Politics

Like many at the time, Berlioz harbored an admiration for the grandeur and heroism of France’s Napoleonic past. Of his precise political sentiments in and around 1830 we know relatively little. With his friend Humbert Ferrand, a devout Catholic and a “légitimiste,” which at the time meant an advocate of the succession of the senior branch of the Bourbon Monarchy, Berlioz apparently agreed to disagree.1 CG 1:353. With his family, and with a number of acquaintances, the subject of politics (as he wrote to his mother on September 19, 1830) was apparently taboo: “Although I have very definite political opinions, I can assure you that I rarely articulate them in public, since I find all conversations about such matters extremely tiresome.”2 CG 1:363. The meaning of this comment, which I believe ought to be taken cum grano salis, is not self-evident. Pierre Citron, editor of Berlioz’s correspondence, assumed that Berlioz’s intention was to mask his pro-revolutionary sentiments in the aftermath of Les Trois Glorieuses. And yet that same revolutionary fervor became an impediment to Berlioz’s efforts to focus attention upon the forthcoming première, in December, of the Symphonie fantastique. It is conceivable that Berlioz kept his political views close to the chest because, while surrounded by young artists optimistic about the future of the new regime, he himself may have regretted the removal from power of Vicomte de La Rochefoucauld, who (as we have seen) had formed a favorable impression of the composer, and who, as director of the Department of Fine Arts, might have authorized the exception that his successors refused to consider. Be this as it may, Berlioz in the year of the Symphonie fantastique, as at other times (as I shall too often remind the reader of this book), was more politically aware and alive than we have usually believed.

Eight months after the première of that work, the composer had a brief flirtation with the Saint-Simonians, whose mission to ameliorate the lot of the working classes, in an uncharacteristically fervent letter to one of the movement’s principals, Berlioz seems to have fully embraced. I have frankly wondered about the sincerity of Berlioz’s enthusiasm (tempered by his principled atheism), because from his mouth, the words mon cher père—addressed, not to his own father, but to the Saint-Simonian leader Charles Duveyrier—sound odd.3 CG 1:476–477. This letter refers to an encounter between Duveyrier and Berlioz which, as I read it, would have taken place in 1831, while Berlioz was away from Rome, on his harebrained and aborted mission to take revenge upon Camille Moke for breaking off their engagement in order to marry Camille Pleyel. Back in Rome from Nice, where he came to his senses, Berlioz read through recent issues of Le Globe, to which Duveyrier was a regular contributor. There he saw the page on which a critic—probably Duveyrier himself, as the fellow was a familiar face at the Opéra and would later coauthor the libretto of Verdi’s Les Vêpres siciliennes—suggested to the new director of the Opéra, Louis Véron (appointed on February 18, 1831), that he renew the repertory: Rossini and Meyerbeer were still their prime, and “new talent, such as that of Hector Berlioz, was waiting to manifest itself.”4 Le Globe (June 23, 1831). In its eight-year existence, this was the only time that Le Globe printed the name of Hector Berlioz. Circumstantial evidence thus suggests, considering the date of the recommendation (June 23, 1831), that Berlioz’s meeting with Duveyrier had a practical purpose. Had he earlier been a member of the inner circle, Le Globe would have sent someone to review his concert of December 5, 1830. It did not. When Berlioz returned to Paris in the autumn of 1832 and gave the revised Symphonie fantastique with its sequel, Le Retour à la vie, on December 9 of that year, Le Globe was no longer in existence.

In the France of 1830, all the arts were politicized, whether in the specific sense of serving certain political ideas or ideals, or in the general sense of being subject to scrutiny of an other-than-purely-artistic sort. Some obviously reacted politically to the patriotic lines from the duet in Auber’s La Muette de Portici, “Amour sacré de la patrie”: the opera’s performance in Brussels, on August 25, 1830, was widely seen as the catalyst for the revolutionary disturbances that took place in Belgium at that time, and that led to the Belgian declaration of independence, six weeks later, on October 4, 1830. “La liberté” in Rossini’s Guillaume Tell, like “la libertà” in Don Giovanni, could provoke emotional reactions from audiences both before and after the Revolution of 1830. We know, from countless archival documents, that individual words—as much if not more than themes and ideas—were considered by the censors as potentially dangerous: Victor Hugo was not permitted to use the words lâche, insensé, or mauvais to modify the word roi—even when the roi in question was centuries removed from Charles X. Eugène Delacroix was chided for painting an ideal of Liberty with certain overly realistic and thus potentially immoral details, for only nudes denuded of bodily hair, it would appear, were considered proper for public display. Berlioz risked negative criticism by incorporating the Dies irae into a passage of symphonic music, as we said above, because Charles X’s Law of Sacrilege of 1825, if violated, could lead to execution.

Berlioz’s concert of December 5, 1830, like other public manifestations during the autumn of that year, was for the benefit of the victims of the July Revolution. Some years ago I was pleased to discover in the archives the letter of invitation that Berlioz sent to the new King, probably at the end of November, in the days leading up to the event:

Berlioz in the year of the Symphonie fantastique, likened by Henri Blaze to a revolutionary Jacobin, as I mentioned, must be seen in the context of the politics of the time. The same is true for Berlioz in the years of the Scène héroïque (1825–1826), of Le Cinq Mai (1831–1835), of the Grande Messe des morts (1837), of the Symphonie funèbre et triomphale (1840–1842), of the Hymne à la France (1844), of the Chant des chemins de fer (1846), of the arrangements of Méhul’s Chant du départ and of Rouget de Lisle’s Mourons pour la patrie (1848), and of the Napoleonic cantata L’Impériale (1854). In short, though I list here only the obviously political works, it is true for his entire career. In his fine biography of the composer, Hugh Macdonald speaks eloquently of the “unreasoning bond which held [Berlioz] in the city he never ceased to curse and abuse but which was, when all was said and done, his home.”9 Macdonald, Berlioz, 51. Was that bond truly “unreasoning”? Or was it rather the result of a belief, despite his later suspicion and censure of republicanism, that the Revolution of 1830 was indeed a gesture in behalf of individual and artistic liberty, that French composers had or should have a role to play in maintaining and intensifying that liberty, and that, as in painting and sculpture (which seemed in comparison to have flourished), in music, too, as he optimistically put it in the report we shall present in chapter 8, that in Paris, one could “do better” than anyplace else in the world?10 From Berlioz’s report to the Minister of the Interior (December 28, 1843). See chapter 8.