We have observed that, in behalf of the art of music, Berlioz occasionally joined the political fray by allying himself with other hopeful artists in the effort to improve the collective prospects of all struggling musicians. Most of Berlioz’s campaigns were individual ones, however, and some—such as requesting from the Minister of the Interior, Vicomte de Martignac, an “encouragement annuel,” on August 20, 1828, to pursue his studies—were daring indeed:
Monseigneur,
I am twenty-four years old, I am a member of an honorable albeit large family from La Côte-Saint-André (in the Isère). Having worked with great diligence, and having received encouragement from the highest authorities, I have just been awarded the Second Grand Prize in musical composition from the Institut de France.
And yet my father, financially drained by the considerable sacrifices he has had to make, is no longer able to support my living in Paris. My career is thus at this moment at an impasse; I am about to lose all hope.
Several students at the École des Beaux-Arts who, like me, have received a Second Grand Prize, have been able to travel to Rome, with the aid of a government grant, in order to pursue their studies.
I therefore dare to solicit the enlightened benevolence of Your Excellency, not in order to gain so great a favor, but rather to benefit from an annual stipend that would allow me to continue my studies in Paris and to compete, next year, for the Grand Prix de Rome.
I should like to believe, Monseigneur, that I shall one day fully justify the encouragement I hope to receive from your good offices.
I am, with profound respect for Your Excellency, your most humble and obedient servant,
Hector Berlioz, student of Monsieur le Chevalier Lesueur, at the École Royale de Musique,
96, rue Richelieu, Paris, this August 20, 1828.
1 CG 1:204–205.(In my translation, I have interpreted the word Berlioz applies to his father, épuisé, as “financially drained.” It is true that, for his two daughters, Doctor Berlioz did have to provide meaningful dowries in order to attract appropriate suitors. It is also true that Berlioz’s father was one of the wealthiest men in his village and surrounding area and was probably not so overdrawn as Berlioz here suggests.) One of the “high authorities” supporting Berlioz’s appeal to Martignac was his teacher, Jean-François Lesueur, whose recommendation is affixed to Berlioz’s letter:
I have the honor to attest to His Excellency that the request from Monsieur Berlioz is founded on the brilliant hopes for success to which his talent and genius give rise, talent and genius that need further development in order to reach their maximum potential. This young man, highly educated in all the other sciences, is in my opinion certain to become a great composer who will bring great honor to the French nation. I do not hesitate to predict that in fewer than ten years, he will even become a true
chef d’école. But he is in need of assistance in order to complete his musical studies in another twelve to eighteen months. Monsieur Berlioz is a born musician; nature itself seems to have chosen him, from among so many others, to become a composer of such extraordinary talent as to become a veritable painter in his art. But all will be lost to him if he fails to obtain the benefaction of an enlightened minister who is the guarantor of the nation’s arts and letters. Should Monsieur Berlioz be so fortunate as to merit the patronage and support of our French Maecenas, he will repay such noble confidence in his future and will forever repeat with gratitude: “It is Monsieur le Comte de Martignac who opened the gates to my career.”
2 CG 1:205.Victor Hugo was accorded such a government stipend by the administration of Charles X, it is worth noting, but in 1828, Hugo, though only one year his senior, was considerably more established than Berlioz. The composer’s petition, in the event, went without response.
Of the other campaigns waged by Berlioz during his student days, none was more concentrated than the two-pronged attack to capture the Rome Prize and, victory attained, to enjoy the traditional government fellowship while remaining in the French capital. Indeed, Berlioz’s activities, from the moment of his disillusionment in the prize competition of 1829, may be construed as battle tactics to obtain the prize in 1830. As the 1828 second-prize winner, he had been within his rights, as his letter to Vicomte de Martignac suggests, to expect a first prize in the following year. But in the summer of 1829, he wrote such an original cantata, La Mort de Cléopâtre, that the judges denied him the crown. He thus gave a concert of some of his own works, and the “Emperor” Concerto, with Ferdinand Hiller, on November 1, 1829; he published the Ballet des ombres in December of that year; he brought out the Mélodies irlandaises in February of 1830; he conceived and composed the Symphonie fantastique in the early months of 1830; he held a rehearsal on May 16, had the program of the symphony printed in Le Figaro on May 21 and in the Journal des comédiens on May 23, and prepared for (but had to cancel) a performance on May 30. These efforts, in addition to being logical steps in the development of a career, were ways of making a public impression and of inducing the judges, in a manner of speaking, to award him the prize. Such a strategy was surely not original. The French have long had a passion for prizes that may date from the creation of the Académie Française itself, in 1635. Prize politics have been in the news since time immemorial; they remain in the news today.
Of the 1830 prize competition and prize cantata I have written elsewhere and at length, expressing some doubt that Berlioz’s winning entry,
Sardanapale, was as mediocre a work as he subsequently claimed:
3 Bloom, “Berlioz and the Prix de Rome,” 279–304. the apparent quotation at measure 89 of a tune from
La Muette de Portici could be read as an impish prank; the final V–I cadence, tacked on, should be read, considering Berlioz’s usual inventiveness at this point of the proceedings, as an intentional impertinence. Be this as it may, it is certain that the completion of this self-designated timid and academic score, played at the Palais de l’Institut on October 30, was accompanied not only by the settings of
La Marseillaise and the
Chant du Neuf Thermidor that I have mentioned, but also by the completion and revision of two other scores, the
Ouverture de La Tempête, played at the Opéra on November 7, and the
Symphonie fantastique, finally performed at the Conservatoire on December 5.
During the autumn, Berlioz pleaded with the authorities that an exception be made to the traditional rules of an Académie des Beaux-Arts founded upon and devoted to tradition. In fact, exceptions to the rules were sometimes made by the Academy, as Berlioz knew and as various archival documents attest, but not in the particular sense that Berlioz had in mind—namely, to receive his stipend while remaining in France. It is no secret that the absurdity of sending composers to Rome is the theme of many of Berlioz’s writings on the Prix de Rome. It is the theme as well of an article by the liberal journalist François-Fortuné Guyot de Fère, “Musique: Art dramatique,” that appeared in the November 21, 1830, issue of the Journal des artistes et des amateurs, of which he was the editor. This fellow, a regular in the liberal press, appears nowhere in the Berlioz literature, but in speaking soundly to the paucity of Roman musical life for the Rome-prize-winning composer, Guyot de Fère seems to take a page from Berlioz’s book.
In the matter of exceptions, the sculptor Antoine Étex, an unsuccessful candidate for the Prix de Rome in 1828, 1829, and 1830, was in fact awarded a fellowship by the new Ministry of the Interior under Louis-Philippe—in part due to his participation in the July Revolution—“in order to complete his studies and produce a work that would give him the right to hope for his fair share of the artistic monuments commissioned by the government of his country.”
4 Le Normand-Romain, “Le Séjour d’Étex à Rome,” 175. Others found their way to Rome with government aid but without a
premier prix;
some shortened their periods of “exile” due to problems of family, or of health.
5 Relevant documents are found in the archives of the Académie de France à Rome (carton 34). But no Rome Prize winner seems to have been able to avoid the trip to Rome, as Eugène-Prosper Prévost hoped to do in 1831,
6 AnF, F21 610. and as Berlioz had hoped to do in 1830.
On August 23, 1830, Berlioz wrote to his mother that if needed he would go so far as to ask the new King himself for permission to remain in Paris. On September 3, he reported to his father in this regard that he had asked for assistance from Alexandre Périer, a member of the great banking family from the Dauphiné, an acquaintance of Berlioz’s uncle Félix Marmion (Périer and Marmion had been fellow students at the École centrale de Grenoble),
7 Information kindly provided by Pascal Beyls, author of Félix Marmion, Oncle de Berlioz. and the younger brother of Casimir Périer, who would become Président de la Chambre des Députés on August 6, 1830, and who would serve as Président du Conseil, that is, Premier Ministre, from March 13, 1831, to May 16, 1832.
8 CG 1:351, 356. At nearly the same moment, Berlioz asked Jules-René Guérin—a physician who was the founding editor of the
Gazette de santé (soon the
Gazette médicale de Paris), and who may well have known Berlioz during his medical-student days, in as much as both men began their studies in 1821—to second his request for an exemption from the rule requiring him to go to Rome by means of an attestation regarding his alleged medical problems. In fact, if we accept Guérin’s testimony at face value—few scholars have—then we must think twice about the remarks of more recent commentators on Berlioz’s mental and physical health:
The undersigned, docteur en médecine de la Faculté de Paris, hereby declares that he has treated Monsieur Hector Berlioz for some five years for disorders of the nervous system [“affections nerveuses”] accompanied by symptoms of stroke [“congestion cérébrale”]. I have noticed that these symptoms become especially acute during the summer months, exacerbated by the hot sun. Consequently, I believe it would be dangerous for Monsieur Berlioz to have to live in a warm climate such as that of Rome, where he would be exposed to conditions likely to renew and augment his medical difficulties.
9 Berlioz to the Minister of the Interior, October 28, 1830 (CG 1:377).In her study of melancholy, monomania, and Berlioz, Francesca Brittan does not mention Doctor Guérin’s diagnosis. In fact, it would tend to support her claim that Berlioz was not entirely well.
10 Brittan, Music and Fantasy in the Age of Berlioz, 53–88.On October 20, 1830, Berlioz mentioned to his mother that he hoped a word from Rossini and Spontini would aid his cause, even though the members of the Section de Musique at the Institut de France, other than his teacher, Jean-François Lesueur, would not.
11 CG 1:371. And in a well-known letter of October 28, he appealed directly to the Minister of the Interior, at the time the formidable historian and statesman François Guizot, for permission to receive his stipend in Paris, citing both medical and professional reasons for his request. This is the letter to which are attached statements of support from Doctor Guérin (which we have cited), F.-J. Fétis, Spontini, Meyerbeer, and Lesueur.
12 CG 1:376–377. A further letter of support addressed to the Minister of the Interior—not included in Berlioz’s
Correspondence générale and important to reproduce here—is especially revealing:
It is neither my custom nor my belief that it is appropriate to make solicitations on behalf of myself or of others. But I should like to appeal to your fine artistic sensibilities in communicating to you a request in behalf of a young man of great talent and promise for the future.
Monsieur Hector Berlioz has been awarded the Grand Prize in composition [at the Institut de France]; he would like to be exempted from the rule requiring him to sojourn in Italy, and thus to profit here in Paris from the stipend to which the prize gives him the right. Having undertaken certain immense new compositions and having begun negotiations with several German theaters for the performance of works already completed, he feels that such a long absence [from the capital] would immediately compromise the beginnings of his career.
Monsieur Berlioz is furthermore in deplorable health. He suffers from excessive nervous irritation; the requirement to leave Paris at this moment throws him into such despair that it is my firm belief that such a trip might well be injurious to his well-being. All of this has made him highly distraught, and his friends are trying, in vain, to restore his equilibrium. But alas, musical genius, like poetic genius, gives rise to certain anomalies; and as to the genius of the laureate in question, I can attest to it, as do his teachers, Messieurs Lesueur and Spontini, and as do all of those who have followed him through the course of a musical education, during which he has had to struggle against unimaginable obstacles placed in his path by his family.
I thought, Monsieur le Comte, that you would graciously allow one of Monsieur Berlioz’s friends to testify in his behalf and to urge you to support a request the granting of which is, to me, a matter of profound concern.
13 Louis de Carné to the Minister of the Interior, in Lapauze, Histoire de l’Académie de France à Rome, 2:205–206.The writer of this letter, a man whom Berlioz knew well, was Louis de Carné, writer, politician, eventually a member of the Académie Française, and earlier, in March 1829, a founding editor of the newspaper
Le Correspondant, for which Berlioz wrote several important articles in 1829 and 1830, notably a three-part biographical sketch of Beethoven and an “Aperçu sur la musique classique et la musique romantique.” Carné was a dedicated constitutional monarchist and an ardent Catholic whom Berlioz’s father held in high esteem. Berlioz may have met him as early as 1825, through the intermediacy of his friend Humbert Ferrand.
14 CG 1:501, 97. Obviously impressed by Berlioz’s musical gifts, and perhaps taken with his ideas on religious music, Carné extended himself to a considerable degree, as we see here, on behalf of the freshly crowned winner of the Prix de Rome.
Vicomte de Carné’s letter, further evidence of the “political” associations maintained by Berlioz during his student days in Paris, raises a practical question regarding the composer’s claims to be negotiating with theaters in Germany. We know that in May he was discussing with the Austrian tenor Anton Haitzinger a possible German performance of his opera
Les Francs-Juges, and that in
December he sent manuscript scores of his works to Spontini, who since 1820 had been General Music Director in Berlin.
15 CG 1:324, 386. Carné seconds Berlioz’s and his doctor’s claims that he was subject to intense nervous irritation. He does not mention, for obvious reasons, that Berlioz was reluctant to leave town because he was head-over-heels in love with Camille Moke.
Why, we may logically be permitted to ask, did Berlioz finally accept the obligation to go to Italy, thus apparently sacrificing both his work and his would-be wife? We know that he needed money. But even without the stipend, the prize offered public acclaim, and thus the possibility of performance in Paris, as well as of the possibility of assistance from what might have been his newly proud family. Furthermore, in 1830, Berlioz was at the beginning of an income-producing career as a journalist, at a time when the newspapers were multiplying and a certain Honoré Balzac (not yet using the nobiliary particle) turned to journalism to earn his daily bread.
Still, like Aeneas leaving Carthage and his beloved Dido, Berlioz, too, despite what he so ardently proclaimed at the end of 1830, was haunted by cries of “Italie! Italie! Italie!,” the cries we hear at the end of act 4 of Les Troyens, and was finally drawn, by a sense of duty as well as by a capitulation to necessity, to the French enclave at the Villa Medici, atop the Pincian Hill, in the Eternal City of Rome.