Prologue

I used to think that most of my various articles, particularly those that offered readers unpublished documents, had served their purpose and settled into comfortable obscurity. I used to believe that some of their findings had become incorporated into the “general knowledge” of those interested in the great French composer and could rest in eternal peace. Now, urged on by friends alert to the needs of current musical scholarship, I have selected these several pieces for resuscitation, encouraged as I have been that their recirculation will prove useful, and perhaps dimly enlightening, to students of Berlioz and of the world of nineteenth-century music. In addition to adjusting passages in need of correction, adding new information, rewriting gobbledygook, and removing hot air, I have attached this prologue, to explain what I believe I have done and am doing, and an epilogue based on an article on Berlioz’s biographers that appeared initially in French, to comment on the writings of those who have supposed, as I do, that Berlioz’s life and work remain significant elements of modern culture, and merit continuing analysis and reflection.

Otherwise, the articles-become-chapters need no special introduction. They are arranged in an order based loosely on the chronology of the principal works and events they consider. This is what I intend by “Berlioz in Time”—and not the evolution of a style from something early and imitative to something late and summative: those Beethovenian categories apply uneasily to the music of the unpredictable Frenchman. I do enjoy the coincidence that, in his essay on conducting, Richard Wagner remarked, in English, that “time is music.” He probably intended to say, given the context, that “time is money”; but perhaps he was telescoping the notion that, to use the later philosopher Susanne Langer’s oft-cited (and oft-misquoted) formulation, “music [is] the passage of time made audible.”2 Langer, Feeling and Form, 135 Be this as it may, “Berlioz in time” has served my purpose as I have revised these texts to fit their reincarnation as chapters in a unified book. (The articles originally appearing in French appear here in English, of course, and, in bringing them over, I have felt no loyalty to my second-language prose.) In the chapter on the Fantastique, I take a fresh look at some of the musical activities Berlioz engaged in before and during the gestation of the symphony, and at some of the undergraduate campaigns he waged to make himself known. In the chapter on Liszt, I look at the relationship the young pianist maintained with the lovesick composer through a lens tinged, I hope reasonably (after fifty years’ residence at the largest liberal arts college for women in the United States), with feminism. In the chapter on the Théâtre-Italien, I bring to light an episode in the life of the composer that has often remained in the shadows. In the chapter on Les Nuits d’été, one of Berlioz’s works that listeners cherish the most, I include new information on Berlioz’s incipient relationship with Marie Recio that suggests a real musical connection between the capacities of the young singer and the completion of the cycle. Indeed, the discovery that the woman who became Berlioz’s mistress began her career in 1840 under the stage name of Marie Willès, with concerts both in Paris and abroad, has led me to a reconsideration of the genesis of Berlioz’s elegant album. In the chapter on Berlioz’s “mission” to Germany, I bring into English a little-known document that casts new light on the raison d’être of the composer’s expedition to the provinces of Goethe and Beethoven: the voyage had an administrative purpose as well as the overmastering one, which he announced in public, of making his music known beyond the walls of the city. In the chapter on Wagner, I touch briefly upon some of the elements of the relationship between two titans who shared common ground and suffered copious disparities, a full exposition of which could itself be a history of mid-nineteenth-century European music. In a chapter that originally appeared in German translation, I attempt only to suggest, because I cannot prove, that the original ending of Les Troyens, more elaborate than what we hear in the opera house and on the recordings, had a purpose that was more than purely artistic. In the two late chapters on Shakespeare, as well as in the early chapter on Berlioz and the translators, I focus on some of the many moments at which Berlioz engaged passionately and penetratingly with the comedies and tragedies of the Bard. If there is some repetition in those three chapters, and elsewhere, too, you will pardon me, I hope, both for my enthusiasm and my expectation that you will not be reading this book as though it were a nail-biting novel. In “Berlioz Writing the Life of Berlioz,” I include information gained from preparing the first fully critical edition of Les Mémoires d’Hector Berlioz. In other chapters, new information, often based on newly available correspondence and criticism, has led to other changes, less dramatic, perhaps, but changes nonetheless. The result is that this is not a brand-new publication, nor is it in any way a simple reprint of matters ancient or old.

To the extent that my name has been seen in the world of musicology, it has, obviously, been attached to work on Berlioz, which has occupied me from the beginning of my so-called career, in the nineteen-seventies, until now. Early on, Hugh Macdonald, the founder and editor-in-chief of the New Berlioz Edition, asked me to join the team then preparing the multivolume publication that now lies at the heart of the modern Berlioz renaissance. At the same time, it fell to me to review the first volume of Pierre Citron’s new edition of Berlioz’s Correspondance générale, an enterprise with which I would engage for many years and enlarge (with assistance from Professor Macdonald and two French colleagues) with a supplementary volume published in 2016. When the Critique musicale d’Hector Berlioz edited by my friends H. Robert Cohen and Yves Gérard reached the fourth of its ten projected volumes, at the beginning of the new century, I was happy to join the editorial committee that provided guidance and supplementary annotations to the work of the principal editors, now Anne Bongrain and Marie-Hélène Coudroy-Saghaï, who brought the series to completion in the autumn of 2020. Finally, when Pierre Citron urged me to undertake a new critical edition of Les Mémoires d’Hector Berlioz, his own edition being rich with complementary information but not “critical” in the scholarly sense of the term, I began meditating such a project (when Professor Citron and I were members of an international committee that oversaw the worldwide celebrations of Berlioz’s bicentenary) and eventually published the book in 2019, in the year of notable celebrations in Paris and La Côte-Saint-André of the one-hundred-fiftieth anniversary of the composer’s death.

It has been my privilege, therefore, to be associated with the critical editions of the fundamental source-documents—the scores, the private letters, the public writings—upon which all serious research on Berlioz now depends. Over those years, during which I became a French citizen (a fact I mentioned in the introduction to my 1998 biography of Berlioz—the only fact, I fear, that some readers found interesting), it was my good fortune to maintain a correspondence and friendship with the father of modern Berlioz scholarship, the Franco-American intellectual historian Jacques Barzun, who for decades tendered insight and advice with uncommon generosity. Jacques became senior to scholars across the United States of America, but, as the distinguished Columbia historian Henry Graff put it, he never made us feel our “juniority.” It was my good fortune to maintain similarly excellent relations with David Cairns, now the composer’s authoritative biographer, from whom I have been learning, and with whom I have been sparring, for the same amount of time; with Hugh Macdonald, of whose extraordinary accomplishments the completion of the New Berlioz Edition may be the most extraordinary of all; and with Joël-Marie Fauquet, now the dean of French musical scholarship, the editor of that bible of nineteenth-century studies which is the Dictionnaire de la musique en France au XIXe siècle, and a friend, like Jacques, David, and Hugh, for nearly fifty years.

I had originally thought to include in this collection articles on subjects other than Berlioz. One of the pieces I prize concerns Robert Schumann’s Bunte Blätter, of whose dedicatee, the American piano student Mary Potts, even the Schumann scholars knew nothing. The momentary involvement of one of the world’s greatest composers with the wife of a man deeply enmeshed in a Confederacy that led Berlioz to speak of the “Disunited States of America” is surprising, to say the least; the account of that involvement became more mystery than musicology. And having for some years co-taught an interdisciplinary course with my Smith College colleague Hans Rudolf Vaget, an expert on Goethe and Thomas Mann and one of the preeminent Wagner scholars of our time, I have now and again added a drop of my own to the unfathomable ocean of Wagner scholarship. A piece of mine on Siegfried resulted from my early career as an oboist, spurred by my studies at the Curtis Institute of Music with John de Lancie, principal oboist of the Philadelphia Orchestra and the most important teacher of my life. Mr. de Lancie also encouraged me to prepare a comprehensive study of the genesis of the oboe concerto of Richard Strauss, which he inspired when he was a soldier in the United States Army and chanced to meet the great German master at the end of the Second World War. Finally, my friendship with Denis Herlin, editor-in-chief of Debussy’s correspondence and complete musical works, led me to prepare a new critical edition of, and write about, the Quatuor à cordes. In the end, however, I thought better of including Schumann, Wagner, Strauss, and Debussy in this gathering—I mention them here to demonstrate that I am almost but not entirely Johnny-One-Note—and determined to concentrate on what I know best.3 “Robert Schumann and Mary Potts,” Notes 65, no. 2 (December 2008): 268–281; “Reading Siegfried’s Reed,” Wagnerspectrum 3, no. 1 (2007): 77–92; “History, Memory, and the Oboe Concerto of Richard Strauss,” The Pendragon Review 2 (2001): 3–25; Claude Debussy, 1er Quatuor pour 2 violons, alto et violoncelle, op. 10 (Œuvres Complètes de Claude Debussy, 3:1) (Paris: Durand, 2015.)

One of the themes of my research over the years has been “politics,” loosely defined, as it has engaged, encroached upon, and been affected by, the art of music. Raised in a politically involved family, and, as an adult, living frequently in Europe, I have become acutely aware of how, in particular on the continent, the arts have long been and continue to be viewed through a political lens, and I have come to see that, however much one might relish the notion of “art for art’s sake,” the history of music cannot be meaningfully articulated without reference to the political and social matters that weighed upon those who made it, and that actively occupied their minds and their artistic endeavors even when their primary work was in the studio or on the stage. Or in the stacks, for that matter, because some of Berlioz’s outstanding contemporaries—Charles Nodier, Alexandre Dumas, Casimir Delavigne, Théophile Gautier, Alfred de Musset, Leconte de Lisle, and Anatole France among them—had part-time careers as librarians. Most notably, Berlioz himself was a librarian at the Conservatoire for some thirty years, from 1839 until his death. I do not treat that history here, except to point out that according to his employment dossier, preserved in one of the registres des personnels administrative et enseignant, he was appointed conservateur de la bibliothèque on January 1, 1839, at a salary of 1,500 francs per annum; he was named bibliothécaire on April 27, 1850; his annual salary was increased to 2,500 francs on January 1, 1852, returned to 1,500 francs on January 1, 1853, and doubled to 3,000 francs on January 1, 1866—but let it be said that “politics” is what enabled him to obtain the post in the first place (it was arguably a sinecure) and to maintain it through the revolutionary year of 1848 and on to the end. On the other hand, “politics” surely prevented him from obtaining more lucrative posts as conductor or professor at one of the capital’s greater or lesser musical institutions (the list of his attempts is not short), or as director of the Théâtre-Italien (explicitly treated here in chapter 4) or of the post-Cherubini Conservatoire. In 1852, he was denied directorship of the new Imperial Chapel of Napoléon III, despite having worked out a detailed and grandiose plan for its organization based on his intimate knowledge of the chapels that had operated successfully under King Louis XVIII and King Charles X. In this collection, “politics” is seen explicitly in the chapters on the Symphonie fantastique, the Théâtre-Italien, the Symphonie militaire, and Les Troyens. Elsewhere, at almost every turn, “politics” inevitably rises to, or lies just below, the surface.

“Politics” has lately led me to write on the merits of honoring Berlioz with a berth in the Panthéon, that imposing edifice atop the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève, where one reads, “Aux grands hommes, la patrie reconnaissante.” It would have been fitting for such a piece to be included in a book that opens with an essay on the Symphonie fantastique, for it was on August 26, 1830, three months after the symphony was fully drafted, that the new King, Louis-Philippe, declared that that originally revolutionary inscription be restored to the pediment of the building. But I omit it here because its main point, to which I shall return in chapters 5 and 10, can be made in relatively short order: Hector Berlioz, in his maturity, from the early eighteen-thirties to the late eighteen-sixties, had little or no sympathy for the republican form of government. In his private letters and public writings, he made it clear that a head of state whose authority was circumscribed by a body of representatives of the population at large was unlikely to ameliorate the current state of the arts. Berlioz—despite regular cooperation with a fledgling national musicians’ union, the Association des Artistes Musiciens, designed to improve the lot of all musicians high and low—was what we would call an elitist. With a somewhat circular sleight-of-hand, he defined the art of music itself as existing primarily for the happy few, for those possessed of the heightened sensitivities and special abilities needed to appreciate it. He explicitly rejected the notion of la musique mise à la portée de tout le monde, this being the title of an important book published in 1830 by François-Joseph Fétis, one of Berlioz’s early bêtes noires, one of the founding fathers of modern musicology, and one of the first practitioners of what we know as “music appreciation,” who believed that music could and should lie at everyone’s doorstep. Berlioz rather believed that music could be properly appreciated only by those with inborn talent, with searching awareness, with skilled ears, and—we may surmise—with some social standing. He was thrilled to perform before the mid-century princes and potentates of the assorted German states; he was delighted to be feted in Russia by the acolytes of the authoritarian czars; he was continuously hopeful of receiving commissions and encouragements, as allowances were called, from the “royals” in France. He was revolted by the revolutions of 1848 and repelled by the crowds who demonstrated in behalf of the republican cause. He was surprised by Louis-Napoléon’s election to the presidency on December 10, 1848 (he used the date as the title of the 1855 cantata we know as L’Impériale), and was delighted by Louis-Napoléon’s coup d’état of December 2, 1851, despite its cost to some of their French citizenship and to others of their lives. And, had he lived through France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, he would surely have figured among those who advocated, not the establishment of a Third Republic, but rather the return to empire—or to monarchy—as a rampart against republicanism.

Fifteen years after the establishment of that Third Republic, in 1885, the authorities honored via panthéonisation one of the country’s greatest sons—greatest poets, greatest playwrights, greatest novelists, pair de France, sénateur—who had gone into exile precisely in order to protest Louis-Napoléon’s coup d’état, and who had ridiculed him in print as “Napoléon le petit.” From the time of Victor Hugo’s entombment in the Panthéon until the present day, those who have received the honor of panthéonisation have been, in one way or another, like Hugo himself, advocates of the lofty ideals of the great French Republic. “The admission to the Panthéon is an acknowledgement of republican accomplishment,” the former French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin has lately written, contesting the entry into the national shrine of the poets Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine, proposed by a fraternity of experts and enthusiasts. It is “an acknowledgement of a particular man or woman’s lifelong battle in behalf of liberty, equality, and fraternity.”4 Dominique de Villepin, “N’entre pas ici, Arthur Rimbaud,” Le Monde (October 5, 2020). In January 2020, the President of the French Republic, Emmanuel Macron, avoiding the political issue, decided to accept the Rimbaud family’s expression of reluctance to translate the remains of their famous ancestor to that chilly vault in the Quartier Latin, and thus to forego the panthéonisation of those two renowned, rebellious literary lions. Meanwhile, on Armistice Day, November 11, 2020, Monsieur Macron ushered into the Panthéon Maurice Genevoix—writer, member, and Secrétaire Perpétuel of the Académie Française, veteran of World War I, and celebrated author of Ceux de 14, a dazzling historical and literary account of the Great War’s heroism and horror—and with him, by analogy, all of those who had fought for La Patrie and who had perished in the conflict.

With Genevoix as point of comparison, with Hugo and Zola, Jean Jaurès and Jean Moulin, André Malraux and Simone Veil therein honorably interred, what are we to do with Berlioz, the inspired composer, the brilliant and witty writer, the agent for the modern orchestra, the advocate of freedom from the constraints of tradition, the pan-European conductor, and the cosmopolitan citizen who once referred to himself ironically as “three-quarters German”—by which phrase he meant nothing of the sort, of course, for he was as thoroughly French as French could be, long regarded Paris as the “centrum gravitas of the musical world and of all possible worlds,”5 Berlioz to his uncle Félix Marmion, March 30, 1843 (CG 8:224). and, though offered positions elsewhere, never seriously imagined settling permanently away from home? Do we set aside his views on the affairs of state and send him willy-nilly to the Panthéon? Do we honor the wishes of his descendants and allow him to rest in peace, with his two wives and mother-in-law, in the serenity of the cemetery in Montmartre, his dwelling since 1869? Or do we take seriously what he said about politics, acknowledge the dissonance between his own leaning right and the republicans’ leaning left, and honor the composer otherwise, appropriately, sufficiently, and simultaneously, by performing his music and by reading his books?

One of the loudest of the current advocates of panthéonisation has asserted that, had Richard Wagner been French, he would have enjoyed the honor many a moon ago. The assertion is absurdly hypothetical yet nonetheless provocative. It is true that wagnérisme was born in France and that Wagner remains enormously popular in the country of Bizet and Boulez. It is true that Paris, for Wagner, was the artistic capital of the century, whose creative wiles and workings impacted almost all of his grandiose artistic projects.6 See in this regard Sabine Le Hir, “Wagner et la France (1830–1861).” It is true that had he been French, Wagner would perhaps have remained a leftist. He would obviously not have imagined the satire, Eine Kapitulation, that lacerates the losers of the Franco-Prussian War. (Gabriel Fauré and André Messager cut him down to size in their hilarious four-hand quadrille Souvenirs de Bayreuth.) It is also true, however, that Wagner would almost certainly have set down Das Judentum in der Musik and the other unmitigatedly antisemitic remarks that color his writings, and that would have appalled the presidents of the French Republic who preside with sole and unique authority over the portals of the Panthéon. It is thus by no means obvious that Richard Wagner would have been carried up those broad stairs and through those mighty doors. Indeed, those who have written on Wagner and his world have long demonstrated an acute awareness of the sometimes troubling political implications of their subject matter, with all of its antisemitic baggage; those who have written on Berlioz, one of whose stellar attributes is his explicit rejection of antisemitism, have preferred to see their fellow as nonpolitical, or extrapolitical—which, as I have attempted to explain, he was not and could never have been.

That fact has apparently not lessened interest in Berlioz’s music, which is sometimes uneven (whose isn’t?), sometimes astounding, sometimes sublime. Nor has it lessened interest in Berlioz’s writing, which is rich in mirth—the portrait of Cherubini, stern and stuttering, with his singular Italian accent; the sketch of Fétis, severe and self-important, with his syrupy speech; the caricatures of Kapellmeisters and conductors drawn in what was a great age for caricature (Daumier, Grandville, Cham)—and which is replete with food for thought, because the man was nothing if not well read, intelligent, and articulate, even when he was undemocratic, politically incorrect, or, despite his great gift for friendship, unkind. His attraction to authoritarianism, seen best in his short story Euphonia, can be disconcerting. This portrait of a musical utopia, which appeared in serialized form in 1844 in the Revue et Gazette musicale and was revised in 1852 for Les Soirées de l’orchestre, is in part an autobiographical fantasy of revenge—against that femme fatale Camille Moke, who jilted him when he was away in Italy; against what he always felt was the ornamental excess of an Italian music far more popular than his own; and against what he deemed to be unmusical music in general. His utopia, despite its hopeful depiction of a permanent fête de la musique, is also a kind of armed dictatorship, a city “under military rule and subjected to despotic regime”—something whose implications the critics, with the brilliant exception of Joël-Marie Fauquet, have preferred to minimize or ignore.7 Fauquet, Musique en Utopie, part 6, 307–384.

Far beyond the Panthéon, the monuments to the heroes of yesterday, artistic and other, are today under severe analysis and even attack. A famous editor has lately reminded us that the reputation of Rudyard Kipling, for example, “the most talented” writer of the Victorian Era, has long suffered because of his “fatal identification with imperialism.”8 Robert Gottlieb, “Dickensworld,” New York Times Book Review (November 8, 2020), 1. I do not see Berlioz as a “hero,” although he shares with heroes a life trajectory that leads from artistic struggle to artistic success. Nor, obviously, do I see Berlioz as “all genius and no talent”—even though versions of that problematical paradox (lately applied by the novelist Martin Amis to James Joyce)9 New York Times Book Review (October 25, 2020), 8. have at times been draped over the career and coffin of the composer of the Symphonie fantastique. The study of the life and work of Berlioz remains relevant in today’s world of music, I continue to believe, not because it serves to promote heroism or genius or their opposites, but because, more unassumingly, it forces us to focus upon matter and material that I, following Barzun, see as “conspicuously unique”; it forces us to consider anew the ancient question—the most intriguing question of all, because it is the most elusive and most difficult to answer—of the nature of the relationship between man and music, between life and art. It forces us to confront our aesthetic and ethical assumptions about a “canon” of “classical” compositions in a contemporary society shaped, today as it was yesterday, by political power, and marked, in politics as in the arts, by ever more exuberant and increasingly uncompromising extremes. Perhaps the musicological “globalists,” who as I write are intent upon “decentering” the Western canon, can find in Berlioz an interesting case study. He did indeed tend to infantilize the music of other cultures—an obvious minus! But the patterns of his music—a potential plus?—do not readily match those that the new globalists find too male and too white. “You can imitate Wagner,” a later composer-translator remarked, “you cannot copy Berlioz.”10 Félix Grenier, Le Guide musical (November 29, 1903), 8.

In the index, for ready reference, I include the names of all authors, editors, and translators cited in the notes.

In an ultimate tincture of sagacity and mirth, my great mentor Jacques Barzun dedicated his final book, From Dawn to Decadence, “to all whom it may concern,” playfully transforming a common expression into a covert exhortation: knowledge ought to concern us all. Perhaps Jacques would be amused to see that I dedicate this book to those whom it has concerned, let us say, from time to time: my wife, Catherine, with whose dictum (si c’est français, c’est bon, si c’est américain, c’est…) I am sometimes inclined to agree, and our two talented and independent children, Alexandra, unaware that I had used it on the cover of my biography of Berlioz and thus surprised that I was familiar with Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People, and Caroline, forgetting that I had been teaching the music of the classic and romantic eras for half a century and thus surprised that I knew the date of Beethoven’s birth. Thank you for your support!