In a summary of Berlioz’s activities of 1830, the editor of his
Correspondance générale, Pierre Citron, mentions “politics” but once. July 28, 1830: Berlioz leaves his “cell” (at the Palais de l’Institut) and finds Paris in the midst of revolution. “He wanders through the streets and procures a rifle. But despite his ardent desire to join the battle for freedom, he finds no opportunity to fight and feels ashamed for having served no useful purpose.”
1 Citron, “Berlioz en 1830,” 176. If one takes Berlioz at his word—that his desire to battle for liberty was “ardent”—then one must assume such a desire was present both before and after the three-day revolution; one must assume the composer, like the other young modernists in the circle around Victor Hugo, was a believer in both political and artistic liberty, and, perhaps worth saying, in their reciprocal relationship. What is the evidence of this? Berlioz most assuredly did not go around inscribing “Vive la liberté”
on the walls of Paris during the eighteen-twenties; nor did he parade around town waving the tricolored flag that Delacroix featured in his famous painting. Those who wished at the time to champion the cause of liberty spoke out, as did Byron and Lamartine and Casimir Delavigne and others, in favor of the Greeks and their war of independence. And in fact, during his student days, Berlioz did so as well. On a libretto prepared by his friend Humbert Ferrand, Berlioz began in the fall of 1825 to compose a work entitled
Scène héroïque pour grands chœurs et grand orchestre, or,
La Révolution grecque. In his correspondence of the time Berlioz does not insist on the political message of the libretto. But the subject was
ipso facto political: the call to arms, in Berlioz’s score, is set to music of great fire and brimstone; the message to other countries, in the printed libretto, is clear:
Europe, bestir thyself! See them dying!
O God of the powerful, render your sword visible in their hands!
Only should you deign with your strength to assist their gallant efforts,
Will their blows ring true, will their frailty become might.
2 This verse of the printed libretto of 1826 was not set by Berlioz. See NBE 12a:396. Until the astonishing rediscovery of the Messe solennelle (1824), in 1991, La Révolution grecque, whose first version was completed in 1826, was the earliest extended work by Berlioz that had come down to us in its entirety. Though in form it is old-fashioned—shaped like a Rome Prize cantata and not illogically viewed as a warm-up exercise for the kind of work Berlioz would compose for the competition—its content was of decidedly current interest, and literally pro-Greek-revolutionary. The music is harmonically unadventurous and rhythmically repetitive, and while Berlioz revised a part of the score in 1833, for a prospective performance in honor of the third anniversary of the July Revolution, he reused its main musical ideas in no subsequent work—quite the opposite of his later appropriation of the score of the Messe solennelle, and a small suggestion that, in hindsight, he was little satisfied by that earlier effort.
Berlioz’s major work in 1826 concerned the opera
Les Francs-Juges, a “rescue opera” befitting of the French revolutionary tradition most famously embodied in Beethoven’s
Fidelio, and perhaps influenced by that celebrated work in the choice of the name of the hero, Lenor, who, like Leonora, appears in the opera in disguise. The extant fragments of Berlioz’s opera have now been published and studied in detail;
3 NBE 4. they need not concern us here. Suffice it to say that if the cries of “Viva la libertà!” in Mozart’s
Don Giovanni may logically be taken for expressions of the composer’s own political sentiments, as they have, then the cries in Berlioz’s opera of “La liberté, fille de la victoire, sera le prix de nos efforts,”
4 Fragment of the libretto of Les Francs-Juges preserved in BnF Musique, papiers divers Berlioz, no. 45. may be reasonably taken as an expression of his.
Other early musical manifestations of Berlioz’s “politics” include a setting from 1829 of Victor Hugo’s
Chanson de pirates from
Les Orientales, in which, among other themes, one finds condemnation of the Ottoman Empire’s practice of cruelty to women. (It has been suggested that Berlioz’s setting, now lost, became the
Chant de brigands in
Le Retour à la vie;
in my edition of that work, I propose a different source.)
5 NBE 7:xi–xii. They also include the most striking number of his
Neuf Mélodies from December of the same year, the
Élégie en prose, in which the poet Thomas Moore relates the heroic acts of the Irish patriot Robert Emmet. It is well known that Berlioz made an orchestral arrangement of
La Marseillaise in 1830, and had an epistolary exchange with the author of the hymn, Rouget de Lisle.
6 Mémoires, 282–288. It is less well known that he made another setting of a work by Rouget de Lisle, the
Chant du Neuf Thermidor, discovered only in 1984, in the Bibliothèque du Conservatoire de Genève.
7 Tchamkerten, “Un Autographe inédit de Berlioz,” 22–28; and NBE 22b. We may logically suppose that this selection, presumably made from Maurice Schlesinger’s republication in 1830 of Rouget de Lisle’s
48 Chants français,
was motivated by the coincidence of the dates—le 9 Thermidor = July 27, 1794; July 27 = the first of
Les Trois Glorieuses—although the political situations were not identical: le 9 Thermidor marked the downfall of Maximilien Robespierre and the beginning of the end of the Reign of Terror; July 27 opened a three-day revolution that was preceded, not by a cycle of revolutionary violence, but by the proclamation of highly reactionary edicts issued by an increasingly authoritarian King. Still, at the time, some observers, such as the royal naval commander Charles Stuart Cochran, did speak of an abhorrence of authority that ran “from the ferocious Robespierre to the fanatical Polignac”;
8 Cochran, The Great Week in Paris, 19. such a comparison was thus by no means out of bounds. Rouget de Lisle, incarcerated as a potential royalist, sent his original hymn to the National Convention on 17 Thermidor (August 4, 1794) to accompany his immediately successful request to be released from prison.
9 Tiersot, Rouget de Lisle, 179. Perhaps Berlioz, too, thought of his arrangement as a kind of offering to the new “King of the French,” Louis-Philippe d’Orléans, who would be sworn in, not on August 4, but five days later, on August 9, 1830. Such a gift would have been only one of numerous such
hommages,
songs and plays and poems and more, many still preserved in the private archives of the Orléans family.
10 AnF, 300 AP 3:45.The precise dates of the composition of these hymns is not known. It is possible that Berlioz set them down several months after the enthroning of the new King, and after the announcement of Berlioz’s victory in the 1830 prize competition, on August 21, as elements of his campaign for an exception to the rules that required him to profit from his fellowship exclusively in Rome. That campaign, to benefit from the fellowship in Paris, went on for some months, as the composer witnessed performances in the capital of Sardanapale, on September 30, of the Fantaisie dramatique sur La Tempête, on November 7, and of the Symphonie fantastique, on December 5. Had it succeeded, Berlioz’s Chant du Neuf Thermidor would have been his ticket to freedom, not from prison, like Rouget’s, but from exile.