . , 183-4. S . W . , 183.

28ο

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those who have done much are reduced by time to the vegetating which the great majority are content to deem synonymous with life, the contrast of past and present is itself a death blow. For every man sets the standard of intensity for his own existence, and as Samuel Butler showed, each of us dies when his organism becomes too puzzled to go on. Nature herself seemed throughout 1867 to have lost her equanimity. From March to August the world was shaken by cyclones, tidal waves, and earthquakes. Vesuvius and Aetna shook the land as far as the British Isles, Mauna Loa erupted, and Hawaii, Mauritius, Ecuador, Peru, and San Francisco suffered from the tremors. In October the earth was showered with five thousand meteors, and the ensuing winter was so severe that many rivers froze: one could walk across the Seine. Berlioz who only a year before had been greatly interested in the Bad Lands and their paleontology now seemed indifferent to the upheavings of Nature immense. In the Memoirs he had ironically remarked that no sign had told his mother she was bearing a dedicated child; he was now free to think that the earth mother was presaging his death. But his mind dwelt rather on the Russian cold and the long hours on the train. It was an arduous trip. At Berlin he stopped for three days, which he mostly spent in bed. In St. Petersburg he rested three days more. He declined all social invitations, saving his strength for work.19 When music was in the air, the old Berlioz "came back to life" like Lélio. The orchestra was superb and the Symphonie Fantastique sounded as young as its composer for the moment felt. The work had been included by request, for the Grand Duchess considered that in his proposed programs his own works were far too modestly represented.20 T o the first three he therefore added the Benvenuto Cellini and Roman Carnival overtures and the Symphonie Fantastique. There was music for soloists by Bach and Haydn, Paganini and Wienawski. But the main courses were the Pastoral, the Eroica, the Fifth and the Ninth (three movements only, for lack of fit singers), choral fragments from Mozart, Weber, and Gluck, including the second act of Orpheus with one hundred and thirty choristers.21 "The 19

R i m s k y - K o r s a k o v does not seem to have understood how ill the composer was and imputes to self-importance the f a c t that Berlioz on this visit was hard to approach. O f the c r o w d of y o u n g musicians he saw chiefly Balakirev and Stasso v. (1000, 7 4 - 5 . ) 20 C o m p a r e the programs Berlioz submitted —in which he hardly figures until the sixth — with those actually played. (345, 2 3 9 - 4 0 and 2 4 3 - 4 . ) 21 T o K o l o g r i v o v , w h o had suggested a larger hall for the final concert of Berlioz' o w n works, the composer had replied: " I t must not be. I cannot acquiesce in the idea that the public will be more eager to hear m y compositions than those of the great masters." ( O c t . 10, 1867, 258, 237.)

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Russians, who knew Gluck only through frightful hashes committed by incompetent people . . . could hardly stop applauding. Oh, it is bliss for me to reveal to them the masterpieces of that great man . . . In two weeks we shall give the first act of Alceste. The duchess gave orders that I was to be obeyed in everything. I don't abuse her authority, but I use it. "She asked me to come and read Hamlet to her one of these evenings. . . . Here they love what is beautiful, they lead a literate and musical existence; they have in their bosoms something that makes one forget the snow and the cold. Why am I so old and tired?" 22 Berlioz' birthday (December 1 1 ) had been celebrated with gifts, banquets, and public tributes. He was allowed to recover, for he felt "as sick as eighteen horses," then was taken to Moscow for two more concerts. The local directors had commandeered the largest hall and engaged five hundred performers. "This idea, which had struck me as mad, produced the liveliest success." 23 Twelve thousand four hundred listeners heard Romeo and Juliet and the Offertory of the Requiem. "I went through agonies when this last piece, which had been requested because of reports from Saint Petersburg, got under way. Listening to the 300 voices repeating their two notes, I suddenly feared the crowd might be bored and not let us finish. But they understood my idea; their attention grew, rather; and in fact they were gripped by this expression of resigned humility. At the last measure, acclamations broke out. I was recalled four times, the orchestra and chorus joined in, I did not know where to hide my head. It was the deepest impression I ever produced." 24 Back in St. Petersburg after the New Year 1868, Berlioz had two more concerts to give — the last in every sense. "What joy for me when I have beaten the final measure of the finale in Harold! . . . I shall go to SaintSymphorien [to see Estelle, who had written to him in Russia] and thence to Monaco, to lie down among the violets and sleep in the sun." 48 The ultimate program had been ordered by the Duchess to be all Berlioz. Just as after Beatrice and Benedict he could feel his creation done, so after this sixth concert he could feel his mission accomplished. For he had met and played for the newest force in European music — the Russian Five. Balakirev, Cui, and Stassov were his special friends and admirers; Rimsky had attended rehearsals; Moussorgsky was deep in the Treatise and ebullient with enthusiasm. At their request and to show his appreeia22

Corresp., 343-4. H e did not seem tired during performance. "Berlioz' beat," says Rimsky, "was simple, clear, and beautiful." (1000, 75.) 23

Corresp., 346. Corresp., 347. 25 Corresp., 348-9. 24

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Berlioz

don for their regard, Berlioz left them the autograph score of his Te Deum. The gift was doubly inspired. Thanks to it, one of the most moving sections of the work was later saved from destruction; thanks to the genuine entente he had established, the continuity of Berlioz' fame was assured. As in 1847 he had blessed "Holy Russia, that hast saved me," so twenty years later he could have repeated the grateful cry, for he had now forged the firmest link binding to him the next generation of creators.

Berlioz' Legacy of Song A Thousand Greetings to Balakirev! — From Berlioz' last letter, August 21, 1868 The affinity which nineteenth-century Russia felt for the music of Berlioz is quite understandable. That country's new school of composers was inspired by a revival of folk melodies, coinciding with a flowering of legend, lyric poetry, and sacred music — the Romanticism of Glinka and Pushkin coming immediately after the great religious composer Bortniansky ( 1 7 5 1 - 1 8 2 5 ) had concluded his work of codifying and embellishing the native liturgy. Berlioz' tradition and first awakening were, as we know, remarkably similar, whence his lifelong sympathy with Russia's musical life is not surprising. W e have seen his early sympathy with Glinka and noted its results.1 Even before this, he had been interested in Russian religious music and had arranged for the Tzar a number of sixteenpart chorales which have unfortunately been lost.2 On his first Russian visit in 1847 he made the acquaintance of Alexis Lvov, to whom he owed the knowledge of Bortniansky so admiringly recorded in his feuilletons But in 1847 there was as yet no modern Russian school. and the later Five were still children, whose true vocation for nearly two decades more. When in the sixties Balakirev, Borodin, Moussorgsky (and Stassov, who was the critic of 1

Tchaikovsky was dormant Rimsky, Cui, this "Mighty

See above, Chapter 15. In 1843 (285, 380). This commission and its remuneration undoubtedly account for the dedication of his next printed score (which happens, oddly, to be the Symphonie Fantastique) to Nicholas I. 3 Soirées (21st) Eves., 231-2, and again: 1386,.Oct. 19, 1850, Jan. 17, 1851, Dec. 13, 1851, Nov. 6, 1862. (This last is a review of Lvov's History of sacred music in Russia.) 2

33 Melodies

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4

Heap") heard and studied Berlioz, they felt the presence of a master whose lessons were at once congenial and free from any constrictive system. He was sufficiently removed in years not to be a rival and he brought them as he had brought his colleagues in other lands the first modern orchestral style; they even more than others could respond to the dramatic technique which served a Romanticism in the genuine tradition. Thus Moussorgsky's first important orchestral score, St. John's Night on Bald Mountain (1867) was a new working of the Faustian elements in the Fantastique * What is more, Berlioz' melodies and developments fell gratefully on the ears of young men bred on Russian folk songs, for these, like Berlioz' tunes, tend to be modal, to consist of uneven groupings of phrases, and to combine in free rather than scholastic polyphony.® The stars in their courses seemed to make Berlioz the predestined mentor of these ultimate creators of the century; and conversely it was through them that he who had fought to a standstill on Western ground might have seen his musical principles sweep the world: Russian ballets, suites, monodramas, and symphonic poems were the offspring of the dramatic symphony; their light, transparent orchestration was his;T and Boris Godunov — a Cellinilike conception — came forth in 1869, the very year of Berlioz' death. Three years later, Moussorgsky, its author, was convinced that "in music there are two giants: the thinker Beethoven, and the super-thinker Berlioz. When around these . . . we gather all their generals and aides-de-camp, we have a pleasant company; but what has this company of subalterns achieved? Skipping and dancing along in the paths marked out by the giants . . ."* 4 This is the meaning of Mogrichaya Kuchka, the name by which the Five were known. (882, 428.) 5 T h e composer describes its parts as follows: " ( 1 ) assembly of the witches, their chatter and gossip; (2) cortege of Satan; (3) unholy glorification of Satan; and (4) Witches' Sabbath . . . The form of interspersed variations and calls is, I think, the most suitable for such a commotion . . . the transitions are full, without any German approach, which is remarkably refreshing." (220, 85-7.) * See Mr. Slonimsky's useful résumé of Sokalski's authoritative book in 882, 422. 7 They admired Wagner's too, but explicitly preferred that of Berlioz. Among Moussorgsky's half-dozen bedside books in the room where he died was the Treatise. (220, 415.) As for Tchaikovsky's relation to the French master, though it was variable in words, it seems to certain critics to have also been that of an unconscious beneficiary. (505·, 6 and 136.) The published correspondence between Tchaikovsky and Balakirev offers striking confirmation of these judgments. (936a.) " 220, 199.

284

Berlioz

We may argue the fitness of these terms but not the significance of the connection in the minds of these interpreters and successors of Berlioz who actually produced new music. The linkage moreover strengthens the general truth that the Impressionism and Naturalism of the end of the century are in any art the direct heirs of Romanticism.9 And since the young Russians were to find kinship in late as well as early Berlioz, in the Te Deum and Troy ens as well as in the Fantastique and the songs, this fact alone is enough to refute the foolish notion that Berlioz' career is that of a lost Romantic who returned to an "essentially French" classicism in old age 10 or —as others would have it —to a sterile reaction against true modernity. This interpretation rests on a confusion between life and art, between biography and criticism. Though Berlioz received from his young friends warm testimonials of their admiration, he could naturally not gauge the full extent of his success as a culture hero, for his success like that of the germinating grain must first take the form of failure through apparent disintegration.11 It signifies as a marvel of right instinct that Berlioz worked to the end for both success and failure. He rejected every expedient that might have tied his works to the musics that seemed to be winning the future, and embraced martyrdom instead with the passion of the elect. Yet he took excellent care that his musical affairs should be left in order and that his career should seem a completed cycle — should show a musical 9 A twentieth-century critic finds a good deal of Stravinsky in the Requiem; another hearing Borodin's Prince Igor and Berlioz' Te Deum at one concert acknowledged that Berlioz was "the true father of the Russian School" (444); the connection resting of course on the last two movements of the Te Deum which — and this is another confirmation — were the only ones to cause Tchaikovsky "great enjoyment." (1020, 311.) 10 It was in that very year 1867 that Berlioz revised his Requiem for a third Italian edition, saying "If I were threatened with the destruction of my whole output save one score, I should ask a reprieve for the 'Requiem" (L,l., 303.) This score of 1837 which Berlioz was so far from repudiating thirty years later is "Romantic" enough; it even contains ideas dating back to his twenty-first year. Again in Les Troy ens, many passages — notably "The Royal Hunt and Storm" — are as "Romantic" as anything in Romeo or the Funeral symphony. What critics have miscalled a return to classicism is the effect of perspective first — the Damnation of Faust seems "classical" in 1934 — and second, of the natural shift in an artist's powers as he grows older: he has a suppler technique and a surer hand in exploiting ideas to the full; but less exuberance does not mean less fire. 11 In his perceptive essay on Berlioz, W . H. Meilers admirably contrasts Wagner's success with Berlioz' failure, seeing each as appropriate but asking for an analysis of the failure. I should like to think that certain parts of this book had supplied a beginning of explanation.

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shape. It was no accident that together with works of his own which belonged to the first half of his life, he brought the Russians Gluck, Weber and Beethoven — his well-loved Pastoral and the Ninth, which was his fighting standard of 1828. His own later works he left in shadow, supplying only the scores; so that formally his end was in his beginning. There is likewise a beautiful fitness in the fact that the titles of his first and last publications echo each other: Nine Melodies in 1830, Thirty-Three Melodies in 1865. 1 The Thirty Three Melodies gathered in one volume the works for one or more voices which he wished to preserve alongside the bigger scores. In the thirty-five years of his productive life he had composed twelve full-size dramatic works, nine overtures, and these songs, chiefly orchestral." Another dozen or more cantatas, occasional pieces, arrangements, album sketches, or discarded first drafts, fell from his pen, by no means all negligible, though he attached to them but little importance.14 With this output Berlioz had filled exactly that great gap of one third of a century when European music was at a low ebb. From 1820 to 1830, the years of his preparation, the output had been extremely rich. Beethoven, Weber and Schubert, Rossini and Bellini, were pouring forth masterpieces for stage, voice, and instrumental ensemble. The next three decades, apart from Berlioz' scores, were to be notable for the piano works of Chopin, Liszt, and Schumann. Vocal and orchestral music was less richly represented by Mendelssohn and Schumann, whose sway was also limited and local. As for Liszt and Wagner, their masterpieces in various degrees of gestation saw the light of day only at the close of the Berliozian age, as did also the great music dramas of the twice-born Verdi. And from that time forward the musical output has not only been abundant but infinitely varied and generally regarded as one of the dominant forms of man's spiritual expression. 12

T h i s terminal date is approximate to within a year, because of the publisher's practice. It will be remembered that the Eight Scenes of Faust, which antedate the first melodies, was at once withdrawn. 13 T h i s count takes the Syinphonie Fantastique and Lelio to be t w o works, hut numbers the Tempest as an overture-fantasia and excludes the overture of the Flight into Egypt which is not really separable from the chorus that follows it. If the bulk of Lélio were reclassified, the total number of "melodies" would be raised to thirty-eight. 14 In sending R e v e r a pile of works for the summing up which the y o u n g critic projected, Berlioz wrote: " H e r e is more than enough; there may be things in the lot which should not even be shown, but I have destroyed so many manuscripts — oratorios, overtures, operas, cantatas — that I may be pardoned for this. . . ." (pi, 764.)

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The more this artistic treasury is examined, the more clearly its relation to the thought of Berlioz is discerned. Are we, for example, interested in the revival of the modes, which has extended the moderns' sense of tonality? Crediting the Russians or Mr. Vaughan Williams is just, provided we remember their antecedents as did Debussy at Bayreuth." If we studv French music and record the influence of the Schola Cantorum with its manifesto in behalf of a free and inventive music, Romain Rolland reminds us that this was the burden of Berlioz* teaching. Dalcroze's crusade for founding musical education on rhythm is nothing but the carrying out of Berlioz' wish for "20 classes in rhythm" in every conservatoire." The historians of jazz are led back to Berlioz' syncopations and use of drums for a starting point in the development of their popular art; " and the modern Viennese hope to deliver melody from the bar line — a hope which goes back as far as Reicha, and which was successfully realized in our own day by Koechlin and Van Dieren — is the extension of Berlioz* actual creation of an unshackled melody. It is in fact his devotion to draftsmanship, his fertility in the invention of lines of every kind, which makes Berlioz impregnable to criticism and perpetually rich in suggestion; so that if it is true to say with Mr. Sollertinski that "Berlioz was the dominant influence in music up to the First World War," it is also true to say with Mr. Cecil Gray that "the composer of the recent past fwho is] of particular significance in respect of the music of the future as here conceived is Berlioz." And Mr. Gray specifies that his "melodic writing, alone among the great masters provides an anticipation" of the new classicism based on linear beauty.18 It should therefore be less and less difficult to state the measure of Berlioz' contribution without seeking for his "school," and without taking away from the merit of the many geniuses whose minds or ears he tuned to his own note: Berlioz' orchestra, his dramatic conceptions, rhythms, chords, and melodies formed the living literature upon which was bred the second international age of music after Mozart and Gluck. Berlioz enforced no manner, gave no formula to exploit, but left his mark everywhere, differently on different men, in accordance with his own pluralistic art; so that by noticing the varied usages to which he gave "Conversing with his teacher Guiraud in 1889, Debussy found Wagner "less of an innovator" than was commonly thought and pointed out especially that Berlioz was "less strictly tonal" than Wagner. ( 9 7 s , 44.) 16 Grot., 244. 17 See — or rather hear — the recorded jazz version of the "Pilgrims' March" from Harold. {143η.) 18 Sollertinski: 305, j-8; Gray: 721, 230-2.

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rise and putting their principles together again, one could reconstruct the great original. 1 " This is a type of influence, not the most common, and hence open to question until many men are dead and many books fumigated. But if w e take the free testimony of those most closely concerned, it is clear that no important musician since his day has been outside Berlioz 1 musical field of force. T h e same statement may be made about Wagner, and it is also true, but it means something different, something more literal and vivid, and hence more quickly perceived: which is what led Busoni to say of a critic who missed this distinction: " W a s he so blind as not to see that it was Berlioz who had pointed the w a y f o r untold generations?" 20 T o sum up these historic relations is to describe simply Berlioz' public or ecumenical import. It is far less easy to describe his intrinsic and intimate effect. As an earlier chapter made clear, Berlioz' admirers choose different works as his characteristic or supreme masterpiece, which really means the one congenial to their idiosyncrasy. This might lead us to infer that diversity is his special effect if the term did not suggest a scattering, a diffuseness, which is in fact the opposite of his (no less special) concentration. Taken together in ever varying guises, this pair of hallmarks is likelv to disorient even a capable and sympathetic listener on hearing an unfamiliar score; on which account one group of interpreters feels that Berlioz applied his powerful mind to make music legitimately serve novel uses; 21 whereas another group asserts that "he is not a musician: he is music itself." 2 2 T h e implication here is that Berlioz spoke music's tongue ^ ith the freedom of the native born and the exuberance of a creator. But in truth the t w o interpretations are not so far apart as they seem. T h e y differ only in their initial assumption about the goal of art — decoration or expression; repose or energy — which irresistibly brings us back to the Shakespearean parallel: in the work of Berlioz it is the esthetic and not the technique or the raw material, which divides friend from foe. T o come under Berlioz' intimate spell one must accept his esthetic, for good or f o r the time being, and then treat it as an accepted thing, which is to say, more than half forget it — as w e do with all our working assumptions. T h e result almost invariably is that one begins to make out his melody and to find pleasure in it. T h i s is the great step to take, 19

Philip Greeley Clapp: "Many composers' eyes have gleamed over Berlioz' original ideas, which remain characteristically his own after more than a century of exploitation by nearly everybody else." (421, Apr. 14, 1943.) 944, 280. 21

2Î

692.

504, *5·

z88

Berlioz

for it is in melodies — melodies that are at once complete statements and independent objects of art —that Berlioz thinks and delivers himself." One need only lend an ear to the exquisite collection of Summer Nights to feel the power, the variety, the precision of what he called Expression — neither depiction nor labeling, but the embodiment in sound of intimations lying deeper than articulate thought. Conventional in words and subject, these six songs or variations on the theme of longing achieve the utmost originality, and with the simplest means — a human voice and a few strings and woodwinds. The first, Villanelle, is a spring ditty, whose modulations impart freshness to a familiar rhythm while strengthening a simple melodic line. The Spectre de la Rose is by contrast a dramatic scene — that of the well-known ballet danced to Weber's music — which in Berlioz' hands has the added quality of sentimental dailiancc suddenly raised to passion. On the Lagoon is a chant récitatif broken by a refrain — a monotony movingly rendering Berlioz' recurrent "evil of isolation." The next song (the gem of the collection) is, as the title Absence implies, another expression of the same feeling of void, but the tremendous call to the departed lover springs from a loneliness that has once been shared and is now twice bitter. Au Cimetière takes us with gruesome immediacy to the realm of the dead fearing oblivion, and Vile Inconnue sings mankind's nostalgic hope of a lotus land of eternal love and perpetual delight of life. The myriad nuances of these inner realities transcribed by Berlioz do not come from words nor do they submit to identification in words. The magic is tangible, imperishable, yet defies analysis. So precise in Berlioz' melos are the modifications of pitch and time that paradoxically the virtue may not fully strike us if we merely hear; we must heed. This is no doubt why Schumann long ago recommended that one sing out Berlioz' melodies, as it were to feel in the body and reproduce by vocal effort the motions of Berlioz' spirit. For it is an active and subtle spirit, who is likely to escape us if we sit passive and wait to be moved. Once we are attuned to this governing element, the rest becomes naturalized in relation to it: harmony, rhythm, counterpoint, orchestration and form. It is then and then only that one may be said to hear Berlioz, that is, to enjoy as he did the sensations he chose and to perceive as he did 23

A n otherwise useful guide to Music for the Voice (1949) states rather incautiously that "the very few songs of Berlioz are perhaps among his least representative compositions," and lists but four, not counting excerpts from two of the major scores. (1328, 256 and 441 ff.) It is apparent that until Berlioz' whole output is seen as dramatic vocal music — "melodies" in his own broad sense — every part will seem "unrepresentative" of his thought.

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the relations he contrived. Having done so we can see that our former bewilderment or sense of alienating coldness was based on an "understanding" which took illicit priority over concrete experience. We knew, or thought we knew, more than we heard. Only beyond this point does a comparison of Berlioz with other composers become just: one must first learn to live reflectively with passages, movements, or "moments" from his music as one does with recollections of other great utterances. Within Berlioz himself groupings and comparisons suggest themselves: the love music in the Harold and Romeo symphonies or the Faustian and Trojan dramas; the prayers and invocations, from the Francs-Juges overture to the death of Dido; the fugues — diabolic and rousing as in the Fantastique, gentle and quaint as in The Infant Christ; the great funeral "monotonies" in Romeo, the Requiem, the Te Deum, Hamlet and the Funeral symphony; the roistering or mass scenes in Harold, Benvenuto, the Damnation and Beatrice; the twelve superb marches — the most varied collection, perhaps, in modern music; the tender nocturnes or pastorales that recur from the Fantastique to Beatrice, taking in nearly all the overtures and dramatic works in between; and finally the haunting "calls" uttered by flute or oboe, French or English horn, in the mysterious movements such as the Queen Mab Scherzo, the Ride to the Abyss or the "Royal Hunt and Storm." Once we have been drawn in, literally by the ears, to explore this rich world, acquired momentum propels us ever closer to the reality of Berlioz as musician. More intent on undergoing, let us say, the third movement of the Fantastique than on knowing whence it came or how it is tied to the rest of the score by words or notes, we ask of Berlioz neither what he felt nor what he knew, but what he sounds. And there, at the close of this ample hymn to natural beauty, we find delight and excitement in a remarkable detail: the plaintive English horn melody of the beginning returns, but its answer is not as before on the oboe; instead we hear softly pulsating chords on the kettledrums. This musical pleasure is sui generis and indescribable. The habit of words may make us exclaim "how dramatic!" or "what realism!" — which is correct enough — but these notions only single out aspects of something which justifies itself to the ear and the imagination long before it is motivated or classified by reason. This is again true of another and yet a different surprise, whose material means is still less obvious — the sharpening of the D in the idée fixe melody at the end of its exposition in the first movement. Here we cannot apply any adjective of conventional criticism, we cannot explain why this modification by a half step is so powerful and right, why it produces

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a total illumination of its surroundings like a subtly colored flare bringing a landscape out of darkness. Berlioz' music is full of such moments, which is to say full of creation, unceasingly expressive. And it is this quality, hidden at first, which makes his admirers call him "simply one of the greatest composers who have ever lived." Compared to this power, which he shares with very few, the art of fashioning clear, strong and satisfying movements appears, for all its importance, ancillary and almost mechanical. Nor is this the end of our discoveries in Berlioz' music. At many points in his work we encounter passages of which the effect seems more than masterly, for it is visibly out of proportion to the notes. These would be normally transitional or quite commonplace, or at times perversely crude, yet they affect us as would a discharge of energy directly into our nerve endings. This disparity between cause and effect is by no means unknown in the other arts, but in music it is specially remarkable because it seems to act in defiance of the very skill to which the artist usually owes his power. The fact has been noted with particular reference to Berlioz by Mr. John Foulds in his book Music Today, where he explains it by what he calls "devic influences" — from Hindu "devas," the Bright Ones.24 There is no need to believe in the action of a transcendental force in order to see that the critic has aptly named an element of mundane artistic reality which others have independently noticed and tried to describe. Mr. Foulds gives as an example of what he means the persistent A flat in the opening of the Fantastic symphony, a passage long deemed a typical Berliozian gaucherie, although it is the very passage that Koechlin, who probably knows nothing of devas, instances as a proof of harmonic genius.25 W e may connect with this "radioactive" property of a few simple notes the experiences noted by Saint-Saëns and others on hearing parts of the Requiem,26 as well as Rachmaninoff's report of a performance of the Fantastique under Mahler,27 or Ernst's remark about the concluding chorus of Les Troy ens, Part I, that "the music seems charged with electricity." 28 Berlioz himself was apparently aware of a like quality in Beetho24 ". . . lacking some understanding of the deva impacts which he so frequently transcribes in his works . . . it is impossible fairly to evaluate Berlioz' work." (802, 285.)

2:'4S2, l24· 26 502, 4J ι.

" " H e conducted it magnificently, especially the March . . . the windows shook, the very walls seemed to vibrate." (994, 160.) 2 V * , 305.

33 Melodies

291

ven. He says, speaking of the Scherzo of the Fifth, "It is a strange piece, the first measures of which, although there is nothing fearful about them, cause that inexplicable emotion one feels under the magnetic gaze of certain persons." M And he likens the mood to that of Goethe's "Blocksberg" scene in Faust, that is, he instinctively thinks of the unseen powers at the very root of Being. When Berlioz found it appropriate in his own scores to call up such emanations from the depths, he was generally able to do so, and it is this rather than any conscious devices of timbre or dynamics which makes so many of his passages glitter, tingle, throb or — to use his special word — "vibrate." 30 In analyzing our intimate response to Berlioz, it is therefore not enough to remember that all music is a trembling and that the inevitable physical by-product of making any music at all is to set up sympathetic vibrations in our nerves, bones and skin. The further technical question arises whether Berlioz* rationale for blending rhythm, melody, harmony and timbre precisely as he did, "in despite of common sense," 11 was not dictated by an intuition of what is needed to detonate unsuspected charges of primal energy stored up or concealed within us. If this were so, it would afford another clue to the understanding of Berlioz' public triumphs without sequels. T o this day one may observe listeners deeply moved by a brilliant Berlioz performance and yet soon objecting to his art: the audience has been aroused to an uncommon pitch of enthusiasm, but shortly a feeling akin to shame mixed with resentment overlays the first impression. It is as if a too secret fiber had been acted on by a thaumaturgist, who is henceforth feared and disliked, or else simply not remembered as having shaken the soul. For the composer who wields this power and administers it in concentrated form instead of diffusing it thinly through his works, our genteel responses create a cruel dilemma: if his music is dully played, he makes no impression; " if he is brilliantly played, he runs the risk, by overstimulating his hearers, of giving them grounds for grievance. Yet this is a disadvantage which may in time turn out to be his salvation with the fearless; for the primitive, devic, or magnetic force is simply the principle of life imparted by the creator to his clay. If Berlioz' music has survived, not disfigurement merely, and neglect, but also anger and organized attack, it is largely due to the fact that whenever played he has always struck 29 30 31

A Trav., 35. See A Trav., 95.

502, 431. This holds especially for light orchestrato«, witness not only Berlioz but Mozart. 32

2 Ç2

Berlioz

some men as possessing the Promethean fire.33 "The reason," said the late James Agate, " w h y I would rather hear the worst Berlioz in preference to the best of anybody else, is that he is the only composer who can be (a) noble (b) voluptuous and (c) exciting all at the same time." 34 This testimony from an amateur of music is most important, for it is the devoted laity who in the end discover an artist's meaning to the world and so decide his fate. The professionals pave the way (or block it) with arguments and adjectives, but the affectionate minority have the last word, both because they represent numbers and because they are the only group disinterested enough to acknowledge what they inwardly recognize. And what they respond to, given enough good chances, is the quality of funded life. All our critical slang — Realism, dramatic truth, form, beauty, variety, tension, devic force, structure or conception—all this is imagery to catch the manifestation of life as it finds its mysterious equivalent in art: the very terms are derived from our attempt to dissect or describe life, which is also — real, dramatic, structural, multiple, and the fruit of conception. Hence it is no verbalism to relate, as Freud and others have done, the artistic impulse to the magnetic core of life which is love. In defining music as the imagination of love in sound, the critic is proceeding as soberly as the religious thinker who puts love at the center of the world of spirit, or as the mathematician Laplace who, on his deathbed, set love higher than the knowledge of physical laws. T o his enlightened hearers, Berlioz' art speaks intimately of the mystery of this trinity of Art, Love, and Life, upon which his own existence was a commentary. Though capable of rendering the many motions of the vital energy, from the dark and diabolical to the bright and heedless, his predominant coloring, as Kufferath rightly pointed out, is the "tragic sadness." S5 In striking this note, Berlioz convinces us that the love which possessed him was no unanchored eroticism seeking Nirvana but a strong tenderness alive to the Virgilian lacrymae rerum. It was out of this love that his melodies were born first and last, and it was the same loving self 83 T h e image itself was used b y Rubinstein on hearing Cellini ( i j i , Feb. 3, 1 8 7 9 ) . O n e m a y compare the magnetic effect of the living Berlioz on many of his contemporaries with what a critic of the graphic arts felt on meeting G e o r g e Eliot: " S h e has singular p o w e r , which is a thing found only in extraordinary genius. She put so much will . . . in trying to convince me that it took a certain effort on m y part to keep m y o w n ideas clear." (¡088, 3 1 4 . ) Could this account f o r the inability of some of Berlioz' readers to retain more than a fragment of w h a t he clearly says?

34

35

Quoted in 1374 (1945) 191. 830, 265.

33 Melodies

293

that he gave unsparingly to art and to love, in the faith that they were "the two wings of the soul." The phrase, it so happens, is the next-to-last dictum in his Memoirs, the burden of which — insofar as they relate to his person — was a demonstration of the law that We are not free to choose What we are free to love. Having, in art and life, fulfilled the law, Berlioz could say, with valedictory truthfulness: "I shall now be able to die without bitterness and without anger." 86 88

Mem., II, 423.

28. Memory's End February t$, 1868 to March 8, 1869

I have known when there was no music with him but the drum and fife. — Much Ado

15, 1868, Berlioz had left the Russian capital, his musical life completed. As if he knew it was his only life, his handwriting shows the sudden disintegration within. At the sight of it his friends could feel what M. Boschot, usually so harsh, expresses with true feeling: "His hitherto admirable script — so decorative, artistic, imperious, and which had not changed in fifty years —is now painful to see. From [1819 to 1868] his hand stayed firm, tracing on paper without any faltering the visible and spontaneous symbols of a body and soul endowed with prodigious stamina, and giving proof of a character truly cast in bronze. . . . One shudders, one weeps at the sight of these autographs of 1868." 1 There was no need of Dr. Nélaton's verdict, given in Paris, to tell Berlioz that he was doomed. His handwriting alone recovered. On March first he left for the South. Nice drew him, as before, with its life-giving air, its memories of earlier healings, and its old martello tower where King Lear and The Corsair had been conceived. He paced the shingle and enjoyed the sea. He drove to Monte Carlo and clambered over the rocks. It was so magnificent that for a few moments he no longer wished to die.2 But without even the warning of dizziness he fell head first. Passing workmen picked him up, bruised and bled, and brought him to his carriage. He returned to his hotel in Nice, slept, and next day felt well enough to go out. This time, in going from one terrace bench to another, he fell again. T w o young men cscorted him to his room where he lay for a week. O N FEBRUARY

When his mother-in-law saw his battle-scarred face, she had hysterics, for he had returned to Paris alone, having told no one of his two accidents; it is probable that he hoped he would not recover from the second. Death was striking all around him — his old associate, Edouard Monnais, editor of the Gazette Musicale, then Pillet and Duponchel, one1

269, 651.

* Corresp., 349.

Death bust, by S. Lami "Thus passed away a Stoic." — HAVERGAL

BRIAN

Memory''s End

295

time directors of the Opera, who must seemingly die as they have lived, in pairs. Worst of all, disaster struck again at Ferrand. This oldest of friends, crippled and impoverished, lived with his wife in a remote mountain hamlet, where they had adopted a child named Blanc Gounet. 3 This was the protégé on whose behalf Berlioz had run errands to a Paris solicitor, for despite his foster parents' kindness the youth had grown into a vicious drunkard and a thief. In 1868 he was on parole under a sentence of ten years' imprisonment and living with the Ferrands. During the night of May twenty-fifth, he strangled Mme. Ferrand and disappeared with her few trinkets. Ferrand, equally devoted to his wife and to the boy, was shattered. Berlioz, who refused the consolations of glib philosophies for himself, could tender none to his friend. He became ever more silent and abstracted, pondering life and the blindness of those who call Shakespeare "morbid" or "exaggerated." On his way south Berlioz had avoided seeing his other dear friends, Lecourt and Morel, because they had known Louis so well. "I should have been broken up by your society more than by any other. Few of my friends loved Louis as you did. And I cannot forget — forgive me both." 4 In July, a little more than six months before Berlioz' death, Dauphiné woke up to the fact that the province had given birth to a great man. The town of Grenoble invited him to preside at a competition of local singing clubs, and to witness the dedication — also a bit tardy — of a statue to the first Napoleon. It was an excuse to fete the composer. In Grenoble, Nanci's husband, Judge Pal, took Berlioz in charge. "There were banquets and toasts to which I hardly knew what to reply. The Mayor gave me a crown of laurels made of gold. . . . " 5 Though he was not far from Estelle and Ferrand, he could not summon the further strength to visit them. Poor Ferrand, whose foster son had been caught and condemned to death, was working to obtain a reprieve. In his Paris apartment, rue de Calais, Berlioz was still badgered by the living, incorrigible as of yore; " T h e y ask me for impossible things. They want me to say something favorable about a German musician —in which indeed I concur — but only on condition that I shall also say something unfavorable about a Russian, whom they want the German to supplant, although the Russian is actually deserving. . . . What the devil of a world is that?" 8 The last months laid low other companions or enemies of early days. The murderer Gounet having been guillotined in September, Ferrand 3

Not related to Berlioz' early friend, Thomas Gounet. 5 6 * Corresp., 353. Corresp., 354. Ibid.

296

Berlioz

died a f e w days later. T h e next month, death took Stephen de la Madelaine, f o r t y years a colleague in musical affairs; then Léon Kreutzer, a fellow student at the Conservatoire; and in November Rossini, w h o was buried in a mood of carnival gaiety, to refresh the jaded Parisians. T w e l v e days later, Berlioz w e n t out f o r the last time. Charles Blanc, w h o had helped him keep the Librarianship during the troubles of 1848, was a candidate for the Institute and called in the regular w a y to solicit Berlioz' vote. Seeing him so ill, Blanc withdrew his request and was about to leave in some confusion but Berlioz bade him stay. " M y days are numbered — the doctor has even stated the number. I can and will vote for y o u . " T O n the appointed day, Berlioz had himself carried across Paris b y his manservant (aptly named Schumann) and cast his vote for Blanc, w h o was elected. 8 In the last note w e have f r o m his pen, he told Stassov: "I feel I am dying; I no longer believe in anything." But he added: "I should like to see y o u ; y o u might act as a tonic, y o u and Cui. . . . A thousand greetings to Balakirev." 9 T h r o u g h the winter he lingered on, silent but not losing his faculties, receiving his friends —the faithful Massarts and Damckes, Saint-Saëns and Reyer, his Dido, Mme. Charton-Demeur. T o w a r d the beginning of March he fell into a partial coma. His tongue seemed to be paralyzed; he could only smile. A t half past twelve in the afternoon of March 8, Berlioz died in the arms of his mother-in-law. A friend of hers and Mme. Charton-Demeur were also present. R e y e r watched b y the body through the night. T h e funeral on March 11 was of the conventional sort f o r a member of the Institute, Librarian of the Conservatoire, and Officer of the Legion of Honor. 1 0 A company of the National Guard, to which Berlioz had once belonged, stood at attention rue de Calais. Trumpets blew for the raising of the coffin. T h e pallbearers included Gounod, Reyer, Ambroise Thomas, and Baron T a y l o r . A t Trinity Church, Pasdeloup's orchestra and singers from the Opera played excerpts from G l u c k , Beethoven, Reported by Legouvé, 362, 139. The date is ascertainable from Charles Blanc's election: Nov. 25, 1868. Since the Revolution Blanc had made his name as a productive historian and critic of art; he had founded the Gazette des Beaux-Arts (1859) still in existence; and his election in replacement of Comte Walewski was fully deserved. 8 Corresp., 354-5. The note to Estelle, printed in 125, seems to be the next-tolast autograph extant. 10 Berlioz, who had foreseen so many things, had long ago chaffed Elwart, of the Conservatoire, "If you are going to be there and make a speech, then I'd just as soon not die." (269, 661.) 7

8

Memory's End

297

Mozart, and Cherubini; also the Hostias from Berlioz' Requiem, the septet from Les Troy ens, and the religious march from Harold. To the sounds of his own Funeral Triumph, the procession moved through the heedless streets toward the cemetery where Harriet and Marie already lay. The Institute delegation in uniform and a considerable following marched behind the hearse. Four speeches were to be made, the last of which, by Elwart as predicted, infuriated Georges Bizet by its absurd reference to the great dead as "our colleague." But before the body had reached the grave, a final Berliozian incident — never to be believed had it been recorded by a Romantic of 1830 —took place. Not far from the goal, the pair of mourning-coach steeds, black and tame as Paris undertakers themselves, suddenly seized the bit in their teeth, plowed through the brass band in front of them, and brought Berlioz alone within the gates.

SUPPLEMENTS

SUPPLEMENT

1. Berlioz After fame :

1869-1969

Once dead he will live for a long time. — S T E P H E N H E L L E R on Berlioz ( 1844) The history of a man's posthumous reputation is the most uncertain of subjects: depending on what one takes to be a sign of renown, almost any account may be given. The fact of Shakespeare's neglect for two hundred years has been disputed because in the century following his death a few dozen Englishmen wrote verses about him, after which he received increasing attention from actors and critics. All this is true, but it is also true that the Shakespeare we know, the "supreme dramatist" and "world poet" did not emerge until the early nineteenth century, as is proved by the controversies that went on between Hazlitt and Gifford, and the things that Coleridge, Goethe, and Berlioz had to keep repeating until the trade-mark "Shakespeare" became a byword for excellence. With regard to Berlioz himself, one cannot simply correlate estimates of his fame and decades of time: one must also speak of countries, for when he is considered with others as a world figure it is usually as a standard-bearer of Romanticism, which in some quarters means not renown but disgrace. In the eyes of the French he has not become a representative of the nation's art, and he is thus deprived of the respect that peoples pay one another formally and diplomatically, in the spirit of logrolling. 1. France Immediately after his death in the spring of 1869, he was virtually forgotten. Sainte-Beuve (who himself did not survive the year), and a few others paid him honor in print.1 The appearance of the Memoirs early in 1870 reminded the journalists of Berlioz and brought forth lukewarm comments, of which the tenor was that Berlioz the writer had been a bitter critic and Berlioz the musician a man of great purposes rather than of great achievements. N o one could pin a label on him, few could cite 1

1212, XII, 152. See also 408, 412, 498, 99η.

302

Berlioz

correctly half a dozen titles of his scores, and operagoers could only argue whether Les Troy ens had or had not failed.2 For the anniversary of Berlioz' death, a commemorative concert was given, under Reyer's direction, at the Opera. But for most of those concerned it was a perfunctory affair, which had been put through only with the greatest difficulty. The performance could not even be got ready for the scheduled date.3 Then came the war with Prussia, which engulfed everything. Regime, dynasty, art, reputations, and national pride went under. When the horrors of invasion, siege and civil war — which Berlioz had been mercifully spared — receded into the distance, the feelings of the period just previous seemed like those of a prehistoric age. Germany was the new fact, perceived in humiliation, and from it grew two divergent attitudes — one the reassertion of ancient national glories; the other, the thirst for new and foreign things. It thus came about that in the mid-seventies, Wagner and Berlioz were again pitted against each other. But although most Berlioz admirers were also Wagnerites, the bulk of the Wagnerites were anti-Berlioz. The latter accused the others of harboring narrow views and of resurrecting an old fogey purely on nationalistic grounds. Wagner was the new coming man, still living, princelike at Bayreuth or Triebschen, a pilgrimage to which stamped you as a superior intellect. He redeemed Germany's might by the right of great art.4 As against this the Berliozians could do little; they were at odds among themselves; no Berlioz tradition existed, and they had too much integrity to turn Wagner into a common enemy.5 The vacillations of Carvalho in 1878-1879 show what choices offered: whether to revive Les Troy ens or put on Lohengrin. It proved a deadlock. Vet Berlioz was not altogether defeated. For the young conductor Edouard Colonne had meanwhile begun to study the Damnation of Faust, and repenting of sonic earlier misdeeds committed by him on Berlioz' music, he devoted the whole season of 1876-1877 to rehearsing a work of which only fragments were - Edmond About's opinion prevailed, that music was healthy except for the t w o monstrosities, Tannhäuser and Les Troy ens. (1141, 324-5.) 3 See Ernest Reyer's account in / 386, reproduced in 957. 4 It was not generally known then that at the time of the siege of Paris, W a g n e r had written a sneering skit about the fallen city, ridiculing V i c t o r H u g o and other notables, in revenge for his humiliations of 1839 and 1861. s T h e absence of tradition and even of common sense was shown in the inadequate performance and absurd alteration of The Infant Christ in 1875; the lack of unity was emphasized b y the lawsuit of the following year about the publication of Les Troyens. Judgment was rendered against the heirs and the Conservatoire in favor of publishers w h o refused to publish. ( 1 5 ? . )

Afterfame

303

known to the public. His older rival, Pasdeloup, was stung into emulation and the two conductors played the score on the same day. When it burst forth on February 18, 1877, after thirty years of obscurity, the public shared Colonne's contrition and the Damnation of Faust was launched. Colonne had to repeat it on six consecutive Sundays. The public went wild, and Flaubert, rejoicing for Berlioz, damned the bourgeois once again.® Gounod's Faust had helped them to understand what Berlioz' "dramatic legend" took for granted, and from that moment on, the work has been the mainstay of the Berlioz repertoire in France. It was staged at Monte Carlo in 1893 and regularly at the Paris Opera since 1920. By 1908, the total of concert performances at Colonne's alone had reached one hundred and sixty. Berlioz had not only made the reputation of this Association Artistique, but his music filled its coffers. Meantime between 1880 and 1890 the great Wagnerian battle was fought and won. A "new art" possessed the minds of the SymbolistImpressionist generation. Berlioz looked Romantic and remote. Except for the Damnation, he could be heard only in fragments, badly played by Pasdeloup in the uninviting Cirque d'Hiver. That is no doubt where Huysmans, Van Gogh, and Odilon Redon went to hear and applaud him, for better opportunities did not come until 1890. In that year, largely owing to the great vogue of Berlioz in Germany, Les Troy ens was revived, with an extraordinary young woman of sixteen named Delna in the double role of Cassandra and Dido.7 The work caused a stir, particularly among young composers and critics, and from then on until the ccntenary celebration of 1903, the tone of reviewing and the knowledge of the scores notably improved. The substance was still fragmentary. Two new schools — the pupils of César Franck and his prophet Vincent d'Indy, and the numerous songwriters clustering about Debussy, Fauré and Ravel — were still resistant to Berlioz. Neither at the Schola Cantorim nor at the Conservatoire was it considered proper to like or to study him. The centenary was in effect more bookish and statuarian than musical. 11 "Three times now the Damnation of Faust has been plaved, which in the lifetime of mv friend Berlioz achieved no success, and todav the public — that eternal imbecile called ' T h e y ' — recognize, proclaim, bawl that he was a man of genius. But this won't make the bourgeois any more diffident the next time it happens." (284, 149.) 7 Her real name was Marie Ledan, made into Delna bv anagram. She sang at a café, in Meudon near Paris and an intelligent patron brought her to a gathering of musicians including Chabrier, who completed her launching. Her understanding of the role of Dido was, according to evervone, a miracle of intuition.

304

Berlioz

Berlioz was praised, patronized, compared, and criticized anew„ with a perhaps increasing sense among his French observers that he transcended their measure and remained baffling. T h e enthusiasm of the Germans, Russians, and a f e w English disconcerted the rest. Some began to discover a wild charm in the remote Romantic, but others were moved to wildness themselves — like the British critic John Runciman, upon whom Berlioz seemed to have exactly the effect that he had had upon the undertaker's horses." T o be sure, the announcement that a German publishing firm was bringing out Berlioz' scores in full impressed the French public, and so did the proselytizing of Felix Weingartner, w h o conducted at the Grenoble concerts and thereafter came to Paris frequently, always with a Berlioz work in hand. Romain Rolland, whom all acknowledged as artist and musicologist, demonstrated in a short biographical essay how profoundly musical Berlioz' genius was and how clearly this was recognized beyond the Rhine. Concurrently, the Fondation Berlioz (established 1908) sought to unite the efforts of all those w h o wanted to hear something more in the regular repertory than the Roman Carnival overture and the Rákóczy March. These efforts culminated in the Weingartner performances of the Requiem and Benvenuto Cellini in 1912 and 1913. Meantime, Adolphe Boschot's biography ( 1 9 0 6 - 1 9 1 3 ) had appeared and b y its tone of steady denigration had created a second legend quite damaging to Berlioz' music, since listeners, whatever they may say, tend to read character into art and to demand "depth" and sincerity, which they associate with solemnity. Instead, the Boschot biography gave them a flighty poseur. T h e outbreak of w a r in August 1 9 1 4 extinguished the Fondation Berlioz and with it the chief influence counteracting the antiRomanticist crusade of Boschot and his supporters. 8 B y 1919, France had once more had cause to take stock of its past. A retrospective view of the century could not fail to show how great Berlioz' role had been in shaping modern music. Recognized authorities like Koechlin, Emmanuel, and P. M. Masson wrote articles and books 8 See above Chapter 28. Runciman's first article begins: "Berlioz me no Berlioz festivals." (fo6, 635. See also 474.) 9 Part of the archives of the Fondation, now in mv possession, show how eager its foreign members — e.g., Richard Strauss — were to further its aims. Yet such a valuable undertaking as Prodhomme's Le Cycle Berlioz, consisting of studies of the great works, did not reach N o . 3, and the admirable essays composing Tiersot's Berlioziana were never gathered in book form. T h e project of issuing the Complete Writings in France has also remained a dead letter since 191 i. T h e French public wanted — and had —a "fantastic" Berlioz, a "genius" in the abstract, with music merely an accidental characteristic.

Afterfame

305

which for the first time sustained the tone of respect from beginning to end. Boschot himself had receded from his truculent position, and when with his aid Les Troy ens was staged at the Opera, he wrote about the work very differently from ten years before.10 Shortly after this revival, Berlioz' music drama ranked fourth in a subscribers' poll, but lack of adequate personnel drove it anew from the repertory. .More important still, a postwar patriotic occasion had led to the rediscovery of the "monumental" works. Berlioz wrote a Te Deum for ceremonies both religious and military; so the French government chose the Requiem and with it honored the memory of the generals fallen in the First World War. The work made a profound impression and has since been performed a dozen times. The Te Detern was played only in 1936, to commemorate at once its first Paris performance some eighty years before, and that of Liszt's Graner Mass in 1866. In the conceit hall, however, the situation had not improved. Unless Weingartner, Furtwaengler, or Kleiber came over from Germany, Berlioz was scarcely represented on the programs, or badly played.11 By 1939, the veteran musical biographer, Guy de Pourtalès, having written about Liszt, Chopin, Wagner, and others, came round to Berlioz and devoted to him his broadest and most thoughtful study. But he reports in the preface that very little interest is shown by the French in the composer's work, and that the orchestral fragments continue to be "shabbily played." " Pourtalès's book made its appearance in the sultry atmosphere preceding the storm. A second world war, opening just seventy years after Berlioz' death, led to the grim rappel de thème which he had not lived to witness the first time —the occupation of Paris. A third stock-taking by the French showed them again that Berlioz was of the great lineage. As they rediscovered Victor Hugo through equivalent experience, they rediscovered Berlioz through direct sight of tragedy. Tokens of this awareness were soon forthcoming. The Chorale Passani recorded the Requiem and the Damnation of Faust; and a little later, the biographical film en10

His essay about the work bore the title " A masterpiece awaiting revival." (770, I, 74 ff.) 11 Henry Prunières wrote in 1932: "In his first program, Furtwaengler presented . . . selections from Romeo and Jttliet and the overture to the Carnaval Romain of Berlioz. It was a revelation to those Frenchmen who have turned away from Berlioz (for all that he is the father of the modern French school, analogous to Delacroix in painting). These pieces . . . sounded as if they had been composed last winter." Ν. V. Times, May 15, 1932. 12 298, ι. Half a dozen years earlier, Léon Constantin had complained of a kind of official boycott exercised against Berlioz in high places. (274, 15 ff.)

3o6

Berlioz

titled "Symphonie Fantastique" was put together with evident good intentions. In it, despite arrant nonsense, two things stand out as new: the film is interlarded with extracts from the master's music — his life is a musical life; and second, the life ends on a note of national recognition. At the supposititious scene of his burial service, Victor Hugo turns to another member of the Academy and says, "He was the greatest of us all." It is only a movie, to be sure, but the conclusion is sound. [The ccntenarv of Berlioz' death (1969) is seeing a notable output of new studies, as well as a reissue of the memoirs, correspondence, and critical writings.] 2. Germany

and Central

Europe

While he was entering the shadows in his own country and lifetime, Berlioz had the satisfaction of knowing that foreign musicians were still reading and playing him. From Geneva, Lausanne, N e w York, Boston, Copenhagen, Brussels, Vienna, Leipzig, Hamburg, and Dresden came notices of concerts and messages of cheer and congratulation.13 But a posthumous falling away from his influence was inevitable, almost in proportion to the impact he had made, and the coincidence of his death with the deterioration of Franco-German relations was the signal for the change. Besides, from 1865 on, Wagner had risen in his native land and remained in the ascendant until near the time of his own death. The seesaw which raised up Berlioz once more can be dated from 1879, when Bülow revived Benvenuto Cellini in Hanover and introduced the composer to a new generation of conductors and musicians. He taught Motti how to conduct the Requiem, "discovered" Harold and Romeo for himself, and urged the overtures upon Vienna.14 The intense excitement of this resurrection can be read in Bülow's letters — the picture of Berlioz appeared on his notepaper — and in his polemic on Berlioz' behalf against a new batch of hostile critics.ir' Liszt was still alive to share in this renewed enthusiasm, and find his earliest judgments confirmed. From 1879 to 1914, the second Berlioz boom continued: Motti and Nikisch, Mahler and Weingartner carried his music wherever they played. Benvenuto was staged in twenty cities.16 Motti in 1890 inaugurated a "Berlioz Cycle" in Carlsruhe, giving Les Troy ens entire, arranging Beatrice 13

Est., passim. See, in various collections, Bülow's letters from Aug. 28, 1877 to Oct. 2, 1884. (E.g., π4, 319 ff.) 15 174, 405-6. "I have, if you will, become an esthetic reactionary, but my glowing enthusiasm for Berlioz contradicts this, or seems to. You will at least grant me the fact that is significant here, namely the non-trumpery quality of 16 all [Berlioz'] barbarisms." (Ibid., 515.) The list is given in $04, 18 n. 14

Afterfame

307

and Benedict, and stimulating choral societies to risk the Requiem and Te Deum. H e then carried Les Troy ens and Benvenuto to Vienna and Munich, 11 b y which time Weingartner in Berlin and Mahler in Vienna had reinstated the symphonies and overtures into the repertory. Criticism kept pace with musical production, this being the period when scholars and artists joined forces to establish Berlioz in Germany: Hugo W o l f , Strauss, and Busoni made definitive statements that were matched b y the writings of Smolian, Scholtze, Rudolf Louis, and others in works of erudition. T h e First W o r l d War, despite its occasional bursts of artistic nationalism, did not destroy the Germans' feeling for Berlioz. Halm republished his essays in 1916; the régisseur of the Dessau opera told the Viennese of his experiences in staging Benvenuto Cellini;18 and immediately after the peace, Kapp issued his study of the "Triple Star," Berlioz-LisztWagner, followed shortly by his biography of the first-named. Berlioz' symphonies continued to be played at concerts, but economic conditions made the larger works inaccessible. It was in the next decade that bloodideology displaced him and other French composers from the programs, despite valiant attempts to prove that the soul of Berlioz, at any rate, was Germanic. 19 T h e Second World W a r and the disturbed occupation of Central Europe by rival powers have made the present cultural situation in most respects unassessable, though there are signs of a return to the cultural internationalism that made Berlioz find his truest interpreters east of the Rhine. As a postscript to the Central European situation it may be said that in Switzerland, Scandinavia, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and the Low Countries, the reputation of Berlioz has tended merely to echo current opinion among their larger neighbors. None the less, all six of these accidental satellites have made important contributions to both performance and study of Berlioz' works. 20 It is a noteworthy fact in itself that Weingartner spent his last years teaching conducting at Basel, where he imposed a good dose of Berlioz on his pupils.21 Lately, publications on Berlioz in Denmark, Belgium, Holland, and Italy have increased in both number and quality. 17 1R

See Annette Kolb, 66j. Franz Mikorey, yjo.

™ 333 and 411. T h e Hungarians, however, honored him by a statue next to that of Liszt in Budapest, and their scholarship cleared him of having "plagiarized" the R á k ó c z y March. (572.) For which see Bibliography Secs, 3 and 4. A special word should be said in honor of the Belgian conductor Maquet, w h o reintroduced Berlioz to Lille, and whose w i f e after his death continued to perform the great works. 21 See a report by one of them, 13'fi, Feb. 1931, 125.

Berlioz

3O8 3.

England

N e x t to G e r m a n y , G r e a t Britain has given the w o r k s of Berlioz the most painstaking study and wholehearted response. T h i s too came in waves. W h e n Berlioz left England f o r the last time in 1855, he was regretted most deeply b y the y o u n g men w h o had heard or played under him, such as A u g u s t Manns and Wilhelm G a n z , but it was not until t w e n t y years later, w h e n they had "arrived," that a Berlioz revival g o t under w a y . G a n z signalized his accession to the conductorship of the N e w Philharmonic in 1874 b y featuring the Symphonie

Fantastique,

w h i c h had

never before been played entire in England. It created a sensation w h i c h he f o l l o w e d up w i t h other works, but pleased though the audience were, the critics were hostile. 22 T h e public wondered, as Punch

said, w h o this

n e w Russian and his strange music might be — and whether he was alive or dead.2* T h o s e w h o k n e w the answers kept on. Manns gave many "firsts" of Berlioz scores at his Crystal Palace concerts, and Hallé — Berlioz' former colleague, n o w in Manchester — made musical history b y bringing his admirable orchestra to L o n d o n in 1880, offering as a test of its powers the Damnation of Faust. N e w s p a p e r notices began to be more appreciative as the music g r e w familiar and as echoes of G e r m a n successes showed that the w o r k s were "serious," technically and artistically. But this, according to English students of the period, brought a counteroffensive by the Wagnerians. " H u e f f e r and Dannreuther's project to belittle Berlioz and then b y comparison to belaud W a g n e r , w a s only t o o successful. . . . T h e influence of their antagonism exists t o d a y . " 2 4

A

little later, Shaw became a discriminating admirer of Berlioz, but he t o o felt that socio-political strategy required him to concentrate on f o r c i n g W a g n e r ' s entry. B y 1900, the Perfect W a g n e r i t e s were triumphant and though the Berlioz centenary brought out a new crop of premières,

re-

vivals, and fresh devotees, the position was still confused: other French masters occupied the scene, and W a g n e r i a n revelation was still being distilled

25

— not to speak of the simultaneous discovery of Russia, her

ballets and operas. It was left for the period between the twentieth-century wars to pro22

955, 63, 138, 144-5. 145-6· 2< Havergal Brian (1934): 324, 209. 25 Mein Leben did not appear until 1911, and to this day the Bayreuth archives retain the many secrets carefully guarded by Cosima until her death in 1933. a955y

Afterfame

309

duce the steady hearing and understanding of Berlioz which now obtains in England. Sir Hamilton Harty led the way by his great performances at Manchester; Sir Thomas Beecham, Sir Adrian Boult, Mr. Erik Chisholm, and Mr. Constant Lambert have continued. Several of these men have written elucidations of the works, and gradually a public opinion deserving the name of critical has been formed. In this movement, it is but fair to say, the leading Wagner scholar Mr. Ernest Newman was a pioneer,** ably seconded by younger musicologists and composers such as Cecil Gray, Laurence Powell, Peter Warlock, and W. H. Meilers. In 1934 the late W. J. Turner — poet, critic, and musician — published his excellent biography after a dozen years of skirmishing in the press; and a year later, Tom S. Wotton, who had studied Berlioz for half a century, produced his masterly volume. Since then, radio and records aiding, Berlioz has held his place in English ether and English minds. One can hear his operas in Covent Garden or broadcast by the B.B.C, and witness the realization of one of his unacted plans — an evening of Shakespearean music from his pen. Meanwhile, magazine articles keep on appearing at close intervals, and the greatest enterprise of Berlioz scholarship — preceded by Cecil Hopkinson's bibliography — is in the press: [the complete edition of the musical works in 25 volumes (Bärenreiter, publisher) 1969 ff.] 4. Russia The history of Berlioz performances in Russia since his second trip of 1867-1868 also shows ups and downs, following the rise and fall of other momentary fashions. His young disciples — Rimsky excepted — remained faithful to his memory and kept him before the public. Up to 1917, if we except again the judgment of Rimsky's pupil Stravinsky, it was an accepted generality that Berlioz was the strongest influence in European music, and conductors such as Emil Cooper produced his works enthusiastically and with great success.*7 Others, like Leopold Auer, had to follow suit whether they liked to or not and the young expressed their admiration.28 Since the Revolution, the story is more difficult to trace. In the first rejection of western and bourgeois ideas, Berlioz suffered like other nineteenth-century artists; but this phase was relatively short and perform- 6 It is instructive to note how N e w m a n ' s opinions on Berlioz evolved from his earliest essay of 1901. Full of reservations at first, he came to see in half a century how Berlioz' melody, harmony, form and personality are justified b y a purpose w h i c h transcends routine criticism.

' f J·

"8 925>

and

253.

31 o

Berlioz

anees of the usual scores, with even an occasional hearing of the Requiem, were reported in the thirties. After the outbreak of war, news became inaccessible to the student equipped with only the ordinary instruments of research.2* j. United States Although Berlioz believed that "the originality and subtle refinement of a special talent could only be appreciated in very old societies," 30 he always responded to the free and open judgments of younger cultures and on this account felt especially grateful to Russia and the United States for their acceptance of his work. 31 Whenever an American musician sought out Berlioz in Paris, he was cordially received, with the result that as early as the 1840's notices of works by Berlioz appeared in New York newspapers — notably in the critiques of William Henry Fry. 32 In the fifties Jullien came over and is said to have played, if not works by his former associate, at least variations upon some of his themes. By then the New York Philharmonic Society was under way, and Berlioz overtures were occasionally to be heard under its conductors, Eisfield and Bergmann.83 Only fragments of the larger works could be heard at these concerts, for Bergmann inclined to Liszt — and later Wagner — rather than to Berlioz. In the sixties, Theodore Thomas, who competed with the Philharmonic, prided himself on bringing new works, and of these four were by Berlioz.34 But it was in the next decade that his fame reached its first flowering on these shores. Leopold Damrosch, who had played under him, challenged Thomas's supremacy as a bold adventurer and produced the Requiem and the Damnation in successive seasons.35 From then on to about 1890, various choral and orchestral societies tackled Berlioz, with only temporary effect. The great educator was Wagner, and by the time that the echo of the Berlioz centenary came to this country — bringing with it a revi /al of 29

Inquiries addressed to agencies for cultural exchange proved futile. Asking about recent Berlioz performances met with the suggestion that Stassov's letters be consulted: Stassov was a contemporary of Berlioz and died in 1906. [ A letter from a French reader of this book elicited a reply from Radio-Moscow dated July 20, 1950 saying that Berlioz was "well-known to Soviet audiences."] " T o Louis Moreau Gottschalk: g 1 3 · William Henry F r y , said to be the composer of the first American opera, had also composed a Childe Harold symphony. 33 Full list in 1333. " L i s t e d in 1022, II, 359, and see η49. 35 Ç42, 27, 33~4, 337. See the interesting account of the rehearsals of the second by the tenor who sang Faust. (970, 41, 43, 119 and 144.)

Afterfame

311

the Damnation — the critics found Berlioz "lacking in true eloquence" or alternatively "having nothing to say and saying it wonderfully." M Little change occurred in America's public taste until the advent of Monteux and Koussevitzky after the First World War, and the development of the gramophone and radio which permit rehearing at close intervals. Still, as was said at the beginning of this book, during the twenties the Berlioz repertory continued to be extremely meager, and Debussy was the "modern" who had yet to be assimilated.37 Boston was then the best place to hear Berlioz, but visits by Harty and Beecham in the thirties, reinforced by Toscanini's emergence as an orchestra conductor (as against opera) opened up new reaches of the music, and criticism followed suit, Mr. B. H. Haggin taking up the tradition which Paul Rosenfeld had inaugurated amid general indifference in the previous decade. By now, American opinion, lay and professional, may be said to have attained the stage of eager inquiry, which the present work was designed in some degree to satisfy. [In the BMI Orchestral Music Survey for the 1967-1968 season, Berlioz held his place as ninth among the "Standard Composers Most Performed." He was played 352 times in a falling frequency for all composers. The year before Berlioz had been played 420 times. ] If one had to generalize about the bearing of these several series of musical events since 1870, one could not do better, perhaps, than to quote Weingartner's conclusion made from his vantage point at the midway mark: "As for Berlioz, one need not fear that he will ever fall out of fashion, for he possesses the most certain sign of immortality — he has never had anything in common with fashion." M 30

Respectively: Lawrence Gilman (¡6$) and James Huneker (Old Fogy).

" I m a y bear witness to the fact that at a concert in Philadelphia The noon of a Faun was not exactly hissed but murmured against. 38

394,

20*·

After-

SUPPLEMENT

2. Biographers

Fallacy:

Boschot's

Berlioz . . . What we oft do best By sick interpreters is not ours Or not allow'd. — SHAKESPEARE

Chesterton wittily remarks that the biographers' great sin and snare is to consider everything characteristic — "characteristic carelessness when their hero drops his pipe, and characteristic carefulness if he picks it up again." 1 The implication is that in order to write a particular life one must first have a fair idea of what human life, life at large, is like. The chances are that even a careful man will sometimes drop his pipe, and the incident is not worth pouncing on with gleaming eyes. The sense of likelihood, the calm acceptance of what may be stranger than fiction, measures the biographer's scope just as it distinguishes the philosopher from the provincial. Reading the first accounts of himself in his latter years, Berlioz concluded that the life of a man could not be written down with exactitude.2 He perceived that his multifarious doings strained the mental categories of Paris journalists, academic Englishmen, and stay-at-home German critics. It was his misfortune that thirty years after his death, his career should have attracted the painstaking attention of a biographer at once sedentary, academic, and Parisian. M. Adolphe Boschot, onetime music critic of L'Echo de Paris and [later] Permanent Secretary of the Institute of France, was trained as a pianist in the classical way, but early showed ambition as a poet and journalist. He founded the Mozart Society and, despite a strong anti-Romantic bias, ultimately chose Berlioz as the subject of his life's work. He devoted several years to study and research and one cannot overestimate the patience and resourcefulness he displayed in hunting down documents, verifying dates, or seeking in contemporary 1 2

"54, 5· 93, 2 4 2 ·

Biographers

313

events now forgotten the elements of the atmosphere in which Berlioz lived and worked. All this is so worthy of admiration that his three-volume work, obviously detailed and seemingly accurate, has discouraged other attempts on the same scale. It has been held definitive by default, and until the present review his text has received no thoroughgoing examination. Because he brought to light many new facts, it was not seen how much he darkened that was becoming clear. The length of his book concealed its frequent contradictions, and the newness — when first published — of his novelistic effects disguised the lack of a firm conception in his portraiture. The author was perpetually guilty of Chesterton's fallacy, but he had done a meritorious amount of spadework which entitled his results to be called indispensable. Hence anyone who also calls them unreliable must in fairness specify the shortcomings. Moreover, not content with being Berlioz' most elaborate biographer, Boschot became as it were his champion in reverse: he continued to write dozens of articles about him, and issued a popular, one-volume abridgment of the Life which was widely translated and of which the latest reissue appeared in 1939. He also published books of commentary on the musical works, the latest in this category being dated 1945. Hence — again — anyone who disputes Boschot's findings is not attacking a negligible error and he must quote chapter and verse for the grounds of his objections. Perhaps the most direct proof of Boschot's inadequacy is to be found in the description of Berlioz near the end of the third volume, when after the final trip to Russia, the composer's shattered health is reflected in his handwriting — a handwriting, says Boschot, which had been "hitherto admirable . . . decorative, artistic, imperious . . . the spontaneous evidence of a body and soul of prodigious stamina, of a character truly cast in bronze."3 The reader who up to this point has taken in some eighteen hundred pages of small print can only be thunderstruck on discovering that such is the character he has been reading about. For except in rare moments presently to be noted, Berlioz has been steadily shown as an ineffectual man and a half-conscious, wayward, incoherent artist. Boschot's tone, style, method, and opinions have throughout been those of the systematic debunker. No doubt his was a reaction against the genteel conventions of a certain type of biography, where the rule of De mortuis engenders an incurable dullness, or tedium vitae. But Berlioz had 8

III, 651. Quoted more fully above, Chapter í8.

314

Berlioz

never been subjected to an excess of eulogy requiring exposure, and in the course of Boschot's opposite excess almost every department of the biographical art suffered harm. Boschot's first false premise is that fact is the same thing as truth. Accordingly, the biographer set out as much to correct the names and dates in Berlioz' Memoirs as to tell the story of their author's life. Pride of discovery and pleasure in putting Berlioz in his place are exhibited without shame — and without awareness that these feelings argue a misunderstanding of what autobiographies, letters, and documents signify. 4 F o r the second form of Biographer's Fallacy is to adopt an invariably lawyerlike attitude to all written texts — whether business contracts, love letters, or day-to-day by-products of an artistic career — and with their aid pursue the hero as if he were a malefactor. 6 T h e biographer himself has many times declined invitations on the pretext of an imaginary engagement; has given an intimate correspondent a rough instead of strict idea of his opinion on a subject, knowing he could explain or amplify later; has mistaken names and dates; and has shifted his point of view with age and circumstance. In the course of an industrious life, traces of these variations survive in abundance, and hearsay complicates what letters record. T h e true biographer, therefore, must not merely juxtapose his conflicting data but interpret them. If he is bent on debunking, however, it is easy for him to destroy character and cast doubt on sanitv by a literal transcript which shows up discrepancies. H e argues from texts as if they were Euclidian theorems and his Q.E.D. certifies his subject as liar or lunatic. He believes moreover that b y ascertaining a multitude of details — Boschot boasts of having unearthed f o r the duration of Berlioz' active years an average of "one document a w e e k " — he has exhausted reality and re-created the sense of life. What he has done rather is to create a pettifogging atmosphere, at once exasperated and exasperating, which exhausts only the patience of the judicious reader. This "scientific" illusion corresponds to the atomistic psychology which was considered critical simply because it destroyed the Gestalt of events. But this kind of analysis also appeals to the modern leveling 4

1 , 524-6 and with gloating, II, 562 n. This "positivism" goes back to the scientific pretensions of historians in the seventies and eighties. It is no accident that Boschot's predecessor in the war against Berlioz' Memoirs was the diplomatic historian, Edmond Hippeau, whose Berlioz Intime (1883) was put forth as a work of science (Pref., 4). Hippeau follows Taine's "rigorous method" which Boschot amends by adding the "artistry" of Renan, but the naïve faith in facts is the same (I, 5 1 3 - 2 6 ) . 5

Biographers

315

instinct: we take apart the great man and, seeing him less great in his dismemberment, are much comforted. Hence the continued vogue of the Derisive School of biography, which has only recently been challenged, at the same time as the scientific historian's illusion was exposed. The complexity of life is being respected anew. Indeed, Mr. Harold Nicolson, whom no one could suspect of misplaced sentiment, has even been impelled to advocate the omission of facts for the sake of truth: "If a biographer discovers material which is so sensational and shocking that it will disturb, not only the average reader, but the whole proportions of his own work, then he is justified in suppressing the actual facts. He is not justified, however, in suppressing the conclusions which he himself draws from those facts, and he must alter his portrait so that it conforms to those facts." β Adolphe Boschot obviously did not practice Mr. Nicolson's art of selection. He seems to lack the imaginative experience of life, like those "average readers" who must be protected by a suppression which is at best arrogant and might easily become illiberal. Like them too, Boschot has the curiosity of the gossip without the judicial temper which asks: "What is the evidence for this?" And "What else could such a man do in such a position?" The consequence is that his surfeit of details turns out as misleading as the shocking fact, and as illiberal as the censored text. The reader is swamped under so many trivia that no character remains, certainly no artist, and life itself is vaporized. We do not see Berlioz armoring his soul with bronze and describing a clear curve of accomplishment; we do not see him leading and inspiring the musical world, nor revolving in his mind the great riddles of time and eternity. We do not even get a glimpse of his friendships or active devotion to a large circle who were devoted to him. W e see only a harassed self-seeker humiliated by clever contemporaries; it is hard to resist the thought that had Boschot been alive at the same time he would have been among the sniggerers. There is, at any rate, inverted sentimentality in Boschot's failure to take the shocks and battles of the artist's career in the proper militant spirit. He keeps repeating that "Berlioz had no public" and won only a "false success" 7 — making this a grievance just like a skeptical parent. At 0 ito8, 109. of the extent daily life . . . this eccentric

ι io.)

He gives an instance from his own work: "I gave no illustration to which [Curzon's] acquisitive instincts were manifested in his It was not that I desired to whitewash Curzon . . . 1 knew that failing would . . . convey an actually false impression." (Ibid.,

7 E.g., II, 390. But two pages later this "false success" is forgotten and Berlioz is shown as a "spoiled child" by reason of his earlv fame.

316

Berlioz

bottom he takes the comic papers' view of those thirty years crowded with results; invariably suggesting — contrary to eyewitness reports — that Berlioz was not really acclaimed or influential abroad. The artist's iron determination, funded experience, and organizing powers do not emerge from the mass of quoted snippets out of which Boschot spins his web of doubts. He mistakes generalship for improvisation, and cannot discern the fruitful respites in what he calls the "breathless" pace — meaning, of course, that he himself would have been out of breath long before the end. Scarcely does the supposition enter his mind that Berlioz' plan of existence was vaster than his own, nor that despite vicissitudes, the composer produced works whose balance and serenity quite outshine his reprover's. In short, the biographer is blind to order and continuity because he takes "quiet" and "orderly" for synonyms — as might a maiden aunt writing the life of Napoleon. 2

All these errors in Boschot's presentment derive from faulty conception. The remaining ones are due to faulty method. T o the end of the work one is puzzled by the biographer's principles of criticism. At times, the author suggests that Berlioz' tradition, differing as it did from the German, disqualified him for music.8 At other times, the biographer shows unexpected wisdom — as when he tells us that the grandeur of the Kyrie of the Requiem comes from an original technique subdued to an artistic intent; 8 or when he suddenly perceives the great significance of Romeo and Juliet for the entire future of music.10 But these glimmerings are of short duration. He contradicts himself from chapter to chapter and volume to volume. He writes egregious nonsense such as: "Unable to play either the violin or the piano, Berlioz could not grasp chamber music" 11 — this in the teeth of Berlioz' penetrating remarks on the genre. In one place Boschot makes fun of Romanticist music criticism for its imagery, and in another he wisely explains that the critics' metaphors change with each generation and are equally valid when rightly understood.12 And again, though Boschot is ever ready to accuse Berlioz of 8 1 , 280-3; H» passim; III, 29; and wherever Bach, Mozart or Beethoven is mentioned. 9 II, 359-60. But see p. 373. 10 II, 509. In later essays, Boschot reiterated this point. Another true insight can be found in III, 136, but again at variance with other passages. " I I , 652. 12 I I , 296.

Biographers

317

literary intentions, he himself analyzes Berlioz' great works in language that is unwarrantably "poetical" and melodramatic to a degree. This brings us to the ultimate class of Boschot's biographical failings: misstatements of fact, through ignorance or through verbal irresponsibility. It is not too much to charge him with liberties bordering on fabrication and suspiciousness amounting to obsession.1' Moreover the debunker loves to jest; thus when he finds Berlioz briefing Scribe on their projected libretto and saying he is willing to treat "scenes of terror laid in the Middle Ages or in the last century," Boschot puts down: "And so our Romantic wants to dally with Louis X V ! " " It was surely obvious that the scenes of terror in the last century could only refer to the Terror of the French Revolution — hence the futility of the biographical caper. But Boschot can seldom resist the temptation to make a mot. Les Troy ens, he declares, is "more Spontinian than spontaneous." 15 This obscure judgment was, on emission, widely quoted in a knowing way. Within ten years Boschot recanted; the score was then a great work, unjustly neglected.1* W h o did he suppose had had a hand in giving it a bad name? Turning to persons, one is astonished to see a writer who sets out to attack the veracity of Berlioz' Memoirs and who pads his own volumes with undocumented and often unprovable statements. Page after page of the narrative is sheer embroidery or pure conjecture, couched in the language of fact.17 In addition, one finds phrases and epithets which, being documented at one point, are served up again and again like Wagnerian leitmotives whenever the context permits. Often Boschot joins these bits together with bad imitations of Berlioz' least mature style, and since the parodist gives no footnote references for any quotations, the reader is at his mercy: he cannot know whose words he is reading — much less appreciate the spectacle of Adolphe Boschot mimicking Berlioz for posterity.1* 13 See above, Chapter 8, his admission that Berlioz accurately described the Vatican choir. Soon after, Boschot "discredits" Berlioz' enthusiasm for Subiaco, denying that it was picturesque. Yet Gounod, who followed in Berlioz' footsteps eight years later, derived the same impressions. M. Boschot's perpetual distrust may be due to a lack of the seeing eye.

"II, 475·

" I I I , 482. 18 770, I, 74 if. 17 E.g., I, 65 and 44J; II, 116. T h e signal instance is the final paragraph of III, 243 where Berlioz' clothing, health, and deportment are gratuitously described as going to pieces. T h e letters and portraits of the period ( i 8 j o ) give the lie to this fiction, which is mere "background" for the musical hard times. 18 If these and the novel-like passages were eliminated, the substance of one volume out of three might be disposed of. Spe the romancing in III, 100-3, including a misquotation.

Berlioz

318

The upshot of these practices is that the would-be objective narrator of Berlioz' life does without excuse what he condemns in the Memoirs: he distorts the truth. Up to a point no narrative can avoid this; the selection of terms and linking of ideas alters the reality; but Boschot carries rhetorical freedom to obscene lengths. The adjective is used advisedly, as any candid reader will admit who recalls the nauseating variations in Volume T w o on the subject of Harriet Smithson's "blond and fleshy" person.18 Boschot harps on her shoulders and throat, evincing a pruriency which culminates in his speculations about her sexual life in marriage — all of it presented as fact. Again, when Berlioz wrote to Liszt and Ferrand in order to still the slander he had unknowingly spread, Boschot's words subtly multiply the two brief notes into a general communiqué on Harriet's innocence.20 The system is clear: whatever Berlioz does or leaves undone, he is in the wrong; and the condemnation, seldom forthright, is never argued: it is implied and insinuated. But the biographer's animus does not pursue Berlioz alone; as regards nearly everyone in his story, Boschot adopts an attitude of preconceived hostility.21 When, in 1822, an elderly academician pays a kindly call on the young musician, a mean motive is imputed for the visit.22 And usually, when another object of derision is at hand, the pressure on the protagonist is relaxed. Thus a mention of Berlioz' parents, sisters, and brothers makes them out weak, stupid, or sickly, while Hector is momentarily exempt 1!1

Ch. III and following. She is unremittingly "apathetic" as well. II, 197; see also I, 106-7 a n d 47*· 21 Much should be said about the forgotten art of dealing justly with the people who in any given biography are for the time being secondary actors. It is impossible to study them as fully as the main subject, and yet the result of depicting them by means of conventional half truths or untruths is to create a general opinion which is actually unexamined hearsay — e.g., the treatment of Berlioz in books on Wagner, Mendelssohn, or Liszt. T o assist the ethical biographer on this point, we need a kind of who's who which would define by actual examples the commonest adjectives that are so blandly misused — "impatient," "undisciplined," "morbid," "self-centered." By making them comparative and illustrating their application, such a lexicon would show — to take only composers — that the headlong, inaccurate and violent musician is not Berlioz, but Gluck, perhaps, or Wagner; that the ungrateful and self-centered one was Debussy, or that the lover of the macabre was Bruckner, who attended executions and took trips to view the charred remains of fire casualties. In a word, the biographer should have present to his mind the series of like cases, just as if he were a physician making a diagnosis. Naturally, the infirmities so tabulated should not be imputed as crimes darkening the memory of their sufferers; but being no guilt in those to whom these traits are justly ascribed, how much less of a blemish in those to whom thev do not apply! 20

22

1 , 115·

Biographers

319

23

from flaws. After Harriet, Marie is the chief victim of Boschot's extrapolations; once she has left the scene, the cuffs fall on Berlioz' devoted mother-in-law." At any earlier point, when the substitute target has been hit, the hounding of Berlioz is resumed: he is accused of not loving his brother, of forgetting Lesueur, of condescending to Nanci, of "not knowing how to suffer," of not being amiable, of being diseased too early in life, and of missing the consolations of a true faith. We are meant to gather that this and other faults justify our feeling superior and our being reconciled to the artist's bufferings.25 Noting this lack of equity — to put it no worse — an early reviewer justly characterized Boschot's work as having "a flavour of acridity, a nagging censoriousness, which is intensely irritating and not a little contemptible." 28 T o sustain his parti-pris, Boschot is led to twist his sources — often unwittingly — and sometimes to overlook what is plainly before his eyes. Thus in discrediting the Memoirs, he exclaims that if Berlioz' story is true the parts of the Rákóczy March must have been miraculously copied in a twinkling: the fact is that Berlioz tells us how and when they were copied, quite normally and in ample time.27 Elsewhere, to prove that a surviving notebook of airs in Berlioz' hand were not by him, Boschot quotes the composer's remark that his youthful melodies were "all in the minor mode." Berlioz' statement reads: "almost all in the minor." 28 Misrepresentation goes still farther: in a letter to Hiller dating from their student days, Berlioz affectionately calls his friend a "big scoundrel." 28 In Boschot's hands this becomes a recurrent description of Hiller, and it is quoted as if Berlioz had uttered it behind his friend's back. This done, it is in keeping for Boschot to suppress what Hiller himself tells us, namely that it was Camille Moke who pursued Hector and told him she loved him. The reader, after these two strokes, will naturally believe anything of Berlioz' unworthiness in love and friendship. " II, 97-8. Prosper, who presumably had typhoid, died prematurely, according to Boschot, because he was born of "tired parents." (II, 466-7.) 24 III, 100, and passim. 25 II, 466 and 664; III, 90; III, 69 and 193. M

3

27

>4-

Boschot, III, 97 and Mem., II, 211. T h e mood of suspecting the criminal hero may be a catching disease: that earlier critic of the Memoirs, Hippeau, elaborately thanks a colleague for having hunted up the verses to which Berlioz wrote his first melody, those verses being all the while available in the fourth chapter of the Memoirs. Again, an English critic scoffed at Berlioz' recital of composing Moore's Elegy — " W h e n Hector knew not a word of English!" Hector states in the account itself that he was using a French translation. I, 68 and Mem., I, 17. 29 Corresp., 91.

320

Berlioz

More neutral errors of fact also abound in Boschot's work, which are not worth detailing. N o sizable history can help being marred by such specks. Only, the knowledge of this should have made Boschot more indulgent toward Berlioz' lapses of memory. In an appendix, the biographer shows how Berlioz wrote down the name of one actor of the 1820's instead of another, the report dating from twenty-five years after the event. For this Boschot deserves that someone in an appendix should call him to task for saying that the third act of Les Francs-Juges had hardly more than one piece of music composed for it; when it is actually the fullest; 30 for saying that at the première of the Symphonie Fantastique Berlioz also gave his Chant Guerrier, although no chorus was present; and for being taken in by the forged program of Rêverie et Caprice. M. Boschot has less excuse than his victim in such errors and confusions, for after all he worked not from memory, like Berlioz at bay in London, but from data patiently collected. 31 Boschot did not, it must be added, collect much outside France: he ignores or misquotes the English and German sources despite their accessibility when he wrote. He also overlooks the glaring faults of the German edition of the scores, which his colleague Malherbe assured him was soundly critical. In short, Boschot did an estimable amount of digging and dating; he had to belittle his subject in order to bring it within his grasp; and he was impelled by a mistaken but not unworthy ambition to make "literature" out of his subject. One can only regret that despite its pedestrian virtues the result must be held — in the judicial phrase — "incomplete, contradictory, suspicious, and unworthy of belief." 30

1, 2JI and Bibl. Nat. Ms. Memory plays tricks even on anti-Romantic scholars: Boschot in 1906 speaks of having unearthed an average of one document for each week of Berlioz' active life (I, 519); by 1939 this has turned into "one document a day" (Une Vie Romantique, pref. of 1939, p. v). 81

3. Desiderata; Present State of Berlioz Studies ( 1949) SUPPLEMENT

It need not run to a Berlioz Society. . . . — W.

R . ANDERSON i n

1932

1. Records The first thing needful is more records. Although small bits of the less well-known major works have at one time or another been recorded, these fragments are usually no longer "in print," and conductors and companies continue to bring out new "interpretations" of the Symphonie Fantastique and the Rákóczy March. The latest important recordings are of the Damnation of Faust and the Requiem (/414 and 1448) but the taste for these might be prepared by the issuing of some of the shorter works complete. In his book on Berlioz, T . S. Wotton suggested that the collection of songs, Stimmer Nights, should be recorded as a representative sample of the composer's fine work on a small scale — and also as an inexpensive undertaking. Since then Miss Maggie Teyte has included two of these Nuits d'Eté in her splendid album of French songs (1444-1445), but this not being generally available, she should be encouraged to record the six songs in an independent Berlioz collection for sale on the open market at standard prices. Likewise, the Toscanini excerpts from the Romeo and Juliet symphony should lead to the recording of the full score, before, during, or after one of the maestro's admirable performances, but preferably with soloists of more equal merit than he has yet been able to muster. In giving us two of the orchestral fragments, Toscanini was compelled to omit the choral introduction to the Adagio. This is a great pity, both in itself and as a sample of the too frequent misrepresentation of the composer: the editorial passion, we know, is to cut. But in fairness to the artist, the cuts or rearrangements should be indicated. In the available list of Berlioz records, excision is too frequent: the latest Damnation of Faust is sold as intégrale but it is cut; the Aeneas scene from Les Troy ens is cut; the Herod scene from L'Enfance du Christ is cut; the Repos de la Sainte

32 2

Berlioz

Famille omits the choral "hallelujah" at the end; in several other records the orchestration — though in no way special — is shamefully reduced or unbalanced.1 All this has been thought a safe risk because so few listeners had any basis for comparison and so few critics seemed willing to consult the scores. But this attitude is visibly changing, and commercial enterprises would be well advised to furnish faithful renditions of Berlioz or hold their hand altogether. Of the moderate-sized major works, The Infant Christ suggests itself as combining very modest means with very wide appeal, through both subject matter and style. T o the overtures now available it would be good to add the youthful Waverley and Rob Roy 2 and to do afresh the Hamlet March, with the drums and obligato vocalizing as scored. Indeed, a collection of a dozen Berlioz marches would form an impressive album of astonishing range, just as a selection of dramatic arias, beginning with Benvenuto Cellini and ending with Beatrice and Benedict would yield many pleasant surprises. In general it is futile or harmful to make orchestral excerpts from Berlioz' dramatic works: the three from the Damnation of Faust and the "Royal Hunt" from Les Troyens only bewilder by their lack of context, or make hearers suppose that they know the whole from a minute part. But the situation is different as regards songs if these are wisely chosen. A well-contrived "anthology" in album form, sold with a booklet of words and accurate comment would fall within an established form of issue. When, nearly twenty years ago, Mr. Anderson deprecated a Berlioz society, he was hoping to obtain in due course more records like the Beatrice and Benedict overture, without the trouble and solemnity of grouping Berlioz admirers into a "market." But the commercial output since then has been distressingly repetitive, and experience has shown that even with better-known composers an organized demand is the only effective demand. We should still be without the Beethoven piano sonatas had it not been for a subscription scheme. If record collectors do not want next year's catalogues to offer them the fifty-first Hungarian March and the seventeenth Symphonie Fantastique, they had better pool their purchasing power, approach the companies, and direct the directors. 1

The American Record Guide noted: "English Decca taught us something we previously had not really appreciated — Berlioz' remarkable uses in the [Roman Carnival overture] of the triangle, the tambourine and the cymbals. . . . " ( M a y 1949, 266. T h e ref. is to 1453.) 2 T o v e y : " A presentable and engaging w o r k . " (590, 75.)

Desiderata

323

2. Books In English, what is urgently needed is a well-edited volume of selected essays and another of selected letters. In French, the undertaking is more vast. It amounts to nothing less than a critical edition of Berlioz' literary works. This would include not a few of the critical essays still buried in newspaper files, as well as a comprehensive, correct and complete edition of the letters available to date. Many of these have been printed in periodicals since the six extant volumes appeared. In those volumes, dates and names are frequently untrustworthy, and the editors have often omitted musical details. A paragraph about a waistcoat that Berlioz left by mistake somewhere on his travels is given full space, whereas remarks upon music and musicians have been excluded as "less interesting." Such childishness is no longer tolerable: the French government owes it to the nation to subsidize a complete Berlioz — prose works and scores — in clear type and correct form. The present printing of the Memoirs in French is full of misprints, completely unedited, and offered in a format which if employed for dime novels would damn the civilization that produced it.

Scores The scores, as is evident from Supplement 5 to the present book, need thorough re-editing. N o t one, but several French scholars, working as a team on both the musical works and the prose documents, are required to accomplish the task. The autograph scores in the Bibliothèque Nationale and the Conservatoire; the first editions corrected in Berlioz' hand in the former repository and at his birthplace; the two piano scores by Liszt, as well as numerous other arrangements, not to speak of the critical works of Tiersot, Wotton, Montaux, Pohl, and Bartenstein, must be consulted before an accurate variorum edition can be produced. T h e score of the Te Deum, left by Berlioz as a gift to Russia, must be consulted, even if it takes a war to obtain permission. For the Freischütz recitatives, the Benvenuto, and the Troy ens scores, the libraries of the Paris, Weimar, and Berlin Operas must be ransacked. Moreover, for the instruction of scholars and concert annotatore everywhere, the long series of articles published by Julien Tiersot under the title "Berlioziana" in Le Ménestrel from January 3, 1904 to December 1, 1906 should be reprinted in book form. These essays are not only informative, they are lively and inspired, and together with Wotton's Hector

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Berlioz

Berlioz (London and New York, 1935) they form the core of any technical literature worth keeping in print. The miniature scores of the first three symphonies and seven of the overtures (Eulenburg) must be put back into circulation just as soon as practicable under the conditions of German decay and European paralysis. The same applies to the miniature scores of the Damnation of Faust and L'Enfance du Christ (Costallat). But these must be supplemented: Benvenuto Cellini and Les Troy ens constitute an underground literature in Choudens's subbasement and must be brought out into the light of day in cheap handy editions. The Requiem (Ricordi) and the (unavailable) Te Deum likewise; while the American edition of the Funeral and Triumphal Symphony by R. F. Goldman (all done but one third published by the Mercury Music Corporation) should be completed. With a very few corrections, a photographic reduction of the Beatrice and Benedict score from the Breitkopf and Härtel edition might be made available. Given the five handy scores previously published and the six here proposed, the orchestral and choral works would lie open to the needs of students and listeners. There would remain to be produced a comparable edition of twenty to twenty-five songs, in the original keys, for amateur and professional singers. 4. Musicology The studies to be undertaken henceforth about Berlioz suggest themselves upon examining the lacunae of the present book: nearly every "second section" of the narrative chapters presents a subject for further investigation. Each of Berlioz' main works deserves re-analysis and replacement in the tradition (narrowly considered) to which it belongs. And each of the "constituents of music" (as he called them) must — with the possible exception of orchestration — be studied from the ground up. Berlioz' harmony especially should engage the attention of a mature theorist and practical orchestrator. Berlioz' rhythm is entitled to a monograph, and his melody to something as yet unattempted — a critical thematic catalogue. His form and counterpoint could then be dealt with, leaving dramatic and esthetic principles as the proper objects of attention for critics capable of synthesis. If it is felt that such a treatment has never been accorded any composer, the answer must be: "Begin now." Musicology has many mansions, some of which only seem to be inhabited: the rest are haunted houses in which the rustling of paper gives an unnatural illusion of life. Putting thought

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325

and effort into the work proposed would animate not merely the place where Berlioz dwells, but might by contagion enliven neighboring houses. j\ Biography The chief desideratum — the reader will perhaps agree —is that the dropsical bulk of the present work be reduced to humane proportions. This can be done as soon as technical discussions on the one hand, and factual narrative on the other can be handled without reference to the superstitions with which they have hitherto been mixed. Certain points in the life of Berlioz may be cleared up by evidence still to come, and aspects of his character will continue to evoke opposite opinions; but the task of later scholars should be to understand still better and re-create still more vividly the life of a subject assumed worthy of their efforts. Whatever controversy may continue should be pursued on the plane of High Contracting Powers. This will raise new problems, infinitely more subtle, engrossing, and rewarding in their solution than those offered by faulty tradition to all previous biographers without exception. 6. Honors and Celebrations It is idle to summon a bankrupt continent to establish for Berlioz, his predecessors and followers, the Euphonia he envisioned. Unlike the kings and noblemen that Berlioz and Wagner dealt with, the present crop of rulers do not number any who are crazy about music and so willing to found a new, less exclusive Bayreuth; rather, they seem uniformly mad without preference as to object. Still, from time to time they spend public moneys in commemoration of the extinct race of great men, and it is possible that if by 1969 airborne evil has not extinguished our species, there may be musical and other festivities to mark the hundredth anniversary of Berlioz' death. This is most likely to happen in England and France. The English, having started the modern revival by playing the works, may be trusted to continue. To the French, the recommendation should be to temporarily forget the Damnation of Faust, which is all they know, and put on Benvenuto Cellini and Les Troyens at the Opera; to publish or republish a few useful books by or about Berlioz; and to keep down to a minimum the making of busts and statues. If a real desire exists to celebrate Berlioz' memory otherwise than by playing his music, there is in Paris a roomy public building on the pediment of which is written Aux grands hommes,

32 6

Berlioz

la patrie reconnaissante. Exhume Berlioz and place him in the Pantheon with his peers. He now lies in the Cimetière Montmartre, section 7, row 2, No. 32. As his ashes enter the domed mausoleum for which he planned his Fête musicale funèbre à la mémoire des hommes illustres de la France, there should resound the Funeral and Triumphal symphony which is but a fragment of the former projected work. The four unwritten movements having remained unwanted, like much else that he had to give, are among those secrets of musical expression which Saint-Saëns said Berlioz had carried with him to the grave. Requiescant in pace.

ROMAIN

ROBERT PITNEY

ROLLAND

VAN DIEREN

PETER WARLOCK

ALBERT SCHWEITZER

\V. J . Τ CRN ER

C. Β. SHAW

Eminent Berliozians:

1890-1950

" I t is m y l o t t o h e a r a g o o d d e a l o f m u s i c . . . a n d e v e r y w h e r e I find t h e t r a i l o f t h e B e r l i o z s e r p e n t . " — JOHN RUNCIMAN

('90})

SUPPLEMENT

4.

Euphoïùa and Bayreuth: Musical

Cities As to old music, reverence is carried so far that we often do not perform it at all . . . — FREDERIC HARRISON

When Berlioz in 1852 returned from the first "Weimar Week" in his honor, he inscribed his volume of Evenings simply: "To my good friends, the artists of the orchestra of X . . . , a civilized town." Seven years later, in the preface to his next book, he explained this to his Paris players, saying how deeply touched he had been by the devoted attentiveness of his performers in German cities. He went on to compliment his French colleagues for their merits and their patience, but he inscribed that second volume, "To my good friends, the choristers and players of the Opera in Paris, a barbaric town." 1 Long before making either of these comparisons, Berlioz had formed a definite view of the role that music should play in modern civilization and had expressed his convictions at every opportunity. As early as 1829, he had invoked the example of the ancients for musical festivals in the service of religion.* In 1834, while preaching Beethoven to the Parisians, he had written that just as Homer had been made an object of worship in Greece, so Beethoven should have a shrine in modern Europe: until it was established, no one could call the age civilized.* This notion of a dedicated place for the performance of great music as a religious rite is Berlioz' calculated idée fixe. In a later essay he dreams of sailing for the site of Troy and after erecting "a Temple of Sound at the foot of Mount Ida," commissioning the best orchestra in the world play the Eroica.* Such music must be heard by an audience familiar with antique lore and 1

Grot., 15. See, one year earlier, his sober and discouraging survey of the musical resources in Paris, "that great capital of the civilized world." (M.M., J07-11.) 2 /j77, Apr. 11, 1829 and see above, Subchapters 13 and 22. *A.R., 254. 4

i}ç8, Jan. 28, 1841.

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Berlioz

imbued with the religion of the City. Wagner read and quoted from this article in his Paris days, and according to his biographer it was this vision which suggested to him the conception of the Biihnenfestspiel and its home — eventually Bayreuth. 5 The example of Greek lyric drama was certainly vivid in the minds of both composers. Berlioz speaks of an arena like the ancient theater, and Wagner had the Bayreuth edifice built on the plan of the theater of Bacchus at Segesta. But it is not necessary that Wagner should have developed the notion on his own. All he had to do was to read a later essay on the same theme; for Berlioz himself amplified the statement of his root idea and made his point again and again to the end of his days." T h e preamble to his plan, so to speak, occurs in the widely reproduced open letter which he wrote to solace Spontini in his troubles of 1841. A f t e r praising the master, Berlioz says: "If music were not abandoned to public charity, there would be somewhere in Europe a theatre, a lyric Pantheon, exclusively devoted to the presentation of the monumental masterpieces. These would be produced at wide intervals by artists, with the care and grandeur that they deserve, and they would be listened to on the solemn festal days of art b y audiences at once receptive and intelligent." 7 T w o years later, Berlioz reprinted this letter in his Voyage Musical, and later again in his biographical sketch of Spontini.8 The stipulation of long intervals between performances of the same work is grounded in the knowledge that music can be worn threadbare by heedless repetition. Both audience and performers end b y coming to the most sublime works as to their Sunday dinner, and this perfunctoriness is the antithesis of the religious attitude towards art." Again and again Berlioz complains that 5

W . A . Ellis: 952, V I I , 139W. He and other Wagneriane like Arthur Symons naturally took Berlioz' words as representing "merely a rhetorical flourish." (890, 17 j - 6 . ) "E.g., " T h e Musical Customs of China" in A Trav., 264-70. 7 A.R., 427 — anticipating Shaw's dictum that music taken immoderately can become "the brandy of the damned." 8 V.M., I, 404 (1844) and Soirées (13th) Eves., 164-5 ( 1852). 9 In writing to Schumann in 1837, Berlioz had already dwelt on the need to preserve a work from vulgarization. (Corresp., 120.) This does not of course invalidate the equal need for a new and difficult work to be heard often — learned, in fact, before being truly heard "at wide intervals": "Eisfield, first conductor of the N e w York Philharmonic Society, shared his duties with Carl Bergmann, a vigorous apostle of Wagner's music, and once while administering a generous dose of Wagner, someone ventured to expostulate. 'But Mr. Bergmann, the people don't like W a g n e r ! ' — ' D o n ' t like Wagner!' replied Bergmann, 'Den dey must hear him till dey do!' " (697, 78.)

Euphemia

329

music is cheapened not b y being too abundant but b y being slackly lavished on the inattentive. 10 A n d while fashion prescribes the tireless repetition of certain works for a f e w decades, the great achievements of the past fall into unmerited oblivion. Berlioz analyzes the causes which produce this glut and scarcity, causes w h i c h can be summed up as the commercialization of art. T h e point is not that artists should w o r k f o r nothing, nor that the public should be given their highest pleasures free, but that the dumping methods and adulterating practices of ordinary trade reduce art to the shoddiest of commodities. 11 It was these reasons and observations that led Berlioz to draw up a plan for a truly musical city, w h i c h he named Euphonia and placed significantly in the G e r m a n y that had welcomed him. H e first described this Utopia in the Gazette Musicale f o r April 28, 1844, near the end of a semiautobiographical novelette w h i c h happens to be also a "science fantasy. 12

fiction"

T h e description of Euphonia, it will be seen, anticipates not

only Bayreuth 1 8 but also such recent offshoots of the idea of providing high art with a proper setting and a w o r k i n g discipline as Glyndebourne in England and T a n g l e w o o d in A m e r i c a . " Berlioz' insistence on putting his Musical C i t y under Spartan rule grows out of his experience of bad musicians and their perversions of masterpieces. H e did not live to see the ultimate effect of " t o o much music," w h i c h is the public and the conductor's search f o r " n e w readings" in hopes of making Beethoven's F i f t h seem fresh. In Berlioz' day, conductors were likely to be tepid rather than eccentric, and Euphonia's martial law, like all its other provisions, has but one goal, w h i c h is to train everyone in the morality of musicianship. A product of that training, Berlioz' fictional hero gives the A c a d e m y of Palermo a report entitled: On his complaint of too much music, see Grot., 121, 214. V.M., I, 219; Grot., 244 ff. His arguments, often rising to eloquence make one think of Yeats's lines: 10

11

H o w but in custom and in ceremony Are innocence and beauty born? "Reprinted in Soirées (25th), with slight changes in the fiction. The concealed orchestra does not feature in the plan, but neither is it original with Wagner: the idea goes back to Grétry; it was repeated by Choron, used by Berlioz in Lélio, and proposed again by Adolphe Sax in 1867. 14 Berlioz applied the principle to other arts as well: "I am in the habit of going every year into a poetry retreat. I lock myself up at home and read Shakespeare or Virgil, sometimes both. This makes me a trifle unwell at first, but I sleep it off and recover wonderfully, though I am left unconquerably sad." The description is of course ironic. Soirées (jth) Eves., 55. 18

33°

Berlioz

A Description of Euphonia Euphonia is a small town of twelve thousand souls, situated on the slopes of the Harz, in Germany. T h e whole town may be looked upon as a great Conservatory of music, since the exercise of this art is the sole purpose of its inhabitants' activity. All Euphonians, men, women, and children, are exclusively occupied with singing and playing instruments, and with everything else that has a direct connection with music. Most of them are both instrumentists and singers. A few who do not perform devote themselves to the manufacture of instruments or to the engraving and printing of music. Others give their time to acoustic research and to the study of whatever in physics bears on the production of sound. T h e singers and players of instruments are grouped by categories in the several quarters of the town. Each type of voice and instrument has a street bearing its name, which is inhabited only by the part of the population which practices that particular voice or instrument. There are streets of sopranos, basses, tenors, contraltos; of violins, horns, flutes, harps, and so on. Needless to say, Euphonia is governed in military fashion and subjected to a despotic regime. Hence the perfect order which obtains in study and the marvelous results that ensue for art. Moreover, the Emperor of Germany does all he can to make the Euphonians' life a happy one. All he asks in return is that they send him, two or three times a year, a few thousand musicians for the festivals which he organizes at different places within the Empire. Seldom is the whole population required to leave its home for that purpose. On the contrary, at the time of the solemn festivals whose sole object is art, it is the listeners who migrate in order to come and hear the Euphonians. An amphitheater, somewhat similar to the amphitheaters of Greek and Roman antiquity, but constructed under far better acoustic conditions, is consecrated to monumental performances. It can accommodate an audience of twenty thousand, and performers to the number of ten thousand. T h e Minister of Fine Arts selects from the population of the several cities of Germany the twenty thousand privileged listeners who are permitted to attend these festivals. T h e choice is always determined by the greater or lesser intelligence or musical culture of the individuals. In spite of the extraordinary interest that these gatherings excite throughout the

Euphonia

3 31

Empire, on no account would a listener known to be unworthy be granted admittance. The education of the Euphonians is carried out in the following manner: the children are trained from an early age in all kinds of rhythmics; within a few years they reach the point where the dividing of any beat in the bar, the syncopated forms, the blending of irreconcilable rhythms, and so on, hold no difficulty for them; next comes the simultaneous study of solfeggio and instruments, and later on, of singing and harmony. At the time of puberty, that moment of life's flowering when the passions begin to make themselves felt, it is sought to develop in them a true sense of expression, and, as a consequence, of good style. The rare faculty of appreciating truth of expression, whether in the work of a composer or in its performance by interpreters, ranks above all others in the mind of the Euphonians. Whoever is shown to be absolutely destitute of it, or who takes pleasure in works that are false as to expression, is inexorably banished from the city, however eminent his talent or exceptional his voice, unless he consents to descend to some inferior employment, such as the making of catgut or the preparation of skins for kettledrums. The teachers of singing and of the various instruments have under them a number of assistant masters whose duty it is to teach certain specialties in which they are known to excel. Thus, as regards the classes for violin, cello, and double bass, in addition to the principal master who directs the main study of the instrument, there is one who teaches exclusively the pizzicato, another the use of harmonics, another the staccato, and so on. Prizes have been established for agility, precision, beauty, and even tenuity of tone. Hence the admirable piano nuances which, in Europe, the Euphonians alone know how to produce.16 The signal for working-hours, meals, and meetings by streets and wards, as well as for rehearsals by small or large masses, is given by a gigantic organ placed at the top of a tower rising above all the buildings of the town. This organ is worked by steam, and so great is its sonority that its tones can easily be heard four leagues away. Five centuries ago, when the ingenious manufacturer Adolphe Sax, to whom we owe the precious group of brass-reed instruments bearing his name, put forward his idea of a similar organ designed to perform in more musical fashion the function of bells, he was looked upon as a madman, like the unfortunate man who in former days had talked of the application of steam to navigation and rail15

For other details of Berlioz' demands in musical education, see Mem., II,

238-46; Grot., 244; M.M., 307.

33^

Berlioz

ways, and like those who, two hundred years ago, steadfastly worked at devices for directing aerial navigation, which has changed the face of the world. The language of the tower organ, this aural telegraphy, is hardly comprehensible by any but Euphonians; they alone understand telephony, an invention the importance of which was foreseen by one Sudre in the nineteenth century, and which one of the prefects of harmony in Euphonia has developed and brought to the degree of perfection it has reached today. They also possess television, so that the rehearsal leaders have only to make a simple sign with either or both hands and the conductor's baton, to indicate to the performers that they are to give out, loud or soft, such and such a chord followed by such and such a cadence or modulation, to perform a given classical work all together, or in a small body, or in crescendo, by having the divers groups enter in succession. When it is a question of performing some important new composition, each part is studied separately for three or four days; next, the organ announces the rehearsal in the amphitheater of all the voices first. There, under the direction of the singing-masters, they sing by "centuries," each hundred constituting a complete chorus. At this rehearsal, all the breathing-points are indicated, and so disposed that there is never more than a quarter of the singers breathing at the same point; whereby the voice production of the entire mass never suffers any appreciable interruption. The first rehearsals are aimed at literal exactitude; then come the broad nuances; lastly style and EXPRESSION. Any marking of the rhythm by bodily movements during the singing is strictly forbidden to the choristers. They are also trained to silence, a silence so absolute and profound that if three thousand Euphonian choristers were assembled in the amphitheater or in any other resonant place, one could still hear the buzzing of an insect, and a blind man in their midst would think he was quite alone. They are so highly practiced that even after a long silence of this sort, which means the counting of hundreds of pauses, they have been known to attack a chord en masse without a single singer missing his entrance. A similar system is employed for orchestra rehearsals; no section is allowed to take part in the ensemble before it has been heard and severely examined separately by the prefects. The entire orchestra then rehearses by itself; the vocal and instrumental masses are brought together only when the prefects have declared themselves satisfied that each group has been sufficiently rehearsed. The grand ensemble is next subjected to the criticism of the composer, who listens from the upper part of the amphitheater which the public

Euphonia

333

will occupy; and when he finds himself the absolute master of this huge intelligent instrument, when he is sure that nothing remains but to communicate to it the vital nuances that he feels and can impart better than anyone else, the moment comes for him to become a performer himself. He climbs the podium to conduct. A tuning fork attached to every desk enables the instrumentists to tune noiselessly before and during the performance; trial runs or any the slightest noise in the orchestra are rigorously forbidden. An ingenious mechanism, which might have been invented five or six centuries earlier had pains been taken to design it, and which is actuated by the conductor without being visible to the public, indicates, to the eye of each performer and quite close to him, the beats of each measure. It also denotes precisely the several degrees of piano or forte. In this way the performers are immediately and instantaneously put id touch with the intention of the conductor, and they respond to it as promptly as do the hammers of a piano under the hand pressing the keys. The master can then say with perfect truth that he is playing the orchestra. Chairs of musical philosophy are held by the most learned men of the time and serve to spread among the Euphonians sound ideas as to the importance and purposes of art. They learn the laws on which it rests, and acquire accurate historical notions of the revolutions it has undergone. It is to one of these professors that we owe the singular institution of concerts of bad music, which the Euphonians attend at certain periods of the year in order to hear the monstrosities admired for centuries throughout Europe, the rules for producing them having been taught in the conservatoires of Germany, France, and Italy. The Euphonians come to study these works in order to get a clear idea of what to avoid — for instance, the majority of the cavatinas and finales of the Italian school at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and the vocal fugues of the more or less religious compositions of epochs preceding the twentieth. The first experiments thus made on a population whose musical sense is today extraordinarily fine and well-nigh impeccable led to rather strange results. Some of the masterpieces of bad music, false in expression and ridiculous in style, which nevertheless produce an effect that is if not agreeable, at least bearable to the ear, aroused in the Euphonians a feeling of pity; it seemed to them that they were listening to the productions of children lisping a language that they do not understand. Other works made them burst out laughing, so that it became impossible to continue the performance. But when it came to singing the fugue on Kyrie eleison from the most celebrated work of one of the greatest masters of our ancient German school, and they were assured that this had

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been written, not b y a madman, but b y a very great musician, w h o in doing so was merely imitating other masters, and w h o was in turn imitated f o r a v e r y long time, their consternation cannot be portrayed. T h e y w e r e seriously grieved at the thought of this humiliating malady to w h i c h , they realized, even human genius was not immune; and their religious sense joining their musical sense in revolt against these ignoble and incredible blasphemies, they sang w i t h one accord the celebrated p r a y e r Parce Deus, the expression of w h i c h is so true, as if they might thereby apologize publicly to G o d in the name of music and musicians. Since every person possesses some kind of voice, every Euphonian is bound to exercise his and to have some idea of the art of singing. T h e result is that the orchestral players of string instruments w h o can at once sing and play form a second reserve choir, w h i c h the composer draws upon in certain circumstances, and whose unexpected entrance occasionally produces remarkable effects. O n their side, singers are compelled to master the mechanism of certain string and percussion instruments so as to be able, if need be, to play them while singing. T h u s all of them are also harpists, pianists, and guitarists. A great number of them can play the violin, the viola, the viola d'amore, and the cello. T h e children play the modern sistrum and the harmonic cymbals, a new instrument, each stroke upon w h i c h produces a chord. T h e parts in w o r k s for the stage and the vocal and instrumental solos are entrusted only to Euphonians whose native gifts and special talents fit them best for right performance. T h e y are selected at a competition held publicly (and patiently) in the presence of the entire population. A l l the necessary time is given over to it. W h e n it was required not long ago to celebrate the decennial anniversary of G l u c k , an eight months' search was made among the w o m e n singers for the one most capable of playing and singing Alcestis, and nearly a thousand w o m e n were successively heard for the purpose. In Euphonia no privileges are granted any artists to the detriment of art. T h e r e are no leading singers, no property rights in the title roles — even w h e n such roles are clearly unsuited to someone's special talent and physique. T h e composer, the minister, and his prefects determine the essential qualities required to fill appropriately such and such a part, to represent this or that character; a search is then made for the person best endowed with these qualities, and were he the most l o w l y in Euphonia, he is elected as soon as discovered. Occasionally the search and the labor of our musical government are in vain. T h u s in the year 2320, after hav-

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ing sought a Eurydice for fifteen months, we were compelled to give up the idea of staging Gluck's Orpheus, for lack of a young woman beautiful enough to represent that poetic figure and intelligent enough to understand the part. T o the literary education of the Euphonians much attention is given; they are able, at least up to a certain point, to appreciate the beauties of the great ancient and modern poets. Those among them whose ignorance and lack of culture in this respect are incurable can never aspire to a part in any of the higher musical functions. And so it is that thanks to the intelligent will of our Emperor and to his untiring solicitude for the most powerful of the arts, Euphonia has become a wonderful Conservatory of Monumental Music. The academicians of Palermo thought they were dreaming as they listened to the reading of these notes drawn up by the friend of Xilef, and asked themselves whether the young Euphonian prefect had not been trying to impose on their credulity. Accordingly it was decided then and there that a delegation from the Academy should visit the musical town, so as to judge for itself of the truth of the extraordinary facts just laid before them.1® 18 In contrast with this European center for music, in which the discipline is that of a religious order dedicated to art and giving the fruits of its austere labors for the pleasure and edification of mankind, we may compare Wagner's plan — its subsequent modification in practice is too well known to need comment. Although in speaking of Bayreuth, Wagner sought to assign its first conception to the year 1851, there is no word of a special theater or shrine in the Communication to My Friends which he wrote in that year; merely a mention of the "Festival Play" in four evenings. T w o years before, in pleading for a national theater in Germany, Wagner wanted to keep sacred music in the church and deny it any instrumental accompaniment save that of the organ. Once more it was the national idea, stimulated by the victories of 1870-1, that brought forth the Bayreuth proposal in the form of two pamphlets, reissued in 187}. In these, Wagner calls for a "national theater in which should be given works of true German spirit." The first performance should be that of the Ninth Symphony, in order to "sound the triumph of the German spirit against decadent modernism." Even the architecture of the Festspielhaus, based on the central idea of a concealed orchestra, should be "unborrowed from abroad"; and the remainder of the discussion expresses little more than Wagner's xenophobia, combined with his continuing acrimony against Meyerbeer. (See 243, I, 391; III, 414; VII, 343-4; V , 303 and 328-40.) The more relaxed and religious interpretation of the establishment as it came to be in the late seventies is due to the writings of Wagner, Wolzogen, and other members of the several Wagnervereine in the pages of the Bayreuther Blätter (1878-1927).

SUPPLEMENT

6. Berlioz on the Future of Rhythm Messiaen's style can be defined through his successive achievements . . . [in 1941] his "irreversible rhythms" and "canons of rhythms" show the importance he attaches from then on to the problems of rhythm. —J. ROY, in Marc Honegger's Dictionnaire de la Musique

From the Feuilleton du Journal des Débats for November 10, 1837 There is an element of the art of music with which composers concern themselves no more than do performers, and whose enormous power is hardly beginning to be felt — this despite the rapid development which is observable in all the other aspects of the art. I am speaking about Rhythm. All the great composers of the Italian and French Schools as well as those of the old German School (Gluck alone excepted) have regarded rhythm from the same point of view: they have indeed considered it an important adjunct of melody and harmony, but only an adjunct. Its resources have been deemed rather limited and its forms felt not capable of much variation, lest one fall into barbarism and chaos. Let me say before going further that each of the conquests which music boasts of today, each of its characteristic modes of energy, have had to meet, before their general acceptance as art, the same kind of resistance that the emancipation of rhythm is still encountering from the musical traditions of France and Italy. A t the time of the rebirth of music — one might even say at its real birth — in the Middle-Ages, it was with difficulty that the present system of tonalities was established. When, later on, after a good many gropings and formless endeavors, composers tried to generalize the use of harmony, the listeners' habits stood firm in opposition and the innovators were accused of defiling the purity of art by substituting groups of different sounds for the unison and octave. (Whether ancient music used harmony or not is irrelevant to my point. W e know that it was only in the eighth century, after the introduction of the church organ, that composers began to give attention to the effectiveness of chords. Harmony was invented then, and it is no matter whether for the first or the second time.) From the fact that harmony is so pleasing to us today, we must not infer that at an earlier time it did not seem to many people a monstrous anomaly. The example of some of our remote countrysides, where modern music has not yet made its way, attests to this hour how false the

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inference would be. I have often noticed among peasants in the Dauphiné their dislike of vocal harmony. In their villages one hears no singing but in unison, and when it sometimes happens that the divine service is sung by a few young persons from the nearby town, the hearers are likely to say: "The young ladies have fine voices, but they don't all sing in tune." Consonant harmony once established, Claudio Monteverdi had to overcome still fiercer revulsions when he tried to win acceptance for the dominant seventh chord, the gentlest and most useful of dissonances. He finally had his way, and since then the complexity of dissonant chords has been a steady growth, if not indeed overdone. At each attempt by innovators to add to the resources of art, then, we can see how little sympathy they received from their contemporaries. At all times, in fact, amateurs and artists have seemed to band together in order to retard as far as they could the emancipation of music. In such matters, convention is for most men a second religion; they are its selfappointed priests and defenders. Today, thanks to the impetus that has come from a few great artists, the influence of old notions is less pernicious; there is a wish to exploit all available means; hardly any systematic prohibitions are left. Yet one prejudice still exists full force in Italy and remains regrettably strong in France — and this in spite of the stout blows dealt against it during the last eight or nine years by the modern German school.1 That prejudice is directed against innovation in rhythm. It has reduced both composers and performers to a pitiable incapacity, at once for creating new rhythmic patterns and for reproducing those that come to us from Germany. Most musicians recognize as properly cast in rhythm only those melodies whose phrases they call "square," that is, which contain four or eight measures each and end on a strong beat. They do not seem aware that true "squareness" is simply symmetry, and that a given phrase whose first member consists of three or five measures may be regular by reason of the comparable member with which it concludes, making a total of six measures or of ten. No one will admit, either, that the non-parity or, if you will, the irregularity of certain rhythmic units is precisely what in certain cases produces force or liveliness of expression. Though people acknowledge readily enough that in harmony, melody, or instrumentation nothing exists which cannot be put to good use, and that what is wrong in these 1

[The allusion is to the works of Beethoven and Weber, known in Paris only since 1828. T h e "German School" thereafter did nor continue to shine by rhythmic invention.]

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departments is only what yields wrong results, still, these same people cling to tradition as soon as rhythm is involved. It is none the less certain that the symmetry of a phrase can often be disregarded to advantage, in the dramatic genre especially. I need only cite two examples in support: in Gluck's Orfeo, the aria "Che farò senza Euridice" and in Weber's Freyschütz, Agatha's great monologue. The first expresses suffering and the second, joy. But those two feelings are so marked by violent agitation that both composers, following the promptings of nature itself, which makes utterance hurtle along in the stormy wake of passion, have by means of a skilful abridgment of the last period ended their melody with a phrase of three measures not symmetrically matched. It is admirable; yet certain wretched editors who possess the dauntless courage to correct Gluck and Weber have added to the end of these arias the phrases that would restore squareness. In each case what they have done is to turn a masterpiece of expression into a platitude, a commonplace, a stupidity. Many rhythmical effects of course exist independently of the odd or even number of measures or the symmetrical relation of phrases. They result from placing the acent on the weak beat instead of the strong; or from the more or less rapid alternation of binary and ternary forms; or from the simultaneous use of unlike phrases whose subdivisions bear to each other no compatible relation and have no other points of contact than the first beat; or from the episodic introduction of a melody based on a ternary rhythm into one based on four (or vice versa); or, finally, from the intermittent use of sounds quite independent of both the main melody and the prevailing rhythm in the accompaniment, sounds which are separated from one another by intervals that lengthen or diminish in proportions not determinable in advance. Combinations of this sort are doubtless as numerous as those involved in the melodic succession of sounds. This species constitutes in the domain of rhythm clusters and progressions analogous to the clusters and progressions that make up chords, melodies, and modulations. There are consonances; such things as rhythmic dissonances; there are rhythmic there are rhythmic modulations. The skilful use of all these is difficult, to be sure; especially as I doubt whether it can be taught much beyond the point where the art of inventing beautiful melodies is teachable. But to try to keep rhythm within the narrow bounds so long assigned to it is as useless and silly as it was in

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Monteverdi's rime to try to stop the invasion of harmony by dissonance: it cannot be done. 1 know that many listeners, French and Italian mainly, are so accustomed to rhythms of a simplicity akin to unison and octave that they will find in new rhythmical forms only disorder and anarchy.2 But the reason lies only in the uncultivated condition of their organs of hearing — and in their old habits. The new rhythms are to them as the different sounds of a chord to the Dauphiné peasants: out of tune. But there is among us yet another obstacle to the progress of this interesting element of music. I mean the inability of the virtuosos to feel, and hence to render accurately, the new forms. Beethoven's symphonies have begun the education of a good many instrumentists. Unfortunately, the teaching of our Conservatoire never seriously tried, and does not now try, to extend this department of musical study; so that the singers who come out well able to sing at sight a series of notes of different pitch, are utterly unable to reproduce certain rhythmic patterns except after painful study, and by an effort that imparts stiffness to their performance and destroys the impression that the composer had a right to expect. The players in Strauss's band 3 are much more practiced than ours in overcoming this sort of difficulty. The pieces they play — these charming waltzes in which the melody seems to delight in teasing and tormenting the measure a thousand ways —contain some fairly exacting problems, and the ease and aplomb with which they are handled only adds an irresistible charm to the rhythmic coquetting. That is why I think Strauss's success among us is of good omen for the musical education of the Paris public. That success is, I am convinced, due much more to the special rhythmic accent of these German waltzes than to their graceful melodies and the glitter of their instrumentation. Let our public and our performers examine and persuade themselves of the fact, and they will see that there is in music a realm as yet unexplored, which Beethoven and Weber have opened up. It is toward that realm that all the perceptive men of the young musical generation are bending their steps — I mean the vast and fruitful realm of Rhvthin, which will bear a good harvest if only it is well tilled. 2 [An anticipation of Adolphe Adam's views on Berlioz' Funeral Symphony in 1840. See above I, 354.] 3 [Berlioz' essay was hung on the peg of Johann Strauss's visit to Paris with a band of twenty-six players, who first introduced Viennese light music to the French public.]

Supplement 6. The Fetish of Form How can anyone deny to M. Berlioz the gift of formal clarity? — M A U R I C E BOURGES i n

1842

More real harm has been done to art in recent years by indiscriminate talk about Form than has been due to any other type of Philistinism. The habit belongs, to be sure, to the Higher Philistinism — it marks those whom Nietzsche called Culture-Philistines — but it is none the less antiartistic, for the emotion behind it is almost always a false and ignorant superiority. As for the damage done, it could be demonstrated by simply pointing to the artists who have either been hindered by critics' objections to their form or — worse still — who have suppressed their true instincts in deference to this vague but menacing criterion. Form is necessarily, inevitably, the creator's chief concern in any art: the artist does nothing but shape material things, even when as a dancer, singer, or actor he uses his own body as a plastic substance. Hence the artist is alert to opinions about his forms — which are his works — and by extension he responds to criticism about what has come to be called his Sense of Form, as if it were a separate faculty used in only one department of his work. To the priggish amateur it may seem very knowing to say in a depreciatory tone: "Ah, yes but formally — " or: "Very moving, I admit, but I find the architectonic somehow not — "; the truth is that such judgments betoken little more than airs and graces mixed with current critical cant. Even in more serious discussions, the dangerous assumption is made that a classified object belongs to its class by an act of God, not of man, and that consequently a moral obligation compels everyone to discountenance objects that lack some feature defining the class: they seem as if rejected of the Lord. Thus earnest young men taught by certain pundits go about wondering whether Pickwick Papers is or is not a novel, and persons culturally proud will declare that jazz is not music. They do not see that the only hope of true culture is to make classifications broad and criticism particular. For by their mode of definition one must in the end conclude

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that only one school, age, or artist truly practiced the given art; all others must be deemed heretical, and more or less tolerable only as they approach the Norm, the Form. The trouble is that in so narrowing his experience for emotional comfort, the Culture-Philistine meets rival sovereignties of the same kind, and culture becomes even more broken up and sectarian than it regrettably is. The history of art makes short shrift of these white-livered tastes, and does it in two ways that illuminate the discussion of Form. In the first place, almost all the great works that have been persistently admired fall outside the classifications based on points of form. What De Quincey called the literature of power consists of apparently lopsided, incomplete, and faulty works. One must say apparently, for it can be shown that the Odyssey, King Lear, and the Brothers Karamazov are not formless, and thát their authors were anything but "deficient in the sense of form." Rather, they strove to create forms suited to unusually massive materials, in the full knowledge that they were giving up symmetry and smooth surface. To dismiss the works as unformed or ill-formed is to show lack of perception in the very category where one claims superior knowledge — which proves again the deplorable effect of teaching the sanctity of set forms instead of teaching their function. A caveat must accordingly be addressed to the beholder: don't talk about Form until you have yourself tackled the problems of craftsmanship in some art; until you have met in a piece of work the particular difficulties which its unique form is supposed to master while revealing the intent that gave them rise. For the artist, the principle is different. He is at liberty to restrict himself like, let us say, Henry James in the novel, to any formal limits he chooses — the "point of view," the giving up of omniscience, the adoption of one or all of the unities. He does this in the light of his temperament and of his purpose too: if Hardy had elected to treat the subject of The Dynasts on the plan of the three unities he would have been mad. We see in what he did why large subjects (which is not the same thing as great works) 1 require the "open" forms in order to exist at all. One 1 There is, of course, a relation between size and greatness. The modern distaste for magnitude involves the illicit assumption that because a work is large its substance will be shoddy. But given equally fine substance, the larger the work the greater it will be. This does not diminish the worth of small works; it only determines their rank: the poems of the Greek Anthology are wonderful but they are not great as Homer is. Is the litad then greater than Hamlet? Do we, after ascertaining power or quality, merely count pages? The mind rebels at the thought. Yet the imagined procedure, which no one would dream of carrying out, has something to

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then judges the creator's formal power not by reference to some classified plan suitable to another subject, but by measuring the degree to which massive materials have been grasped and held in place by the organizing mind.2 When the centripetal force of the substance has been overcome, we have Form. T o this general rule of tension in large works, there is an important corollary which explains the apparent faults of surface workmanship. For a long time the mind of man in its naïveté desired the planets to move in round orbits and at regular speeds. But the splendid equilibrium of the solar system is based on a not-quite-elliptical plan, which involves irregularities, compensations, and — to the hasty observer — absurdities, such as the retrograde motion of Mars. Just so in art. The half-educated or semithoughtful observer has no conception of the degree to which successful form is a matter of compromise and compensation — the greater the art the more frequently so. Indeed, the artist might borrow from mathematics the symbol P.E. and make it stand for his own principle of Preferable Error, which is the rule in all material creation, from shipbuilding to fresco painting; for the highest goals are not all attainable simultaneously. Hence, "the critic would discover, if he came to know more of the matter, that the artist had been hampered by difficulties which nobody but an artist could fully appreciate, and that he had made some compromise or sacrifice, intentionally, so as to preserve as much of one quality as was compatible with the existence of another. . . . There is no such thing as absolute technical perfection . . . sacrifices have always to be made somewhere, and . . . it is grievous injustice in a critic to pounce upon the sacrificed parts, and exhibit their purposeful slightness or dullness as an imperfection which a better workman could have avoided." 3 This is no more than what Dr. Johnson meant when he warned the readers of Paradise Lost — a work to which incidentally he did not instinctively respond — that "he who can put the faults of that wonderful performance . . . in balance with its beauties must be considered not as suggest: it tells us, notably, that we can no longer read Hamlet as a work by itself. If Shakespeare had written only this one, or if it were the only grand design among his works, we should certainly not compare his greatness with Homer's. A s it is, we read into Ha?nlet, and quite properly, the greatness of all the other plays. Quantity, or as we say more genteelly, "scope," "range," has us thrall. Its parts cast mutual reflections like the parts of a planetary system, and like mass in physics, massiveness in art exerts an irresistible gravitational pull. 2 1 am indebted here to conversations with my colleague James Gutmann, and to his article 1084. 3 Hamerton: 108η, 259-60.

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4

nice but as dull." It is the part of pedantry — the prevailing vice of modem criticism — to haggle over faults, supposed or real, as if they stood by themselves, or as if it were the sole aim of the artist to avoid them. The truth is that the artist's desire for perfection goes with a kind of carelessness which has the effect upon the whole work that magnanimity has upon the human character. This carelessness is not inattention or ignorance, it is the attending to superior things by ignoring the lesser; it is the "sacrifice" which will preserve the greatest number of qualities, however inconsistent in their natures: it is Preferable Error. How this applies to Berlioz has been shown several rimes before — in connection with his aims as a dramatic musician and with his interest in more than the common number of musical elements. "The composer's business," said Berlioz more than once, "is to write true and beautiful music, music remarkable by its expression, by its melody, by its harmony, by its rhythm, and by its instrumentation . . . But if you try to establish a doctrine of absolute beauty, I give up." 5 Berlioz reminds us here that there is a link between the critic's failure to understand the motives that lead an artist to choose the preferable error and the casual imputation of ignorance based on inability to distinguish different goals or types of beauty. The history of styles — and this is the second lesson of history — shows that artists do not always seek the same effects, and that equally valid results are often mutually exclusive. The poet cannot at the same time be honey-tongued like Tennyson and rugged like Donne. What is tried for in one esthetic is avoided like the plague in another, whence it follows that criticism is worthless when it counts as blunders the very merits striven for. Dickens, we are told by certain moderns, did not know how to write. The fact is that Dickens handled words like a virtuoso even though he never attempted the limpidity of Addison and Steele. Now, numerous as are the possible literary and pictorial styles, the conceivable variety in music is infinitely greater because neither spoken language nor visual conventions restrict it. Sound is moreover so plastic as to require the imposition of arbitrary patterns, which again makes for diversity. The "logic" of music is by no means inherent, but rather acquired — as is shown by the different kinds of melody, harmony, counterpoint, and so on, whose extension is still open to genius. Even if we exclude oriental musics, which are music whether we "recognize" them or not, the course of western history from the Gregorian chant to Schoen4 5

"Milton" in 1185, I, 186. 1398, Apr. 10, 1842, 149.

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berg, Cowell,· and Partch T shows what can be done in less than a millennium. One may prefer what for the moment looks "central," namely the stretch from Bach to Beethoven, but the abundance of masterpieces in these closely allied styles no more constitutes a standard of musical right and wrong than the technique of Vermeer stands as a reproach to Goya. The charge that after Beethoven music becomes formless; that the Romantic period stressed contents at the expense of form; that "the school of Berlioz, Liszt, and Wagner" was revolutionary in the sense of anarchical — all these cliches of secondhand scholarship rest on the unspoken premise that form in music must be based on the usages of major-minor harmony developed in the eighteenth century and on nothing else. B y an historical illusion it has come to be believed that from eternity everything has worked toward that high point, from which by definition there can be nothing but decline. Through formalism her progress lay, Arrived at form there let her stay, For if she still must onward press, 'Tis but few steps to formlessness. These words by William Watson about music are those of a man in unfamiliar territory, expressing the fears that come from confusing Form with formulas. "Arrived at form" is nonsense. The earliest attempts in all the arts are always the most "formal" in the sense of symmetrical, regular, ritualistic — especially so in music. What the poet really means is that he enjoys and hopes to eternalize the complex forms of his time, and principally the sonata form which was then about a century old. But sonata form or any other is only an empty mold into which certain musical ideas may be cast. The actual form of a given sonata — the form that is artistically valuable — does not lie in mere concordance with the textbook pattern. It is found, rather, in every detail of the work, down to the indications of tempo and dynamics; so that one really ought to say that the form of a musical piece varies with each performance: if the pianist misuses the pedal, the form is in part destroyed.8 (i

For his conception of "tone clusters," see his New Musical Resources (781). For his 42-tone scale and the instruments that play it, see his treatise Genesis of a Music, Wisconsin University Press, Madison, 1949. " This is the reason w h y calling music "pure f o r m " is absurd. If music were valued exclusively f o r the abstract and fixed relations within the work, then one sonata would suffice — w h y write another? And equally intricate relations could be fashioned with matches on a tablecloth — why instruments and the grueling effort of perfect performance? 7

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For brevity, of course, the word "form" may stand for "type of form" but this obvious ambiguity should not impose on anyone. In one usage, Form is a specified cut of the cloth; in the other it is a property of the texture and the fit. Only by playing on words can theorists raise the bugbear of predicting formlessness from the modification of forms. The new patterns may be good or bad or hard to schematize on first hearing, but they have form — just as what we call a shapeless lump has a shape. It is only Mr. Mantalini in Dickens who confounds reality with geometry and refers to his wife's "beautiful outline." Neither musical patterns nor the arts of tailoring follow immutable laws. They follow habit and history, which may be why our judgments are always in danger of becoming provincial. Generally speaking, modern European music is descended from two sources: the repertory of dances and the vocal polyphony of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. From the former, which follows an external "program" insofar as it is foot music and thus has to be repetitious for social use, instrumental music derived its unhappy passion for symmetry, squareness, and shortness of phrase.* When someone lengthened the minuet phrases it was truly scandalous, for the dancers were caught off base. From vocal polyphony — programmatic again because made to suit words or religious rites — modern music derived its happy passion for expressiveness and multiplicity. It also derived from a third sort of program — the riddles, messages, and ciphered puzzles of the decadent period — a possibly unhealthy interest in "difficulty overcome." By the eighteenth century this last tendency was strengthened as a result of the new convention of the tempered scale and the arbitrary rationalism of a "classical" harmony.10 T h e false analogy between musical art and the dominant science of mathematics, which had reduced "invention" to "problems," was also inherited; so that to this day one finds among the many contradictory types of formal analysis such bland definitions of musical form as "solving the problem of establishing a key, leaving it, and returning to it" — "without," one is tempted to add, "being seen." 9 M r . W e r n e r W o l f f : "Incidentally, in spite of the efforts of Berlioz, of occasional attempts b y Schumann, and of the onslaughts of the younger Stravinsky, musical creation is not yet rid of the hampering chains of s y m m e t r y . " ( 1 9 4 2 ) 1038, 122. 10 T h e belief in the wickedness of consecutive fifths, the dissonance of the fourth, the folly of certain inversions and resolutions, regardless of the ear's experience, equaled the fanaticism of religious dogma. Until well into the nineteenth century, harmony was deemed a science and its laws held mandatory — b y another play on the w o r d " l a w . " Genuine science, that of Helmholtz, refuted Rameau just as Rousseau and Berlioz had done on empirical grounds.

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W h a t this narrow definition takes f o r a fundamental principle is simply a temporary goal of the enharmonic system, which relied on key relations to outline the sections of a piece: "It can hardly be doubted that the . . . practically new discovery of the element of positive harmonic or tonal form . . . must have acted like many other fresh discoveries in the realms of art, and tended to swamp the other elements of effect; making composers look to form rather as ultimate and preeminent than as inevitable but subsidiary. It seems not improbable that the meaningless commonplace which often offends the sensitive musician in the works of Haydn and Mozart, and appears like just so much rubbish shot in to fill up a hole, was the result of this strong new feeling. . . . In [them], it is common to find very sweet tunes in each of the primary sections, and then a lot of scurrying about — "brilliant passages" as they are often called — the only purpose of which is to . . . point out that the tune just finished is in such and such a k e y . " 1 1 In the light of recurrent excesses of this sort, it would be easy as well as gratifying to show that, as a class, musicians tend to have a rather blunted sense of form, precisely because they rely on formulas, none of which (since they change with the times) necessarily correspond to that "inner logic" invoked b y critics. W h e n one considers how childishly obvious are some of the august commands of tradition — the alternation of slow and fast, of melody and refrain, of A and Β in order to reach A once more; when one knows how long it took for music to develop sizable movements that were not made so b y repeats; how great the innovation seemed when the melodies of an opera began to be used in its overture; and how ready musicians have been to patch together original ideas and inherited commonplaces — one is driven to admit that the constructive imagination is as rare in composers as the melodic. T h e great majority work with others' tunes on others' plans and content themselves with deft spinning. But it must be pointed out at the same time that many works are sublime in spite of formalistic excess and ungainly shape. Schubert's chamber music supplies many examples, of which perhaps the clearest and greatest is the first movement of the Death and the Maiden quartet. T o call a movement ungainly brings us back to the criterion by which to judge Form, old or new, and more particularly, the form of a given sample — what has here been called Form as against formula. Most errors come from supposing that one and the same mental operation will suffice 11

H. C. Colles in Grove's Dictionary, art. "Form." ( / j / j , II, 276.)

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for all musics. Yet it should be clear that in certain instances our "sense of form" legitimately relies on an expectation derived from a knowledge of the models, whereas in others it effects a discovery guided by the piece itself. Until that exploration has been fully charted, it cannot in the nature of things give the hearer the same pleasure that he feels in expectation fulfilled. And this in turn explains why the modern music of any age undergoes a twenty-year period of probation during which it is called formless. T o analyze new music by first principles one must at the outset recognize that all successful musical forms, large or small, answer to a simple pattern which might be called the oratorical plan: exposition, development, and summing up.12 In groups of movements the same goal is still more broadly understood: one wants kinship with a difference, which is symbolized in the formula ABA, the second A being desired heavier or faster — more conclusive.13 The classical symphony in four movements is just as plainly reducible to the satisfaction of these fundamental artistic needs. Derived from the French or Italian overture (fast — slow — fast or the converse), into which dance movements were inserted toward the close (which in turn called for a slow introduction to prop up the structure from in front), the symphony grew by successive distortions and reformations. The last phase of rapid change took place between 1750, when the sinfonie or opera overtures began to be copied as pieces independent of the play, and the time when Haydn (after the Mannheimers) expanded the three-movement form to introduce the minuet, altered in tempo. Beethoven substituted the scherzo for the minuet, amplified each division, added a fifth movement (in the Pastoral) writing titles for each, and finally (in the Ninth) introduced soloists and chorus, recitatives, and dramatic ensembles. At that point, the greater architectonic of "one work" using voice and instruments came into play. Its design was different for each work in order to organize the various unrestricted means and subforms. These expanded creations still bear some relation to the "oratorical plan," though its application on this scale may become too abstract to be useful. Instead, a definition may be hazarded which will aid in the judg12

In so-called binary form, this is reduced to its simplest expression — question and answer. 13 In the extended forms, repetitions and digressions are allowed (e.g., episodes in the fugue), and the space required for one or more developments is fixed. But as each user's deviations show, the rigor of the rule is solely for the maintenance of the A B A prime effect.

348

Berlioz

ment of forms on any scale; it is at the same time a summary of what history and observation show: Organic, or better, intrinsic musical form resembles form in all the other arts; it consists in achieving the richest compromise among the claims of the constituent elements of the art, in such a manner that bare sensations, their interrelations, and their retinue of associations shall present the appearance of unity and coherence among themselves. Two subdefinitions are obviously called for. Unity has been immortally defined by Mr. Curdle as "a sort of a general oneness," and it would be rash to try to do better; still it can also be defined by its effects: unity satisfies the sense of economy by persuading us that ornament has grown out of main subjects. Coherence, on the other hand, satisfies the desire to follow without stumbling, by making one moment lead easily to the next." In music, the traditional forms differ greatly with respect to these two qualities. If theme and variation is the most unified, it may also be the least coherent; the late-Beethoven sonata form is thoroughly coherent but less unified than a fugue or a "regular" sonata. As for balance and proportion, apart from obvious measurements of space or time, they are clearly a function of the unequal attention given to unity and coherence in a particular work. A final caution is necessary lest the groundwork of this definition be used to the detriment of certain styles. What has been said about "formulas" does not disqualify them for use in music, any more than the facilities of the sonnet should keep a poet from using the pattern, or the warning about clichés should prevent their occurrence in good prose: it is a matter of which formulas are used, when, and how. The critic may condemn Haydn and Mozart for repeating their cadences and making "mere business" of stressing the divisions of the form; and he may praise Beethoven for turning form from an absolute, overt feature into "a hidden presence." 15 But there is no need to follow the critic as far as the edge of superiority which he would accord Beethoven's conception of form. It is but another ideal, which leaves intact the ideal of Haydn and Mozart in their best works, and which must not be erected into another absolute. Every type of form has its advantages and its defects, and every type engenders its special fatigue in the listener who does not vary the diet — which is why historic forms become exhausted and are replaced. The critic who cannot play fair with the past but must praise each period 14 The musician, therefore, may be said to ask himself at any point, "Do I repeat or do I vary?" 15,3is, II, 276.

Fetish of Form

349

or person at the expense of the others is unfit to exercise his craft. 18 It follows that in order to deal justly with Berlioz' sense of form, one must consider him as coming after Beethoven in the expanded realm of dramatic music. Yet since he was not an imitator but a continuator, he must be judged as a disciple who held to the point of the lesson rather than to the terms of it. The place where one finds his models is Beethoven's latest works — not so much the instrumental symphonies as the Ninth and the late piano sonatas and quartets. It is there that we discern the prototypes of Berlioz' melodic variation, the development by altered restatement, the harmonic concision, and the construction by interweaving rather than juxtaposing sections within a movement. In making form a hidden presence by these devices, the composer is forced to consider his entire pattern at every point instead of at stated intervals, and this in turn multiplies the occasions when he must choose the Preferable Error. This preoccupation being further complicated in Berlioz by his special concerns enumerated earlier — from distinctive melody and dramatic intent to rhythm and timbre —the resultant shapes were bound to differ in striking ways from familiar ones.17 W e may well believe him when he intimates that he bent the whole force of his intellect on fashioning the right form for each piece.18 This is not to say that he invariably succeeded, but that his endeavor was never perfunctory; so that those who undertake to analyze his works must bring to bear a comparable degree of intelligence before they can reconstruct his reasoning. Sir Donald T o v e y who, despite his automatic levity and weak historical sense, can be depended on in matters of technique, has validated Berlioz' forms in a truly suggestive statement: 16

James Agate: " T h e worst of dramatic critics is that they will not make up their minds about a thing and stick to it. Lewes has quite settled, has he not, that Rachel had no pathos? N o w take his description of her Phèdre: 'Nothing I have ever seen surpassed this picture of a soul torn by . . . conflicts . . . T h e remorseful lines viere charged -with pathos.1" ( 1 1 4 2 , 87-8.) 17 On a small scale, this is well illustrated by Stewart Macpherson's comments on the English horn melody in the Roman Carnival overture: " U n i t y is preserved [because] . . . we are made to feel that the various 'limbs' are in keeping one with another although varied in outline . . . the accompaniment figure is continuous and there is a certain relevancy of character throughout the whole strain of the melody." (1326a, p. 28 and ex. 47.) This is another, and an excellent w a y of describing intrinsic form. 18 Berlioz never published a word about his formal prowess. On two occasions he regretted being the author of some of his music because it kept him from discussing its technical interest. (20η, II, 2o and M.C., 81.) Manners have changed and now our leading artists inform us unblushingly about their profound workmanship.

35°

Berlioz

From the two typical defects of bad highbrow music, Berlioz is absolutely free: he never writes a piece consisting of introductions to introductions; and he never writes a piece consisting . . . entirely of impassioned ends. His hollowness . . . may be said to lie on the surface; inwardly all is as true as if Mr. Gulliver had spoken it . . . His forms are totally different from (and infinitely better than) anything they profess to be. Tovey being on the whole a purist, one would expect him to recognize that a piece of music cannot profess to be anything other than it is, and he does add that Berlioz had "a genius for composition and not merely for orchestration." In a word, Berlioz fulfills the Aristotelian requirement of Beginning, Middle, and End, and is moreover steadily inventive. For Tovey's modifier about forms "infinitely better than what they profess to be" can only mean Tovey's expectation of (let us say) a traditional first movement when a work is entitled symphony." In this left-handed way of putting his approval and in his surprise at meeting intrinsic form, we have the clearest demonstration of the thesis here presented, namely, that until critics are emancipated from fetishism and misleading formulas they will scarcely be able to enlighten the rest of mankind. Nor indeed will they be able to pay the serious attention to form which they pretend to give, and which the subject deserves in all considerations of Art. " m

7«·

Chronology 1803

Dec. 11: Berlioz born

Beethoven's first sketches of Fidelio. Birth of Adolphe Adam, Mérimée

181 j

Berlioz' uncle at Waterloo Hector studies flute and guitar

Schubert's Erlkönig. first collection of

1816

Berlioz' first "musical event" Earliest compositions

Rossini's Barber of Seville. Byron's Childe Harold, Canto III

1817

Love for Estelle. Emotions caused by Virgil and Florian

Byron's Manfred. Death of Méhui, Mme. de Staël

1820

Prosper Berlioz born

Donizetti's Nozze in Villa

1821

November: Berlioz in Paris. Discovery of Gluck and the French masters of opera

Beethoven's Piano Sonata Op. 110. Weber's Freischütz. Birth of Pauline Viardot, Flaubert. Death of Napoleon

1822

Berlioz' first cantata, The and His Horse

Arab

Beethoven's Piano Sonata Op. 1 1 1 . Liszt's debut in Vienna. Birth of César Franck

1823

Berlioz a pupil of Lesueur. Publishes first essay on music

Diabelli asks 51 musicians (incl. Beethoven, Schubert and Liszt — aged 1 1 ) for variations on his waltz theme

1824

Berlioz' second musical article. B.S. degree. First return home

Beethoven's Quartet Op. 127. Stendhal's Life of Rossini. Death of Louis XVIII, Byron. Birth of Bruckner

1825

Berlioz' Mass of 1825 finished and performed (July 10). Defense of Gluck and Weber against Castil-Blaze

Weber's Freischütz and Euryanthc produced in Paris. Schubert's Songs frojn Walter Scott. The Mendelssohns in Paris

1826

Berlioz seeks out Weber, in vain. Completes cantata "The Greek Revolution." Admitted to Conservatoire. Composing FrancsJuges

Beethoven Quartets Op. 131 and 135 and new finale to Op. 130 (last composition) Mendelssohn's Overture to Midsummer Night's Dream

Béranger's songs

352

Chronological Table

1827

Berlioz' Mort d'Orphée and first sight of Harriet Smithson in Shakespeare. Discovers Goethe and Beethoven

Rossini's Moise in Paris. Hugo's Cromwell (with Preface). Nerval's Faust. Delacroix's Sardanapalus. Death of Beethoven

1828

First Concert of his own works (May 26): Waverley and Francs-Juges Overtures, Second Prize in Rome contest. Composes Roi de Τ bulé

Establishment of Concerts du Conservatoire: Beethoven symphonies played for first time in Paris. Death of Schubert

1829

Berlioz' Mort de Cléopâtre, eight scenes from Faust and biography of Beethoven. Reads De Quincey, Hoffmann and Thomas Moore

Rossini's William Tell. Chopin's debut. First performance of Bach's St. Matthew Passion in Berlin. Birth of Gottschalk

1830

Berlioz' Irish Melodies, Tempest Fantasia, Symphonie Fantastique, and Rome Prize. Love affair with Camille Moke

Hugo's Hernant. Delacroix's "Liberty Leading the People." Gautier's first poems. Death of Hazlitt. Birth of H. von Biilow

1831

Berlioz in Rome. Engagement to Camille broken. Revision of Fantastique and preparation of Lelio. Projects of a lifetime. Paris concert. Hector meets Harriet

Bellini's Sonnambula and Norma. Lamennais's break with the Church. Death of Scott, Cuvier, Goethe, Bentham. Birth of L. Damrosch, Joachim. Mendelssohn's Hebrides Overture. Donizetti's Elisir d'Amore

1833

Rob Roy Overture played. Concerts and benefits. Married to Harriet Smithson (Oct. 3)

Donizetti's Lucrezia Borgia. Birth of Brahms. Death of Hérold

1834

Berlioz' Harold in Italy. Sketches libretto of Benvenuto. Gazette Musicale founded. Louis Berlioz born (Aug. 14)

Schumann's Symphonic Etudes. Delacroix's "Algerian Women." Balzac's Pere Goriot. Death of Choron, Boieldieu. Birth of Borodin

183j

Berlioz takes up career of conductor (December). Aids Louise Bertin put on her opera

Donizetti's Lucia, Vigny's Chatterton. Birth of Moussorgskv, Saint-Saëns, Cui. Meyerbeer's Les Huguenots

1837

Berlioz' Requievt. Full reconciliation with family at La Côte. Encyclopedia article on Music

Wagner's Liebesverbot. Schumann's David. Birth of Balakirev. Death of Lesueur, Leopardi, Pushkin

1838

Completion of Benvenuto Cellini, première and fall of opera. Death of Berlioz' mother. Gift of Paganini. D'Ortigue's book on Berlioz' dramatic music

Schumann's Kinderscenen and Kreisleriana. Jenny Lind's debut. Birth of Bizet, Bruch, Edouard Colonne, La Mara

to 1832

to

Chronological Table

353

and Juliet Symphony. of Prosper. Berlioz reLegion of Honor. WagParis

Donizetti's Favorita. Turner's "Fighting Temeraire." Invention of photography. Death of Nourrit. Stendhal's Charterhouse of Parma

1840 Funeral and Triumphal Symphony. Biography of Paganini

Schumann's Frauenliebe und Leben. Birth of Tchaikovsky, Zola. Death of Paganini

1841 to 1843

Berlioz' adaptation of Freischütz. Publication of Nuits d'Eté. Affair with Marie Recio. Musical mission in Germany

Schumann's First Symphony. Birth of Chabrier. Death of Cherubini. Mendelssohn's Scotch Symphony. Hugo's Les Burgraves

1844 Roman Carnival Overture. Treatise on Modern Instrumentation and Orchestration. Euphonia; to Voyage Musical. Friendly separation from Harriet. Visit from and concerts with Glinka Trip to Austria, Hungary, and 1846 Bohemia. Damnation of Faust (in Paris). Requiem (second time in Paris) to commemorate Gluck

Schumann's Faust (Epilogue). Verdi's Emani. Birth of Nietzsche, Verlaine. Dumas's Count of Monte Cristo. Death of Dalton, Thorwaldsen. Birth of RimskyKorsakov Wagner's Tannhäuser (ist version). Rossini's Robert Bruce. Mendelssohn's Elijah. Meyerbeer's Le Prophète (ms). SaintSaëns's debut, aged 10

1847 Berlioz' first trip to Russia sees Hamlet in Riga and composes to two "scenes." First trip to Eng1848 land. Begins Memoirs. Death of Dr. Berlioz

Flotow's Martha. Verdi's Macbeth. Marx and Engels's Communist Manifesto. Death of Mendelssohn Birth of Duparc. Death of Chateaubriand, Bielinski. Wagner's Lohengrin (ms)

1849 Te Deum. Berlioz publishes Liszt's article on Tannhäuser. Founds Philharmonic Society

Liszt's Prometheus. Verdi's Luisa Miller. Death of Chopin, Habeneck, Nicolai

1850 Berlioz begins Enfance du Christ. to Death of Nanci. Biography of i8ji Spontini. Final version of Corsair Overture

Liszt's Berg-symphonie. Schumann's Julius Caesar Ov. Verdi's Rigoletto. Birth of Vincent d'Indy. Death of Balzac, Spontini, Turner, J. F. Cooper

1852

Benvenuto a success at Weimar, Requiem in Paris. Berlioz conducts Ninth in London. Publishes Soirées

Lenz's Beethoven and His Three Styles. Cornelius in Weimar. Schumann's Requiem. Death of Gogol, Wellington, Thomas Moore

1853 Third trip to London. Benvenuto's second fall. Trip to Germany. Success of Fuite en Egypte in Paris. Suit about Freischütz

Schumann's Faust Overture. Verdi's Traviata. Steinway begins manufacture of pianos. Death of Onslow

1839 Romeo Death ceives ner in

354 i8$4

Chronological

Table

Completion of Infant Christ. Death of Harriet. Trip to Germany. Marriage with Marie Recio. Ms. Memoirs continued. Emperor cantata

Meyerbeer's Stella del Nord. Dickens's Hard Times. Delacroix's "Lion Hunt." Liszt's Orpheus. Death of Lamennais. Birth of Rimbaud

i8jj Visit to Liszt at Weimar. Les Troyens begun. Te Deum at St. Eustache. Trip to London, cordial meeting with Wagner. The Art of Conducting

Verdi's Sicilian Vespers. Manns musical director at Crystal Palace. Birth of Chausson. Death of Kierkegaard, Rude, Nerval

i8j6 Trip to Germany: success of Benvenuto and Damnation of Faust. Orchestration of Songs. Les Troyens under way. First Baden concert

Liszt's Tasso and Dante. Rubinstein's debut. Birth of G. B. Shaw. Death of Schumann, Heine, Ad. Adam

1857

Berlioz' illness diagnosed, henceforth severe. Concert with Th. Ritter. Poem of Troyens finished, read in public; music fourfifths done

Liszt's Heróide Funèbre and Bergsymph. (rev.) Verdi's Simone Boccanegra. Bizet wins Rome Prize. Birth of Bruneau; death of Musset

1858

l-es Troyens completed. Visit from Wagner. P.S. added to Memoirs. Romeo at Baden. Illness increasing

Cornelius's Barber of Bagdad. Gounod's Médecin malgré lui. Offenbach's Orpheus in Hell. Death of Rachel

i8$9

Grotesques de la Musique. Les Troyens sung (with piano) at private hearing. Directs Orpheus and inspires editing of Gluck

Wagner's Tristan (ms). Gounod's Faust. Meyerbeer's Dinorah. Darwin's Origin of Species. Death of Spohr, A. v. Humboldt, De Quincey

i860

Berlioz' article on Wagner. Death of Adèle. Orchestration of Erlkönig. Beatrice and Benedict begun

Wagner's concerts and propaganda. Autographed copy of Tristan to Berlioz. Revival of Fidelio. Offenbach's Barkouf. Birth of Fanelli, Mahler, H. Wolf

1861

Second private hearing of Troyens. Berlioz directs revival of Alceste

Tannhäuser riot in Paris. Liszt's Faust Symphony, dedicated to Berlioz. Death of Lipinski

1862

Beatrice and Benedict completed. Death of Berlioz' second wife. Publication of A Travers Chants. Praise of Salammbô

Verdi's Forza del Destino. Beethoven hissed in Paris Conservatoire. Birth of Debussy. Death of Halévy

1863

Trip to Weimar. Celebration in Berlioz' honor at Loewenberg. Enfance and Speeches at Strasbourg. Les Troyens cut and performed in Paris

Bizet's Pearl-Fishers. Birth of Felix Weingartner. Death of Vigny, Delacroix, Vernet, Hebbel, Thackeray

Chronological Table

355

1864 Resigns from Débats. Visit to Estelle. Visit from Liszt. Memoirs sent to printer

Offenbach's La Belle Hélène. Death of Meyerbeer, Hawthorne, Walter Savage Landor

1865 Trip to Geneva to see Estelle and stay with nieces in Dauphine. Proofreading and dating of Memoirs

Verdi's Macbeth (revised). Tristan first performed. Paul Dukas born. Liszt takes orders in Rome

1866 Directs revival of Armide (with Saint-Saëns) and Alceste. Readings of Shakespeare. Damnation of Faust in Vienna

Erik Satie born. Death of d'Ortigue. Thomas's Mignon a great success

1867

Death of Louis (June 5). Second trip to Russia (St. Petersburg and Moscow) Requiem, rev. ed.

Strauss's Blue Danube waltz. Charles Koechlin born. Death of Ingres

1868 Trip to Monaco and Nice, fall on the rocks. Illness. Last visit to Institute for Charles Blanc (Nov. 2j)

Wagner's Meistersinger. Boi'to's Mefistofele. Death of Ferrand, Léon Kreutzer, Rossini. Baudelaire's Vart romantique

1869 March 8: Berlioz dies. March 11: Funeral

Flaubert's Education Sentimentale. Death of Sainte-Beuve, Lamartine

Berlioz Domiciles With Approximate Dates of Occupancy Until his eighteenth year November 1821-June 1824 August 1815-July 1826 September 1 [?], 1826 September [?] 1827December 30, i8jo January 3-February (ist week) 1831 March 12, 1831May 28,1832 June ι—October 28,1832 November 7,1832 April 10, 1834 Mid-September [?] 1836December 31,1843 May 4 [?], 1844 to November 1847 November 5,1847April 20,1848 May-July 13,1848 July 17,1848-July 1849

La Côte Saint-André (Isère) 104 rue St. Jacques, Paris [also No. 79]1 27 rue de Harlay, Paris (?) rue La Harpe, Paris (probably until August 1827) 96 rue Richelieu, Paris La Côte Saint-André (Isère) Académie de France in Rome (plus other Italian towns, but any letter dated from Italy falls within these dates) La Côte Saint-André (Isère) ι rue Neuve Saint-Marc, Paris io [also 12] rue Saint-Denis [later du MontCenis], Montmartre (at least until October 5, 1836) 31 [also 35] rue de Londres (legal residence until August 1844) 41 rue de Provence (Marie Recio's address) until February 14, 1847 (date of first trip to Russia) and again: July 7—November 3, 1847. Also: between December 26, 1842 and May 25, 1843, letters are dated from any of a dozen German towns. 43 rue Blanche (legal residence of Berlioz during this same period August 1844-1847). 76 Harley Street, London 26 [also 20] Osnaburgh St., Regent's Park, London 15 rue de la Rochefoucauld, Paris

1 This and other differences are usually due to the renumbering of the street, and occasionally to the writer's careless haste.

Berlioz' July 1849-April 1856 May 10-July 28,1851 March 4-June 21, i8j2 May 10-July 9,1853 April j-May 1,1854 June 8—July 7,1855 April 16-November 1856 November 14,1856March 8,1869 November 12, 1867— February 20,1868 November 17,1867February 10,1868 End of Dec. 1867beg. of Jan. 1868

Domiciles

357

19 rue de Boursault, Paris. Except for: 27 Queen Anne Street, London 10 Old Cavendish Street, London 17 [ñc] Old Cavendish Street, London Hôtel de l'Ange d'Or, Dresden 13 Margaret Street, London 17 rue Vintimille, Paris. This became: 4 rue de Calais, Paris Second trip to Russia, via Berlin "Palais Michel, Place Michel," S t Petersburg Some ten days in care of Moscow Conservatory

Errors in the " Complete" Edition of the Scores Thus we have the remarkable spectacle of an edition of a man's works in which his own music is in small type while the ideas of his editors are in unblushing large characters. — T . S.

WOTTON

T h e scores of Berlioz which are most commonly found in libraries for readers, as well as f o r concert and opera performance, belong to the so-called German edition, edited by Charles Malherbe and Felix Weingartner f o r Breitkopf and Härtel. T h e edition began to appear in 1900 and comprises twenty volumes, beautifully engraved and printed. Its handsome format and its well-publicized coincidence with the Centenary celebration have made most twentieth-century critics take it for granted that the edition is faithful, monumental, and complete — "as advertised." 1 It is in fact none of these things, since the monumental quality could only arise from the other two. A f t e r collating the greater part of the edition, T . S. Wotton pointed out in the Musical Times f o r November, 1915, how frequent and serious were the errors in this supposedly definitive version of Berlioz' works. H e continued his research, which I began to second under his guidance in 1930. T h e corrections listed below embody the result of this collaboration in which he had the leading and the larger part. Although with this list of errata we are brought closer to Berlioz' thought, much remains to be done. Until all Berlioz' letters are printed in full {i.e.., with his musical comments included instead of removed) and until his memoranda in the several autograph and printed scores in libraries from Paris to Leningrad have been collated by a scholar of Wotton's stature, w e shall not have an edition worthy of the name. 1

E.g., Die Musik (1902), 453. Mr. Nicolas Slonimsky signalizes the event in his valuable chronology, Music Since 1900: "January ist, 1900 — T h e first volume of the complete edition of the works of Hector Berlioz, precursor of modern developments in music, is issued by Breitkopf and Härtel." (¡360, 3.)

German Edition

359

Meanwhile, a knowledge of the defects in the current version should be of help to both critic and performer. For example, the article on Orchestration in the latest edition of Grove's Dictionary (vol. Ill, p. 730) is vitiated by the fact that the author followed the German scores in drafting his remarks about the "new" instrumentation of the Damnation of Faust. And the author's further remarks about Berlioz' use of multiple crooks for his horn parts will certainly mislead anyone who refers to that same edition in which they have been changed from the original without notice. As for the performer, he is repeatedly handicapped by the altered disposition of forces. The number of strings which Berlioz often specified and which varied from work to work are omitted. Worse than this, Berlioz' usual four bassoons are reduced to two, which may lead a conscientious conductor to reduce his forces accordingly and thus nullify the composer's wish. Finally, certain important directions as to tempo or expression are falsified or rendered meaningless by bad editing. What seems to have happened to the well-meant undertaking of the German firm is this: Weingartner was asked — or took it upon himself — to rearrange the works so as to fit the usual resources of German orchestras at the turn of the century. Malherbe, then archivist of the Paris Opera, was to supply the historical and documentary background and collate the editions. This, in spite of his large collection of Berlioziana, he was not equipped to do.2 His lack of sympathy with the composer and ignorance of his methods stood in his way at every step. Lacking these prerequisites he could not even date accurately the composition and publication of certain works although the evidence was at hand. The result is that this German edition is a true counterpart of Boschot's French biography — indispensable but untrustworthy. When the veteran 2 See below, note to page 5 of Symphonie Fantastique. O n January 1 2 / 2 4 , 1900, Balakirev, w h o had been consulted b y the editors with regard to the autograph score of the Te Deum, wrote to Charles Malherbe: " . . . the second part of y o u r letter upset me a good deal. It seems that instead of taking up arms to preserve intact Berlioz' instrumentation, y o u are completely in agreement with the projected changes . . . But if one allowed editors to change instrumentation in accordance with the current state of the orchestra, one would need new editions every fifteen or twenty years. . . . " Y o u thanked me in y o u r kind letter for the trouble I took in raising objections to the changes made by M . Weingartner in the score of the Te Deum. F o r the glory of Berlioz, I am ready to work twice and thrice as hard, provided it be in an undertaking I find congenial. If you really wish to be grateful, the most handsome and indeed the only possible honorarium would be the complete restoration of Berlioz' instrumentation in the edition you are preparing. . . . Hasten while it is yet time to retrieve a step of w h i c h the whole moral guilt will fall back on you. . . ." (80, 1 7 - 1 9 . )

3Óo

Berlioz

teacher and theorist Ebenezer Prout thought of the mutilations he wept with anger and chagrin.* Wotton's protest at the time did compel the publishers to strike off some eight new plates in replacement of their original falsifications. But by a characteristic publishers' decision, the Prefaces to each score, in which the editors sometimes reveal their alterations, were made available only to subscribers who took the whole set. Throughout, the translations into German and English — both of the score markings and of the prefatory remarks — were done by incompetent hacks. Moreover, Berlioz' nomenclature in perfectly clear French was turned into less accurate Italian. T o render the indication sons bouchés by con sordini, or sans timbre (for drums) by coperti adds further confusion to the unfaithful reproduction of scores which were quite satisfactory in their original editions. Why it should be precisely the "creator of the modern orchestra" (Weingartner's phrase) who is singled out for a treatment which stultifies the study of his orchestration, defies conjecture. And why a composer who took the greatest pains to make his intentions pellucid and his scoring practicable should be misrepresented in regard to both features by errors in the text and innuendo in prefaces, can only be ascribed to the animus of one of the editors, M. Boschot's close friend and collaborator Charles Malherbe. Lastly, the German edition lacks the two indispensable scores of Benvenuto Cellini and Les Troy ens.* Here was a splendid opportunity to serve musicology and the memory of the composer by publishing them as soon as they fell into the public domain. Regard for the inexistent "rights" of French publishers prevented. But no such regard was paid to Berlioz' order and classification of his works, though he signified it in a plan for a collected edition in 1852. The German grouping is in some ways arbitrary and far less significant; it prevents, for example, the ready comparison of succeeding versions of the songs. In short, the editing of Berlioz has yet to be done. 3

>54, '3· It also lacks the fragments of Les Francs-Juges, Erigone, La Nonne Sanglante, the first version of the Incendie de Sardanapale and the subsequently discovered score of La Mort d'Orphée. Compare what had happened to Mozart a century before: ". . . when preparing their édition de luxe [Breitkopf and Härtel] should have obtained definite information . . . it is most revolting to hear these gentlemen talking of the great expense they have not shrunk from incurring to honor Mozart in his grave . . . [when] they did not even trouble to inquire into . . . authenticity." (March 1800, 219, 1471.) T h e Edition Compiette des Oeuvres de W. Α. Mozart was no more complete than the Berlioz of 1900. 4

German Edition

361

VOLUME I General Preface p. viii: Note lack of sympathy with Berlioz' mind or outlook. The editors speak of the "eccentricity" (bizarrerie) of his literary tastes, which caused him to "hold in equal adoration Virgil and Goethe, Shakespeare and Bernardin de Saint Pierre, and which is found again in his musical preferences, for his idols were simultaneously Gluck and Spontini, Beethoven and Weber." This is inaccurate as to the "equality" of admirations, and even more as to the "eccentricity" of such catholic taste. p. ix: Quotes a "still unpublished letter . . . to his friend Morel," in which Berlioz is supposed to have written: "I dream of a carefully executed German edition, done in Leipzig, comprising the whole of my works." They go on to state that the present edition, done in Leipzig by Breitkopf und Härtel is the fulfillment of Berlioz' hope. Berlioz' actual words in the letter are: "done by Kistner of Leipzig" 5 a publisher with whom Berlioz had had dealings and from whom he appears to have obtained an estimate of cost. Berlioz also wrote to Liszt, asking him to approach Härtel, but the editors of the present edition do not quote that inquiry, preferring to suppress a phrase of Berlioz' letter to Morel and suggest what is contrary to fact. List of Works (See below for arrangement intended by Berlioz.) p. xxii item 13: Hymne Vocal arranged for six Sax instruments (1843) is the same as the Chant Sacré. Symphonie Fantastique Pref. p. xxvi: Ref. to p. 39 bar 8 — "the flutes are given a chord of c-a which is doubtless mere carelessness on the composer's part. We have replaced it by a chord of e-c." Turning to page 39, bar 8, one finds that the editors have done the opposite of what they promise, leaving the c-a. Pref. p. xxxvii: The "memorandum" stating that the B-flat ophicleide "could be replaced by an Ε-flat Tuba" does not occur in the first impressions of the score. First Movement p. 3:2 Fagotti — four in ist edition. 2 Cornetti in Β (Β flat) orig. in G. e M.C., 214.

362

Berlioz

p. 5: poco rallenì, et riten, al tempo I makes nonsense, asking as it does that the conductor slow down and maintain a tempo at the same time. The note in the Preface p. xiv shows that the editors are trying to improve without understanding. The original marks are: over bar 2: poco ralleni.; over bar 3: retenu jusqu'au premier mouvement; over bar 6: un poco ritard. Fourth Movement p. 76: Corni: add to part: faites les sons bouchés avec la main sans employer les cylindres, i.e., use the hand, not the valve, p. 81 bar 3: Corni: avec les cylindres (both parts), p. 90 bar 5: in ist ed. only one ophicleide plays the passage here marked a 2. p. 96 bar 4: in ist ed. the G given here to the 2nd bassoon does not occur. Bassoons I and II play in unison the upper part of the line. Fifth Movement p. 99 bar 3: Corni: add bouché avec les cylindres. p. 101 bar 4 p. 132 bar 9 p. 133 bar 2: " " " " " Symphonie Funèbre et Triomphale Pref. p. xlvii: The editors say they have changed Berlioz' instrumentation in order to bring it in line with the resources of symphonic orchestras, e.g., ophicleides have been replaced by tubas. They do not state, however, that they have written the 2nd ophicleide-tuba part for the lower octave throughout, nor do they explain how they square their remark about symphonic orchestras with an earlier and more correct remark to the effect that the work was not intended for such an orchestra. First Movement p. 151: Composed 1840 — Published

184η.

Flauti piccoli: read: petites flutes en ré. Flauti: read: flutes tierces en mi. Corni III and I V orig. in A flat and add: Cors à pistons ou cors ordinaires. Cornetti I and II orig. in A flat. Tube I and II should be: Ophicleide in C, Ophicleide in Β flat. Tamburi I and II should be sans timbres ou voilés, not coperti.

German Edition

363

Cinelli and Gran Cassa. (A Vautre extremité de Porchette, loin des tambours) should read: away from the side drums, not kettledrums. Trombone basso ad lib. throughout the score: should be printed in same size type as other instruments, since Berlioz wrote the part, not the editors. ρ 167: Tromb. bassi: read basso. p. 183 bar 7: In ist ed. cello part ad lib has no mf and the second half note has > without the tremolo; the next two bars, without ff and in whole notes with tremolo. Second Movement p. 184: Corni III and IV orig. in G . Tamburi I and II add: sans timbres ou voilés. Third Movement p. 192: Corni III and IV orig. in G. Tamburi I: avec timbres NOT non coperti. N O T E on disposition: Louise Pohl's book Hector Berlioz' Leben und Werke, based on mss. left by her father Richard Pohl, gives a list of instruments (before the strings were added to the score) amounting to 190, as follows: 6 piccolos, 6 flutes, 10 small clarinets, 18 clarinets, 8 oboes, 8 horns in E, 8 in G, 8 in D, 10 trumpets in F, 9 in B, 10 cornets in G , 12 trombones (alto and tenor), 6 trombones (basso), 1 trombone (solo), 16 bassoons, 6 ophicleides in B, 8 in C, 6 drums without snares (caisses roulantes), 12 side drums, 6 bass drums, 10 pair cymbals, 4 Chinese crescents, 2 tam-tams. Boschot gives the number of original performers as 207, which suggests that the 17 additional instruments may have been second clarinets in Β flat, since the Pohl list usually gives double, or nearly double, the number of instruments in the engraved score, except for the second clarinets.

V O L U M E II Harold en Italie Pref. xvi: Here as elsewhere, the English translator guesses at the meaning of contretemps (syncopation): he calls it in this instance "contrary motion." Just above, the editor refers to this syncopation as given by the trumpets, trombones and tubas. For Trumpets read Horns.

364

Berlioz

First Movement p. 1: The ist trombone should alone be written in viola clef, the 2nd and 3rd in bass. p. 2: The oboe and clarinet parts should be marked solo. [The editors remove this frequent marking of Berlioz' on the ground that it is obsolete, although many modern composers use it or its equivalents.] The bassoons marked a 2 in bar 10, should be marked unis, which means the four bassoons intended bv Berlioz, p. 4 bar 8: bassoon part: solo. p. 33 bar 8: bassoons: fF. p. 43 bar 3: here only 2 bassoons play. p. 51 : According to the ms., Berlioz struck out the repeat, which would mean going from bar 6 on this page to bar 3 on p. 56. p. 56: The English translation of the note should read: "Here the tempo should gradually have reached about double that of the opening of the Allegro." p. 58 bar 9: only two bassoons. Second Movement p. 83: The last note of the harp marked solo and son harmonique, pppp. Third Movement p. 84: One ist bassoon and one 2nd. (The editors' reduction of the bassoon tone without notice in the earlier movements works its further evil here, where a conscientious conductor, wishing to restore Berlioz' balance, will put in four in this movement as well.) Fourth Movement p. 160: " T o the instruments playing the recall of the March theme in the wings, add 2 oboes to the ist and 2nd violins and a bassoon to the cello, altering the notes of the 2nd violin which are too low for the oboe. The oboes are silent during the bars of the psalmody." These were Berlioz' instructions to Liszt in a letter of June 7, 1852. Consequently on p. 161 bar 2: the second violins should have e flat twice and c instead of going down to b flat and a. V O L U M E III Roméo et Juliette Pref. p. x: The editions quoted give 20 tenors and 20 basses, not 30 each; as for the Englishing of clef into "key," with the added error of

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365

"contralto key" for tenor clef, it may be unnecessary to draw attention to it, except as another instance of poor editing. More serious nonsense occurs on Pref. p. xi: where the conductor is asked to "divide each quarter note by two, not by three"; the beat, not the note, is intended. Pref. p. xiv: The mixup about the mutes is referred to below, in the comment on p. 105 of the score. Pref. p. xvii: The similar confusion about the bowing of the double basses, p. 126, will be dealt with at that page also. The second variant of the musical quotation, lower line of second violins, bar 3, should have two b natural. Pref. p. xxii: The autograph ref. to p. 199 of the score gave different vocal and wind parts, as well as strings, and the original 10 bars grew to 16. Pref. p. xxiii: Berlioz did not "transpose the trumpet part to B" but "changed the part of the trumpets in B." Part I p. 1: second Cornets orig. in E flat, 3 trombones all tenor. Prologue p. 17: sung by a contralto solo and contralti, not as marked by editors. Part II Allegro p. 74 bar 5: ist bassoon solo, not I and II. bar 8: top line: bassoons I and III, second line: bassoon II. p. 75 bar 1: second line: bassoons I and II. Part II Adagio p. 105 bar 12: beginning here, the arrangement of the mutes is confused by the editors in their effort to correct an obvious engraver's error in the 2nd French edition. For the ist part of the Adagio (pp. 99104) the viola and cello parts, which carry the melody, have mutes. In the second part of the Adagio as far as p. 113, the 2nd violins and violas carrying the arpeggio accompaniment. Therefore p. 107 bar 3: the con sordini should not appear over the viola and cello parts but should appear over the 2nd violins at bar 6. Further, p. 113 bar 2 : the senza sordini over the cellos should be struck out (see also Subchapter 12, n. 11 of the present work). Part II Scherzo p. 122: The third horn orig. marked in A flat also.

366

Berlioz

p. 135: The notation of the harp harmonics is misleading: Berlioz states in his Treatise that the written note gives the actual sound, the o above it showing that the note an octave below is to be plucked. The diamond-shaped notes given in the edition properly signify the note plucked, which consequently sounds an octave higher. In his later works, Berlioz employed the modern notation which gives the plucked notes. Part III Andante p. 155: Distribution of voices should read: Soprani I and II; Tenori, al meno 20; Bassi, al meno 20. Part III Allegro agitato p. 165: second horn orig. in A fiat. VOLUME IV Pref. p. ix: Where the English translator writes "legato signs," read "slurs." Pref. p. xi line 8: read "flutes and violins," not cellos. Ouverture de

Waverley

p. 1: The orchestration should read: violins I, at least 15; violins II, 15; violas, 10; cellos, 12; basses, 9. p. 4 bar 5: Berlioz' mark for the woodwinds is pp not p; similarly for the timpani in bar 7. p. 5 bar 6: Berlioz' mark for the woodwinds is f not ff, and the same is true again in p. 6 bar 2. Ouverture des Francs-Juges p. 39: See the disposition of strings under Waverley. The orig. time for Les Francs-Juges is alla breve. p. 46: The metronome time for the Allegro assai should make the whole note equal 80, for in the Adagio prayer beginning on p. 52, the quarter note equals a whole note, which would be absurd if the quarter note equaled 40, as the editors make it. Ouverture du "Roi

Lear"

p. 87: number of bassoons not specified; the editors have put in the 2. The strings, on the contrary, should follow the distribution of the previous two overtures: 1 5 - 1 5 - 1 0 - 1 2 - 9 . p. 109 bar 7: It is likely that here and on p. n o bar 1, the double basses

German Edition

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would play the low e with the cellos, but for the fact that Berlioz could not be sure of having 4-stringed instruments. See below note vol. X, p. 116. Ouverture de "Rob

Roy"

p. 143: 4 bassoons very likely; in any case not 2 as marked. VOLUME V Pref. p. xiii: Mistranslation of "bass clef" and "timpani" — kettledrums, not cymbals. Pref. p. xviii: The editors' solution of the problem presented by the metronome mark for the Andante of the Béatrice et Bénédict Overture is imbecile. They omit metronome time entirely because they find that the vocal score has quarter note equal to 25, which is clearly wrong. Had they turned to the same andante air in the opera, either in the vocal score or in their own orchestral score, they would have found the marking 52, which supplies the needed time and explains the 25 as an engraver's error. Ouverture de Benvenuto Cellini p. ι : 4 bassoons: strike out ossia 2. Trombone I on tenor clef; II and III on bass. Strings: 15-15-10-12-9. p. 5 bar ι : bassoons: unis, not a 2. The slurs over the woodwind accompaniment are without authority from the original and since Berlioz wrote them alike in the 3 parts there is no pretext of "standardizing" to justify their alteration. As they stand they nullify the editors' remark that slurs over woodwinds are generally to be taken in one breath, p. 28 bar 2: bassoons: unis, not a 2. Ouverture du Carnaval Romain p. 45: 4 bassoons not 2; Trombones arranged in Berlioz' usual way. Ouverture de la Fuite en Egypte No corrections, except that Berlioz did not consider this piece separable from its choral sequel. Ouverture Le Corsaire p. 97: 4 bassoons, not 2; strings 15-15-10-10-9. p. 109 bar 1: bassoons unis, not a 2. Moreover, for the whole passage from bar 1 to bar 17 the four bassoons in the orig. are marked ff. The

368

Berlioz

decrescendo marks f to ρ under each pair of bars are a gratuitous effect contributed by the editors. p. 1 1 5 bar 1 : T h e orig. ed. has b natural for the ophicleide or tuba on the second beat. p. 1 1 6 bar 1 1 : the c is doubled in the 2nd horn part and all four instruments have f instead of ff. p. 1 1 9 bars 1 1 - 1 2 : should read ff> ρ for all the strings. Bar 12 has ρ for all nine parts and bar 15 also has cresc. for all parts. T h e same phrase occurring earlier kept Berlioz' sforzando markings. As marked here the ff passage would end on p. 120 bar 1: with a forte. Ouverture

de "Béatrice

et

Bénédict"

p. 137: Cornets I and II in D orig. marked à pistons. p. 142: Andante un poco sostenuto: add: quarter note equals 52. Prélude

des Troy ens à Carthage

p. 175: Cornets I and II in F orig. marked à pistons. V O L U M E VI Rêverie

et Caprice

p. 13: T h e "program" reprinted here is not by Berlioz, but was added to a reprint of the score in 1880. p. 27: As the editors note in the preface, some of the bowings in the violin part are due to J . Armingaud. Marche Funèbre

pour la Dernière Scène

d'Hamlet

p. 41: 4 bassoons: strike out ossia 2. Trombones: add: tenor. Vocal parts: Femmes, Hommes, not Soprani, etc. 6 Tamburi: add: voilés ou sans timbres. String parts: 1 5 - 1 5 - 1 2 - 1 2 - 1 0 . Marche Troy enne p. 78 bar 4: omitted mark: cymbales

seules.

V O L U M E VII Pref. p. vi: T h e vocal passages changed by the editors in the Resurrexit on the ground of unsingability were not written for contralti (women's

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low voices) but for hautes contres (high tenors). Since this score has only an historical value among Berlioz' works, there was no call to alter it in any way or for any reason. Pref. p. ix: The reference to the Requiem scoring should read "four gongs," not three. Pref. p. xiii: The note referred to at the bottom of the page was not in the first edition but was added between the first and second. Pref. p. xiv: The editors report a change they have supposedly made in substituting tubas for ophicleides in the Lacrymosa. They have in fact made no change. Resurrexit p. ι : Instead of tubas, the scoring should read: Serpent d'harmonie et ophicléide. Berlioz' letter to Ferrand (L.l., pp. 5-6) should have been quoted by the editors as throwing an interesting light on the orchestration used by Berlioz when the Mass was performed a second time on Nov. 22, 1827. The present arrangement lacks all documentary value — the vocal parts being "unsingable" besides — as they would not be if Berlioz' terminology (Dessus, Hautes-Contre, Tailles and Basses-tailles) were retained. Grande Messe des Morts (Requiem) p. 65: Soprani I and II (not ed alti). p. 83: The 2 tubas of Orchestra no. 1 for the Tuba mirum were originally: ι ophicléide monstre à pistons. Other variants of the first edition would be worth noting from an historical point of view, p. 117: Tam-tam: in the 3rd ed: tam-tams. p. 146: subtitle of Offertorium is omitted here: choeur des âmes du purgatoire. pp. 105-110: The tuba part being written in lower octave affects nine bars out of 58. VOLUME VIII Pref. p. iv: Two remarks by the editors show how they damaged their edition by failing to understand and to quote their author correctly. Berlioz marked Trombones II and III tenor so that they could play the pedal notes called for in the Judex crederis. He also marked the organ passage in question Ped., knowing perfectly well that the low notes were not on the keyboard. But the idée fixe that Berlioz has to

370

Berlioz

be helped out led the editors to overlook this marking and to suggest that they are supplying it for the first time. Pref. p. v: A similar misrepresentation of Berlioz' score: he wrote the bassoons on two staves and in his arrangement the first pair could not play with the oboes — as marked here — since they are playing already. Pref. p. vi: The editors point out a choral progression written in a manner usual in Berlioz' day but which brings about hidden octaves. They suggest a change proposed originally by Balakirev but decide to leave the passage as written by Berlioz. In spite of their own decision, they made the change in the score, thereby avoiding the octave between top line and inner part in a 5-part passage. Te Dettm p. 1: 6 Tromboni: add: tenori. 2 Tube: 1 ophicleide and 1 tuba. Vocal parts: ist chorus: 40 soprani, 30 tenori, 30 bassi; 2nd chorus: the same; 3rd chorus: 600 soprani ed alti. String parts: 25-24-18-18-16. p. 11 bar 6: Questionable distribution of trombones. French ed. makes it possible that all six are in two parts. p. 44 (Prélude): 6 Tamburi militari: add: sans timbres and strike out senza tuono preciso. p. 53 bar 9 to p. 54 bar 2: Bassoons I and II should be given the part here given to bassoons III and IV, who count pauses. The doubling of the oboes in the overlapping measure is the editors' idea, p.67: Under Soprani II, strike out (Alti). p. 105 bar 7: Here occurs the change which the editors announced they would not make. Read b in the tenor part despite the b of the sopranos. p. 107 (Judex crederis): The trombones should be written on three staves and in three clefs. As to tubas and drums see note above: Prelude p. 44. Organo: add: Jeu de trompettes. p. 109 bar 2: add: ophicléide seul. p. 123 bar 8: The editors go against both the ms. and the French edition by delaying the entry of the horns, double basses, and basses until the next bar, simply because this entry does not balance the first three

German Edition

371

measures of the same page. But this may be intended by the composer, for his version preserves the rhythm and sounds more impressive. Whatever one's preference in the matter, it is not likely that Berlioz' manuscript should carry a detail of this magnitude as a mere oversight, p. 143 (March): Tamburi: add: Avec les timbres; strike out: non coperti.β p. 158 bar 4: upper line of cellos: add: six /*" violoncelles: tous les autres violoncelles en double corde. p. 160 bar 2: organ part: add: Grand jeu. V O L U M E IX Pref. p. iv: The editors add mutes to the double basses, thinking Berlioz had forgotten them. In the Treatise he had written: "Mutes are sometimes used on double basses as on other stringed instruments, but the effect they produce is not so clearly characterized. They merely lessen the sonority of the basses, making it darker and duller." L'Enfance du Christ p. 4 bar 3: As indicated above, the mutes should not appear on the double bass part. p. 75: Organ: add: Céleste et tremblant doux. p. 78 bar 1: omitted mark: sourdine vocale, which is explained in the note. p. 100 bar 6: The con sordini on the double bass part is correct here. VOLUME

X

Pref. p. iii: The comment on Berlioz' note to p. 8 of the score argues ignorance of its history. Berlioz wrote the work while still a pupil of Lesueur's and it was his master's habit to give such dramatic directions. Moreover, the note says precisely what the editors explain it might mean. Their interpretation is at once condescending and needless, and the translation of the note is garbled as usual. Pref. p. iv: The "correction" of the a for kettledrums is doubtless necessary but it has not been carried out by the editors who mention it.

6 On the representation of T . S. Wotton, the publishers corrected and issued new pages for the orchestral disposition and terminology of the Prelude, Judex crederis and March. There are thus some copies of the edition which carry the proper indication as to the snares for drums. But none of the other changes were incorporated.

372

Berlioz Scène Héroïque

p. ι: 4 bassoons (strike out ossia 2)·, ophicleide instead of tuba, p. 8: footnote: the last word of the English translation should be pity, not tenderness. pp. 9 and 17: Vocal parts should read Hautes-contre, Tailles and Bassestailles. p. 52: All the ossia 2 opposite the woodwinds should be struck out, and the Alti should read either Soprani III, or even better Dessus, as the editors suggest but fail to write. p. 67: 4 bassoons and vocal parts as corrected above. The time sig. should be alla breve, because of a serious error committed on p. 78: where the editors add (and sign) a note instructing the conductor to battre à deux temps, which is laconically rendered in English as T w o Beats. The cause of this interpolation is that the copyist's manuscript bore incompatible indications of tempo at the beginning and at the middle of this section (pp. 67 and 78). These should read: p. 67: half note equals 80 and p. 78: Doppio Movimento. Whole note equals 80. The clearest fact is that Berlioz intended his doppio movimento. The editorial note assumes that this mark came from the copyist's own brain and overlooks the possibility that his contribution was simply the tail added to the whole note. At any rate, editorial handling alters the tempo of 216 bars for the sake of clearing up an obvious error in the first eight. Knowledge of Berlioz' letter to Ferrand, where he describes this finale as a "marche précipitée," would have conclusively settled the difficulty and prevented the incoherent guesses recorded in the Preface. Huit Scènes de Faust p. 107: Componirt zu Paris 1829: read: 1828. The nomenclature of the vocal parts has been altered as usual (see above Scène Héroïque). bars 1-4: In the cello part, the d's on open strings are noted in the first (and only) edition. p. 1 1 1 bars 1 and 2 : The English horn and Clarinet have solo over their entries. p. n i bar 6: Clarinet has p; cellos and double basses: > < . p. 114 bar 4: strings have Β double flat in original, p. 116: Berlioz' note about writing a low F for double basses in the hope that the 4-stringed instruments would soon be available in France

German Edition

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should have been retained as historically significant. Before bar z, the original has: Choeur beaucoup plus nombreux qu'au commencement." p. 119 bar 1 et seq.: ist Cellos written an octave higher in orig. p. 121 bars ζ et seq.: Vocalisation (in original and no doubt needless, but important as biographical detail). p. 122 bar ι : pp. in all instrumental parts — a first instance of Berlioz* preparation for the coming diminuendo of all the parts, p. 17 bar 2. p. 126 bar 3: both harp parts: > ; cellos have their g's marked open string till the end. p. 132: For Basse I and II read Bariton and Basse; Bassoons unis, not a 2 throughout. p. 133 bar 3: violins and violas have cresc. p. 137 bar 4: Altos and tenors marked solo; cellos marked soli. p. 157 bar 5: All vocal parts: cresc. poco a poco. p. 161 bar 6: Harp part: solo. NOTE: throughout this first published score, Berlioz wrote sons harmoniques next to the notes in the harp part. Since, in the cello part, he clearly indicated that the notes meant the real sounds, it is likely that he meant the same arrangement for the harp part. The diamond-shaped notes of the present edition are therefore ambiguous. p. 178: Under Brander add: (/vre), and over his part: A pleine voix. Over the string parts: A un teins (sic). p. 182: Clarinet I and Bassoons have solo, and of course the tuba is an ophicleide. p. 188 bars 2 and 4: add fF's. p. 194: The English horn is solo, which is marked again at the various re-entries. p. 201: The Lento appassionato assai is marked: quarter note equals 58. p. 203 bar 1: marked Allegretto, half note equals 58. p. 212 : The accompanying instrument is marked Guitare by Berlioz. Giving the Italian name and omitting the vertical notation opposite the staves — Effronterie — is a needless distortion. VOLUMES XI-XII La Damnation de Faust Pref. pp. vi-ix: The editors' reasoning about the use of ophicleides and/ or tubas is neither clear nor correct, as these notes on the score will show.

374 Berlioz This is a pity, here being the first work for which Berlioz indicated a tuba part. Moreover, when they state that the second ophicleide part has been given by them to the 3rd trombone they misread their own arrangement: it is given to trombone I. And they altogether omit mention of the part in the Fugue. Pref. p. xi: line 3: "bar" should be "beat." Pref. p. xiv: In the comment referring to p. 288, the editors misstate the facts about the piccolo part in the French edition and fail to mention what the autograph indicates. Pref. p. xviii: The variant quoted, and omitted by the editors from the score itself, is certainly "practicable" and had every reason to be included. Pref. p. xix: The further reference to the tuba part is absolutely contrary to fact; both the arrangement imputed to Berlioz and the editors' own alterations are here misrepresented — from carelessness, not design, p. 8: though the orchestration on p. 5 bears the correct number of bassoons, i.e., four, the indication here that only 2 bassoons are playing has no basis in the original, p. 13 : con sordini for violins I not in Fr. ed. p. 14: Tutti for violins I and II occurs eight bars later in Fr. ed. p. 26: The indication of only 2 bassoons in this scene (No. 2) is gratuitous. p. 52 (Hungarian March): should have: ophicleide and tuba, which on p. 63 bar 1: are marked unis. Later, on p. 69 bar 8: the ophicleide plays in the upper octave continuing p. 70 bars 1 and 2, and being unis again to the end. p. 78 (Easter Hymn): Corni III and IV orig. in A. p. 79 bar 5-8: Bassoons unis throughout, not a 4, a 2. p. 110 (Drinkers' Chorus): Bassoons should be I and II, III and IV, not as shown and Tromb. I, Tuba should read: 2 ophicleides. p. 134 (Fugue): Tromb. I and III should be Ophicl. I, and Tuba: Ophicl. II. The entire rone color of these last two scenes is altered by having the ophicleide part played by a trombone with thumb attachment. p. 142 bar ι and p. 143 bar 4 have sons bouchés for the horns: con sordini is wrong, p. 168 bar 1: bassoons should have 1 and II unis.

German Edition

375

p. 172 bar ι et seq.: All four bassoons play. p. 241 bars 1 and 2: The orig. has the entry of the double basses marked ppp, the English horn pp, and the rest of the wood p. Here everything has been made uniform at pp. p. 242 (Scene X ) : The editors add a part for cymbals (in small type) to punctuate Mephisto's entrance. But the chord when used earlier joined cymbals and piccolo. Since Berlioz uses no piccolo here, he needed no cymbals, and he merely reminds us of Mephisto by sounding the rhythm of his appearance on strings and brass — a change which exemplifies the difference between an allusive and a mechanical mind, p. 249 (King of Thüle): The metronome mark is doubtful and probably too slow. p. 303 (Scene XIII): The 2 bassoons is gratuitous; doubtless the usual four play until p. 312 bar 3, where the orig. ed. has: un seul basson. p. 317 bar 2: should have: 1" et 2' bassons unis. p. 371 (Scene XVIII): The 4th horn with pistons, p. 378 (Scene XVIII): ophicleide and tuba. V O L U M E XIII Pref. p. v: The commentary on Le Pêcheur which they promise "elsewhere" is not to be found. Pref. p. vi: The editors do not seem aware of the fact that the Choeur d'Ombres they are discussing came, with a few changes, from the prize cantata Cléopâtre which they reprint in vol. X V . A comparison of the two would have cleared up some of the difficulties. Pref. p. viii: The doubt about the proper place for the sf is settled by consulting the ist French edition. Pref. p. xi: T o omit suivez le chant as "superfluous" and then to put in ed canto seems pure whimsy. Pref. p. xii last line: The question about the harp part is settled by a look at the Treatise where the passage is reproduced, with an e. Likewise, on Pref. p. xiii: the questions about the Vins. Div., and the "2 pianos à 4 mains'' for the Tempest fantasia. Pref. p. xxxvi: The substitution of tubas does cause a change in the notes, as the editors themselves admit on p. xxxviii.

Berlioz

376

Lélio ou le Retour à la Vie p. 2: Throughout, the English text is full of mistranslations and absurdities. p. 9 (Choeur d'Ombres) : The con sord. on violas, cellos, and basses are neither in the first ed. nor in the autograph. They are added here because the violins I and II have them — for two beats, Berlioz' obvious desire being to mix the timbres in the arpeggio series, p. 22 bar 3 et seq.: Instead of con sord. for the Horn in F, read: Solo: sons bouchés avec les cylindres over bars 3 and 4; sans cylindres over bar 5; and sons bouchés avec, etc. over bars 6 and 7. p. 89 bars 6 and 7 (La Tempête): In Fr. ed. the 8 violins soli do not play, to give them time to put on mutes. p. 150 bar 7 (Le Cinq Mai): add: Moderato (quarter tone equals 92). Tromboni: add: tenori, p. 169 bar 4: Instead of con sordini: faites les so?is bouchés avec la main, sans employer les cylindres. p. 176 (L'Impériale):

Corni III and IYr orig. in A.

Instead of Tube (5) read: 2 tubas et 3 ophicleides. p. 209 bars 4 et seq.: Tubas and ophicleides in upper octave, as far as p. 212 bar 3 inclusive. VOLUME XIV Pref. p. iv: The condensed score quoted here is inaccurate. Pref. p. ix: The Bibl. Conservatoire has a fully orchestrated 5th stanza of the Hymne à la France in Berlioz' own hand, and therefore to be consulted in any edition of the work. p. ι (Méditation Religieuse): The metronome time of the piano version (quarter note equals 66) should be noted. Woodwinds are in pairs, strings: 10-10-8-8-8. p. 7 (Chant sacré): Woodwinds in pairs except for horns. Soprani I and II not alti. The editors might have noted the use of this same work rescored for a tryout of Sax's new instruments, including the saxophone, in February 1844. p. 24 bar 2 (Chant des Chemins de Fer): repeated. p. 75 (La Mort d'Ophélie):

In the piano version bar 2 is

2 flutes, English horn, 2 clarincts in Β flat. Strings: 15-10-10-8-8.

German Edition p. 89 (Sara la Baigneuse):

377

Piccolo, 2 flutes, oboe, 2 clarinets in A, 2

bassoons. Contralti (after Soprani II) Strings: 1 2 - 1 2 - 1 0 - 1 0 - 8 . p. 105 bar 4: Horns marked soli. p. 1 1 5 bar 3 : Tenor part of chorus I marked solo, as somewhat more prominent than the rest, ρ against pp. Marked solo again on p. 119 bar ι over the mf of the other tenors. p. 127 ( H y m n e à la France): "Instrumentiert 1 8 5 1 " is wrong: the work was composed, orchestrated, and performed in the same year, 1844. Bassoons unis, not a 2, no number being specified. Ophicleide instead of tuba and soprani I and II, contralti. Metronome time of the piano version is quarter note equals 48. p. 130 bar ι upper line: Soprani I; second line: Soprani II and Contralti, p. 130 bar 5 upper line: Soprani I and II. p. 133 bar 5: Tempo in piano version: Moderato (quarter note equals 84). p. 140 bar 1: Bassoons: unis, not a 2. p. 149 ( L a Menace des Francs): garding disposition.

same remarks as previous Hymne re-

p. 152-p. 157: Indications for trombones a 2 and a 3 without warrant. VOLUME XV Pref. p. vii: In the collection of "33 Mélodies" published in 1863 t?] the slurs and notes differ from the 2 examples here quoted. p. 99 bar 4 (Cléopitre): the English note to the singer should read: "with weakened voice" not "with great excitement," and similarly for the German. On p. 100 bar 4: it should read "still weaker," etc. p. 110 (La Belle Voyageuse) marked pppp.

bar 16: the dotted quarter should be

p. 121 (Absence) : The date of composition is without warrant. "Before 1841" is all that can be said. Strings indicated on facsimile in Kapp's Berlioz: 4-4-3 and 5 basses. p. 1 : 6 (La Captive): 2 bassoons should be noted; ist string orch.: 10-10-8-8-6; second string orch. should be marked: Tous les autres ιviolons, etc. down to Toutes les autres contrebasses à 4 cordes.

378

Berlioz

p. 135 top: the direction is to beat six quavers, not crotchets, to each bar, i.e., six eighth notes. p. 160 (Le Chasseur Danois): Strings: 5-5-3-2-3. p. 184 (Sur les Lagunes) ·. Woodwinds in pairs, the second horn in F being à cylindres. VOLUME XVI Pref. p. χ last lines: T h e " f e w nuances" referred to by the editors come from their own unaided imagination since there is no orchestral score of Irlande to which they can "conform." p. ι (Ballet des Ombres) ·. Berlioz' note is mistranslated: he wishes the voice to drag between the marked notes; that it should be "carried on" went without saying. p. 47 (La Mort dOphêlie) : T h e first version for single voice was undoubtedly composed before 1848 — the date here given — and in Paris, not London, since it originally appeared in a N e w Year's album offered b y the Gazette Musicale in 1848. p. 59 (Apothéose): This rearrangement of the last movement of the Symphonie Funèbre et Triomphale should not be dated merely London 1848, since the symphony was completed in 1840. p. 101 (Prière du Matin)·. Soprani I and II in place of Soprani and Alti. V O L U M E XVII Pref. p. xi: T h e Chant de Bonheur was drawn from La Mort d'Orphée, the ms. of which had not been found when the editors wrote their preface. Pref. p. xiv: Je crois en vous was originally for mezzo soprano> which is worth noting. p. 48 (Elégie): T h e French translation of Moore's poem is not by Berlioz but by Thomas Gounet, and the date of composition is 1829 not 1830. (See L.I., 39 and 58.) p. 49 bar 9: T h e ". . . poco rit." should go as far as Tempo I. p. 56 (Le Pêcheur):

Tiersot maintains that this is the first version, not

the second as stated here, and the likelihood is all in Tiersot's favor, since Lélio is a rifaccimento of previous parts and therefore constitutes the second version of those parts. p. 66: T h e same holds true of the Chant de Bonheur, for which the evidence is conclusive.

German Edition

379

p. 131 et seq. (Nuits d'Eté) : The dates given here for this collection of six songs are worthless. They were composed before 1841, hence it is absurd to mark these first versions as having been "reworked" in that year. The later versions of Nos. 2 and 5 belong to the year 1856. p. 212 (La Mort dOphélie): This version for single voice being in all probability the first should not bear the date 1848 nor the place London (see note to vol. X V I p. 47); nor does it, in this form, have anything to do with Tristia, Oeuvre 18. V O L U M E XVIII p. 2 (Marseillaise) : Trumpets I and II are à pistons, the rest ordinaires. The 2 tube are, of course, ophicleides. p. 6 end of bar 2 has double bar and repeat sign, p. 8: The voice parts are divided into: 1" choeur d'hommes and 2' choeur d'hommes, femmes, et enfants. p. 10 5th stanza, should be marked: un peu moins vite. p. 12 end of bar 1: double bar and sign, p. 16 6th stanza: Religioso plus lent. p. 17 bar 3: i° tempo. bar 4: double bar and sign, plus note: Les basses tailles à Γ octave des ténors jusqu'à Ventrée du 2' choeur. p. 32 (Der Erlkönig — arr.): Oboe (single), Corni III: add: à pistons. The French translation by M. Chassang is not the one set by Berlioz, who used the far superior version of Edouard Bouscatel. Restoring Schubert's vocal part could have been done without falling into verbal bathos. p. 36 bar 1: Fag. I is gratuitous. p. 46 bar 7: strings are f f f . p. 50 bar 5 and p. 51 bar 1: fp not sfp. Extracts from the Treatise p. 19: Since a note refers the reader to the full score of Roméo et Juliette in vol. Ill of this edition, some notice should have been taken of the absence of mutes on the strings in the present excerpt, pp. 80, 117, and 124 (Meyerbeer), 89 and 197 (Berlioz): the substitution of tubas for ophicleides stultifies the value of the examples, since they presumably reproduce a treatise on orchestral practice at a certain date while misrepresenting that practice.

Berlioz

380 VOLUMES XIX-XX

Béatrice et Bénédict Pref. p. ix: The note referring to the b flat given the violins on p. 214 bars 5 and 6 indicates that the substitution of an α goes against the autograph score. It also goes against the vocal score, in which Berlioz had a hand. p. 39: Corni III and IV: add: à pistons. p. 74: 2 trombe in D: add: à pistons. p. be p. p. p. p.

105 bar 7: Vocal score has: half note equals 112; the time sig. should alia breve. 108 bar 8: Vocal score has: Allegretto (quarter note equals 132). 117: Corni I and II: à pistons. 184: Vocal score has Allegretto; Corni III and IV: à pistons. 191 (Act II): Guitare should be in the singular. 2 Trombe in E: a pistons.

p. 206: 2 Corni in Es: à pistons. p. 214: See note above: Pref. p. ix. p. 244: Again Guitare in the singular, p. 249: Corni I and II: à pistons. p. 265: same as p. 249. p. 267: Corni III and IV: à pistons. Berlioz' Own Arrangement of His Works up to 1852 OEUVRE OEUVRE OEUVRE OEUVRE OEUVRE OEUVRE OEUVRE OEUVRE OEUVRE OEUVRE OEUVRE OEUVRE OEUVRE

I. 2. 3· 4· 5· 6. 7· 8. 9· 10. II. 12. '3·

Ouverture de Waverley Irlande Ouverture des Francs-Juges Ouverture du Roi Lear Messe des Morts (Requiem) Le Cinq Mai Les Nuits d'Eté Rêverie et Caprice Ouverture du Carnaval Romain Traité d'Instrumentation Sara la Baigneuse La Captive Fleurs des Landes

German Edition O E U V R E 14. O E U V R E 14b. O E U V R E ιj. O E U V R E 16. O E U V R E 17. O E U V R E 18. O E U V R E 19. O E U V R E 20. O E U V R E si. O E U V R E 22. O E U V R E 23. O E U V R E 24. O E U V R E 25. [OEUVRE 26. 7

381

Episode de la vie d'un artiste Le Retour à la vie Symphonie Funèbre et Triomphale Harold en Italie Roméo et Juliette Tristia Feuillets d'album Vox Populi Ouverture du Corsaire Te Deum Benvenuto Cellini La Damnation de Faust La Fuite en Egypte L'Impériale]1

Not included in the original prospectus, but added in advertisement sheets

of Grot, in 1859. See Bibliography under Grot.

Bibliography You have read 1500 books in order to write one. It does you no good — as long as you write well, you are not a serious scholar and your friends treat you like a schoolboy. — F L A U B E R T in the last months of his life For convenience, the bibliography has been subdivided into the categories below. It may thus serve as a guide to the Berlioz literature in addition to indicating the authorities used in this book. Critical or explanatory remarks have been added after titles wherever it seemed advisable. ι. Berlioz' Works A. Music Printed and Manuscript B. Librettos and Dramatic Poems C. Prose Writings (1) Books and Articles (2) Prefaces and Notes to Scores D. Letters ( 1 ) Collected (2) In Books or Periodicals (3) Autographs (4) Facsimiles 2. Other Primary Sources, Printed and Manuscript A. Private Collections B. Letters and Contemporary Works C. Handbills, Programs, and Other Fugitives D. Iconography: Paintings, Lithographs, Busts, and Photographs of (1) Berlioz (2) Associated Persons and Places 3. Biographies of Berlioz A. Books B. Essays 4. Criticism of Berlioz and His Works A. General Estimates B. Particular Works 5. Histories of Music A. General Works B. Special Studies C. Memoirs and Lives 6. Works on Esthetics and Other Arts than Music 7. Biographies and Works on Political and Social History 8. Works of Literature 9. Works of Reference and Periodicals 10. Gramophone Records

3

Bibliography

84

NOTE ON ABBREVIATIONS:

Ρ = Paris; L = London; Β = Berlin; Ν. Y. — New York. Min. Sc. = Miniature Score: consult Sec. iA for editions used in the text. Similarly, other abbreviations, such as A.R., Corresp., and so on, will be found in place of numbers opposite the work intended. See below, Sections iC and iD.

1. BERLIOZ'

WORKS

A — M U S I C P R I N T E D AND

MANUSCRIPT

A complete list of Berlioz' published scores, original and transcribed, would fill a volume. The items below are the works extant in various forms that are of special interest or have been referred to in the text. [The great work next mentioned renders my notations on scores and variants obsolete ( 1969).] As this book goes to press [ 1949] a true bibliography of the scores is announced in England. Its author, Mr. Cecil Hopkinson, has been collecting Berlioziana for fifteen years, and his work, scheduled to appear within the same fortnight as this biography, deserves to head the present imperfect list. A Bibliography of the Musical and Literary Works of Hector Berlioz, by Cecil Hopkinson, Edinburgh Bibliographical Society, 1950. Bibl. Conserv.

Bibl. Nat.

Bibl. Opera Musée

Bibliothèque du Conservatoire Owns all the autograph scores except the Te Deum (in Leningrad), L'Enfance du Christ (Bibl. Nat.) and the fragments 12, 21, and 22. Also the originals of many letters and other documents, as well as the famous guitar bearing the signatures of Paganini and Berlioz. [Photograph in Musique, 1928, No. 4, p. 159·] Bibliothèque Nationale Owns, m addition to L'Enfance du Christ and the autographs listed in 12, 21 and 22, the printed scores, with annotations by Berlioz, of: Huit Scènes de Faust; Symphonie Fantastique; Harold en Italie; Roméo et Juliette; Sy?nphonie Funèbre; Damnation de Faust; Te Deum; L'Enfance du Christ; Tristia; L'Invitation à la Valse; Waverley, Francs-Juges, and Roi Lear overtures; and three songs. Bibliothèque de l'Opéra (Paris) Owns miscellaneous duplicates of scores above, portraits, playbills, etc. Musée Hector Berlioz, La Côte St. André (Isère) Collection of notebooks, scores, portraits, passports, maps, musical instruments, etc. Some 130 items, including Berlioz' guitar and umbrella as well as annotated music and books, are listed in 25g.

[ ι- ì 7 ] /. 2. j. 4.

j. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. a.

12. 13. 14. /j. 16.

ιη.

Bibliography

385

Beatrice und Benedict, Oper m 2 Akten; German tr. R. Pohl; Die Recitative von G. zu Putzlitz und Felix Motti. Berlin (E. Bote und G. Bock) 1888 Benvenuto Celimi [copy of score in Berlioz' hand, with notes taken by him, see Musée] Benvenuto Cellini, Opera in 3 Acts (piano score) P. (Choudens) A C 989 [c. 1865] Benvenuto Cellini, Oper in Drei Akten von de Vailly und Barbier. Deutsch von Peter Cornelius, Musik von Hector Berlioz; (piano score) Braunschweig, Henry Litolff (1*173) n-d· La Damnation de Faust, P. (Richault) 1854 ; [adapted by Raoul Gunsbourg as an opera in 5 acts and 10 scenes] P. (Costallat) 1903 [Contains verses and stage directions added by adapter without notice] ; Piano score with German text after Goethe. N. Y. (Schirmer) 1880 Erigone [fragments of text and music, c. 1840] Ms. in Bibl. Conserv. Huit Scènes de Faust. P. (Schlesinger) 1829 [also represented in the Goetheana Collection of the Yale University Library] Le Faust de Goethe, tr. Emile Vedel, music by Berlioz, Schumann, Liszt, Gluck, and Florent Schmitt; produced at the Odeon, Paris, 1912-1913 Berlioz-Liszt, Episode de la Vie d'un Artiste, Grande Symphonie Fantastique; Partition de Piano par François Liszt. 2nd ed. Leipzig (FECL 2893) [Does not follow Berlioz' last revisions of his orchestral score] Lenor ou Les Francs-Juges, Opera [Remains of Ms. score without the overture] Bibl. Nat. Rés. Vm 2 177 Ouverture des Francs-Juges, Oeuv. 3. arrangée pour le Pianoforte à quatre mains par C. Czerny. Brunswick (G. M. Meyer, Jr.) No. 431 n.d. Grand Symphony for Band (Funeral and Triumphal) Revised and edited by Richard Franko Goldman: III. Apotheosis. N. Y. (Mercury Music Corporation) 1947 Apothéose [from the Funeral and Triumphal symphony] transcribed for voices and instruments by J. Tiersot. P. (Rouart Lerolle) 1923 L'apothéose, Chant héroïque extrait du final de la Symphonie funèbre et triomphale avec accomp. de piano. L. (Cramer, Beale & Co.) 1848 [The only extant copy is in the Boston Public Library, bound with other Berlioz scores, with interesting annotations by him] Thalberg, S., Grand Caprice pour piano sur la marche de l'Apothéose de H. Berlioz. P. (Schlesinger) Leipzig (Breitkopf und Härtel) 184?

Bibliography

[18-31]

[Weber, C. M.], Le Frey schütz, Opéra en 3 actes . . . avec récitatifs de Hector Berlioz. Partition chant et piano. P. (J. Thierry) 1873 Berlioz-Liszt, Harold en Itàlie, Symphonie en Quatre Parties avec alto principal. Partition de Piano par F. Liszt. P. (Brandus) 12533 [Does not follow Berlioz' last revisions of his orchestral score] L'Incendie de Sardanapale, Fragment symphonique transcrit pour piano à quatre mains par Joseph Boulnois. Publications du Monde Musical. P. Supplément du 15 décembre 1907. No. M M 197 La Mort d'Orphée, Monologue et Bacchanale à grands choeurs et à grand orchestre. Ms. Bibl. Nat. Facsimile by Editions de la Réunion des Bibliothèques Nationales. P. 1930 La Nonne Sanglante [fragments] and Sardanapale [part of first draft] Bibl. Nationale [Nuits d'Eté] Die Sommernächte, ins Deutsche übertragen von P. Cornelius. Winterthur (Rieter-Biedermann) i8j6 [No. 2 differs from both the French and the German scores; for derails of this publication during Berlioz' lifetime, see pj·] Suvwier Nights. English version by Francis Hueffer. L. (Novello) 1881 Rêverie et Caprice. P. (Richault) No. 6297R n.d. [Later reissues carry, on a new title page, the supposititious "program" which was written by Ticrsot in 1880 at Pasdeloup's instigation. See 308, Nov. j , 1905, 356J Le Roi des Aulnes, Der Erlkönig; Ballade de Goethe. Musique par François Schubert, orchestrée p.ir Hector Berlioz. P. (Legouix) No. O.L.G. 450 Roméo et Juliette (piano score) Winterthur (Rieter-Biedermann) 1857 [Transcription by Theodore Ritter; copy with Berlioz' autograph inscription to him — in the possession of Jacques Barzun] Romeo and Juliet, Dramatic Symphony composed from the Tragedy of Shakespeare; [tr. by J. H. Cornell] is the property of Theodore Thomas, published by John Church for the Cincinnati Music Festival Association, 1878 [A very fair translation, with the minimum of poeticizing; should be used instead of the English in the German edition] 33 Mélodies pour chant et piano. P. (Richault) [post 1863] 1887 No. i3,682R Les Troyens; Partition Chant et Piano. P. (Choudens) A.C. 987, 1863, 2 vols. [Contains Berlioz' printed notes and is the only genuine piano score] Les Troyens à Carthage, arranged as a dramatic cantata by H. E. Krebiehl for performance in English. N. Y., Feb. 26, 1887

[32-36]

G er. ed.

Min. Sc. Min. Sc. Min. Sc. Min. Sc.

Min. Sc. Min. Se.

Bibliography

387

[ A poor patchwork but has a useful essay b y the arranger on the history of the work] Werke, herausgegeben von Charles Malherbe und Felix Wemgartner. Leipzig (Breitkopf und Härtel) 1900-1907, 20 vols. [See Supplement 5] La Damnation de Faust. P. (Costallat) n6o$R L'Enfance du Christ. P. (Costallat) 11277 Harold en Italie, Pref. A . Smolian, Ernst Eulenburg (23) Leipzig 1899 (3623) Sieben Ouvertüren von Hector Berlioz; Waverley (17) Francs-Juges (18) Roi Lear (19) Carnaval Romain (20) Le Corsaire (21) Benvenuto Cellini (22) Beatrice et Benedict (23) Pref. A. Smolian, Ernst Eulenburg, Leipzig 1899 (Nos. 3717 to 3723) Roméo et Juliette, Pref. A . Smolian, Ernst Eulenburg (24) Leipzig 1900 (3624) Symphonie Fantastique, Pref. A . Smolian, Ernst Eulenburg (22) Leipzig 1899 (3622) I B — LIBRETTOS AND DRAMATIC POEMS

32. 33. 34.

3$.

36.

Lenor, ou les Francs-Juges [in collaboration with Ferrand] Ms. only, Bibl. Nat., but see 1196a and 308, July 1 and 15, Aug. 5 and 12, 1906 Lélio, ou le Retour à la Vie; see Ger. ed., vol. XIII; 308; and ¡2η8 Benvenuto Cellini [in collaboration with Vigny, Wailly, and Barbier] Several versions, of which the original is entitled: Benvenuto Cellini, Opéra en deux actes, Paroles de MM. Léon de Wailly et Auguste Barbier, Musique de M. Hector Berlioz . . . Paris, D. Jonas, éditeur, à l'Opéra . . . ¡838, 32 PPIt bears the initial date of the opening (Sept. 3) one week ahead of the actual date. T h e text as recast by Berlioz fourteen years later may be found in the full score at the Liszt archives in Weimar, but should be collated with still later revisions in Berlioz' own copy, now at the Birthplace Museum. See also 1190. A German text by Peter Cornelius was published b y Breitkopf und Härtel, Leipzig, v.d. Roméo et Juliette [in collaboration with Emile Deschamps] printed in its original form in Deschamps's translations from Shakespeare (see 1248). Revised form in Min. Sc. [For the second Prologue, see 308, July 24, 1904 and 1385, Feb. 28 and Mar. 7, 1909] La Damnation de Faust [in collaboration with Gérard de Nerval and Almire Gandonnière] Final text in Min. Sc., Ger. ed., as well as several vocal scores. The autograph bears a note in Berlioz' hand: " T h e words of Mephisto's recitative in Auerbach's Tavern, of

Bibliography

[3Ί-4Ί]

the students' Latin song, of the recitative preceding the Minuet, of the Finale of Part 3, and of the whole of Part 4 and the Epilogue — except for Gretchen's romance — are by Mr. H. Berlioz." L'Enfance du Christ; final text in Min. Sc. Les Troyens; final text in Berlioz' own piano-vocal score in two parts, though division into three and five acts is a compromise with his true intention. This is to be found only in the full score, privately printed, and available only in the libraries of opera houses. The word-books issued by Michel Levy (1863) and Choudens and Calmann-Lévy (1891) represent gross distortions of the poem. Béatrice et Bénédict; final text in Ger. ed. IC—PROSE WRITINGS (/) Books and Articles Berlioz, Hector, Grand traité d'instrumentation et d'orchestration; P. (Schonenberger) S. 996, 1844 Le chef d'orchestre, théorie de son art; P. (Schonenberger) 1856 The Orchestral Conductor, Theory of his Art; Ν. Y. 1902 "Monograph on Conducting — Republished by Request"; Etude (1927) pp. 825 ff. and 911 ff. [Editor's note states that "owing to the rarity" of the Treatise on Orchestration this essay is "seldom seen today." P. 825] Traité d'instrumentation et d'orchestration. Nouvelle édition suivie de "L'art du chef d'orchestre"·, Henry Lemoine No. 14518 (S. 996) n.p. n.d. [A reprint from the original plates of the first revised edition. The references in the present book are to this edition] Die moderne Instrumentation und Orchestration; tr. J. C. Griinbaum, Berlin n.d. [An earlier German version of Berlioz' Articles on Instrumentation had been given by J. A. Leibrock: Die Kunst der lnstrumentirung, Leipzig, 1843, 112 pp.] A Treatise upon Modern Instrumentation and Orchestration; tr. Mary Cowden Clarke, L. 1856 [Other editions 1858 . . . down to the present, which retain some of the errors of the original translation: see 12η and i f 4 ] A Treatise on Modern Instrumentation and Orchestration, to which is appended "The Chef d'Orchestre"; tr. Mary Cowden Clarke, new ed. revised and ed. Joseph Bennett, L. and Ν . Y. (Novello) (Theoretical Series No. 7) n.d. Gran tratado de instrumentación y orquestación de M. E. Berlioz . . . para uso de los compositores españoles; por Oscar Campo y Soler; Madrid i860

[48-53] 48.

4ç. ¡o. 57.

Soirées Eves.

Grot.

A Trav.

V.M.

Bibliography

389

Instrumentationslehre. Ein vollständiges Lehrbuch zur Erlangung, nebst einer Anleitung zur Behandlung und Direction des Orchesters; autorisiete deutsche Ausgabe von Alfred Dörffel, Leipzig 1864 [Contains special preface by Berlioz, in German] An Abridged Treatise on Modern Instrumentation and Orchestration; tr. and ed. Johann Bernhard (? ), Ν. Y. 1888, reissued 194? Grosse Instrumentationslehre, mit Anhang: "Der Dirigent"·, ed. Felix Weingartner, Leipzig 1904 Instrumentationslehre; ed. Richard Strauss, Leipzig 1905, 2 vols. [Tr. into French by M. Closson, P. Fischbacher, n.d.] [Tr. into English by Theodore Front, Ν. Y. (Edwin Kalmus) 1948] Grande trattato di instrumentazione e rhythm I, 112 B . his "disciple" I, 142, IJ2 ff., 171 fF., 182, 317, 320-1, 338, 422, 4*4. 4 4 s . 4 0 2 . 4 8 6 . 4 9 s . 5°3. 5 o 6 ; II, 16η., 43-4, 47, 76, 103-4, 1 2 3"·. " 7 . 195, 202, 226-7, 256, 280, 285, 327, 361, 349 and G l u c k compared b y Β . II, 12277., 263 and 77. Koechlin on I, 459 scoring I, 329η., 46577. Mass in C I, 471 B . remembers I, 473 in cellar I, 528-9 B . plays I, J46, 556; II, 42, 113, 119, 157 answer to Paer II, 17 and » . sense of persecution II, 2077. death mask II, 36η. and Furtwaengler II, 58η. as conductor II, 5977. and the mediums II, 101, 204-5 piety II, 104 Beethoven Music School II, 127, 162 B . and W a g n e r his offspring II, 257 and 77. on Haydn II, 26577. imitative effects I, 172fr., 198 Leonore overture (s) I, 174, 441 W e b e r ' s opinion I, 1767/.; II, 262 quartets I, 99, 178, 184. 192; 32372.; II, 34-j, 349 sonatas I, 186, 19071., 192, 207, 314, 424; II, 60, 103-4, 131, 204-5, 22?7., 349 trios I, 194 Eginont I, 195, 3657z. Fantasia op. 80 I, 22577. Victory symphony I, 22577. career and character I, 227, 39577., 530, 53777. Heine on I, 27877. Moussorgsky on II, 283 scherzos I, 196, 332, 530 "writes for band" I, 35877. objections today I, 365 and n. Missa Solemnis I, 36577. W a g n e r on I, 394; II, 114 monument I, 406, 448, 470 and 77., 472; II, 55 Battle symphony I, 53777. See also: Victory symphony; and Italian music I, 421 Bekker, Paul. O n " G h o s t T r i o " I, 194 Belgiojoso, Princess Cristina. I, 243 Belgium. Cited II, 307 revolts in 1830 I, 147, 275 B. visits I, 414, 508; II, [07, 255 Adolphe Sax leaves I, 441-2 exiles to, in 1848 I, 5247;. Fétîs plays B. I. 55° Bellini, V . Cited II, 285 / Capuletti ed i Montecchi ( Β . on) I, 201, 218 La Sonnambula, I, 217 other works I, 416, 520; B . on I, 201, 218; II, 264, 270 Belloni, Gaetano. I, 544 Bénazet, Edouard. Identified II, 51, 71 Β . engaged b y II, 71, 118, 125, 231 B.'s gratitude f o r generous treatment

II, 71, 156-7, 210 commissions B . opera II, 163, 168, 203fr., 211 Benda, J . A . I, 225ru Benedict, Sir Julius. I, 18271.; II, 10977. in Paris I, 27577. Bennet, Toussaint. O n orchestral power II, 11077. father of T h e o d o r e R i t t e r II, 123 and 77. B.'s letters to II, 130 Bennett, Sir William Sterndale. I, 226; II. 3 2 Bentley, E r i c . Bernard Shaw II, 7477. Béranger, P. J . de. Cited II, 209 political songs I, 136 Mary Stuart's Farewell, set b y W a g n e r I, 24277. Fifth of May, set b y B. I, 266-7, 3 0 1 " · Balzac on I, 52677. Berg, Alban. O n meter I, 112-3 and "program" I, 185 Bergmann, Carl. Leads in Ν . Y . II, 310 imposes W a g n e r on hearers II, 32877. Bériot, Charles de. Β. arbitrates for I, 318-9 Berlioz, Adèle (1814-1860) sister. I, 27 and 77. favorite companion I, 30, 59, 72, 200, 205, 218, 245, 292, 553; II, 19, 175, 209; remembered II, 247 engaged I, 292 married 316 B.'s confidant I, 410 and 77., 553, 558-9; II, 78-80, 12077., 130 her family life I, 438, 544; II, 175 on her father's death I, 543 love for Β. I, 236, 240, 268 her daughters II, 75 ill health II, 12777. death II, 175 Berlioz, Auguste, distant cousin of B.'s. I, 52, 213 marriage 219 Berlioz, Louis (1834-1867) son. Cited I, 4677., 315, 520 birth I, 257 baptism I, 25777. rearing I, 261, 316^7; II, 29, 80 B.'s affection for I, 315, 478; II, 29, 7880, 83-5, 88, 130, 157-8, 160, 170, 20910, 212-3, 238, 249, 277, 295 and his aunts I, 316, 545; II, 79-80 hears B.'s music I, 342; II, 170 in parents' domestic turmoil I, 409, 410-1, 438 at school in Rouen I, 482, 513-4, 545 trip to La Còte with Β . I, 512 and his mother I, 544, 560; II, 29, 78-80 disturbing letters I, 545; II, 205, 209 Chooses career at sea I, 545, 552, 554 first voyage I, 559; (later training) II, 49; 80, 83, 87, 157-8, (B.'s anxiety) II, 161, 170; 175, 210, 211-2, 244, 246-7, 248, 275, 277 gives up post II, 45, 115, 236 character II, 29, 45, 80, 85, 120, 123. 205, 246, 249-51 devotion to Β. II, 81, 205-6, 213, 238-9, 276 ill II, 112, 115 at the wars II, 80, 83-4, 205, 275 death 11, 2 77 ff., 295

Index of Names Berlioz, Louis H e c t o r (1803-1869) 1. Life j. W o r k s (including Writings) ι. LIFE Born I, 23 genealogy I, 24ft.·, II, 277 n. birthplace I, 25 "race" I, 25 and 77. and Rabelais I, 25η.; II, 16, 2477., 5377., 270 Napoleonic ideal I, 28, 154, 196, 204, 217, 266-7, 346, 375 and n., $47 education I, 2 9 f r . , 45, 138fr., 144 and n., 145; II, 56ff., 13271.-371., 16677. emotional conflicts I, 30, 131, 203, 315, $10, Í44, JJ2-4; II, 116, 170 sense of isolation I, 32. 39. 4*. 7 ' , 9°. i 6 3 . 2 °3, 2 ' ° - ' , 599; II, 29, 30, 155-6, 213 identification with poets I, 32, 163-4, 33°> 5 " , J 2 2 ; H, '4» 221, 226-7 attitude toward politics I, 33, 63, 199 and n., 241, 264 and n., 52iff., 52872., 531; II, 84, 22572. See also: Politics and preceding Index, item 33; musical companions I, 34fr., 210-1; II, 21 and n. See also: D a m c k e , Massart, Osborne, R i t t e r ; p e r f o r m e r on instruments I, 28, 34-5 and 72., 41, 45, 210 sings I, 35, 211 and n., 216, 510; II, 162 First musical occasion I, 36, 41 medical career I, 37, 45, 47, 55, 58, 16477., (recalled) 204, 542; II, 777. love of nature I, 42, 44, 21 off., 223; II, 4, 84, 281 love of travel I, 28, 552, 553; II, 4, 82, 124 and n. at Meylan I, 30, 43, 96, 217, 544; II, 247-8 physical appearance I, 46, 443; II, 22-3, 24, 45, 249, 294 at dances and parties I, 52-3, 63, 212; II, 90 Music critic I, 55, 57, 244, (at Débats) 257, 260; elsewhere 260-1 and n. retires as II, 230, 242 speaks of his career as II, 258 r e t u r n s t o Dauphiné I, 58, 69, 104, 152, 199-200, 217-20; (1847) 512-3; (1848) 5 4 3 f r . ; (1864) 247-9; (1865) 250; (1867) II, 278; (1868) II, 248, 295; religious opinions I, 27, 32, 62, 63, 16} and 77., 212, 222, 245; II, 22577., 279 and Cherubini I, 63, 73, 91, 95, 103, 273, 45877., 543; II, 18, 131 personal traits I, 63, 216, 239, 345, 375, 467-8, 509-10; II, i2ff., 23, 28, 155-6 struggle with parents I, 68ff„ 72fï., 120, (1833) 235; II, 4 reconciliation I, 268 enters Conservatoire I, 71 f r u i t of studies I, 138-42, 146 first characteristic w o r k I, 736. discove r y of Shakespeare I, 8}fF., 103 and 77., io8ff., 223, 380 See also: Shakespeare; discovery of G o e t h e I, 87, 94, 96, 101, 203 See also: G o e t h e ; ill health I, 84, 120-1, 199η., 200, 203, 268, 293, 309-10,

and

Subjects

467

Berlioz, Louis H e c t o r 3'7, 34 2 · 434 and «·. 445, 473, $'5> 5591 II, 50, 87, 106-7, 11 Si '2071., 121, 127 and 72., 156, 159, 162, 166, 170, 175, 18072., 181, 203, 211, 213, 216, 228, 250, 252, 256, (first collapse) II, 277; 280 and 77., (second) II, 294; hears, studies, and plays Beethoven I, 88 and 77.-89 and 71., 5377J., 546, 556; II, 42, 113, 119, 157 See also: Beethoven L o v e affairs: Estelle I, 30-1, 162, 217, 2 3 ' , 5'°> 544; Π, 4, 5. 2 9~3° and nn., 213, 215, 247 and 77.-8 H a r r i e t I, 86, 100-1, 106, 1 2 0 , 164, 231, 2 3 4 f r . , 408-9, 437-8, 478; II, 4-5, 78-80 Camille I, 124fr., 152, 199fr.; II, 4 Marie I, 410, 4 " , 433, 434, 445, 473^·, 5 ' ° and 72. Russian chorister I, 510, 516 Amélie II, 215, 236, 245 First concert of his o w n w o r k s I, 9off. second concert I, 105 third (.Fantastique) I, i2off. wins Second R o m e Prize I, 95 First Prize I, 134, 277, 279 learns English I, 97 speaks it I, 514 other foreign languages I, 433, 514; II, 877., 81-2, 14777. p r o o f r e a d s Beethoven and Rossini I, 98 his o w n w o r k s I, 554; II, 49, 70, 78, 112, 206 at Hemam I, 127, 128-9 marriage plans I, 10277., 133, 234fr.; II, 79-80 in revolutions (1830) I, 135-6, 147, 264 and n.; (1848) I, 513, 52ΐ-3 88, 280, 308 timpani chords I, 192η., 282; II, 289 harps in I, 358η. first p e r f o r m a n c e II, 657z., 6772.

Symphony in A. Dreamed and not composed I, 550 and 72. II, 49 and 72., 50 Te Deiim. Tenor melody in I, 11672., 563 Judex crederis I, 11672., 562, 563, 566; II, 125, 289 character computab l e II, 10572. genesis I, 228, 266, 401,

547, 561 and 72. composed I, 550, 554, 561; II, 3, 49, 25372. f o r m I, 327, 564fr. MAIN TREATMENT I, 561—73 OTCheS-

tration I, 357 and 72. published II, 70 Prelude

( N o . 3) I, 42572., 562, 56372.,

564, 573 Te Deum (No. 1) I, 561, 564, 567 Tibi omnes I, 561, 564; II, 27 Dignare I, 561, 564; II, 27 Christe, rex I, 562, 564 Te ergo I, 11672., 562, 563, 565-6; II, 27 Military March I, 561, 562, 566-7; II, 1 1 3 , 359W.

Links with Requiem I, 562-3 and 72., 564, 573; II, 108 "Babylonian" style I, 561, 565 and 72. premiere I, 561, 565; II, 85, 108 and 72. performances II, 34, 39, 46, (New York) 64 and

72., 87,

(Paris)

II, 252η., 30472.

appraisal (B.'s) 561, (Gray's) 567, (Tchaikovsky's) II, 28472. publication II, 112 ms. in Russia II, 282, 284, 337n. Tempest Fantasia. See: Lélio Teviple Universel, Le. II, 20822. Tower of Nice overture. See: Corsair Treatise on Orchestration. First articles published I, 411-2 in German I, 438 revised and collected I, 438; II, 1172., 41

translations

Subjects

Berlioz, Louis Hector

Berlioz, Louis Hector

I, 1 1 7 η . , i j j ,

and

I, 44872., 4Ó172., 543

and 72. Saint-Saëns on I, 44922.

M A I N TREATMENT I , 4 4 8 - 6 9 B .

men-

tions I, 543 and 72. on scoring voices I, 275 and 72., 56872. composers cited or quoted I, 45672.; II, 21η. Essay on Conducting II, 57fr., 112 in Egypt II, 251 Moussorgsky studies II, 281, 28372.

Τ ristia. See: Songs (Mort d'Ophélie), Méditation Religieuse, and Hamlet Funeral March Troyens, Les. Cited I, 513, 527; II, 195, 217, 301 B. on familiarity with characters I, 2972. and Nature I, 43, 175 "Royal Hunt and Storm" I, 175, 49972.; II, 139-40 a n d rm., 148-9, 152, 189, 240-1 a n d 72., 28472., (Β. H . H a g -

gin on) II, 140; II, 289 form I, 188, 327, 501; II, 119, 132ÍT., 13872., 14572.672., 20872., 221

Genesis I, 111, 228, 166, 318; II, 3072., 88-9, 106, 115, ii6ff., 131 B. remarks upon II, yon., 119, 127, 129, 131, 132, 133 Grout on I, 30271.; II, 115 and w., 144/2. Tovey on II, 115 and 72., 144, 2727). tempi I, 35522. title (s) II, 118, 135 celebrates labor I, 36372.; II, 138-9 celebrates peace I, 40172.; II, 138 Epic character II, 115, 132, 135, 152-3 Moscheles on I, 43672.; other appraisals I, 495; II, 12922., 133, 151 readings of libretto II, 123, 128, 234, 249 i n f l u e n c e II, 14172., 142, 14972., 186, 284 as o r a t o r i o II, 13472. MAIN TREATMENT II, 1 3 2 - 5 3 Marche

Troyenne II, 136 and n., 137 and 72., 139, 143, 150, 289 Cassandra's death II,

137-8,

146

disarrangements

II,

13972. love scenes II, 139-42, (Septet) II, 245, 254, 297 Hylas's song II, 142, (words) II, 147 sentries' dialogue II, 142 and 72., 146, 241 opening, quoted II, 145 72. prosody II, 148 Preface II, 151 Prologue II, 237, 240 partial performance II, 156, 166, 169, 175, 203, 207, 208, 235, 236ff., (cuts) 242

Première II, 240, 242, 249 sale of score II, 237 and 72.-872., revivals II, 151 and 72., 302, 303, 305 never published II, 252, 30272., 338 piano score II,

158,

206,

242-3

and

11η.,

significance II, 232, 233, 25222. Dido's death II, 106, 121, 143, 150, 162, 167, 185 ballets II, 136, 140 and 72., 168 Wagner on II, 172 Liszt on II, 23272. dedication II, 244, 252 and n.

Index of Names and Subjects Berlioz, Louis Hector Vox Populi. See: Hymne à la France and Menace des Francs Voyage Musical. I, 416 published I, 443; II, ι in. recast I, 519; II, 3-4, 8 sketch of Spontini II, 328 Warriors of the Breisgau, The. See: Francs-Juges and I, 98 Waverley overture. I, 81, 88 opening note I, 82 played I, 92 form I, 145, 188 to be recorded II, 322 Writings. On Beethoven's life I, 99100; II, 55, 260 on Beethoven's chamber works I, 99, 244, 424; II, 34, 100, 103-4, 215, 262 on Beethoven's symphonies I, 143-4, '82. 196, 244-5, 2 6i, 344. 4i6ff., 424, 426; II, 100, 123η., 159-60, 266-7, 2 9°-' o n Classic and Romantic I, 129-30, 150 and n., 152, 153 and n. See also: Hugo, Η emani; on Italian music I, 215, 228η., 314, 414, 416fF. on Imitation in music I, 172fr., 417ft. II, 260, 26572. on religious music I, 98, 350, 356, 359; II, 95ff., 102 and n., 103, 114, 260 Autobiographical I, 239-40, 25672., 410-1, 439, 443, 512, 519, 520, 521-2; II, 4ff., 17, 3077, 7572., ι ion., 130, 131, 204, 216, 258 and 72.-259 and n., 293 his style described I, 48, 55-6, 223, 240; II, 16, 162, 268-70 on Institute I, 240 and τι., II, 84, 117-8 on Chopin I, 241, 344 on Mozart I, 244, 26171., 454; II, 35, 16072., 215, 273-4 o n Gluck I, 57, 67, 261, 416fF.; II, 12377., 187, 210, 21 j, 244, 255, 26372. on Weber I, 261; II, 215 on elements of music I, 274, 416 and n., 428; II, 55, 119, 18071., 363 On Orchestration I, 28271., 350®., 411-2, 442 on Spontini I, 3177?., 344; II, 254, 328 on Rameau I, 38072.; II, 264, 36572. on Paganini I, 344-5 on Lesueur I, 345 on music in the state I, 360-1 and n., 408, 476, 481, 507, 511-2, 513, 53471.,- II, 55, 10572., 116, 327 and 72., 328 on music and poetry I, 363-4, 417ff.; II, 74 on opera I, 293, 299, 473, 480, 542, 548; II, 11772., 119, 124, 210-1, 239 on imagination I, 39272.; II, 248 on artistic world I, 406, 440, 472-3, 4 8 2 · 537. ÎÎ7-8. 560«·.· II. 39. 1 0 1 . ' 3 ' On reviewing I, 40972., 439, 482; II, 26, 45-6, 55, 206-7, 2I0 > 25*H> on Cherubini I, 27372., 414 on relativism in art I, 415, 417/7.—fF. on musicianship I, 4i6ff.; II, 57ff., 6872., 69, 122, 330-5 his esthetic creed I, 419, 46772.; II, 73-4, 180 and 72., 188, 193, 363, 369

475

Berlioz, Louis Hector and 72. on criticism I, 422 and η.; II, 258-9, 262 on David and Glinka I, 446-7 and 72. on Liszt I, 469, 470-2; II, 233 on love I, 121, 131, 510; II, 307J., 214 and 72., 248, 292-3 on the poor I, 53372. on euthanasia I, 552 and n.; II, 17 and 72. on his own music II, 20, 119, 161, 216-7, 234~5. 2^3. 285w., 36972. on his mission and conducting II, 54, 83 on nature II, 84, 9872., 100 On religion II, 89, 95ÍÍ·, 129 on the public II, 103, 122 and n., 27072. on the music of the future II, 128 on Meyerbeer I, 551 and 72.; II, 78, 160-1 on Wagner II, 171fr., 176, 190, 194-5, 215 on Flaubert II, 232 and n. on Bizet II, 239 and 72., 242, 261, 262 on Mendelssohn II, 266, 270-1 on Rossini I, 198; II, 261, 264, 268 on Molière II, 273-4 Ζ aide. Composed and orchestrated I, 474. 475. Berlioz, Louis Joseph (1747-1815) grandfather. I, 25 death of I, 31 Berlioz, Louis Joseph [Dr.] (1776-1848) father. Cited I, 57, 58, 93-4, 105, 120, 150, 16772. character I, 24fr. political views I, 26 medical studies and career I, 267».; II, 16772. agnosticism I, 32; II, 94 mayor of La Côte I, 33 teaches B. music I, 36 urges medical studies I, 39, 45 tries to discourage Β. I, 55, sçff·, 69, 72, 90, 94, 101, I04; II, 120 Devotion to Β. I, 84, 96, 270, 341 B.'s devotion to him I, 131, 218, 245, 292-3, 314, 340, 437 and 72., 553; II, 4, 29, 120, 209 thanks Lesueur I, 149 opposes B.'s marriage I, 235, 236 and n. approaching death I, 513 last moments I, 543; II, 5 B. reads his works I, 553 and 72. Berlioz, Louis-Jules-Félix (1816-1819) brother. I, 31 Berlioz, Louise Virginie (1807-1815) sister. I, 31 Berlioz, Marie Antoinette, née Marmion (1781-1838) mother, character I, 27!?., 102, 125, 21872.-1972.; II, 30 religious views I, 32 sings folk songs I, 40 opposes B.'s career I, 58fr., 69ff. political views I, 26, 147 ill health I, 27, 292 death I, 292, 310 B.'s affection for I, 66, 102, 292, 513, 552; II, 30, 209 Berlioz, Nanci (1806-1850) sister. Cited I, 27 and 72., 48, 50, 52, 72, 205, 543, 544; II, 209 studies guitar I, 35 first communion I, 36-7 on B. in her diary I,

476

Index of Names and Subjects

59, 69, loom.; II, 15η. corresponds with Camille I, 200 marriage I, 213, 217 childbirth I, 236 reconciliation with Β. I, 268 opinion of Louis I, 545 illness and death I« S5 2 ' 553» 558; II> '7 Boschot's view of II, 319 Berlioz, Prosper (1820-1839) brother. Cited I, 27 and n., 45, 59, 199, 218, 220 in Paris 309fr. death 314 musical talents I, 218, 309 mathematician 310 B.'s estimate of 31077. B. remembers I, 513; II,

Blake, William. Cited I, 1772., 18, 396, 398 on

the D e i t y

I , 395-6 and η . ; I I , 97

violent art I, 530 on love II, 140 on marriage II, 214 Blanc, Charles. Aids Β . I, 543; II, 39 B . votes for him II, 296 identified II, 29677. Blanc, Louis. I, 34371.; II, 39, 230 History of Ten Years I, 36272., 399-400 Organisation du Travail I, 412-3 leader in 1848 I, 517 Blaze, F. H. J . [Castil-]. Β. attacks I, 67-8; II, 165 and 77. identified I, 6772. owns 209 Freischütz I, 405 Berlioz, Victor-Abraham (1784-184?) uncle. Identified I, 6m. B.'s letters to I, Blaze, A. H. [de Bury]. Identified I, 67η. attacks Β. I, 405 697z. Blessington, Marguerite, Countess of. Bernard, Emile. On Delacroix I, 384 Quoted on Liszt I, 272 and 11. receives Bernard, General. Commissions Requiem Β. I, 516 I, 277 congratulates B. 278-9 Bloc, ? I, 120 Bernardin de St. Pierre. B . reads I, 28, Blom, Eric. On Wagner II, 183, 18677. 164, 346; II, 247, 361 Bocage, Pierre Tousez. I, 232 Berry, Duc de. Murdered I, 47 Boccherini. I, 10077. Berry, Duchesse de. Plots against Louis Böcklin, A. I, 517, 532 Philippe I, 232 Boehm, Theobald. Woodwind system I, Bertin, Armand. Family ownership of 77; II, 33 and 77. Débats I, 246 link with Orleanists I, 260, 269 devotion to Β. I, 258, 340, J07, 552 Bohain, V. Faust ballet I, 94, 96, 97 identified I, 9477. edits L'Europe Littéraire in 1848 I, 518; II, 39, 40 death II, 77 237 Β. contributes to periodical 24072. operatic plans I, 246, 267, 291 Boieldieu, François Adrien. I, 37 IdentiBertin, F.douard. Identified I, 267; II, 77 fied 5472. attempts a Faust 97 chides succeeds his brother II, 77 Troyens at B. 103, 14372. his house II, 123, 207 Bonaparte, Jerome (brother of Napoleon; Bertin, Louise. Identified I, 267 Faust 267 267fr. B.'s relation to King of Westphalia). II, 15677. La Esmeralda i6yR. and Paganini gift I, 312, 313η. Bonaparte, Louis-Napoleon. See: Naporetired II, 77 leon III Berton, Η . Μ. I, 37 his Virginie j o Bonaparte, Napoleon. See: Napoleon Bertrand, G . On Troyens II, 24m. Bonaparte, Napoleon-Louis. Death in 1831 Beulé, Charles Ernest. II, 212 on ChateauI, 204, 217 briand, Byron, and Meyerbeer I, 250 Bonavia, F. I, 12 on B.'s Fantastique 167 Beyle, Henri. See: Stendhal Bond-Head, General Sir F. Prophet about Biancolli, L. I, 128η. w a r I I , 15577. Bonington, R . P. I, 376 Bierce, Ambrose. Defines plagiarism II, Bornoff, J . on Celimi I, 298fr. 184η. Borodin, Alexander. Among Russian Five B i g g s , Ε . P . I , 563n. II, 282-3 B. and Prince Igor II, 28472. Biletta, Emanuele. Rose de Florence II, Bortniansky, Dmitri. B . hears and plays .154 him I, 511 and η.; II, 34, 282 and n. Biré, Edmond. I, 7η. Boschot, Adolphe. His life of B . I, 7, Birkhoff. G . D. I, 109n. Bismarck, Prince Otto von. II, 46, 275 Eroica rededicated to II, 200 Bizet, Georges. Cited I, 1977. In Β. tradition II, 94, 200, 257 Carinen I, 29772., 487η.; II, 200 on civil wars I, 53577. Artésienne II, 94 wins Rome Prize II, 125 admonished II, 169 Nietzsche on II, 200 and 72. Pearl Fishers II, 239, 241 B. on II, 239, 261, 262 at B.'s funeral II, 2 97

52672.; I I , l i , 304 a n d

n., 305,

312-20,

337 identified II, 312 and Malherbe II, 320, 338 partial recantation I, 12 conjecture about B.'s fears I, 31 on B.'s native landscape 44 on B.'s familv 62 on B.'s relation to Lesueur Í, 14477. on March in Fantastique 16077. on B.'s attempted suicide I, 20577. on B.'s accuracy 21577. on B.'s livelihood 23172., 26077. o n m a n n e r s

o f 1830 233

Index on Janin's " h o a x " incident 278η.

of Names

23772. on s n u f f b o x

On Requiem 28 m., 568η. on Apo-

théose 35572. o n B.'s marriage 40971. on R á k ó c z y m a r c h 477/2. on B.'s d r a m a t i c

intensity 486 on Te Dettm 564, 565, 573

on Memoirs II, 9n., 11 on B. and

W a g n e r , II, 176 o n B. and Estelle II, 247 on B.'s h a n d w r i t i n g II, 294, 313

on Troy ens II, 305 and τι., 317 on Chant Guerrier II, 320 on Rêverie et

Caprice II, 320 o n G e r m a n edition II, 320, 359 o n his o w n w o r k II, 32072. Botstiber, H . Q u o t e d on p r o g r a m music I, 18571. Bottée de T o u l m o n , A u g u s t e . Conservatoire librarian I, 276 on B.'s Requiem 313, 4 2 m . death 560 Bougainville, L. de. I, 28, 554 Boult, Sir A d r i a n . P e r f o r m s Β. II, 309 Boult, Katharine. O n B.'s character II, 22 Bourgeois(-ie). See: Philistine, F r e n c h Revolution (1830), I n d u s t r y , and Politics Bourges, Maurice. Cited I, 420». o n B.'s music I, 42177. and its f o r m II, 360 Bourges, Michel de. O n art and politics I, 533 Bourget, Paul. O n Stendhal I, 385η. Bouyer, R . O n B.'s personality II, 24 and

n.

Bozzano, Emilio. I, 3087z. B r a d f o r d , Selina Louisa, Countess of. II, 215 and 72. Brahms, J. Cited I, 18, 183 early musical experiences I, 37 t e c h n i q u e of developm e n t 11672. Academic o v e r t u r e 177 Tragic o v e r t u r e 193-4 and n. C M i n o r q u a r t e t 19672. use of mutes I, 32472. neoclassicism I, 386; II, 18171. s y m phonies I, 428, 49972. tests melodies I, 46472. and d e v e l o p m e n t I, 49972. and

D'Indy I, J6972. on Infant Christ II, 75

and 72. praised b y Β. Π, 75 and 72., 261 against Liszt and W a g n e r II, 181 and n. and Bülow II, 200 Branchu, Mme. Cited, I, $6 her style 57 B. meets 67 Brandus (publisher). I, 517, 518 b u y s o u t Schlesinger I, 54272. B. addresses o n P h i l h a r m o n i q u e I, 56071. Brassev, Sir T h o m a s . Sponsors c o n c e r t s I I . 3272.

Rrcir';o|)f and H ä r t e l (publishers). I. 438 and 71. u n d e r t a k e to p u b l ^ h Β. II, :oo;j.. 304, 324, 358-81 edit M o z a r t II, 36072. Brendel. Karl F r a n z . A n d y o u n g Brahms

and

Subjects

477

II, 7571. Liszt addresses on Troyens II, 23271. Brian, H a v e r g a l . O n Funeral s y m p h o n y I, 354 on B.'s exaggeration II, 16 and η ση Β. and W a g n e r II, 20172., 308 and n. Brigands. Appeal and significance of I, 204, 2 1 1 , 223, 253-5 Brisbane, A r t h u r . I, 40272. Brizeux, A . Meets B. in R o m e I, 209 poems set b y B. 292 Broglie, D u c de. I, 524 Bronsart, H a n s von. Plays Β. II, 199 Brooks, Cleanth. O n D o n n e II, 22271.

Brothers Karamazov, The. II, 361

B r o w n e , Sir T h o m a s . Q u o t e d on musick I 493"· B r o w n e , W . D . I, 4577J. Browning, R o b e r t . A n d m o n o d r a m a I, 227 and 72. on Perseus m y t h II, 7472. B r u c k n e r , A n t o n . I, 197). on B.'s Requiem I, 28972. and Treatise I, 44972. Bruneau, A l f r e d . Cited I, 53872. sets prose t o music II, 14772. on Carvalho II, 23972. Brunswick, M a r k . I, 32672. Büchner, G e o r g . Cited I, 70 death 531

Danton II, 190

Buck, P e r c y . I, 18572.; II, 224 and n. Bülow, H . von. Cited I, 2572. on B.'s

Requiem I, 28971. on Cellini I, 30772.; II, 47, 20071. fantasia on Cellini t h e m e s Π, 73 on t h e t h r e e B.'s II, 7672., 200 at Dresden p r o m o t i n g m o d e r n music II,

81, 82, 83 transcribes B.'s Corsair II,

10972. role in L i s z t - W a g n e r crusade II, 83, 110, 128, 17172. 179, 183, 199-200 plays in Paris II, 163 r e t u r n t o B.'s art I, 28972. plays Romeo II, 276 revives Cellini II, 306 and o t h e r w o r k s II, 306 and 72. Burk, J o h n . O n Brahms I, 194 a n d n. on

B.'s Memoirs II, 6 and n.

Burke, E d m u n d . G e n i u s of II, 22672. Burke, T h o m a s . Q u o t e d I, 23 B u r n e y , D r . Charles. A n d H a n d e l festivals I, 36172. Burns, R o b e r t . I, 29972. Burr, A n n a R . O n B.'s Memoirs II, 872. Busoni, F. Cited I, 1972. on B.'s Requiem

I, 28972. on Romeo I, 33272. and Treatise

I, 449 and 72. and Liszt fantasia o n themes of B. I, 46972. influenced b y B.

I, 56372.; II, 134 Faust II, 134 on B.'s

influence II, 275, 287, 307 Butler, Samuel ( D r . ) . Q u o t e d I, 4072. Butler, Samuel (grandson of p r e c e d i n g ) . O n solicitors I, 497 on death II, 280 Buxtehude, D . I, 185, 186 Byrd, William. I, 185

47

Index of Names and Subjects

8

Byron, L o r d . Q u o t e d I, 34, 252, 376 B . on his own Byronism I, 20J-6; derided I, 385 death I, 61, 65 influence I, I' 37°> J76, 381; II, 250 Sardanapalus 134 Corsair I, 197; II, 50n. sailor who knew I, 200, 2J4 tales of passion I, 2056 and Countess Guiccioli I, 212 and n. B . reads Childe Harold I, 228, 243η., 247, 252—3, 254 >n G r e e c e I, 61, 65, 255n. and Romanticism I, 370, 376, 381 to T o m M o o r e I, 42777. an athlete I, 532 and a dandy I, 53477. borrows ideas II, 185 C CABANEL, ALEXANDRE. I I ,

231

Cabanis, G . I, 219 and n. Caesar, Julius. I, 376 Calvocoressi, M . D . Q u o t e d on critical dissensus I, 1671., 421 on " f a c t " in art I, 42177., 56777. on B.'s counterpoint I, 4, 567 on B . as critic II, 267 and n. Cambridge, Duke of. I, 5 1 7 ; II, 1 1 3 Camondo, M . de. The Clown I, 30477. Cannon, B . C . O n Mattheson I, 45477. Capell, Richard. Cited I, 12 on B.'s Faust I, 22, 383, 48477.; II, 28477. on B.'s letter-writing II, 53 on Troyens II, 142 on B . and Russians II, 28471. Carafa, Μ . Ε . I, 521, 55777. Carlyle, T . And Saint-Simon I, 136 and Napoleon 1, 375 Heroes and Hero Worship I, 375 and 77. French Revolution I, 378 fighting his age I, 397 on Mirabeau's death II, 28 Carnot, Lazare. I, 376 Carpani, G . Letters on Haydn I, 172fr., i8off. Carrel, Armand. I, 136; II, 230 Carse, A d a m . Uses B. Memoirs II, 4 Caruso, E n r i c o . I, 21177. Carvalho, L . Cited II, 207 B. characterizes II, 2177. modifies judgment II, 240 and 77. mode of directing II, 23977. identified II, 12277. engages B. to direct II, 165-6, 168, 175, 210 and Troyens II, '75, -33· 236-7ÎÏ. Casimir-Périer. Death of I, 213 Castil-Blaze. See: Blaze Catel, C . S. I, 37 his Bayadères I, 50, 7577. Cauchie, Maurice. O n tempo in Β . I, 44177. Cavaignac, General. I, 520, 546 arrested II, 3777-3877. Ceccherini, F . II, 15477. Cecilie, Admiral. II, 80 Cellini, Β . Typified I, 1 1 3 Memoirs I, 228, 299, ( B . reads) 256, 30577., 308; II, 3

libretto on I, 257; II, 185 as artistic symbol I, 270 and 77., 305-6, 537 life I, 30777., 537 and Romanticism I, 370 Cervantes, M . de S. Β . reads I, 346 II, 247 quotes II, 38, 11177., 1 1 4 their humor akin II, 16 Cézanne, Paul. Cited I, 9 Jan G o r d o n on II, 25077. Chabrier, Emmanuel. O n B.'s music I, 30677. transcribes Β . II, 10977. launches Delna II, 303 Chamberlain, Houston S. I, 389-90 Champfleurv. II, 27677. Chant-récitatif. In B.'s work I, 11177., 115, 30672., 3 3 1 ; II, 151 and n., 195, 288 Romeo Chapman, J . J . O n Shakespeare's I, 33off. on historical types II, 24 Charbonnel, A. I, 33 B. rooms with 72, 84 marriage 219 Charivari, Le. And artists I, 348 on regime I, 347 on Β. I, 347-8, 508, 5 1 2 ; II, 25771. Charles I (of England). II, 2177;. Charles X . I, 62, 947;., 1 3 5 - 6 Charpentier, Gustave. I. 24977. Chartism. See: Industry, social unrest Charton-Demeur, Mme. Β. hears and hires I, 513 sings Troyens II, 162, 237, 242 and n. asked for again II, 251 in Armide II, 254 at B.'s deathbed II, 296 Chartres Cathedral. I, 286 and 7;., 287, 397; II, I0277. Chateaubriand, V i c o m t e René de. I, 28, 5777. 61, 87, 1 6 3 - 4 a r , d voung R o mantics I, 48, 37277., 381 on Restoration 62 on the arts 64 answers B.'s request 64-5 and 77. on Dante 13077. Atala 1 3 1 - 2 in politics I, 61, 136 Genius of Christianity I, 32, 63-4, i62ff., 202, 396; II, 139 and n. literary circle I, 28, 29277. influence II, 250 Chatterton, Thomas. I, 263, 372 Chaucer, G . I, 22571. Chaudes-Aigues, J . G . I, 295-6 Chélard, H . Cited I, 433 identified I. 432 and 77. death II, 206 Chénier, André. W o r d s before his death I, 32, 163, 164 poetic creed I, 372 Cherubini, Luigi. I, 63, 71, 73; II, 297 orchestral effects I, 7577., 7677. scoring notation I, 78 on the svmphonv I, 88 identified I, 90-1 and 77. on Bach I, 90, 141 Opposition to Β. I, 63, 9 1 , 273, 4587:., 543, 569; II, 18, 131 relents I, 95, 103, 105 disciplinarian I, 63, 91, 139 and n. his Requievi I, 273, 279 uncanonical 286 death I, 413 B . on I, 27377., 414; II, 261, 264 Salpêtre Républicain I, 52677.

Index of Names and Subjects Chesterfield, Anne Elizabeth, Countess of. II, 21572. Chesterfield, Lord (4th Earl). Quoted on music I, 1072., 154 and 77. Chesterton, G . K. On popular music I, 35in. on "Nubian" conditions II, 68 and n. on biographic fallacy II, 312, 313 Chisholm, Erik. Identified I, 298 produces Troy ens II, 151 and other works II, 309 Chopin, F. Cited I, 19, 70; II, 157n., 28J and B.'s form I, 144η. among the Romantics I, 232, 258, 262 B. on I, 241, 2j6 friendship with B. 243, 244, 315, 34072., 559 F Minor concerto I, 258 Delacroix on I, 262η. at Funeral symphony I, 347 disapproval of Β. I, 356n. piano transcriber I, 27171., 51772. in 1848 I, 52471., 5257?. death I, 54472., 557 Chorley, Henry F. on Β. I, 516; IÍ, 44 and Cellini music II, 42 as critic II, 21 n., 44 and 72. Choron, A. Cited I, 49 his choir school I, :13η., 290 abolished 360 concerts of sacred music I, 274 proposes hidden orchestra II, 32971. Choudens (publishers). II, 23772.-8«., 242-3, 252 and »2., 30272. Chuquet, G . On Nourrit I, 27572. Churchill, Winston. On memory II, 1072. Ciano, Count. Diaries I, 37471. Ciceri, P. L . C. I, 241 Cicero. II, 97 Cimelli, T . I, 185 Clapisson, Antoine. Identified II, 8472. Jeanne la Folle I, 40972., 548 Gibby la Cornemuse I, 505 and η.; II, 8472. elected to Institute II, 84 death II, 255 Clapp, Philip Greeley. I, 13 on Cellini I, 29772. on universal borrowing from B. II, 253-4 ar>d 72., 28772. Claque. For Gluck I, 51 for B. 66 and n. Clauss, YVilhelmine. Rival of Mme. Pleyel II, 43 Clement VII. I, 294, 305 Cleveland, Grover. I, 360 Clio. A musical muse I, 42872. Clutton-Brock, A. On Delacroix I, 38472. Cobbctt, \V. \V. On B. as music critic II, 26377. Cocteau, Jean. I, 16672. Colin, ΛΙ. Composes I, 556 Coleridge, S. T . On Hamlet I, 13072. on imagination I, 392/2. and religion I, 396, 398 on Shakespeare II, 223-4, 3 o 1 Colles, H. C. On Form II, 346 and 72. Collins, Wm. Ode on the Passions I, 221«., 372

479

Colonne, Edouard. On B.'s Requiem I, 281 plays Damnation I, 483, 506; II, 302-3 "successor" to Β. I, 554; II, 12472. Columbus, Christopher. B.'s admiration of II, 155-6 Combarieu, Jules. I, 1967z., 49372. Comte, Auguste. And Realism I, 390 Conducting. Gestures I, 195; II, 62, 218 B.'s first attempts I, 87-8, 241-2, 253 later lapses II, 256 becomes professional II, 258, 272 B.'s new method I, 319, 346-7 and 72.; II, 68 and n. Romeo I, 340 Harold II, 208 his baton sought after I, 342 long stretches of I, 402, 433, 443, 474IÏ., 481-2, 514, 554ff.; II, 4off^ io8ff., 112, 28off. electric metronome I, 53972.; II, 59-60 and 72., 10872., 16972. B.'s described II, 55, 5672., 61 and 7262 and 72., 8172., 8872., i n , 122, 28172. history of II, 55-8 modern weakness about II, 5772. and Shakespearean acting II, 223 B.'s ranking claim in II, 245 B. gives up Baden II, 249 B. theorizes upon II, 57ff., 112, 333 Connolly, Cyril. I, 41672. Conservatoire (Paris). Cited I, 49 library of I, 51, 63 B. enters I, 71, struggles with I, 129, 139-142 Concert Society founded I, 88, 91 plays B. I, 237-8, 442; II, 231, 232 B. uses its hall I, 91, 105, 232fr., 279, 440 this use denied I, 44072., 507 musicians aid B. I, 120 founding I, 138 limitations I, 141 and n., 142S., 424; II, 127 Opposes B. I, 238 and η.; II, 303 relents I, 549 honored through B. I, 277 B. curator of Libran' I, 313, 518, 542-3, 546, 560; promoted II, 251, 254-5 and 72., (destroys own papers) II, 278; II, 296 B. candidate for Harmony chair I, 458 and Beethoven celebration I, 471 in competition with B. I, 504 plays B. in latter years I, 550-1; II, 207, 231, 232, 245, 254 Constant, Benjamin. I, 132 Constantin, L. On B. and officialdom II, 30572.

Conti, Carlo. II, 169 and n. Cooper, Emil. Performs B. II, 309 Cooper, James Fenimore. B. reads I, 374; II, ξοη. death II, 50n. B. paraphrases I, 435 and 72. Red Rover II, 5 0 7 2 . Cooper, M. On B.'s melody I, 1 1 5 7 2 . Copland, Aaron. El Salón Mexico I, 254 Corder, Sir Frederick. On Liszt II, 198 Corneille, P. I, 69n. Cornelius, Peter. I, 1972. On B.'s looks I, 4672. on the three B.'s II, 76 in B. tradi-

480

hid ex of Names and Subjects

tion I, 464; II, 72, 200n., 2J7 self-described II, 76 and n. praised by Β. II, 261 Barber of Bagdad II, 76 and n., 163, (Shaw on) II, 220n. promotes modern school II, 82 transcribes Β. II, 10972. alienated from W a g n e r II, 20072. at Damnation in 1866 II, 256 Corot, J . B. And Delacroix I, 387, 393 and Troyens II, 242«. Costa, Sir Michael. Manhandles Mozart II, 3j opposes Β. II, 37 aids in Cellini II, 4çff. doubtful behavior II, 52 invites B. to conduct II, 51 B. thanks II, 53 resigns post II, 87 Counterpoint. I, 248ff., 284«., 567-72; II, 73, 76, 271, 283 Couperin, François. I, 142 and "program" 186, 192 Courbet, G. And Delacroix I, 387, 394 B. portrait I, 405«. fame II, 86 in exile I, 53 2 Courteline, Georges. On Molière II, 144η. Couture, Thomas. I, 551 n. Cowell, H e n r y . II, 344 and n. Cramer and Company

(publishers).

II,

32 Crane, H a r t . I, 264 Craven, Thomas. On Delacroix I, 384-5 and n. Crispin, Edmund. On Meistersinger I, 30777. Criticism. Inadequacy I, 9 and n., 14, 285, 288, 395, 419, 424-5, 437, 468, 569, 5 7 1 ; II, 176, 193, 195-6, 363, 370 modern views of Β. I, 1 2 - 1 3 indebtedness of this book to previous I, 14 and n. and the Romantics I, 7, 380; II, 316 of character II, 9η., 137z. of letters and memoirs II, 7 - 1 0 the " n e w " I, 16 Historical I, 16, 227, 385, 395, 422 defined I, 18, 1 1 2 , 385, 4255., 572; II, 176, 184, 261ra., 266, 2 7 2 - 3 comparative II, 289 technical I, 139, 570-1; II, 266-7, 292 B.'s

( M A I N TREATMENT)

II,

258-74;

See also: B., Works, Writings; readability I, 244-5; II» 2 7° dissensus I, 1516 and n., 4 2 1 - 2 and n., 569 and n.; II, 98, 271 Croce, Β. Complains of brigandage I, 25472.-5«. Cross, Wilbur. I, 1772. Crystal Palace. See: Exhibition (s) Cui, César. On Β. conducting II, 6m., 62 on B.'s last Russian tour II, 281, 282-3 message to II, 296 Cummings, E . E . I, 12272. Curran, Sarah. And Robert E m m e t I, 16472.

Curzon, Lord. II, 31472. Cuvillier-FIeury, A . A . On B.'s Festival (1844) I, 444 Czerny, Carl. I, 55772.; II, 10972. D D'ABRANTÈS,

DUCHESSE.

Identified

II,

15972. and B.'s friendship for Balzac II, 159 D'Agoult, Marie. H e r salon I, 243 elopement with Liszt I, 244, 292; II, 214 B.'s regard for I, 292, 315 reunion with daughters II, 8672. opposition to Empire II, 130 B. tells of landscape II, 142 and 72. Daguerre, L . J . I, 50 Dalayrac, N . Air from Nina I, 37 identified I, 537z. Dalcroze, Jaques-. Eurhythmies I, 439 pedagogy II, 286 D'Alembert. Scorns Gluck I, 76 Damcke, Berthold. Helps edit Gluck II, 165 identified II, 16572., friendship with Β. II, 16572., 206, 246, 247, 277, 296 Dame Blanche, La. I, 103 Damrémont, General. Death of I, 277 identified 27772. Damrosch, L . Plays Requiem I, 281 in B. tradition II, 235 brings it to U.S. II, 235, 310 Dannreuther, Edward. On Beethoven I, 17872., anti-B. campaign II, 2Q172., 308 Dantan, Antoine-Laurent (the E l d e r ) . I, 207 Dantan, Jean Pierre (the Younger). Caricature of B. I, 271 Dante. Cited I, 21, 31, 63, 13072., 131, 165, 370 Vita Nuova I, 167, 51072.; II, 248 B. reads I, 217, 228 and quotes II, 119 on Paolo and Francesca I, 397 moral realism I, 426 orthodoxy II, 104 and courtly love II, 248 Danton, G. J . I, 376 Darwin, Charles. Origin of Species II, 171 and 72., 202 Darwinism. II, 192, 193-4, 2 0 2 Daubrée, Mme. "Orthopedic" school I, 104, 12off. D'Aumale, Duc. I, 340, 444 Daumier, Honoré. Caricaturist I, 348 painter I, 387 possible B. portrait I, 40572. Dauphiné. Characteristics I, 2 3ff., 34, 4 0 - 1 , 43-4, 30672.; II, 23572. Daussoigne-Méhul, L . - J . Cited I, 1972., letter on Troyens II, 243-4

Index of Names and Subjects David, Félicien. And B.'s Requiem I, 28171. Paris discovers I, 445 B. plays and writes on I, 446; II, 261 persona] relations I, 474 and η.; II, 179, 257 Le Désert I, 446 Symphonic Ode I, 446 party hvmns 445, 532 his concert society I, 554

David, Ferdinand. Plays Β. I, 435 identified I, 445η. soirée for Β . II, 73 Β . writes to, on Freischütz II, 77 David, Jacques Louis (painter). I, 163n. plan for national ceremony I, 35177.35277. his style I, 37471. Goya on I, 396

David, Jules. II, 220 and 71. Davies, Sir Walford. On opera II, 152«. Davison, Archibald. On B.'s vocal writing

I , 57077.

Davison, J . W . Friendship with Β . I, 51Ó, 518; I I , 19, 5277., 87, i n ? : . ,

233

on B. conducting II, 62 and 77. on Wagner II, n o and 77., 11177., 178 D'Azeglio, Massimo Taparelli. Fieramosca I, 30271. Debussy, Claude. Cited I, 11, 4477., 420, II, 66, 241 taught by Guiraud I, 73n.; II, 28671. on tonality in Β. I, 143; II, 28671. Nuages I, 177, 185 and "program" I, 185, 19577. on B.'s music I, 35177. debt to B. I, 388-9, 449, 464; II, 134, 14071. Fêtes I, 388-9 Afternoon of a Faun I, 389, (in U.S.) II, 311 and n. on B.'s Faust I, 48477. Pelléas, I, 534; II, 134 on B.'s Memoirs II, 6 and 77. La

Mer I I , 14977. o n W a g n e r I I , 28677.

influence II, 303 Decamps, G . A. I, 104 Dehmel, Richard. I, 1977. Delacroix, Eugène. Cited I, 8, 48, 70, 372, 48777., 525, 530, 557; II, 77 Baudelaire on I, 389; II, 231 misknown I, 383fr. f o u n t a i n h e a d

II,

in art I , 12, 387;

Van Gogh on I, 384, 387 and 77. on religious subjects I, 5772.; II, 9577. on the Philistines I, 61, 62 and Shakespeare I, 85; II, 22177., 222, 224 Sardanapalus I, 87, 134 Faust lithographs I, 97 And Romanticism I, 129 and n., 381, 387, 390, 397, 505 Thiers's patron25077., 30577.

a g e o f I, 238 o n B e e t h o v e n

I , 2627?.

follows Chopin's taste I, 26277., 35677. on large and small means I, 3587;. tireless worker I, 376 Twenty-Eighth of July I, 378 and perfect form I, 38377.; II, 224 Massacre at Scio I, 385, 387 on imagination I, 392/7. use of color I, 384 and 77., 394, (divided) 500 insulted

481

I, 403; II, 230 and B . portrait I, 405 and 77. Gautier on I, 505 on Chopin's death I, 54477. on Couture I, 55m. On artistic career I, 55777., 55872.; II, 20 Medea and her children I, 56277. and London Exhibition II, 34 on politics of Empire II, 38-9 and Institute II, 84, 8677., (elected) II, 117; 121, 12577., 169 and 77., 21277. brief fame II, 86, 10872. religious painter II, 95 and 77. on the soul II, 9577. ill-health II, 12071., 121 and 77., 12577. meets B . again II, 121,

12577. and

Liszt

I I , 169 a n d 77.

death II, 239 and n. following II, 25077. Journal II, 26077. Delattre, André. I, 8571. Delavigne, Casimir. I, 148 Deldevez, Ernest. I, 23871. Delécluze, E . J . I, 8677. visualizes guill o t i n e 16377.

Delius, F. I, 185, 449 Lambert on I, 50177. Delna. In Troyens II, 14177., 303 identified I I , 30377.

De Quincey, Thomas. B.'s interest in I, 107, 157, 165 critic, on Wordsworth I , 233 and his o w n

t i m e s I , 37572. o n

literature I, 380 and n. on Mme. Pleyel's playing II, 10977. on Virgil II, 14477. opium eater and Opium Eater

I , 153, 165, 166, 381; I I , 16777. o n l i t e r a -

ture, II, 341 Dérivis, I I . F.. I, 50 Desbordes-Valniore, Marceline. In 1848 I, 52477. Deschamps, Antony. I, 48 among the Romantics 132, 258 writes words for Apothéose I, 349 Deschamps, Emile. Cited I, 48, 22877. among the Romantics I, 232, 244, 258, 26: and Spontini 317 translation of Romeo I, 22877., 33277. librettist I, 228 and 77.; II, 146 Desmarest, ? Identified I, 213 and n. and B.'s Cellini I, 296 in 1848 I, 518 DeVane, W . C. on Browning II, 7477. Devienne, F. Flute-playing method of I. 34

Devrient, Eduard. I, 22677. Diaz, Eugène. I, 30877. Dickens, Charles. Pickwick (quoted) I, 119; cited I, 514»., II, 340 character of 1, 23977. M r . P o d s n a p I . 362; I I , 102 M r .

Mantalini II, 345 Mr. Curdle II, 348 on poetry I, 540«. B. reads II, 40 and Pauline Viardot II, 158, 168 and n. and style II, 343 Dickinson, A. E. F. on Wagner I, 36271.; I I , 19577.

Index of Names and Subjects

482

Diderot, Denis. I, 29, 69ra., j j 4 B.'s prose like II, 49 Didier, ? I, 33 Dido. B.'s childhood compassion for I, 2 9 , 6 3 , 8 6 ; II, 155ra., 1 6 1 - 2 melodies associated with I, 29ra., 10372., 1 1 8 , 1 6 3 and St. Augustine I, 211«. funeral pyre II, 1 0 6 , 121 and ra., 1 4 3 , 1 5 0 , 1 6 1 and n. tragic love II, 117 and Anna sor or II, 118 and »., 139, 143, 237 and Aeneas II, 117,

132

Role in Troy ens II, 135fr. Chateaubriand on II, 139«. Shakespeare's lines on II, 141 lines given her by B. II, 1 4 6 f f . , 2 3 2 Pauline Viardot and role II, 162«., 163, 1 6 6 link with at deathbed II, 2 9 6 Delna sings II, 41ra., 3 0 3 and ra. Diehl, A. M. On B.'s character II, 1472. Dietsch, Pierre. Rehearses B.'s Requiem I, 2 7 6 and n., 55572. and his Romeo I, 319 identified I, 555 n. member of B.'s Philharmonique I, 554®. as composer I, 5 5 5 and W . - 5 5 6 leads Opera II, 175 D'Indy, V . Cited I, 2222., 1 8 5 , 4 4 9 on use of organ I, 5 6 3 r a . on Brahms I, 56972. and Schola Cantorum II, 303 Disraeli, B. B. meets II, 123 and Lady Bradford II, 215 and ra. Dittersdorf, Karl Ditters von. On Mozart I, 11772.; as musician I, 1 8 5 Don Giovanni. Cited I, 483, criticized by Geoffroy I, 3672.; by others 11772. damnation scene I, 1 6 5 » . , 4 8 7 , 4 9 1 "scene with three orchestras" I, 174, 4 6 8 , 57072. characterization in I, 1 8 2 « . , 1 9 6 B. on I, 2 4 4 , 2 6 1 and ra.; II, 3 8 , I6O?2., 19422., 2 6 4 , 2 7 4 "failure" 26522., 407 and B.'s musical dramas I, 300, 30672.; II, 1 4 2 Wagner adapts I, 40772. epilogue 491 B. protests alterations I, 5 2 2 Don John (of Austria). II, 246 Donizetti, Gaetano. L'elisir d'amore I, 217 Les Martyrs I, 344 Lucia I, 480 B. conducts I, 514, 515; II, 208 La Favorita I, 480 Linda di Chamouni I, 515 other works I, 520 Donne, John. On Judgment Day I, 287 as lyricist II, 22222. rugged II, 3 4 3 Donop, Baron von. One of B.'s "encouragers" II, 115 Dorant. Music teacher of B. I, 35 plays under B. 447 introduced by him 447 Doré, Gustave. Meets Β. II, 15 Dorian, F. On Β. as conductor II, 5 8 7 2 . 5972.

Dorn, Ignaz. I, 44972. D'Orsay, Alfred Guillaume Gabriel, Count. In Spanish campaign I, 44072. appraisal of Β. I, 516 D'Ôrtigue, Joseph. Cited I, 4672., 5 2 , 2 4 3 , 504; II, 91, 98, 207, 252 quoted on Β. I, 22172., 2 3 3 - 4 , 415; II, 972-, 1 6 4 , 2 5 5 among the Romantics I, 232, 237, 258, 262 disciple of Lamennais I, 243 on name Lélio I, 25972. book on Cellini I, 3 1 0 - 1 and 72., 313, 421 as critic I, 425, 506; II, 2122. B.'s friendship for I, 478; II, 95-6, 125, 255 on B.'s Faust I, 506 on religious music II, 34, 95 and 72.-96, 102, 125 on

Infant Christ II, 94 La Musique à l'Eglise II, 9572. reviews Tannhäuser II, 181 succeeds B. on Débats II, 245 and reviews Liszt II, 25272. death II, 2 55 Dorus-Gras, Mme. I, 294, 309 B. defends I, 296 chooses as singer I, 514 Dorval, Marie. Identified I, 241 Doudan, Ximenes. I, 343ra., on 1 8 4 8 I, 5 2 4 , 53572. on Second Empire I, 54672.; II, 37- 8 , 23 0 - 1 Downes, Olin. On Symphonie Fantastique I,

3ra.

Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan. I, 20272. D'Óyly Carte, R . II, 220 Draeseke, F. I, 55722. Drama. See also: Gluck, Greeks, Shakespeare, and Wagner Dramatic music. I, 3, 18, 37, 41, 55, 57, 6 3 , 1 5 6 ; II, 1 5 2 , 1 8 6 - 7 a n d ff., 2 1 7 B. creates forms of I, 74-5, 82-3, 146, 156fr., 166,

190,

280,

299ÎÏ.,

192,

566,

570

and

14072., 1 4 4 f r . ,

197,

324, ra.;

244-5,

II,

i8ora.,

181-2,

441M.,

5, 6 4 ,

168, 217fr.,

Characterization in I, 118,

146ÏÏ;

429-30,

188

112,

223,

I32ff.,

288

114, 115, and

27522., 483ff.,

ra.,

116-7, 191,

337, 417, 485; II, 148fr. expression in, defined I, 1 7 6 , 1 7 7 - 8 , i 8 i f f . , 1 9 1 , 4 1 6 - 7 ; II, 1 4 8 f r . contrast with other genres I, 1 8 7 , 4 2 5 , 4 2 6 ; II, 1 0 0 Dramatic symphony. B.'s goal and contribution I, 2 4 7 , 2 6 5 , 3 2 7 - 8 and ra., 4 8 0 , 4 9 5 f r . , 5 0 3 ; II, 1 8 7 - 9 , 2&3 form I, 22872., 3 1 9 , 3 2 0 - 3 9 , 5 0 2 ; I I ,

13872.,

148-9

estimates of I, 2 5 9 , 3 2 3 , 3 3 4 MAIN TREATM E N T I, 3 2 0 - 3 9 relation to epic II, 1 1 5 , 1 3 2 , 1 3 5 , 144fr., 1 4 9 - 5 0 , 1 5 2 - 3 Drouet, L. F. P. Concertos played by B. I, 3 5 Dryden, John. On eyesight I, 338 on Gorboduc II, 4872. Essay on Dramatic Poesy II, 191 and ra. on Ben Jonson II, 20272. on Shakespeare II, 2 2 2

Index of Names and Subjects Duboeuf, Estelle. B.'s childhood love f o r I. 30-1, 39, 86, 96, 200, 219«., 544; II, 4, 5, 29-30 and rtn. married I, 21871.9n. widowed I, J44 B . writes to I, 544; II, 296 B. revisits II, 247-9, 2 j j , 278 letters of II, 25272., 281 remembered II, 29i DuBoys, A . Cited I, J2, 64, 66, 213 translates Herder I, 107 opposes 1830 147 marriage 219 Dubufe, Claude. Supposed portrait of Β. I, 2IÖW-2I77J. Due, Louis. I, 207 B.'s letter t o I, 5 2 1 - 2 , 524, 527 Apothéose dedicated t o I, 521 his Bastille Column I, 344, 5 2 1 , 542 and Shepherds' Farewell II, 90 Ducré, Pierre. Imaginary chapel-master I I , 90 D'Udine, Jean. O n B.'s Faust I, tftf., 494 identified 4837;. Dufay, Guillaume. I, 56371. Dufrenoy, Mme. I, 37377. Duhamel, G . His fear of mountains I, 44"· Dujardin, Edouard. O n W a g n e r I, 390 Dukas, Paul. I, 1977. Sorcerer's Apprentice I, 162 Dumas, Alexandre. I, 70, 2 7 1 - 2 , O n Shakespeare I, 85, 86 Henri III 104 on Hemani 12877. among the R o mantics I, 232, 258 Antony I, 233 at Esmeralda preimère I, 269 friendship with B. I, 277, 315 his daughter's looks I, 558 on Harriet's death II, 79 Duparc, Henri. I, 13977. and B . I, 38977. Duponchel C . - E . Identified I, 267 and n. opera director 267-8, 272, 344, 507, 522 with Roqueplan I, 507, 512 B.'s behavior toward II, 17 death II, 294-5 Dupont, Alexis. In Cellini I, 309, 319 in Romeo 319 Duprez, G . Cited I, 309; II, 15972. meets B. again in R o m e I, 209 début I, 274 characteristics I, 274 and n. as Cellini I, 293, 295fr.; II, 24077. Durkheim, Emile. Defines crime I, 53072. Duveyrier, Charles. Corresponds with B. I, 136 Dvorak, A . I, 185 Dwiggins, \V. A. On artists I, 51677. Dyson, G . Quoted on B . I, 18772. F. EAR(S). In judging music I, 4. 8 and :>.. 65-6, 35672. Bach's not cut off I, 76; II, 6372. the tone deaf I, 24, 44477.; II, 13172., 32872. of musicians at large I, 76 and n.,

483

7772., 423, 45272.-377.; II, 55-6, 244, 363-4 and tone color See: T i m b r e ; B.'s endowment of I, 34, 37-8, 51, 78, 81, 140, 360-1, (flute) 4 5 5 - 6 ; (muskets) 457*2872.; (timpani) 46377.; acknowledged by critics ( V a n Dieren) I, 38, (Emmanuel) 80, 143; ( K o e c h l i n ) 143; ( K i r b y ) 28271.; ( W a l l a c e ) 4 5 7 - « ; (denied: B o s c h o t ) II, 316; other evidence II, 14772., 262 and 72., 27972. B . makes and judges music b y I. 78, 99. 135. '39. 2 >5. 2 37~8, * 4 ' 72., 346 and 72., 349, 356-9, 400, 4 2 3 - 4 , 429, 445, MAIN TREATMENT 450-60, 47172, 51772., 563, 56872.; II, 61, 9377., 18072. hearing B.'s music requires I, 871., 97, i n and n., 113, 393, 430η., 483, 488, 491, and 77.-492, 50677.; II, 288-9 rank and function o f , in w o r k o f art I, 82, 197, 249, 283 and 72, 321, 362, 46772.; II, 65 and 72., 19072. and eye ( N e w m a n ) I, 1 1 3 and 72.; ( Β . ) I, 172, 1 8 0 - 1 , 198, 4 1 7 - β ; (Beethoven) I, 191W.; ( V e r n o n ) I, 193; (synesthesia) I, 19572.; (Liszt) I, 25171.; (Runge) I, 39672.; ( C h o r l e y ) II, 52; ( W a g n e r ) II, 189 and 77.; Kreutzer shuts his to Beethoven I, 8872., 422 Beethoven composed f o r I, 448 Fntwell, D r . ? D e Q u i n c e y his patient II, 16772. Ehlert, L . I, 42472. Eiffel T o w e r . II, 33 Einstein, Alfred. O n B . and Lesueur I, 14477. his Dictionary on Romeo 328 and 72. on B . as Impressionist I, 38972.; on Troyens ballet II, 14072. Eisf[i]eld, T h e o d o r . Leads Ν . Y . Philharmonic II, 310, 32872. Elgar, Edward. I, 36, 185, 449 E l G r e c o . I, 53772. Eliot, G e o r g e . Meets Β . II, 10772. her strength of will II, 29272. Eliot, T . S. I, 254 Elliot, J . H . Biography of Β . I, 677., on Lélio 221 and 72., 229 on the multiple Β . I, 387-8 on Infant Christ I, 388 on B.'s character II, 28 Ellis, Havelock. II, 202 Ellis, W . A . O n B. and Bayreuth II, 32872. Elssler, Fannv. I, 275 Elwart, Antoine. Speech at B.'s grave II, 29672., 297 Emerson, R . W . Quoted on musicians I, 1077. on " T h i n g s in the saddle" I, 343 Emmanuel, M . Cited I, 1972.; II, 304-5 on B.'s orchestration I, 79-80 on B.'s texture I, 250 on nuances in B. I, 56877. on W a g n e r ' s System II, 196-7

484

Index of Ή ames and Subjects

Emmet, Robert. B.'s interest in I, 98, 107, 523 speech to the ¡udge I, 164η. Encyclopedists (French). See: Enlightenment Enlightenment, The. Inherited by 19th century I, 23, 27, 29, 144, 37off., 379, 39S> 535 musical ideas I, 80, 144, 337η., 454; II, 191, 193 strong reaction toward I, 337«., 390, 39J; II, 191ÎÏ. Epicurus II, 97 Erard, Pierre. Instrument maker II, 32 identified II, 43 Erard-Spontini, Mme. C. II, 42-3 B. visits II, 247 reads Troyens II, 249 and Othello 249 Eroica symphony. Cited I, 154, 182, 184η., 196 genesis I, 375-6 in 1840 I, 404 made over to Bismarck II, 200 B. conducts II, 280 wants in Troad II, 327 Ernst, Alfred. On "electric" chorus in Troyens II, 138, 290 Ernst, Heinrich Wilhelm. In Russia with Β. I, 509 in Paris II, 39 in London II, 109 praised by Β. II, 262η. Escudier, L. I, 4672., 504, musical brothers and brokers I, 51 iff. on B. Te Deum II, 64 Estelle. See: Duboeuf Estelle et Némorin. Quoted from I, 39 libretto set by B. 56, 107 set by Cherubini 9177. themes used again 94, 114 Etex, A. I, 207 on hike with Β. 210-1 Euclid. I, 449; II, 314 Eugénie de Montijo, Empress of the French. Marriage II, 78 at B. concert II, 113 B. converses with II, 123 her beauty 12372. leader of fashion II, 158, 229, 231 Euripides. As subject of biography I, 17 and n. his mood and B.'s II, 144 B. on Alcestis II, 210 and 260 Europe Littéraire, V. See: Bohain Euryanthe. B. first hears I, 68 and praises II, 115 failure II, 125 Exhibition (s) Paris (1844) I, 443ff.; II, 157 (1849) 548 London (1851) Crystal Palace I, 362; 560; II, 3377. musical instruments I, 560; II, 32-3 B. attends II, 32fr. projects concert for II, 34 and 72. Paris (1855) II, 85, 108 B. leads concerts II, io8ff. judges instruments II, 112 medal to B. II, 121 Tahitian music at II, 124 and n. Paris (1867) Crowds at II, 275-6 Paris (1889) Allusion to II, 3377.

Expression. See: Dramatic music, expression and characterization; Music, psychology; Program F FAGUET, E M I L E . O n B a l z a c

I, 38477.

Falcon, Marie Cornélie. I, 260 Farren, H . W . Identified II, 10677. on biographic broadcast of B. II, 1277. Fauré, Gabriel. Requiem I, 286 B.'s influence on I, 464 influence in nineties II, 303 Faust (Goethe's). Quoted I, 87, io6ff. Nerval's translation I, 87, 96 B. begins setting I, 96fï. popularity in Paris I, 96-7, 214 Bohain's I, 94, 96, 97, 157, 16677. Ferrand's I, 119 musical subject 1, 11877., 181; literary II, 146 Goethe publishes with Singspiele I, 107 Gochhausen ms. 109 first drafts 2 1 1 Romantic prototype I, 87, 376-7, 39777., 494-5, 510; II, 94 B. resumes music for I, 438, 47off., 483ff. B.'s handling I, 49off. B. cites II, 291 Paris turns away from I, 505ff. Goethe on I, 97; II, 8177. Schumann's I, 492 Liszt's I, 16677., 492; II, 19777. Favre, ? Boyhood friend of B. I, 3477. Ferrand, Humbert. Cited I, 52, 58, 103, 119, 121, 122; II, 157, 203, 25877.-977., 26377., 276 writes Greek Revolution I, 65 Francs-Juges I, 68, 90; II, 146, -250 projected visit to B. I, 96, 200, 512 parents turn against B. I, 98 political views I, 147 political writings I, 512 and 77. marriage I, 213, 219 reunion with B. I, 219 Harold inscribed to him I, 246, 34177. devotion between B. and him II, 19, 206, 209, 246, 249, 318 declining health and fortunes II, 159, 236 rekindled poetry II, 244, 249 brother's death II, 251 foster son's troubles II, 278, 295 murder of wife II, 295 death 295-6 Ferranti, Ζ. de. On Β. I, 42477., 433 Fétis, F. J. Cited II, ¡66/7. on Β. I, 92, 97, 105, 151, 19977.; II, 107 and η., 131 friend of Moke family I, 12477., 23277. B. addresses I, 9277., 152 B. attacks in Lelio 232-3 retaliates 233, 242, 25077. on tonality I, 5077. variable views on B. I, 550; II, 70, 107 and ν., ¡31, 255 on Meyerbeer I, 55177. translates Wagner II, 170, 17877. on B. and Gluck II, 255 Feuerbach, Ludwig. And Wagner I, 390 Fidelio. Β. on grave-digging scene I, 173; other parts I, 41777., 427, 270 in Paris I,

Index of Names 299; II, 174, 179, 211 and Romeo and Juliet I, 323n. and Damnation I, 486, 495· 5°3 A d . A d a m o n I, 497η. and P a e r II, 17 and n. W a g n e r c o n d u c t s II, 6m. a n d addresses B. u p o n II, 174, '79 Field, C y r u s . L a y s A t l a n t i c cable II, 27J Fielding, H e n r y . I, 17n. o n Tom Jones I, 3 Í ' Fieschi, G i u s e p p e . I, 267, 273 Fifth Symphony (Beethoven's). H o f f m a n n o n I, 156η. and F a t e 196 finale I, 365η. Β. plays II, 42, 280 " n e w r e a d ings" II, 58 B. o n b r i d g e t o finale II, 266-7 B- ° n s c h e r z o II, 290-1 w a r h o r s e II, 329 Figaro, Le. O n B.'s first c o n c e r t I, 92, 94

133, 151

on Fantastique

F i n k , G . O n B.'s s t r u c t u r e I, i n n . F i o r e n t i n o , P . - A . II, 26977. Fitzgerald, F . Scott. O n Shakespeare II, "5 F l a u b e r t , G . Cited I, 19n., 393; II, 231 against t h e b o u r g e o i s I, 398, 467, 530; II, 229 Education Sentimentale I, 429η., ( q u o t e d ) 535 and n., 542«. P r o u s t o n I, 4297z. Bouvard et Pécuchet I, 512; II, 1197?. on B.'s career a n d c h a r a c t e r II, 22, 269 a n d Vivier's a n t h o l o g y of b r o m i d e s II, 11971. at Orpheus II, 168

and 72. Madame

Bovary

II, 229 Sa-

lammbô II, 231, 232 and η., 240η. f r i e n d s h i p w i t h Β. II, 237 and η. a t t a c k e d II, 27677. o n Damnation II, 303 a n d η. M m e . A r n o u x his ideal love I, $42η. F l e u r y , Jules. See: C h a m p f l e u r y Florian, J.-P.-C. de. Identified I, 39 and n. verses of Estelle ( q u o t e d ) I, 39; j ó , 917J. F l o t o w , F r i e d r i c h v o n . Cited I, 55771. Martha I, 51572. Der Förster II, 167 and η. F l u t e . Β. p r o f i c i e n t on I, 34-5 a n d n., 41; II, 33 as b r i b e 45 possible c a r e e r 72 B. teaches 72 i m p r o v e m e n t s in I, 77; II, 33 and n. - a n d - t r o m b o n e c h o r d s

and

485

Subjects

MAIN

TREATMENT ( s )

I, 4 9 5 - 5 0 3 ;

II,

340-50 as development I, 499fr. in symp h o n i c p o e m II, 198 and 71.-99 s o n a t a li, 344, 348 symphony II, 367, 370 unity II, 348, 349». F o r n i e r , M m e . Estelle. See: D u b o e u f F o r s y t h , Cecil. I, 25077. Fouillée, A l f r e d . I, 25η. F o u l d s , J o h n . O n B.'s music II, 290 and n. F o u q u e , O c t a v e . O n B. and L e s u e u r I, 14471.

F o w l e r , H . W . O n special p l e a d i n g I, 1777. F r a n c k , César. Characteristics I, 2277. and R e i c h a 71, 139 a n d C h e r u b i n i 9172. a n d " p r o g r a m " 185 and d r a m a t i c s y m p h o n y 326, 33777. at B.'s c o n c e r t s I, 34077. p i e t y

104 m a r r i a g e

II,

II,

21477.

B. o n pianistic w o r t h I I , · 26177. his pupils II, 303 F r a n c o n i , A d o l p h e . I, 445-7 F r a n z - J o s e p h of A u s t r i a - H u n g a r y . II, 27Í F r e d e r i c k t h e G r e a t . I, 7877. inspires I , 37777.

Goethe

F r e d e r i c k W i l l i a m I V ( K i n g of P r u s s i a ) . B. m e e t s I, 433 has B. p l a y e d 437, 509, 511 receives d e d i c a t i o n of Treatise I, 438 a t B e e t h o v e n c e l e b r a t i o n I, 471 invites B. 472 i n t r o d u c e s B. t o T s a r i n a I, 508 a n d 77. loses reason II, 124 Freischütz, Der. Mutilated in Paris I, 67, ill r e c e i v e d 299 suit a b o u t II, 77 a t m o s p h e r e of I, 68, 80, 99 a n d 77., 180-1 r e v i v a l

(1840)

I , 344, 405ff.; I I ,

10, 77 a n d 77., 165, 207 B.'s e a r n i n g s f r o m I, 433; II, 210 " D e n of W o l v e s " I, 436 See also: T y s z k i e w i c z F r e n c h R e v o l u t i o n (1789). Musical t r a d i t i o n I , i l , 34 a n d 77., 138ff., 146, 156,

266, 279, 287, 351 c u l t u r a l influence I, 23,

163

and

77.,

165,

377ff.,

526

in

56

D a u p h i n é I, 24ff. M m e . de Staël o n 47 f e a r of t y r a n n v 9577. and 1848 I,

B. describes t i m b r e I, 455-6 and n. acoustical reasons 458/7. h a r m o n i c use

F r e n c h R e v o l u t i o n (1830) P o r t e n t s I, 61,

I,

283 a n d

77., 284, 458«., 465, I I ,

529,

552;

II,

3877.

87, 104, 127fr., 132 d i s c u s s e d

456

Fondation Berlioz. II, 304 and n. Forkel, J. N . O n

524-5,

Bach

I I , 6372., 22471.

F o r m ( s ) . R e l a t i o n t o c o n t e n t s I, 9, 176-7; II, 364fr. in m e l o d y I, i i 2 f f . basic r e q u i r e m e n t s of I, 19177.,· II, 367-8 c o h e r e n t e I, 177, 197, 329/7., 498, 501, 564; II, 368 d r a m a t i c I, 82-3, 108-9, " i f f · , :46ft'., 3;off. elements of I, 465 relation t o "effects" I, 466?;.

I,

135-7;

11, 83 c u l t u r a l effects I, 146, 148, 202, 214, 232, 272-3, 280, 360, 44077.; I I , 228

political a f t e r m a t h I, 147, 150, 210, 212, 213, 218, 240 Italian c o u n t e r p a r t I, 20iff., 204 declining liberties I, 255-6, 264, 402, 443

F r e n c h R e v o l u t i o n (1848) Beginnings outside F r a n c e I, 505 in F r a n c e I, 516 Paris riots I, 505, 520, 524, 542 B. senses

4

Index of Names and Subjects

86

approaching I, 513 outbreak 517fr., spread 518 June Days 520, 524 political aftermath J24, 546-7 cultural effects 1, S ' 8 , 533-5. 54*s II, 113 Queen of Sheba II, 210 and »2., temperament I, 70; II, 28/2. friendship 211 on Beatrice II, 218-9 sings Troy ens with Schiller I, 434 and n. discovery II, 249 pallbearer of B.'s II, 296 on b y Β . I , 87, 96, 107, 164, 397η.; I I , 4 Italian landscape II, 31772. Β. writes to I, 97 and n. on Delacroix Goya, Francisco. Cited II, 364 on David I, 97 on Shakespeare Π, 73, 223η., 301 I, 396 as Romanticist 396 quoted by Β. I, io6ff. remembered by Grabo, Carl. I, ιηη. I, 434, 438 Lobe calls on I, 41971. WalGrace, H. On Bach I, 57072. purgisnacht I, 107 and Nature I, 165, Gray, Cecil. Cited I, 12 on "B. problem" 16677., 494-5 Werther I, 87, 203, 395«. I, 5 on B. as melodist I, 13; II, 286 "Italian Journey" I, 209-10, 212 Der on Requiem I, 284 on B.'s orchestraFischer I, 10877., 22off. B.'s "secular tion I, 489 on B.'s counterpoint I, scripture" I, 33577.; II, 26 Goetheana at 567, 568 on Wagner II, 183 on Liszt II, Yale I, 10677. a Romanticist I, 370, 371, 198-9 B., Liszt, and Wagner compared 372, 37777., 381, 395-7 Autobiography II, 198-9 on B. and the future II, 286, I, 37777.; II, 22372. religion I, 396; II, 99 309 Goetschius, Percy. I, 1977. Identified Gray, Thomas. I, 372 25177. on B.'s melodies I, 117 and n. Gazza Ladra, La. I, 57 overture 240 on B.'s structure 251 on B.'s counter- Greek (s) (ancient). Their music I, 58, point I, 568 144-5, 156, 361 and amphitheaters II, Goldman, Richard Franko. On Paganini 328, 330 their poetry I, 16377. revered I, 31372. edits and conducts Funeral by Romantics I, 65 their drama I, 22 Symphony I, 350ÎÏ., 358-9; II, 324 de5. 32I> 359. 4° 8 ; H. " 9 and n., 133, plores its neglect II, 152 13672., 153, 328 as critics I, 19377., 380 Goldsmith, Oliver. DeQuincey on I, 37577. and π., 396 — Anthology II, 36172. Gombert, Ν. I, 185 Greenwood, Edwin. I, 2537». Goncourt, E. and J. de. Cited II, 269 on Gregory, H. On modern ego II, 2672. nature and art I, 44η. naturalist-sym- Grenier, Felix. On B.'s character II, 24 bolist writers I, 38777. on Badenand n. Baden II, 71η. on 1830 and Second Giitry, André. Cited I, 371 on his own Empire II, 228, 229 and »., 241 scoring I, 81 B. defends Mozart against Gordon, Jan. On Cézanne II, 25077. II, 16072. concealed orchestra II, Gossec, F. J. Cited I, 371 and trombone 32972. I, 77, and 77., 287 and 77., 288 Tuba Grieg, Edvard. Peer Gynt suite I, 56272. minim I, 81, 28772. Te Deum 187η. Griepenkerl, R. W . And B.'s Faust I, "Gothic" tradition. I, 21, 37, 130, 165-6, 197; II, 82 identified I, 433, 43772. 257; II, 222, 223 and 72. revived I, 165, owns scores II, 4272. pamphlet on Β. I, 37iff. and Requiem I, 280, 286, 287 and 437; II, 4777. prepares concerts II, 72 Romanticism I, 38311., 389, 397 one on B.'s personality II, 24 and 72. meaning of word I, 48777. Grote, Harriet. II, 41 Gottschalk, ^Louis Moreau II, 26272., 310 Grout, Donald J. On Cellini I, 30272. on and 72. Troy ens II, 115 and 72., 14472. on opera I I , 21172. Gould, Dr. George M. On astigmatism Grove, Sir George. On B. and Beethoven I I , 12072. II, 43 and n.y 272 his Dictionary Gounet, Blanc. Kills Mme. Ferrand II, estimate of B. in 1879 I| 1 3 on 295 B. conducts I, 266, 326*2., 514, 546, II, 11 j, 119, 133n., 280-1 reforms opera I, 311, 326 "impious" theory of 556;

Index

488

of Names

Beethoven I, 184η.; on B.'s orchestration II, 359 on Form II, 366 and n. Gruneisen, C. L. On Β. I, 517, 560 Guéroult, Adolphe. On B.'s genius I, Guiccioli, Countess. B. meets I, 212 and rt. Guinot, Eugène. Death II, 206 Guiraud, J. B. Classmate of B.'s I, 73 and n. Guiraud, Ernest. Son of preceding, identified I, 7371. assists Β. II, 7371. and teaches Debussy II, 2867:. Guitar. Cited II, 334, 351 B. plays I, 35, 82, (classic instrument described) I, 35n.; B. entertains in Italy I, 210 influence on harmony I, 3571., 38, 457 and τι. Β. teaches I, 72 and τι., 104, 120 Ronsard's I, 84 Luther plays I, 31872. Paganini and Β. I, 345 owed to Clio I, 42877. B.'s writing for I, 35//., 7277., 487 joke about B. s I, 512 Guizot, F. Dismissed from lectureship I, 53 writes history 104 in 1830 revolution 136 befriends Vernet 202 Prime Minister 343, 400 ousted in 1848 I, 517 quoted on democracy I, 412 on B.'s personality II, 15, 23, 28 on Ritter II, 12371.

Gunsbourg, C. Tampers with Damnation I, 48471. Gurney, Edmund. On function of music I, 1787;. defines Wagner's error II, 19577. Gutmann, James. Cited and thanked II, 342η. Gymnase Musical. I, 267, 521 H A. Cited I, 49; II, 35 founds Concerts du Conservatoire 88 identified 8877. conducts early works of B. 105, 241 refuses to 242 insists on conducting I, 277, 40iff. style of conducting II, 56 and 72., 57 plays Beethoven I, 88, 8972., 154 B. sends him Fantastique 205 plays Rob Roy 237 Lacrymosa 293 snuffbox incident I, 277-8 and n.; II, 15777. his post vacant I, 414 intrigues of I, 27871., 401, 440, 44272., 443 wrong tempi I, 27271., 441; II, 57 B. cities in Treatise I, 45671. Hadas, M. I, 1771. Hadow, Sir H . On B.'s rhythm and modulation I, 143 on race in art I, 18572. on B.'s harmony I, 45971. on Wagner preludes II, 17272. HABENECK, F .

and

Subjects

Haggin, B. H . Cited I, 13; II, 311 on B.'s mind I, 21; on tempi in Harold symphony II, 66-7 on Troyens II, 140 Hainl, George. Friendship with B. I, 447; II, 14 at Conservatoire II, 245 Haitzinger, Anton. 1, 125 Hale, Philip. On Sy?nphonie Fantastique I, 3n. Halévy, J. F. Cited I, 270; II, 16071. B. on La June I, 265. 267rt. Kästner on 455 B. plays I, 444-5, 556; II, 208 Guido and Ginevra I, 289 and burial of Napoleon I, 400 Charles VI chorus I, 444-5, 527 B. cites in Treatise I, 45671. Val d'Andorre I, 40971., 548 Magicienne II, 12877. on Bizet II, 169 death 11, 211 Hallays, A. On B. as critic Π, 267 and n. Hallé, Sir Charles. I, 278η., 34071. in Roman Carnival I, 442 in 1848 I, 52471. brings Damnation to London Ii, 308 Halm, August. On B.'s "music dramas" I, 485; II, 134 identified I, 48571., II, 307 on "Pandemonium" I, 490 on Amen fugue 569 Hamerton, P. G . O n teaching art I, 14077. on Intellectual Life II, 205 on George Eliot II, 29272. on Preferable Error II, 342 Hannlet (Shakespeare's). Cited I, ejfF., 89, 174 Coleridge on I, 13071. B. on I, 201, 222-3, 397 «·. 5 " . 522; II, 98, 155, 22077. Horatio I, 222, 397 and Tennyson's Maud I, 22471. Princc's temperament I, 223, 22477., 226; II, 155 libretto proposed to Β. I, 246 soliloquies I, 483, 500 quoted I, 56271. misknown II, 73 B. reads aloud II, 251, 281 as great as Iliad!' II, 34171. Handel, G. F. I, 21, 36, 142, 520; II, 27 orchestration I, 76 gunfire I, 7972. sacred music I, 107; II, 104 Israel in Egypt I, 173 imitative effects I, 173, 180 B.'s opinion of I, 345 and η.; II, 264-5 repertory I, 346 in England II, 27, 44 commemorations I, 36172. B. conducts I, 40iff.; II, 34, 113 Koechlm on I, 459 affinity with Β. I, 570; II, 112, 134 and 77., 265 Alceste II, 210 Hannibal. I, 43, 217; II, 12171., 143 Hanslick, Eduard. Cited I, 15377.; II, 26177. meets B. 479 on B.'s success I, 399; II, 1171. on his charactcr II, 1571. on B. and Wagner II, 18077., 257 Hanska-Balzac, Mme. I, 507, 559 Haraszti, E. On B.'s Rákóczy march I 47777., 52372.,· II, 1072. Hardy, Thomas. Cited I, 37 The Well

Index of Names and Subjects Beloved I, 124η., (quoted) II, 114-$ bitterness II, 20 on Much Ado II, 103 on himself II, 22471. Dynasts II, 341 Harman, Carter. On Funeral symphony I. 353

Harmony. B.'s early views I, 129, 460 restores its strength in French music I, 143 later views I, 4J6-60 B. on history of I, 423 B. on Beethoven's 424 in B. generally 452, 457d n., 19577., 485; II, 148 unsuitcd to outdoors I, 241 and 72., 346 and n., 348, 481 routine habits II, 54ft., 74, 152, 254 divided tastes in I, 244, 364-5, 41 iff. ("musics") 420, 423, 4677;., 468; II, 151, 363-4, 347 commodity' by the yard I, 271 its cost I, 540 and η., II, 44 and 72., 207 and v. B. defines I, 274. 416ft., 46772.; II, 73-4, 103 Narrow repertory I, 345, 346, 420, 4 : 2 an art of adjustment II, 66, 122 abstract o r concrete see subheading: mathematics; monumental I, 359ff., II, 34, 55, 63 and 72.-64 See also: F.uphonia; "Mediterranean" II, 200 "pure" I, 171 flF.; 18672., 42372.; II, 201, 34472. and architecture I, 35972.; II, 19572. vulgarity in I, 35572., 364 and 72., 365 cffect on the

Index of Names and Subjects groundlings, I, 274, 417η., 427, 46772.; II, 20 Music Drama. See: Dramatic Music, Dramatic Symphony, Opera (genre), and Wagner, R . Musset, Alfred de. On death and glory I, )2 and n. habit of life 71 translates De Quincey 166 and Baudelaire I, 389η. Rhine poem I, 399 in 1848 I, 5*4»· Myers, C. S. O n psychology of music I. 193 Myers, Robert M. On Handel I, 345n.

499

Nelson, Lord. I, 376 death II, 228 Neoclassicism. In 19th century I, 386, 389. 393; Π, 121, 18172., 231, 257

Nerval, Gérard de. Among t h e R o mantics I, 48, 258, translation of Faust 87, 97, 127 on folk music 10872. claque for Hemani 127 edits Monde Dramatique 26172. and dream world I, 381, 397 "El Desdichado" II, 27 and n. defends Wagner II, 12672., 201 Nettel, Reginald. On London orchestras I I , 877J.

New Way to Pay Old Debts (Massinger's). I, 516 Ν Newlin, Dika. On B.'s Romeo I, 3287232972. on Beethoven 32972. NAPOLEON (BONAPARTE). Cited I , 24, 46; Newman, Ernest. Cited I, 12 on B. II, 164 pattern for genius I, 23, 28, misknown I, 5 o n his true character 4872., J4, 56, 202, 217, 266-7, 34-6. 350, and appearance II, 22 on B.'s contribu375**·. 395. 4 ° ' . 4>5. 525. 561 and n.; tion i m . edits Memoirs I, 2071., 27872.; II, 12, 316 a n d B. c o m p a r e d I, 349-50; on B.-Wagner relation II, 17972.-18072. II, Sin.; II, 183 Hundred Days I, 32-3 on B.'s melodies 113 and n. on B.'s death I, 45 censorship I, 49, 219«. and form I, 159, 428, 49972. on B.'s Faust Lesueur I, 54 and orientalism I, 57n. I, 49072. o n Troyens I I , 141 a n d 72. and Vernet I, 202 and Prince Jerome o n B . ' s l i t e r a r y a r t I , 56571.; I I , 22, 5472. li, 15672. on B. as critic II, 25872.-972. on program Legend and following I, 32, 62, 276, music I, 18372. on history of music I, 346, 349, 382, 399, 402; II, 39, 122, 421 on Wagner II, 4872. on B.'s har156«. "whiff of grapeshot" I, 65 coromony I, 459-60 pioneer B. scholar II, nation music 79 life b y Hazlitt 87 309 Unconscious Beethoven I, 561 Paris burial I, 349, 400 statue in Newman, John Henry. And religion I, Grenoble II, 295 B.'s music associated 39Ó; Π, 9? with I, 154, 196, 217, 228, 349, 363, Newman, Sir Isaac. Sense of persecution 563η. and locomotives I, 349η. sentenII, 2072. tiousness I, 374 debunked I, 404 Nicholas I of Russia. II, 28272. Napoleon III. Cited II, 154η. Italian Nicolai, Otto. I, 55772. as conductor II, Carbonaro I, 204 coup of 1840 I, 349 57 elected in 1848 I, 519, 546, 547 Empire Nicolson, Harold. O n biography II, 315 mooted I, 546 and n., 552; II, 38, 46-7 Niecks, F. On Program Music I, 18472. coup tf état of 1851 II, 37 and 71.-38». On B.'s orchestration 21472. contacts with Β. I, 554; II, 40, 113, Niedermeyer, A. L. Cited I, 558 Stradella 119, 121, 130 and 77., 157, 164, 207 I, 269 fails 272 B. studies Mass by II, 118 vague promises II, 39, 46-7 Empire Nietzsche, F. Cited I, 1972. amor fati voted for II, 49 marriage II, 78 I, 23572.; II, 145 necessity of mask II, Crimean W a r II, 80, 83-4; Austrian 13 on art II, 100 and Wagner Π, 182 II, 155, 158 Prussian II, 162, 302 Imunderstanding of B. II, 200-1 Mystery perial atmosphere II, 38 and n., 39-40, of Saint Sylvester II, 200 on culture 85, 116, 122, 125, 156, 204, 228-31, 275 philistines II, 340 proscriptions II, 3872.-97/.; 107 hates Nikisch, A. Conducts B. II, 20071. music II, 115 B.'s proud letter to II, Ninth Symphony (Beethoven's). Cited 130 and 72. and Prince Jerome II, 15671. I, 100, 182, 395; II, 347 B.'s analysis Tocqueville on II, 15777. collapse of I, 143-4, 424> 4 2 5; II, 262 characterized regime II, 302 I, 15772., 266; II, 131, 190 played in Naturalism. Offshoot of Romanticism I, Paris I, 214, 320 386ff„ 397; I I , 284 i n B . I , 388

Neate, Charles. I, 191 n. Nélaton, Dr. Auguste. Verdict on B.'s health II. 294

Influence oii B. I, 22472.-22572., 247, 266, 320-1, 326, 361, 425, 503; II, 285,

349 form I, 143-4, 3 2 9 " · > 4*4; H, ·9° recitative in I, 328-972., 352-3 finale

Index of Names and

500

"vulgar" I, j6jn. Adam on I, 497η. Β. conducts II, 43, 44, 62, 280 text unlike original Ode II, 82η. Wagner's use II, 33571. Noailles, M. de. 1, i 2 j Noailles, Mme. de. I, 16371. Nodier, Charles. And young Romantics I, 48, 62, 84 Nottebohm, Martin. I, 182η. Noufflard, G . On Romeo symphony I, 3*3 Nourrit, Adolphe. Identified I, 50, 275 singing arouses Belgians I, 147, 275 praises Β. I, 233 and Lelio 2 7 J nervous breakdown I, 274-5; II, 159η. death I, 2 7 j B. remembers II, 1J9 Novello, Clara. II, 43 Nuances. Added to in 1700's I, 80 new ones in Β. I, 133; II, 66, 67, 331 opposite in simultaneous parts I, 81-2, 4656, 567n., 568 and η.; II, 67 Rousseau on I, 37 m. exist in scale I, 467 O Oberen. Cited I, 68, 407; II, 125, (and Wagner) II, 18672. B. plays overture II, 42 a success II, 122 O'Connell, Daniel. I, 272 O'Connor, Feargus. I, 412 Offenbach, J. Cited I, 10772.; II, 204 B. on I, 425; II, 275 honors B. and his music I, 506; II, 8472., 24172. expresses decadence II, 156 Orpheus in Hell II, 211 parodies Β. II, 241 and n. Ogdon, J. A . H . On B.'s melodies I, 118 on B.'s morbidity 2047». Ohnewald, Joseph. I, 286 Olivier, Juste. O n Harriet Smithson I, 8j77. Olivier, Sir Laurence. Film Hamlet II, 22472. Ollivier, Emile. Liszt's son-in-law II, 128 in opposition to Empire II, 130 Onslow, G . O n B.'s Eight Scenes I, 98 on Francs-Juges 132 elected to Academy I, 413-4 Opera (genre). Cited I, 145, 152, 156, 183-4, '97 Wagnerian I, 156, 336-7 and 71., 362; II, 152, i9off. French and Grand I, 214 and n., 261-2, 29972.; II, 160 -oratorio I, 226ff., 229; II, 133-4 librettos I, 29772.; II, 132fr. Β. reforms I, 299ft.; H, 114, 117, íjzñ., 152-3, 154 Marmontel on I, 33722. Vischer's reform 1, 390 and 72. Sir W . Davies on I, 15272. and Bach II, 188 Opera (Paris). Rebuilt in 1820 I, 47, 49

Subjects

aids government II, 39 B. attends I, 48, 51, 66 lends its personnel 64ÍT-, 88, 120, 260 orchestra in 18th century I, 7872. monopoly I, 96, 119, 231, 23272., 271, 522, 539; II, 128 accepts Atala I, 132 at loose ends I, 132, 344, 473, 480; II, 120 B. gives concerts at I, 150 Veron's directorship and Lully's 232 and n. Pressed to accept Β. I, 234, 258, 271; II, 120, 207, 208, 209, lampoons B. I, 258-9 its character 260-1, 265, 290, 344; II, 38, 24271., 254 changes directors I, 241, 267, 401, 507, 511; II, 208, 232 Mozart on I, 29172.-29272. B. writes about I, 293; II, 40, 327 B. congratulated by II, 40 B. excluded from I, 369, 507 B. involved in suit II, 77fr. Opéra Comique (Paris). Cited I, 132; II, 122, 175 refuses Benvenuto I, 257 monopoly I, 266 "owns" Freischütz I, 40572. engages Marie Recio I, 439 B. hires for Damnation I, 504^. cash intake I, 50672. B. on II, 38 and Beatrice II, 232 Opium. In art I, 153, 165, 16672., 222 in medicine I, 513; II, 120 and 72., 167 and 72. Orchestration. O f Symphonie Fantastique I, 3, 19272. Β. codifies I, 11, 8172., 137, 241, 346, 361, 448-69 B.'s intuition about I, 3872., 81, 82, 143, 145, 146 B. undertakes to teach I, 543; II, 127 B. and Gluck's I, 50-1, 7572., 417fï-, 454ÍF., 458; II, 210 B.'s innovations in I, 81 and 72., 133, 18972., 19272., 21472., 248, 28272., 283 and 72., 436, 437, 563fr.; II, 8772., 141 B.'s general concern with I, 53, 55, 35off., 424; II, 210 History of 73-83, 424, 449-53; II, 33 and 72., 337 characteristics of B.'s scoring I, 248, 394, 428, 456, 461 and 72.ff., 467; II, 88, 217; (and Russian School's) II, 283 and n.; (and Mozart's) II, 29172.; compared with Wagner's I, 394; II, ]86, 193, 195 B.'s use of timpani I, 192η., 282 and 72., 28472., 463 and 72., 508, and 72.; II, 6572., 66n., 141, 32272. B.'s for military band 1, 350, 354-6 Rousseau on I, 37172. Wellesz on I, 56372. Mendelssohn on B.'s I, 435 Schumann on B.'s I, 43572. Rimsky on I, 45172. "classical," defined I, 46672.; il, 195 relation to harmony I, 452-3, 456 and 72. Orleans, Duke of. Befriends Vernet I, 202 artistic tastes repressed 256, 362, 525 friendly to B. 260, 277, 412 killed 412, 413 widow as regent I, 517

index of Names and Subjects

501

Partch, Harry. Π, 344 and n. Orpheus (Gluck's). B.'s early interest in I, 50, 58 in concert form I, 326; II, Pascal, Blaise. Denied choice of career I, 36 on poetry I, 109 on man's fate I, 280-1 B. on overture I, 418 B. on 379 on authors II, 269 flute solo I, 4 J J - 6 B. directs II, 165, Pasdeloup, Jules. Founds orchestra II, 207, 251 and comments on II, 281 124 identified Π, 124η. plays Β. I, derided by dilettanti II, 168n. success 534ft.-5ft.,· II, 231, 245, 250, 254, (DamII, 168, 169, 251 piano score II, 169 nation) II, 303 at B.'s funeral II, 296 in Euphonia II, 335 Pastoral symphony. Cited I, 155, 182 Orsini, Antonio. I, 308». and π.; II, 367 B. on "storm" I, 172-3 Osborne, George. Identified I, 27J and w., on birds 174ft. o n whole work II, 235 hearsay on Requiem 278». at B.'s conits program I, 155ft·, 182η., 184ft. and certs I, 34071. honors B. I, 506 and Harold in Italy 247 performed in Fantastique II, 6871. with B. and Nourrit Paris (1840) I, 345 B. conducts II, 280 I, 275; I I , 159ft. fondness for II, 285 Ossian. I, 374 See also: Bardes, Les Patti, Adelina. II, 279 Oudinot, General. I, 552 Othello (Shakespeare's). I, 84, 193, 194 Paul III. On Cellini I, 30571. Paul, Elliot. Quoted on Requiem I, 15η. B.'s fondness for I, 516; II, 220η. Β. Paul et Virginie. Read by Β. I, 63 by alludes to II, 147η.; quotes II, 232 reads Hazlitt 164ft. discussed by Chateaualoud 249 comments on 249 briand I, 164 musical fragment by B. 164 and ft. other annotations by B. Ρ II, 100 PACINI, GIOVANNI. I, 4 1 6 Paulin, Louis. Founds music school II, I2 Paer, Ferdinando. Death of I, 317 ( 7 Beethoven and his Leonora Π, 17 Péguy, Charles. On Hugo and Napoleon and n. II, 39 and ft. on religion II, 95 Paganini, Achille. I, 312-3, 314; II, 157 Pclletan, Fanny. Helps edit Gluck II, Paganini, Nicolo. Cited I, 17η, 242, 254ft., 165-6 identified II, 16571. 271 character I, 312η., 313 andft.,314; Pellico, Silvio. My Prisons dramatized II, 13 guitarist I, 35ft. praises Β. I, 233, I* *7$ 295η., 3 ' 3 . 3 ' 7 · 345"- commissions Percy, Bishop. Reliques I, 371 viola concerto 1, 242-3 declines to play Pergolesi, G . B. I, 64 Harold 247-8, 257 gift to Β. I, 312ft., Perttins, Francis. On Funeral symphony 342 B. describes 313-4 in Nice 341 I. 353"· death 344 article by Β. I, 344; II, 55 Perle, George. Adagio for strings I, 324η. B. conducts II, 280 Perraud, Jean. Bust of Β. II, 267ft. Page, Captain. I, 552 Perrin, Emile. Directs Opera II, 232 Paisiello, Giovanni. B. on II, 211 Pal, Camille. Brother-in-law of Β. I, 217, Perseus. Artistic symbol I, 270ft., 294, 298η., 305-6; II, 36η., 74 and ft., 185 558 his conversation I, 218-9 greets B. Petronius Arbiter. Π, 156 at celebration II, 295 Palestrina. His technique I, 140 B. con- Peyre, Henri. On B.'s Funeral symphony I, 266ft. ducts I, 266, 40iff.; II, 23ft., 264 musical Peyser, H. F. On Troy ens II, 150». subject I, 308ft. B. accused of tampering with Í, 405-6; II, 77ft. B. on Im- Pfitzner, Hans. Palestrina I, 30871.; II, 134 and B. L, 464 properia II, 264 and ft. Philharmonic (London). And Β. I, 271, Pannain, Guido. I, 12 on B. and Liszt I, 171 3427z., 4j8; II, 51, 87 and n. New — (London). Ganz conducPantomime. Analogy with music I, 178ff, tor L, 515ft. founded in 1851 II, 35ÎÏ., 195, 334; II, 196 hypocritic 1,144 and τι.; 40 artistic success 42ff. finances II, II, 122, 136 and n n 219 in Wagnerian 44 and n. offer to Β. II, 71-2, 130 opera IL, 136 η., 171-2 Philharmonic (New York). Π, 246ft., 310 Parish-Alvars, Elias. I, 433; II, 26271. Philharmonique (Paris). B. founds I, Parisienne, La (song). I, 148 and η. 554IT. appraised 555 decline 560 and n. Parry, Sir Η. I, 185ft., '93 death II, 38 Joachim plays for II, 3771. Parsifal. Cited I, 224ft., 394 Prelude I, Pasdeloup starts from II, 124 and ft. 280; II, 185 Enchantment II, 185 Philidor, F.-A.(?) II, 243

502

Index of Names and Subjects

Philistine ( s ) . Defined I, 6 1 - 2 , 361, 378-9, 526 attacked by Romantics I, l t f S · , * 4 4 - i . 343. 347. 377! H, ' 8 , 55 and b y others I, 398; II, 126 and » . and industry I, 343-4, 505; H. 39 a t work I, 132 M r . Podsnap I, 362 modern regimes necessarily I, 2 J J , 348, 360 journalists support I, 403, J08, J I 2 culture — II, 360, 361 Photiadès, C. O n B.'s esthetic parable II, 7471. Piano. B. did not compose f o r I, un., 73-4, 80, 82, 94 identified with music itself I, 35-6 as percussion 151 n., 224 and. 72., 2257:., 22671. relation to orchestral composition I, 78-90, 82, 457, 459, 460 and η., 464, 5 1 7 and η.; II, IIOT/., 12 3, '54~5. '58 and η. Piano-organ (Liszt's). II, 3672. Pietism. I, 370 Piccinni, Nicola. Cited I, 33772. friend of Carle Vernet 1, 216 Dido subject II, 117 B . on II, 264 Pickett, William Vose. A n d new architecture II, 3372. Pierné, Gabriel. Quoted on Harold in Italy I, 248 on B.'s style I, 429 and 11., on B.'s orchestration I, 46372., 464, 46J, 468-9; II, 6J72. Pifferali. Β . comments on I, 215 in Harold symphony 250-1 origin of name I, 25072. T u r n e r paints I, 2437;. Pillet, Léon. Opera director I, 401, 480 displaced I, 507 B . on I, 5 1 1 death II, 294-5 Pingard, ? I, 13472. Piston, W a l t e r . O n counterpoint I, 24772., 57172. Pitney, Robert. O n Harold symphony I, 25172. on Romeo 334 and n. Pitt, William (the Y o u n g e r ) . I, 376 Pius I X . I, 552; II, 3872. Pius X . I, 286 Pixis, J . P. I, 34072., 42072., 55772. arranges and plays in Roman Carnival I, 442; II, 10972. Pizzetti, I. Fedra I, 33772. Plato. Symposium I, 12472. on tragedy and comedy I, 396 as a god II, 97 Pteyel, Camille. Suitor of Mile. M o k e I, 125-6, 149 engaged to her 204 repudiates her 268 Pleyel, Ignaz. B . hears quartets I, 37; II, 972. firm approached b y B . as publisher 126 Pleyel, Mile. Death II, 1 1 5

Pleyel, M m e . See: Moke-Pleyel Plouvier, Edouard. Librettist for Β . II, 163, 168, 203 Plutarch. And short biographies II, 268 Poe, E . A . And the Fantastic I, 166 and B.'s art 20472. Pohl, R . Cited II, 323 on B.'s rhythm I, 468, 56872. one of the B. faithful II, 72, 199, 201, 234, 257 B. gives triangle to II, 9472. on B. and W a g n e r II, 18072., 201, 363 Politics. Interference from I, 87, 199, 218 and 72., 269, 276, 347, 398, 505, $48; II, 162-3 and art 238, 266, 267, 270, 290-1, 342, 348, 398, 444-5, 478 and 72., 479-8°. 5 ° 7 . I ' 8 , 5 2 1 - 2 , 52377., 5 2 5 » . , 533. 54°. 546. 547. 5 4 8 ; Π, 25, I 2 I , 126, 200 MAIN TREATMENT I, 523-41 and freedom of speech II, 38 and 72. 39-40 o c casionally favorable I, 53, 504, 525-6; » . 174 Poniatowski, Prince Joseph. A c o m poser II, 154 identified II, 15472. candidate for Opera II, 169 Pons, A. de. Identified I, 52 loan to B . 65, 67, 68-9, 72 B.'s friendship with I, 213, 55972. suicide I, J 4 4 , 559 Ponsard, Francis. And School of Common Sense I, 505 B . eulogizes II, 122 danger of his stvle II, 146 neoclassic II, 231 Pontmartin, A. de. O n B.'s person II, 24 and 72. Pope, Alexander. T o r m e n t e d youth I, 70 on Shakespeare I, 257; II, 22472. weak substance I, 38272. P o p e ( s ) . Medici I, 537 See also: Clement V I I , Paul III, Pius I X , Pius X Pourtalcs, G . de. O n B.'s character I, 20572.,· II, 305 on Lelio I, 25972. on B. and Liszt in love affairs I,'43472. Poussin, Ν . Tribulations I, 537 Powell, Laurence. Cited I, 1 3 ; II, 309 on B.'s technique I, 571 Pradier, James. I, 103 Praeger, F. Compares B. and W a g n e r II, 15 defines their relation II, 17972. Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. I, 535 Prcscott, W . Η . I, 378 Prévost, E. P. Identified T, 213 and 71. Prévost, Hippolyte. I, 64 Primrose, William. In Harold symphony I, 25072. Prinzhofer, August. Portrait of B . I, 443 Prod'homme, J . - G . O n B . librarian II, 25572.

Index of Names and Subjects P r o g r a m , m u s i c a l . C i t e d I , 3, 10, 1 2 2 , 1 4 4 - 5 . ' J ' . ' Î 3 f f · . Î 1 0 ; Π , 153 B e e t h o v e n ' s I, ι J 5 a n d » . S p o h r ' s I, 1 5 5 a n d n. W a g n e r ' s I , 1 5 5 a n d n., 184, 18971.; II, 18271., 18772., 1 9 4 MAIN TREATMENT I , 1 7 1 - 9 8 a u n i c o r n I , 1 9 7 , 2 5 4 a n d τι.,* I I , 1 5 3 a n d i m i t a t i v e e f f e c t s I, 1 7 1 - 6 , 198 B . discusses G l u c k ' s I , 4 1 7 Î Î . in L i s z t I I , 198 a n d n . o f

Rêverie

et Caprice

not by Β. II, 320,

368 P r o k o v i e v , S . I , 1 8 5 r e l a t i o n t o his g o v e r n m e n t I I , 13072.

Prophète,

Le.

I, 26772.

Proudhon, P.-J. Property

Is Theft

I,

4'3 P r o u s t , M a r c e l . O n F l a u b e r t I , 42971. o n m e m o r y I I , 7971. P r o u t , E b e n e z e r . C i t e d I , 1972. o n G e r m a n "edition o f Β . II, 360 P r u c k n e r , D i o n y s . II, 4 7 , 73 P r u n i è r e s , H . O n B . ' s i n f l u e n c e I I , 30572. See also: Einstein, Alfred (dictionary e n t r i e s , Romeo and Impressionist) P u g i n , W e l b y . A n d n e w architecture II, 3377.

P u l v e r , J e f f r e y . I , 1772. o n P a g a n i n i 31371.

Punch

or

the

London

Charivari.

On

J u l l i e n I, 51472. o n B . a R o o s h i a n I I , 308 P u r c e l l , H . C i t e d I , 1 4 3 , 191 a n d Tempest

I, 19072. Dido and Aeneas

II, 117 and

Β . I I , 264, 265 Puritans. Misknown I , 1772., 1 3 0 and m u s i c I , 19η., 1 8 4 , 193 Β . o n I , 2 7 0 , 3 1 8 a n d 72. P u s h k i n , A l e x S e r g i e v i c h . C i t e d I, 370 o n R o m a n t i c i s m I , 369 a n d r e a l i s m I , 381 a n d R u s s i a n m u s i c I I , 282 Püttlingen, V e s q u e de. I, 5 5 7 » . Puttmann, Max. O n B.'s melodies I, 1 1 5 a n d 72. P u v i s d e C h a v a n n e s . I , 386, 390

Q QUANTZ, J . O n i d e a l o r c h e s t r a I , 7872. Q u e e n of H o v a s (Madagascar). B.'s des i g n s o n I I , 82 Queen Mab.

and

Queen

Juliet

See:

Pomaré

B e r l i o z , WORKS,

Romeo

( T a h i t i ) . B.'s interest

in

I I , 1 2 4 a n d n. Q u i n a u l t , P h i l i p p e . Armide I I , 12972. Q u i n e t , E d g a r . I , 52577. o n B . as m a n a n d m u s i c i a n I I , 107 Q u i n t a n a , R . I,

1772.

503 R

King Lear I I , 5172. o n s y m p h o n i c p o e m I I , 19872. Rabelais, François. A n d B . c o m p a r e d I, 2571.; I I , 16, 2472., 5372., 270 d e f e n d e d b y R o m a n t i c s I, 256, 3 7 0 m i s k n o w n I I , 1672., 2 2 4 RAABE, P . O n L i s z t s c o r e o f

R a c e . S u p e r s t i t i o n s a b o u t I , 2572., 18572.; II, 270-1 Rachel. B.'s regard f o r II, 148, 159 i d e n t i f i e d I I , 15972. L e w e s ' s o p i n i o n o f II, 349«. Rachmaninoff, S. O n Mahler conducting Β . I I , 290 a n d 72. R a c i n e , J . C i t e d I , 7 0 Phèdre I, 1 6 3 ; II, 36972. At balie I , 22172. s e t b y Mend e l s s o h n 2 2 6 a n d 72. a n d W a g n e r I , 301 flaws i n I , 38172. r e t u r n t o I , 390 v e r s i f i c a t i o n I , 38172.; I I , 1 4 6 R a f f , J . C i t e d I , 5 7 0 m u s i c o n Β . I I , 88 b o o k o n W a g n e r I I , 17972. R a i l r o a d s . N e w I , 3 4 3 a n d 72., 34972., 4 1 3 , 4 3 3 ; I I , 230 c u l t u r a l e f f e c t s I, 4 1 3 and 72., 5 5 3 ; I I , 7 1 , 2 3 0 V e r s a i l l e s a c c i d e n t I, 4 1 3 V i g n y o n I, 41372. B . i n a u g u r a l cantata I, 480-1 R a m e a u , J . P . C i t e d I I , 243 t h e o r y o f h a r m o n y I , 37 a n d n., 38072.; I I , 264, 3 4 5 » . R o u s s e a u o n I , 37172. Ransom, John Crowe. II, 222 a n d n .

On

Shakespeare

Ranz des vaches. I, 40 and η., 155 R a p h a e l , C i t e d I , 49, 16572.; I I , R a u c o u r t , M l l e . I , 6972. Ravel, M . Fails t o win Prize

and "program" I, 185 Habanera

107, I,

114

10272.

I, 14m.

i n f l u e n c e I I , 303 Realism. Offshoot of Romanticism I, 3 8 6 « . , 3 9 7 , 5 3 5 ; I I , i 9 i f f . in Β . I , 3 8 8 , 394 i n s c i e n c e a n d p h i l o s o p h y Π , 101 i n W a g n e r I , 39372., 3 9 4 ; I I , i 9 i f f . , 202 i t s s u c c e s s I , 3 9 8 ; I I , 202 a n d v a r i a t i o n s I I , 27672. R e b e r , H . C i t e d I , 42072., 55772. e l e c t e d t o I n s t i t u t e I I , 7 2 B . o n I I , 2 1 5 , 260 R é c a m i e r , M m e . I , 29272. Recio-Berlioz, Marie-Genevieve [Martin] ( 1 8 1 4 - 1 8 6 2 ) wife. Cited II, 157 i d e n t i f i e d I , 4 1 0 a n d n. F i r s t t r i p w i t h Β . I , 4 1 1 ; I I , 29 aid t o Β . I , 4 3 3 d e s i r e s t o s i n g I, 4 3 4 at O p é r a - C o m i q u e I, 4 3 9 at 1844 Festival 445 trip t o A u s t r i a I, 473ÍT. i m p e d i m e n t t o Β . I , 5 1 3 ; I I , 1 1 0 , 170, 2 1 2 m e a n n e s s I, 5 1 9 ; I I , 2 1 4 at W e i m a r I I , 3 6 - 7 , 47 m a r r i a g e t o B . I I , 7 9 - 8 0 , 85 t a c t l e s s n e s s I I , 8 3 , 1 5 5 ,

Index of Names 171, 174, 179, 180 and n., 182 ill health II, 205 death II, 212 burial II, 245, 297 Boschot's treatment of II, 319 Recitative(s). In Β. I, 300-1, 306n., 321,

and

Subjects

B. addresses o n his o w n II, 28572. o n

Marie Recio II, 17172. Salammbô lì, 232 and 71. on Débats II, 245 and at Baden II, 252, 257 B. encourages II, 261 on criticism II, 266-7 a t B- s death II, 35272.-35372., 484, 493; I I , 132 i n h i s 296 commemorative concert II, 302 adaptation of W e b e r I, 406-7 and n. Reynaud, Jean. On Bourgeoisie I, 36272. in B e e t h o v e n I, 328-9»., 351—3 in Reznicek, E. N . von. And B.'s music I, Bach I, 32J A p t h o r p o n I, 407η. 464 Wagner's in Mozart I, 407η. in Gluck II, 168η. at large II, 195 Rheingold, Das. Anvils in I, 285, 394 Recordings. Inadequacy I, 359η.; II, 65, prologue to trilogy I, 321 321-2 insufficiency II, 321-2 influence Rhythm. In B. I, 143, 159, 222, 2joff., 303 a n d 72., 30672., 331, 333, 352, 430, I, 877., 1872. Weingartner's I, 3, 15371.; 468, 56372., 568 a n d 72.; I I , 67, 92, 94, II, 13(m. Sir Adrian Boult's I, 92 186, 196, 324 and imitation I, 175 exMaggie Teyte's I, 40571.; II, 321 Toscapressive I, 176, 493; II, 67 B.'s views nini's I, 32271. Szigeti's I, 41 272. Rose on I, 293. 468. 474; II, fo. 13'. '47. ·95. Bampton's I, 48872. trade barriers limit I, 286, 331, 343 " p o l y - " I, 468, 486, 568; II, 540 prize-winning mistake II, 67 n. 336-9 G . Thill's II, 14371. of Beatrice II. 21771. of Damnation and Requiem II, Richard, ? Identified I, 213 and 71. 3°i. 31 ' Richardson, Samuel. I, 37272. Redfield, John. O n brass bands I, Richault, C. S. (publisher). Buys B.'s 3517». Faust II, 49 Redon, Odilon. Cited I, 1971. on B.'s poliRichter, Jean-Paul. I, 107 tics I, 362 and Delacroix I, 387; II, Ricordi (publishing firm). I, 438 issues 25072. on B.'s mind II, 1 9 , i o i r . hears B.'s Requiem II, 49 new edition II, 276 Β. II, 303 Ries, Hubert. I, 55772. Reed, P. H . I, 13 on B. recording II, 32272. Rimbaud, A. I, 554 Reeves, Sims. II, 43 Rimsky-Korsakov, N . On Gluck tradiReicha, Anton. Identified L, 71 orchestral tion I, 42072. on orchestration I, 449 ideas 71, 79, 81 and n., 282 and Beetreatise II, 2172. on B. conducting II, thoven 99 teacher of composition 1386172., 281 and 72. and his Russian friend9, 141, 142, 5147z. revolutionary notions ships II, 28072. in Russian school II, 282 I, 280, 371; II, 286 attitude toward Β. II, 309 Reichardt, Alexander. II, 26271. Ritter, Alexander. I, 44972. Reid, Louis Arnaud. I, 4472. A Study m Ritter, Theodore. Protégé of B.'s II, Aesthetics 17971. 15, 11172., 123 transcribes Romeo II, Reine de Chypre, La. I, 167». 10972. identified II, 11072. B. addresses Rembrandt. I, 384; II, 224 on Wagner II, 11172.; on Gluck II, Remenyi, Eduard. II, 73 12372. plays Troy ens II, 162 in BeeRémusat, Charles de. I, 136 Commissions thoven concertos II, 246 at B. reception Funeral symphony I, 344 II, 277 Renan, Ernest. O n Second Empire I, Rivals, The. I, 85 398, 404 in 1848 I, 524, 52571. Life of Rivière, Jacques. I, 426 on B.'s Faust I, Jesus II, 231 historical method II, 48872., 49172. 31472. Robert, Alphonse, Dr. Cousin of B.'s Renduel, Pierre Eugène. I, 158 Cited I, 45, 60, 68 rooms with B. in Paris 47 diagnoses last illness II, 1 2 0 Renoir, A. And Delacroix I, 387 and n. Robert, Paul-Louis. On B.'s "race" I, Rewald, John. On Delacroix and Manet II, 23972.

Rey, Etienne. On B.'s marriage I, 40972. Reybaud, Louis. Satirizes B. T, 403 and

257z.

Robin des Bois. See: Freisclyiitz Robinson Crusoe. B. alludes to II, 127 72.-404 Rochefoucauld, Sosthènes de la. I, 64, 66, 29972. aids Β. against Cherubini I, 91 Reyer, Ernest. In B. tradition I, 464; Β. appeals to for Faust 96 dedicates II, 1237J., 252 first performed II, 38 on himself and Ritter II, 12372. de- the score to 97 fends Wagner Π, 126, 17171. except for Rocher, Edouard. I, 219 his family 245 conduct II, 18372. on B.'s music II, 164 Rochlitz, J. F. I, 22572. Roeden, Count. I, 509

Index of Names and Roger, G. Sings in Damnation L, 504 understands it later I, 506 and n.; II, 240«., 243 in 1848 I, 524η. on altera-

tions by singers II, y8n. sings Erlkönig II, 175—6 attends Troy ens II, 243 Rogers, Cornwell. I, 34«. Rolland, Romain. On Β. misknown I, 5 mistaken on B.'s character 14 on B.'s genius I, 21; II, 304 on B.'s melodies I, m » , II, 15112. on B.'s politics I, 363 on B. and Handel II, 264 and n. Romance de Mary Tudor, La. Composed and played I, 242 and n. Romanticism. Crusade against I, 7, 9, 62, 370, 381-2, 386; II, 312 essence of I, 506; II, 190 language of period I, 127«.,

128-9, $ 6 ί » · ; II, 316 view

of

the arts I, 10, 233, 237, 264, 306-8, 328, 396

M A I N TREATMENT I, 369-98 Gautier on I, 505 misunderstandings within I, 129 and n., 53071.; II, 121 in music I,

ι in.,

19$»., 214, 32off., 330fr., 483fr.,

494-$. $05; Π. 5 8 . '9°.

l8j

. *83

A revolution I, 21, 128-9, 2 ' 4 , 219Λ·,

37572., 377, 526, J30 its European scope I, 372 and n., 376ff.; II, 282-3 and orientalism I, 57n., 107, 216, 381, (belated) 446; II, 140 and n. inclusive-

Subjects

505

I, 22871. B.'s unlike I, 323, (yet very like) I, 329, handling of I, 490; II, 221 Garrick ending 32972. Chapman on 330fr. author's age 32972. B. cites I, 509; II, 164-5, 12072. Vaccai's II, 16471. Ronsard, Pierre de. Quoted I, 84 defended by Romantics 87, 370 Rood, Louise. On viola I, 45272. Roquemont, ? B.'s musical amanuensis I, 513 and 72.; II, 166 Roqueplan, N . Opera director I, 507, 512 congratulates Β. II, 108 writes on opera II, 27672. Rosa, Salvator. Revives fantastic genre I, 16572. paints amid banditti 254 quoted by B. I, 561 •Rosenfeld, Paul. Cited I, 13, IJ8TJ.; Π, 311 on B.'s "race" I, 2512. on B.'s Requiem 284, 285 Rossi, Lauro. I, 30872. Rossini, G. Cited I, 132, 262, 413, 520; II, 285 Paris idol I, 49 derided by B. I, 55-6, 57, 214, 215 has official support I, 64 against Weber I, 9972. William Tell (B. proofreads) I, 98; (performed) I, 104; I, 180, 414; B. on II, 261, 268 imitative effects I, 173, 180, 198 Stabat Mater I, 286; B. conducts II, 109

B.'s feelings about II, 18, 169, 261, 264 Adam on I, 354η·, 497 B. on 73, 104, i27ff., 232, 234-î, 237, 372 Barber of Seville I, 373, 414, 522; II, 261 on Comte Ory I, 414; II, 261 lesser and n., 44071. and love I, 122-4, 127-31, works I, 416 mot against Opera II, 167, 510 and n. its realism I, 127ÁF., 122 on Sax instruments I, 442 marriage 13071., 30671., 307, 328, 377, 379, 381 II, 21471. B. cites in Treatise I, 45672. terror and the fantastic I, 165-6 secondon death of Meyerbeer II, 246 B. hand imitations I, 232; II, 24-5, 191 ff. plays I, 546; II, 34, 42, 109, 113 death and religion I, 396; II, 97, 98 local and burial II, 296 color I, 251, 381; II, 192 History of I, 3377»., 343, 37iff., 386, Rothschild, Baron. I, 312 and Opera 507 397. 4'3. 5°ΐ~6· 525-6; II, 85, 191 ff., Rouge et le Noir, Le. I, 61, 6372^ 119, 377 annotation about B. in I, 20672. 200-1, 241 and sentimentality I, 373 and «.-374 rhetoric I, 374 and form Rouget de Lisle. Cited I, 371 on B.'s genius I, 148 on his own 47871. B. I, 379-80, 383 writes to I, 199 Macbeth I, 433η. Romberg, H. Plays Requiem I, J0771. Rousseau, J.-J. I, 1771., 27 on learning Rome, Amable, Dr. I, 2671. harmony I, 3772. on scoring 7872. Devin Rome Prize. I, 68, 71, 73, 94, 102, 119, de Village I, 10871. musical opinions I, 131 B. wins I, 134, 149, 279; anniversary 144 and duodrama I, 22572. and B. of II, 83 won by Lesueur's pupils I, 139 B. criticizes I, 240 takes action I, 371 and 72. Dictionnaire de Musique I, 7872., 371 and 72.; II, 5672. " L e t t e r on about I, 556 B. helps award II, 118, (to Bizet) II, 125 French Music" I, 37172. and Rameau I, 3717».; II, 34$». on G l u c k I, 37172. Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare's). I, 85 quoted 309, 330 B. quotes in score 103 Pygmalion I, 37172. and Romanticism I, 37272. and ff., 381, 39572. Confessions and n., 22371. love scene I, 130, 309; Π, 164 musical subject I, 11872., 15672., 181, Π, 6 religious views II, 99 3i8flF.; Π, 163, 164 Bellini's I, 201, 228, Roussel, Albert. I, 139n. 33472.; Π, 164-5 Deschamps translates Rousselot, Scipion. II, 34 ness

I,

127-31,

162-7,

379. 387

and

royalism 62, 380 develops in France

Index of Names and Subjects

5O6

Royer, A. Directs Opera II, 208 Rubinstein, Anton. Plays Fantastique, I, ιοοη. rival of Liszt II, 163 on Cellini II, 292η. Rude, François. In Paris I, 87 first success I, 238 identified I, 382η. artistic creed II, 51 n. misdeeds against II, 125η. Ruggi, F. I, 19072. Ruggles, Carl. I, 18$; II, 23m. Rumbold, Sir Horace. Remembers Baden II, 71 n. Runciman, John. "Piano test" I, 4647z. denounces Β . II, 304 and n. Runge, Philip Otto. I, 10872., 396n. Ruskin, John. I, 44n. on imagination I, 39271. on contempt of work II, 16η. Russia (n) (s). Musical school I, 11, 56472.; II, 27, 241, 281, 282ÍT. debt to Β. I, 162, 388, 464; II, 279fr., 286 B.'s praise of II, 261, 310 Musical institutions I, 507-9, 515-6, J53 and literate public II, 281 new outlook II, 275 B. played in I, 507 and η.; II, 162, 250 the Five identified II, 282-3 and n. S Antonio. Oedipe I, 50 Saga of Billy the Kid. I, 254 Saint Augustine. Reads Virgil I, 21 iti. Confessions II, 9 Saint Matthew Passion. Cited I, 1772., 76, 325 "rending of the veil" I, 176 massive scoring 285 dramatic meaning 325, 335 B. on II, 264 Saint-Saëns, C. In B. tradition I, 11, 464; II, 134, 251, 2J7 on B.'s teachings I, 14, 35871., 44972., 45072. B. encourages II, 261, 275, 276 his Cellini 30872. his own training I, 140 on B.'s Requiem I, 281, 288; II, 46 and n. on Romeo 332, plays Bach to B. I, 34572., 264 on slow delivery I, 40771. On B.'s style I, 281, 288, 429 and n., 464 on B.'s harmony I, 45977.-460 and η.; II, 15877. on B.'s Faust I, 48577. on use of organ I. 50372. on B.'s character II, 14-15 on B. and W a g n e r II, 178 and n., 20172. on Hamlet march II, 65 on Pasdeloup II, 1247;. Samson et Dalilah II, 134 on repetition II, 14872. at Pauline Viardot's II, 15872. helps edit Gluck II, 165-6 and B. in directing II, 251, 254 at B.'s deathbed II, 296 Saint-Simon (ism). B. and Liszt attracted by I, 136 and 72., 523 David and his band I, 446 Sacchini,

Sainte-Beuve, C. A. Cited I, 48772. among the Romantics I, 48, 163η., 258, 372 on Shakespeare I, 85, 8672. defends Ronsard I, 87 Poetry of the Sixteenth Century I, 104 on culture of his century I, 239; II, 2297z., 230-1 and n. method I, 309; II, 260 on Republic of '48 I, 504 exile I, 52472. besieged I, 529 on distinction II, 13 on B.'s mind II, 28 and 72., 301 on Harriet II, 78n. and Flaubert II, 23272. death II, 301 Sainton, Prosper. II, 51, 87 arranges B.Wagner meeting II, n o Salieri, A. Danaides I, 50, 7572. Sammartini, G . Β . Orchestral innovator I, 80 Samuel, Adolphe. Β. addresses on creation II, 3072., 127, 129, 133 other confidences II, 170 meets again in Brussels II, 107 identified II, 10772. an "encourager" II, 115 The Two Suitors II, 11772. Sand, George. Among the Romantics I, 232, 243 La Marquise (and Lélio) 25972. on B. a genius 27072. friendship with B. 315 on art and society I, 34372., 533 B. reads I, 346 and Chopin on B. I, 35672. Santayana, G . On music I, 426«. Sappho. I, 206 Sardanapalus (Liszt's). I, 509 and n. Sargent, Malcolm. Plays Β. II, 309 Sarrette, Bernard. I, 138 Sarti, G . Te Deum I, 7972. on Mozart 570 and 77. Sassoon, S. I, 1777. Saurín, Bernard-Joseph. Identified I, 56». Beverley 129n. Sax, Adolphe. Identified I, 358, 441 B. assists I, 358; II, 331 saxophone in B.'s work I, 358, 442 other instruments I, 442, 453; II, 31 aids B. I, 507 triangle II, 9472. "cured" by Dr. Noir II, 159 proposes hidden orchestra II, 32972. Saxe-Weimar, Carl Alexander, Duke of (1853-1901). Continues patron of B. II, 163-4 a n d "•> 1 44 a n c l n Saxe-Weimar, Carl Friedrich, Duke of (died 1853). Patron of Β. II, 47, 153-4 and 72. Saxe-Weimar, Sophie Louise, Duchess of (1824-1897). Requests Beatrice II, 41, 163-4 a n d n-i 2 33 a n d 77. Saxophone. See: Sax, Adolphe Sayn-Wittgenstein, Princcss Carolyne. B. meets in Russia. I, 509 letters to and from B. II, 22, 41, 86, 108, 126, 129-30, 159, :o6, 208, 213, 232, 233,

Index of Nantes and 242-3, 2JI, 2J2, 279 at Weimar Altenburg II, 36 and 72., 88-9 And Troy ens II, 88-9, ioófL, i i j , iióff., 155, 163-4, (dedication) 244 and 72., 252 and n. attitude toward Wagner II, 155, 179, 182 visits Β. II, 166-7 Delacroix II, 167 her daughter Marie II, 164, 279 Scarlatti, A. I, 143, 424 Schelling, Ernest. On B.'s Memoirs II, 6 and n. Schenker, Heinrich. I, 10972. Schiller, J. C. F. von. I, 208, 393 Ode to Joy translated I, 21372. used by Beethoven I, 361, 395; II, 8272. a Romanticist I, 371 B. on friendship with Goethe I, 434 and 71. and Shakespeare II, 22371. Schilling, G. Identified I, 433 and n. Schindler, Anton. I, 18272. Schlciemiacher, F. D. E. And religion I, 396

Schlesinger, Maurice. B.'s publisher I, 98, 231, 236, 243, 279, 284, 438 founds Gazette Musicale I, 242 which B. edits 2 7 2 and 72. which gives concerts I, 342-3 which prints Euphonia I, 439 sold to Brandus I, 517 and B.'s livelihood I, 548 Owner's practices I, 24272., 271 sells his firm I, 54272. among the Romantics I, 243, 258 publishes Wagner I, 350 Schloesser, Adolph. Recollects Β. II, 82 and 72. Schloesser, Louis. Classmate of B.'s I, 63 his Cellini I, 30872., other compositions 42072. in Darmstadt I, 432 Schmitt. Florent. I, 10272. Schnabel, Artur. II, 91 Schneitzhöffer, Jean. I, 240 Schnyder, Franz-Xaver. On Β. a Napoleonic invader II, 8172. Schoelcher, Victor. I, 315 Schoenberg, A. Cited I, 185, 420; II, 343-4 his monodramas I, 2 2 6 and 72. Gurrelieder I, 36072. Theory of Harmony I, 45872. and rhythm I, 468 on composing

I , 50022.

Scholes, Percv. I, 1972. on Fantastique II, 65η. Scholtze, J. On Troy ens II, 151 and other works II, 307 School. B.'s See: preceding Index, items 13, 21, and 36 School "of Berlioz, Liszt, and Wagner" I, 19, 185, 25off., 53772., II, 154, 192-3, 257- 344 Schorer, Mark. I, 1772. Schubart, C. F. D. I, 155

Subjects

Schubart, Mark. On Symphonie Fantastique I, 371. on music criticism 972. Schubert, Franz. Cited I, 11, 27172., 56572.; II, 285 melodic style I, 40 meter in I, 113 C Major Symphony I, 153 Moments Musicals 165 and B. compared I, 441 and 72., 488; II, 188 Rosamunde overture I, 44172. Erlkönig II, 175-6, 190 songs II, 190 symphonies II, 191 on Beethoven II, 262 Death and the Maiden II, 346 Schuman, William. I, 1972. Cited and identified I, 3871. Schumann, ? B.'s manservant II, 296 Schumann, Clara (Wieck). Β. meets in Paris and Leipzig I, 435; II, 14η. and Brahms II, 18171. Schumann, Robert. Cited I, 1971., 341, 432; II, 18172., 186, 285, 328 essay on Fantastique I, 4, 153 and 72., 158fr., 429, 43572.; II, 223 on B.'s genius I, 3; II, 225 on B.'s melody I, 112, 113; II, 288 Papillons I, 16072. on "programs" I, 160, 187, 19572. as critic I, 158, 194, 429, 430, 435 and 7272.-43671. influence in music II, 186 and n., 257, 345η. ill health I, 5 5 7 as composer of symphonies I, 27172.; II, 18672., 191 of songs II, 190 Plays Β. I, 270 reprints him I, 433 on B.'s Requiem 283, 435 invites visit from B. 42072. receives him 434 on consecutive fifths 4 2 4 on B.'s technique I, 429, 430, 459 on B.'s character I, 43572.; II, 1472. and Beethoven celebration I, 471 and B.'s songs I, 488 Faust 492 on Wagner conducting II, 6172. Schuré, Edouard. On Berlioz a "Celt" I, 2572. Schweitzer, Albert. Cited II, 1527»., 23372. on Goethe's Faust I, 39172. on Bach and Β. II, 187-9 Science(s). Physics I, 76-7; II, 36572. chemistry II, 56, 101 mathematics I, 141, 192, 356, 42372., 572; I I ,

365 a n d

72.

B.'s interest in I, 48, 53972.; II, 101, 27572., 280, 332 applied II, 59-60 and n., 275 and 72. and culture I, 395; II, 96, 100, 10I72., 275 vitalist biology II, 101 and politics I, 517 and philosophy I, 535; II, 100-2 and n. and art II, 25, 100-2 and 72., 270 fiction II, 329 Scott, Walter. Cited I, 6872., 370; II, 223 IVaverley quoted 188 and n., 25477. Scotland tour 210 Mediterranean cruise 213 Rob Roy I, 254 and n, quoted I, 289 romances I, 372 weeps I, 37472.

5o8

índex of Names and Subjects

and Middle Ages I, 381 bankruptcy I, 189, 536 Scriabin, A . N . I, 19$n. Scribe, E . Cited I, 97 librettist f o r B . I, 317, 408, 427, 438, 473, (Faust) 484 and 71. dilatory I, 344 La Ν orme Sanglante I, 408, 4 1 3 , 473 released b y B. $ 1 1 death II, 206 Scudo, P. Cited I, 558 on B.'s Faust I, j o j - 6 on Infant Christ II, 86 on Troyens II, 241 loses reason II, 246 Seghers, F . I, 340η. a p o o r conductor II, 77 conducts Roman Carnival I, 441 Flight into Egypt II, 77, 78 SaintCecilia Society I, 554; II, 77, 78, 124η. Segovia, A . I, 3Jn. Seidl, Anton. O n B . conducting II, 62 n. Seifriz, Max. O n Romeo II, 234 Séjean, Louis-Nicolas. I, 279 Senfl, Ludwig. Kling-Klang I, 173η. Serapbina, La. B . on I, 409η. Servetus, M . I, 24 Sessions, R o g e r . I, 19η. on meaning in music 178, 1807!. on B.'s Requiem 282 Seurat, Georges. And Pointillism I, 394 Seventh symphony (Beethoven's). O r g i astic finale I, 253. B . on theme of allegro I, 426, 427; II, 272 Shakespeare. Cited I, 21, 96, 102, 370, 372, 392, 479, 537; II, 7, 14, 11 m., 14977., 191 and 71., 295, 361 his reputation I, 383, J007J.-J0I7J., 53777.,· II, 101 and 77., 122, 2 2 2 - 7 , 3 0 1 quoted I, 147, 255, 309, 330, 339, 41771., 49J, 5 1 8 ; II, 1 2 1 , 242, 294, 312 first played in Paris I, 49, 84, 295 second run 85 Stendhal on I, 49 and 77., 62, 84 Pope on I, 257; II, 22471. discovery b y Β . I, 83ÎÏ·, 96, 107, 164, 203 and 72., 2 1 7 ; II, 4 B.'s "secular scripture" I, 33577., 346, 397; II, 26, 15577., 164, 2 1 1 , (B.'s list) 22077., 23877., 247, 25I, 32977. B.'s affinity with II, 220-7 B- reveres as god II, 97, 221, 2 2 6 - 7 , 2 3 4 landscape artist II, 100 B . quotes in scores I, 103 and 77., io8ff., 223 and η.; II, 1 1 7 and n.; 142 and B.'s Tempest 1, 133, 189-90 humor I, 345, II, 16, 219, 220 his realism I, 130, 380; II, 225 and Imagination I, 33577. and Romanticism I, 84ff., 370, 380 and rhetoric I, 38277. Sonnets I, 167 Coriolanus I, 363; II, 73, 22077., 251 As You Like It I, 41777. Timon of Athens quoted I, 495 Winter's Tale a musical I, 53977. Paris turns away from I, 505; Π, 122 B.'s Shakespeare Music I, 518, 547, 56277.;

II, 71 Midsummer Night's Dream I, 332, 47977. ( B . on) I, 479; II, 16, 244 Keats on II, 31 Shaw on I, 261; II, 777., 97 Love's Labor's Lost II, 98, 216 Troilus and Cressida II, 121, 22077. a borrower II, 185 a punster II, 270 Richard III I, 94; II, 13277. and B e n Jonson II, 19177., 202 and 77. Much Ado I, 228; II, 203, 2 1 7 - 2 0 and 7i., 294 Shakespearean Form. I, 86, 129, 165, 287, 300-2, 32iff., 392 77., 416, 49iff., 49577., 500, 564; II, 22iff., 34ifï. Shaw, G . B. O n History I, 17 admirer of Β. I, 1977.; II, 677., 220 and n. on himself I, 52 and his art II, 7477. on FrancsJuges I, 93 on Benvenuto and Beatrice II, 220 and 77. on technique in art I, 141 π. and greatness I, 469 character of I, 23977., 39277.; II, 19 artistic tactics I, 261, 36277. O n W a g n e r I, 36277., 42077.; II, 308 and Handel II, 264 on heart and imagination I, 36277. The Perfect Wagnerite I, 36277., 42077.; II, 308 Man and Superman I, 490 aggressiveness I, 530 on biography II, 29 and criticism II, 26177. and music II, 32877. W a l k l e y on II, 4877. Saint Joan II, 4877. on the great II, 97 On Going to Church II, 10377. Caesar and Cleopatra II, 168 Back to Methuselah II, 251 Shelley, P. B. Cited I, 1777., 70, 376 quoted 46, 396 his broad tradition 138 and ideas I, 393 and 77. and Keats I, 392, 393 imagination 393 on poets as lawgivers I, 396 The Cenci II, 190 S h o s t a k o v i c h , D . I, 185 Sibelius, J . Quoted on his art I, 4477. and B. 288 Siegfried. I, 249 and n., 30677. Signac, Paul. I, 387 Signol, Emile. Paints B. I, 216, 443 Silas, Edward. Plays under Β . II, 5977. Silence. Its role in antiquity and in music I, 42877. measured in Infant Christ I, 42877.; I I , 9 3 , 9 4

Simon, Jules. In 1848 I, 52577. Simon, Prosper Charles. Classmate of B.'s II, 206 Sina, ? I, 345 Singer, Kurt. O n B.'s diathesis II, 12077. Sismondi, J . C. L. de. I, 24, 104 on intellectual decline I, 52477. Sitwell, S. Cited I, 13 O n Altenburg II, 3677. on B.'s character II, 4377., 17377. on Barber of Bagdad II, 7677. on Liszt II, 197/7.

Index of Names and Subjects Slonimsky, N . On Russian music II, 285η. on German Edition of Β. II, 358η. Smart, Sir George II, 32 Smctana, F. Aus Meinem Leben I, 177 Smithson-Berlioz, Harriet (1800-1854) wife. Plays Shakespeare I, 85ft., 94, 241, 272, 409η.; II, 78 physical appearance I, 85η.; II, 78 Β. seeks her out I, 88, 91 first meeting 233 travels I, 100, 120 tribulations 149, 151-2, 236 B.'s lovr for I, 86, 100-1, 120-2, 12$, 130, 133, 149, 164η. 229, 231, (declared) 234; sustained 478, 55on., j60; II, 4, 28, 170 debut in London I, 516η. character, real and imaginary I, 122-3, 2 34^·· 237"·> 3i$«.,· II, 12-13, Role in B.'s work I, 158, 164 and n.; II, 164 acts in melodrama I, 8$η., 163η., 25$, 2$8 her family I, 85, 234, 236 engaged to Β. I, 235-6 married 2 37 benefit performances with B. 240-1 B.'s name for her I, 245η. birth of son I, 157 growing attachment to B. 264, 315n. end of career I, 264, 270, 272, 275n., 392n. resdessness I, 268 jealous distress I, 315 and n., 316, 408ft., 519-20; II, 78-9 Marriage broken I, 410-1, 438, 439; II, 5, 10 ill-health I, 342, 513, 551; II, 45 intemperance I, 409; II, 29 and n. paralyzed by stroke I, 543, $44-5; II, 45, 78 death II, 78-80, 8$, 8772. removal of ashes II, 245, 297 influence on Rachel II, 15977. Boschot's treatment of II, 318 and 77. Smolian, A. And B. criticism II, 307 Smythson, ? B.'s chorus master at Covent Garden II, 52 Sobrier. In 1848 I, 529 Sokalski, Peter. On Russian music II, 283η. Sollertinski, I. On B.'s influence II, 286 and 71. Sontag, Henrietta. B. on her death II, 26771. Sophoclcs. Antigone I, 515 and B. compared II, 14877. Sorabji, Kaikhosru. On B.'s Requiem I, 28477. Soulié, Frédéric. And libretto for Β. I, 405 death I, 559 Spalding, W. R. I, 1972. on counterpoint I, 57'«· Spinoza, B. Romantics discover I, 370 on music II, 32 Spohr, L. I, 102, 131; II, 87 his programs 15577., 185 his innovations I, 21571. B. plays I, 556 as conductor II, 56 and n.

Spontini, Gasparo. I, 437, $12»., 361 relations with Β. I, 121, 149R·, >99»·, 2007I., 408, 559 hears B.'s music 134, 151 and 71., 29571. B. quotes I, 245 B.'s deference toward I, 317 and n., 557; II, 328 B. performs I, 326 72., 514; II, 2671., 42-3, 13371. Cortez I, 408; II, 254 role of his works I, 420 death I, 557, 558; II, 42 B. writes obituary I, 557; II, 55, 266 Wagner on 55772. his widow II, 42-3 as conductor II, 5671. See also: Vestale, La Squire, W . Β. I, 19071. Staël, Baronne de. On French Revolution I, 47 on German literature 62, 37272. and Romanticism I, 37272. in Weimar I* 434 Stamitz, J . W . A . I, 7971. leads Mannheim orchestra I, 80; II, 55-6 Stanford, Sir C. V . On B.'s scoring I, 46171. Stassov, V . Cited I, 510 identified II, 2823, 31071. on B.'s Russian tour II, 28072., 281 B.'s last message to II, 296 Staudigl, J. Sings Β. I, 475 and Beethoven II, 43 Stebbins, Richard. On Romeo I, 325 Steinway (music firm). And Β. II, 279 and 72.-280 Stendhal. Cited I, 8 reputation I, 385 and 71. misunderstood I, 530η. on the Berlioz clan 2772. Napoleonic ideal 28, 61, 375-6 on Paris 46 on Shakespeare 49 and τι., 62, 84 on prose style I, 45072. Charterhouse of Parma 52$ other novels $26 his temperament 70 on love I, 123-4; H> '9· 45 on art II, 100 And Romanticism I, 129 and 72., 213-4, 395 comments on B.'s "revenge" I, 20672. B. sees in Italy 213 and n. Life of Rossini 213 and n., 45071. Racine et Shakespeare I, 49, 214 and η. on Montesquieu 45072. Histoire de la Peinture en Italie I, 214 and n. and censorship 218 and Idéologues 21972. death 413 and Nietzsche II, 200 plagiarist II, 184-5 Stephanie, Princess of Prussia. Admires B. II, 125 Steme, L. I, 29977. and Sentiment I, 373 Sternfeld, R. Cited I, 22771. on vocables in Faust II, 14871. Stevenson, R. L. II, 217 Stewart, Robert Prescott. I, 1977. on B.'s Treatise 44972. Stockhausen, Julius. II, 26272. Stokowski, L. I, 32677.,· II, 19372. Stolz, Rosine. In Cellini I, 295 in Romeo 319 public tantrum I, 507 and n.

Index of Names and Subjects Stowe, Cabin

Harriet Beecher. I, 299η.

Uncle

Tom's

S t r a c h e y , L y t t o n . I, 7 S t r a u s , N o e l . O n B r a h m s I, 19672. on M o z a r t 26171. Strauss, J . (of P a r i s ) . I, 443ÍT. Strauss, J . (of V i e n n a ) . Blue Danube I, 161 B . o n his w o r k s I, 4 7 4 ; II, 3 3 9 a n d n. Strauss, R i c h a r d . C i t e d I, i6n., 4 2 0 ; II, 307 in B. tradition I, 161 72., 1 8 5 , 250η., 2 j 3 * i . , 33777., 5 6 8 ; II, 193 a c k n o w l e d g e s d e b t I, 1 2 , 388, 4497;., 4 6 4 ; II, 30471. Ein Heldenleben I, 1 6 2 , $02 imitative e f f e c t s

Sylphide, La. I, 275 S y m b o l i s m (in l i t e r a t u r e ) . I, 166, 386 and 72., 394 social r e p e r c u s s i o n s 5 3 4 N i e tzsche, W a g n e r a n d II, 201 and n. See also: Impressionism S y m o n s , A r t h u r . O n B.'s E u p h o n i a II, 32872. S y m p h o n i c p o e m . See: Liszt, s y m p h o n i c p o e m s and B., WORKS, La Captive " S y m p h o n i e Fantastique." Motion pict u r e b i o g r a p h y of Β. I, 2827;.,· II, 1271., 306 t e m p o of Apothéose I, 35572. S z i g e t i , J o s e p h . I, 41277.

I, 173, 174, 175 Don Quixote I, 174, 25371.,

388,

502

form

in I,

18771.

Aus

Italien I, 2497J. Also Sprach Zarathustra I, 25072. edits Treatise I, 4 4 8 a n d n449 o v e r l o a d e d h a r m o n y 45972. L a m b e r t o n same I, 50172. o r c h e s t r a t i o n II, 6072. Salome II, 1 4 0 S t r a v i n s k y , I g o r . D e f i n e s m e l o d y I, 109 Petrouschka 15172., 22672. P o l y t o n a l i t y I, 15172., 162 imitative e f f e c t s 1 7 3 and " p r o g r a m " I, 1 8 5 Histoire du Soldat I, 226 Oedipus I, 2 2 6 - 7 ; II, ' 3 3 - 4 Persephone I, 22672. and B . I, 288, 4 6 4 ; II, 28472., 309, 3 4 5 « . Sacre du Printemps I, 34172.; II, 1497;. Mass f o r v o i c e s a n d w i n d s I, 3417;. C o n c e r t o f o r piano a n d band I, 34972. neoclassicism I, 386

Poétique de la Musique I, 109, 386, 454 o p e r a o r a t o r i o I, 226, 2 2 9 ; II, 1 3 3 - 4 Strepponi, Giuseppina. A n d V e r d i II, 21472. S u a t , J o s e p h i n e . N i e c e of Β . Infant Christ d e d i c a t e d t o II, 7 5 Β. tells of m e d a l s II, 12372. B . addresses on m a r r i a g e II, 21472. B . ' s f o n d n e s s f o r II, 247, 250 w i t h sister nurses ailing Β . II, 250, 2 7 8 S u a t , M a r c . B r o t h e r - i n - l a w of B . identified I, 292, 3 1 6 aids and c o m f o r t s Β . I, 5 4 3 , 5 4 4 ; II, 80 d o m e s t i c happiness II, 175 S u a t , N a n c i . N i e c e of B . Infant Christ d e d i c a t e d to II, 75 B. on her b e t r o t h a l II, 21471. B . ' s f o n d n e s s f o r II, 2 4 7 , 250 S u d r e , ? II, 3 3 2 S u e , E u g è n e . A m o n g the R o m a n t i c s I, 232, 258 S u p p é , F r a n z v o n . I, 55772. S u r r e a l i s m I, 397 S w e d e n b o r g , E . I, 222 and 72., 4 8 9 a n d n. Spiritual Diary 48972. S w i f t , J n o . C i t e d I, 1771., 22, 1 5 4 , 29977.,· II, 1 8 4 - 5 o n genius 4 1 4 in h i e r a r c h y 4 4 0 o n satire II, 161 B . q u o t e s II, 169 p u n s t e r II, 2 7 0 G u l l i v e r II, 3 5 0 S w i n b u r n e , A . C . II, 202

Τ TACITUS. II, 231 T a g l i o n i , M a r i a . I, 2 4 1 , 2 7 5 Taine, H . Sainte-Beuve on II, 2297/. D e l a c r o i x on II, 1 3 0 historical m e t h o d II, 31472. T a j a n - R o g é , ? I, 5 1 6 T a l l i s , T h o m a s . V o c a l o r c h e s t r a t o r I, 461 T a m b e r l i c k , E n r i c o . In Cellini II, 51 Tannhäuser. A n d w o r k s b y B . I, 305, 3 2 3 and 72., 3 3 1 , 5 6 8 ; II, 1 8 5 - 6 , 25772. L i s z t ' s article on I, 5 5 2 - 3 and v . ; II, 48, 8 3 , 1 7 8 B.'s o p i n i o n on II, 1 7 , 1 1 2 , 1 7 2 , 1 8 0 - 1 , 194, 2 3 3 - 4 L i s z t p e r f o r m s II, 48 and music of the f u t u r e II, 1 1 4 - 5 , 1 2 5 - 6 , 12772., 180 asked f o r in Paris II, 1 2 6 « . , p e r f o r m e d and felled II, 1 3 0 - 1 , 180, 204, 207 e x c e r p t s in Paris II, 1 7 1 W a g n e r m a n e u v e r s a b o u t II, 1 7 2 - 3 , 1 7 4 B . ' s letters on II, 1 8 0 - 1 , 206 A b o u t a b o u t II, 3027;. T a s s o , T o r q u a t o . I, 94 T a u b m a n , H o w a r d . O n B.'s Faust I, 4887;. T a y l o r , B a r o n . Identified I, 43912.-44077. f o u n d s musical union I, 4 3 9 - 4 0 , 5 3 8 s e c o n d s B.'s e f f o r t s I, 4 8 1 - 2 , 5 4 6 ; II, 45 h o n o r s B . I, 506 at H a r r i e t ' s funeral II, 78 o n Troyens I I , 12972. pallbearer of B.'s II, 296 Taylor, 5'6

Sir

H.

Philip

vat:

Artevelde

I,

Taylor, General Zacharv. American President I, 5 5 2 T c h a i k o v s k y , P . I. C i t e d I, 19, 25472., 282 blameless in c a n n o n a d e I, 797;. lack of e a r l y training 13972. in B. tradition 1 8 5 , 33772., 4 6 4 ; I I , 2 7 , 28311. Tempest I, 19071. 1812 o v e r t u r e I, 7972., 35672. a n d d e v e l o p m e n t I, 49972. on B. Te Deum II, 6472., 28472. T e a r s . See:

Hazlitt

Index of Names and Subjects Tempest, The (Shakespeare's). Cited I, 189-90 and η. Β quotes II, $8n., 12on. possible farewell work II, 226-7 Temple Universel, Le. Performed II, 208 and n. Tempo. B. on I, 272η.; II, 57fr., 66-9, m , 147 of Apothéose 35472.-355«. Rousseau on I, 37m. of Roman Carnival I, 441 and n. rubato II, 60-1, i n in transcription II, 21777. Tennyson, Alfred. Maud I, 223-224 and n.; II, 88/1. fortunate career I, 531 verses on Exhibition II, 34 on Virgil II, 106 and smoothness II, 343 Tenth Symphony. Beethoven's plans for I, 321, 329η. Terris, Lionel. Plays Harold in Italy I, 248 · Teyte, Maggie. B. recordings I, 40577. Thackeray, W . M. I, 29977., 514η. on Napoleon's funeral I, 400η. on Jerome Paturot I, 403 and n. Thalberg, S. Teacher of Camille Moke I, 124η. and B.'s music I, 34071.; II, 109η. piano score of Apothéose I, 35577., 438 a composer I, 42072. on London jury II, 32 Théâtre des Nouveautés. Β. a chorister I, 72, 84 lends him its orchestra 120 Théâtre Lyrique. Β. aids in staging Oberon at II, 122 identified II, 20377. other works II, 165-6, 168, 175 Troy ens produced at II, 175, 103 "Thematic index." In B.'s compositions I, 74, 323ra., 330, 500, 502; II, 13877. in B.'s Memoirs II, 4 in Wagner's Ring I, 32377.; II, 185 Thiers. Journalist and historian I, 104 in 1830 revolution 136 would-be connoisseur I, 202, 238 Prime Minister I, 399 arrested II, 3777. exiled 3877. Thomas, Ambroise. Identified I, 275 and Academy I, 413, 558 Mignon success of, 1866-7 H- 257-8 B. on II, 275 pallbearer of B.'s II, 296 Thomas, Theodore. Plays Β. II, 246 and 77., 310 visits Β. II. 279 Thompson, Francis. On B.'s character II, 677. Thompson, James. I, 372n. Thomson, George. I, 9877. Thomson, Virgil. Cited I, 13, on B.'s greatness II, 15277. Thoreau, H. D. On heart and imagination I, 3927;. Thucvdides. II, 7 Ticck, Ludwig. I, 108, 39677. Ticrsot, Julien. Berlioziana II, 30477., 323

5

1 1

Tilmant, T . A. Leads conservatoire II,