Chapter One
Berlioz in the Year of the Symphonie fantastique
Et l’inexorable mélodie retentissant à mon oreille jusque dans ce léthargique sommeil…
—Berlioz, Lélio ou Le Retour à la vie
At Berlioz’s funeral, the eulogy pronounced by the President of the Académie des Beaux-Arts of the Institut de France, Eugène Guillaume, included the following passage:
At an early age, Berlioz was irresistibly drawn to music. From the outset, his strong will led him to repudiate some of the wrong-headed and frivolous conventions of the art. He was only at the beginning of his career, and yet his originality was already abundantly in evidence. His first work, the
Symphonie fantastique, established his reputation.
1 Institut impérial de France, Académie des Beaux-Arts. Discours de M. Guillaume, président, prononcé aux funérailles de M. Berlioz (March 11, 1869).Guillaume was among the many who assumed, correctly, that the
Symphonie fantastique was the source of Berlioz’s celebrity; he was also among the many who assumed, incorrectly, that the
Fantastique was the composer’s “first work.” Earlier, Henri Blaze had likewise written that Berlioz first came before the public with the
Symphonie fantastique, striding on to the musical scene “with the wild look of a Jacobin of 1793.”
2 Blaze, “De l’école fantastique et de M. Berlioz,” 98. The error is minor but indicative: talked about incessantly during the composer’s lifetime with a partisanship equaled in passion only by that which met the introduction in France of the music of Richard Wagner, the
Symphonie fantastique, well before the composer’s demise, became synonymous with both his name and his role as an
agent provocateur of musical discourse and debate. Its sketches, drafts, self-borrowings, and several versions have now been scanned, its literary and autobiographical sources have now been well studied. Scholars old and new have found the symphony and its program eminently apt for analysis, psychoanalysis, and criticism. Does anything remain to be said?
The answer, I believe, is yes. The practical details of its first performance, for example, can be further clarified by documents preserved at the Musée Hector-Berlioz at La Côte-Saint-André: that Berlioz had over fifteen hundred programs run off between November 22 and November 29, 1830, and six hundred publicity posters printed between November 29 and December 3, tells us something of his urgent last-minute preparations for the concert; that he was renting violas, double basses, bows, strings, and mutes up to and including the very day of the première tells us much about the preparedness of his orchestra.
3 Information from documents preserved at the Musée Hector-Berlioz, where my initial research was generously assisted by Adolphe Boschot’s daughter, Henriette-Louis-Margaret Boschot (1903–1994). And as for the narrative program of this “Épisode de la vie d’un artiste,” the storied document which the composer distributed to the audience and attached to the score, new literary sources continue to turn up. In an out-of-the-way book, for example, I was pleased to discover a certain “Épisode de la vie d’un voyageur,” in which a young man wanders round Paris for a month trying to find the beautiful young woman he has seen but once—a woman whose image appears before his mind’s eye, like an
idée fixe, whenever he sees a rose.
4 Lanfranchi, Voyage à Paris, “Épisode de la vie d’un voyageur,” 207–224. The woman meets a tragic fate. Did Berlioz—who tells us of the extraordinary images he saw in his
own mind’s eye
5 CG 1:310 (February 29, 1830).—read this book?
These are matters of detail—fascinating, perhaps; far-reaching, perhaps not. There are larger issues, however, which in my view merit more extensive consideration. The
ranz des vaches that opens and closes the third movement is nowhere to be found in the official repertories of such Alpine melodies,
6 See, for example, Starenne, Recherches sur les ranz de vaches. nor does it closely resemble the
ranz des vaches, which we can be sure our composer knew, in Rossini’s
Guillaume Tell. Is this Berlioz’s invention? The “
Dies irae” of the finale is authentic plainsong, and thus, for some, “sanctified.” Was not the parody of the chant—indeed, the mockery of the Gregorian melody (I am thinking of bars 157–162 and other corresponding passages)—an audacious conception at a time when the Catholic Church was powerfully influential upon the censors of the arts, and when sacrilege, for example, was punishable by death? Indeed, is this not what Ludwig Börne had in mind when he called the work “heretical” and even “licentious”?
7 Börne, Briefe aus Paris, 1:120–121. As for the “
Marche au supplice,” which Berlioz claimed was written “in one night”
8 Mémoires, 274.: was the composer here taking a stand, indirectly, on the preeminent issue on everyone’s mind at the time of the trial of Charles X’s disgraced ministers—the issue that caused Alfred de Vigny to mold his drama
La Maréchal d’Ancre around the fundamental idea of “the abolition of the death penalty” and Lamartine to enter the political arena with his
Ode contre la peine de mort?
9 Vigny, Le Journal d’un poète, 1:118; and Lamartine, “Ode contre la peine de mort.” Regardless of its origins in the opera
Les Francs-Juges,
from which it was most definitely extricated (even if the precise date of the surviving source of the march is uncertain), this music—ominous, brilliant, triumphalist—is celebratory in a way that a musical condemnation of capital punishment, if one could imagine such a thing, would not be. In its original guise—if its placement in the libretto of Berlioz’s early opera has been correctly identified
10 Holoman, The Creative Process, 315.—it is rather a music for the brutal soldiers of a cruel usurper, for a salute to tyranny, for an acknowledgement of despotism, or so one might wish to conjecture, even though in music, violence, like other emotional attributes, resists facile interpretation. The final fifteen bars of the march, you will perhaps remember, give us the final cry of the love-crazed murderer, the thwack of the guillotine, the thump of the severed head as it falls from the scaffold, and the mighty if macabre applause of the crowd.
The meaning of this gesture, more obviously pictorial than any other in the work, is not readily interpreted. If it does suggest approval of the ultimate punishment, then it puts the composer at odds, not only with Lamartine and Vigny, but also with Charles Nodier and, most famously, with Victor Hugo. The matter needs review in the light of the larger political history of France from the waning years of the Bourbon Restoration to the collapse of the Second Empire; clarification of his stance on the death penalty would further illuminate the picture we have of the composer of the Symphonie fantastique. At the end of her life, in 2018, the Berlioz scholar Katherine Kolb was at work on a book entitled Music After the Guillotine; it is sad that we do not have the light she would have cast on this dark matter.