Walter Scott

On June 4, 1827, Berlioz complained to his twenty-year-old sister Nanci: “You never speak to me about what you are reading; I think well enough of you to suppose that you know by heart your Walter Scott, that giant of English literature; but Cooper, do you know Cooper, the American Walter Scott?”4 CG 1:155. There are one hundred ninety-six pages on Scott in the catalogue of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France; these list hundreds of Scott’s publications, many in English, that were brought out in France during the Scottish writer’s lifetime. It would seem that the first of his novels to be translated was Guy Mannering, published in English 1815 and translated immediately, in 1816, by a gentleman whose name will sound familiar, Joseph Martin. This, however, is not the army officer Joseph Martin, who fathered Berlioz’s second wife, Marie-Geneviève Martin, whom we know as Marie Recio. In chapter 57 of the Mémoires, Berlioz imitates the schoolmaster Dominie Samson’s many-times repeated word, “prodigious”—which proves that he did indeed read Guy Mannering.5 Mémoires, 753. The second Scott novel to be translated was The Antiquary of 1816; it was rendered into French in 1817 by Sophie de Maraise, a novelist in her own right. The third was Rob Roy (1817), translated in 1818 by Auguste-Jean-Baptiste Defauconpret. Defauconpret would go on to translate the complete works: his “complete” Scott, many times reissued, began to appear in 1820, one year before Berlioz departed for Paris from the family home in La Côte-Saint-André.

The Talisman, published in English in 1825, is a novel Berlioz must have read later that year, as soon as it appeared in French (as Le Talisman, ou Richard en Palestine) since he was almost immediately involved with the opéra-comique I have mentioned—whose French title, we note, comes from the subtitle of the French translation; in the Furne edition of 1830, the title is Richard en Palestine, the subtitle, Le Talisman. (The English edition had only the single title.) The first translation, by Defauconpret, was published in Paris by a man whose business became very famous when he began to bring out the works of Balzac and Victor Hugo. In fact, between 1822 and 1830, Charles Gosselin would bring out a nearly complete edition of the works of Scott in sixty compact volumes, whose contents (substituting the original English titles for the French while following the occasionally gapped numbering in the catalogue of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France) are as follows:

On the title page of the autograph manuscript of his own Grande Ouverture de Waverley, Berlioz cites eight separate passages from the novel. The question we would ask is: Was he citing a French translation that he knew? Or was he translating himself? Before attempting an answer, let me take note of the carefully scripted dedication set down on that title page: “À Monsieur Brown, témoignage d’une vive et inaltérable amitié, Hector Berlioz, ce 16 avril 1839.” “A rich and immutable friendship” is no small thing—which makes it doubly odd that there is no other mention of a “Monsieur Brown” in Berlioz’s preserved writings. This fellow, not yet identified in the Berlioz literature, was a certain Jean-François-Adolphe Brown, who lived in Paris in the eighteen-thirties and -forties at 20, rue des Fossés du Temple, and at 15, Quai Bourbon. He was a translator, interpreter, professor of English at one of the secondary schools of the capital, and he gave lessons at home.8 Almanach-Bottin du commerce de Paris, 1842. In 1837, he seems to have entered into an association with the watchmaker Pierre-Charles Leclerc at 2, rue des Enfants rouges—an association formalized on November 4, 1840, according to the Gazette des Tribunaux of November 15, 1840—to form the enterprise of “Leclerc et Brown” for the purpose of manufacturing a musical instrument that was patented on July 31, 1837, as having “two wind chambers, keys, and strings,” and that was known as a mélophone.9 http://www.europeana.eu/portal/en/record/09102/_CM_0852470.html. A detailed description of this instrument first appeared in the Revue et Gazette musicale de Paris on May 26, 1839, in an article (by Berlioz’s colleague and Richard Wagner’s friend Gottfried Engelbert Anders) on the current exhibition of French industrial products in the Champs-Élysées, where the mélophone would win a silver medal.

How can I be sure that “Monsieur Brown” of the mélophone is the “Monsieur Brown” of the Waverley Overture? Because Berlioz himself mentions the instrument in his article for the Journal des débats of May 28, 1839, noting that, in Halévy’s opera Guido et Ginevra, one hears the mélophone of Monsieur Leclerc. “This instrument at once resembles the flute, the horn, the clarinet, and the basset horn. We cannot explain its interior mechanism because until now Monsieur Leclerc has preferred to keep its secret to himself.” Berlioz was always fascinated by new instruments; he was particularly taken with hand-held instruments such as this one and the English concertina, to which he consecrated an entire chapter of the second edition of his orchestration treatise. He always befriended instrument makers, including two who became lifelong friends: Adolphe Sax, of the saxophone, and Édouard Alexandre, of the orgue-mélodium. Perhaps the co-inventor of the mélophone, “Monsieur Brown,” the professor with an English surname and a French Christian name, had family relations in London; perhaps he had something to do with the performance of the Ouverture de Waverley that took place in London on March 23, 1839, only three weeks before Berlioz offered the autograph manuscript to this hitherto unknown gentleman. Perhaps the man, who seems to have annotated French translations of Shakespeare,10 Coriolane: Expliqué littéralement (1850), “with French notes by A. Brown,” is listed in Thimm, Shakespeariana, 105. and who, as a teacher, insisted that “no word of the student’s native language” be used in the teaching of English, was in fact teaching English to Berlioz! Be all of this as it may, “Monsieur Brown” is most certainly the Jean-François-Adolphe Brown we have identified:11 Bulletin de la société pour l’instruction élémentaire, 35. if we knew more about his friendship with Berlioz, we might know more about Berlioz’s study of English.

Comparisons of the French and English texts of the eight quotations Berlioz affixed to the title page of the Waverley Overture, in French, can be instructive.

Are the differences between Berlioz’s version and the Defauconpret translation due to Berlioz’s unbelievable but sometimes unreliable memory? Or are they rather due to his conviction that his own renderings were more accurate? “Habits of abstraction” is not readily rendered in French: “caractère distrait” is perfectly fine; “caractère mélancolique” is more expressive. “Love” of solitude is literally “amour” for solitude; “goût” for solitude is better reflective of the psychological reality. Berlioz’s use of the old-style spelling (“étoit”) of the imperfect tense, here and elsewhere, is characteristic of his usage in the eighteen-twenties; it is also what we find in Defauconpret’s translation. The composer’s reversal of the order of the expressions with “habits” and “love” is also characteristic, not of Berlioz, but of French sentence structure in general, although I have not seen this rule of transposition in the official guides: in Moore’s “When he who adores thee,” cited below, “lovers and friends” become, in the translation, “les amis” and “les amants,” in that order; the colors of the flag of the United States, for an American, are “red, white, and blue”; the colors of the flag of the French Republic (the same), for a Frenchman, are “bleu, blanc, [and] rouge”!

That translator, Auguste Defauconpret, was born in Lille in 1767 and worked successfully in Paris as a notaire until a reversal of fortune led him to emigrate to England. There he remained for some twenty-five years, translating and writing novels of his own. He returned to France in or around 1840, where he died, at Fontainebleau, in 1843. Defauconpret is credited with as many as four hundred translations.12 Hersant, “Defauconpret,” 83–88. His philosophy of translation displeased some of those whom he translated, among them the Irish writer Lady Morgan, the author of Florence Macarthy, published initially in 1818 and in Defauconpret’s translation in the following year. In fact, Lady Morgan rejected Defauconpret’s unauthorized translation, which led to a rejoinder from the translator, dated January 31, 1819, that was printed on February 8 of that year, in French, of course, in the Journal des débats: