Chapter Two
Berlioz and the Translators
From Scott to Shakespeare
Quelle est donc cette faculté singulière qui substitute ainsi l’imagination à la réalité?
—Berlioz, Lélio ou Le Retour à la vie
On the occasion of my lecture to the members of the Berlioz Society, in London, which prompted the present chapter, the distinguished conductor Sir John Eliot Gardiner was in the audience. This led me to recall his performance of Les Troyens, at the Châtelet in Paris, in 2003. As an oboe player, I had noticed, among maestro Gardiner’s period instruments, a modern English horn, which is not quite the same thing as the nineteenth-century model. “You saw that damn thing!” Sir John Eliot exclaimed, and went on to explain how furious he had been when the poor chap had shown up with the wrong instrument when it was too late to make a change. That wrong instrument was the only wrong thing in what was a splendid performance, which starred the ever-splendid American soprano Susan Graham.
On that same occasion I had the pleasure of congratulating Miss Graham on the stage, shortly after the final curtain. She put her arm around me, in thanks, which caused a dramatic rise in my standing among the dusty musicologists of my entourage, who did not realize that she did so not because I was someone, but because she was exhausted, drained by trying to speak French, gratified to see a professor from Smith College, where she had friends, and happy in particular to hear my American English!