In a letter highly revealing of his literary sensitivities, sent to his sister Nanci on June 4, 1827, Berlioz goes on at length about the “American Walter Scott,” James Fenimore Cooper:
While in no way approaching his Scottish model in dialogue or character portrayal, one cannot help but admire [Cooper’s] portraits of the violence of nature, and the interest he creates in his protagonists. Among others, there is one who appears in three separate novels, the celebrated hunter
Natty Bumppo, a highly unique fellow, a European whose hankering for solitude has turned him into something of a recluse, and something of a philosopher of the desert. He first appears in
The Last of the Mohicans, then in
The Pioneers, and finally in
The Prairie. This is the order in which you must read the three books, for as you go along, you become gradually more attached to this hunter; and his death, which you have to be expecting, because he is ninety years old, afflicts the reader with a kind of sadness that is simply indescribable.
The Prairie appeared only a month ago, I devoured it right away, and arrived at the end at seven in the evening. At eleven, I was still weeping while leaning against the pedestal of a column of the Panthéon. You should read all three novels, I know you will like them.
1 CG 1:156.Berlioz is unaware that Natty Bumppo will appear again in both The Pathfinder (1840), translated in that year as Le Lac Ontario, and The Deerslayer (1841), translated in 1843 as Le Tueur de Daims. (Cooper’s The Pioneers, published in English in 1823, appeared in French in the same year; The Last of the Mohicans, published in English in 1826, appeared in French in 1827; The Prairie, published in English in 1827, appeared in French in the same year.) Perhaps confused by the potentially English-sounding name of Nathaniel Bumppo, Berlioz suggests that Natty is a European, which is not correct, although the character, raised by Delaware Indians, does at times ally himself with various European factions, and is given by Cooper a Dutch heritage.
Defauconpret’s translation of The Pioneers carries many footnotes, which explain to the French reader aspects of the English text, including “la culture de l’érable,” or the making of maple syrup, about which the French know very little. (Most French people I know like neither American peanut butter nor American maple syrup.) Indeed, the very notion of “Pioneers” was something curious to French readers, who inhabited a country whose pioneers presumably arrived with Julius Caesar in 52 BC.
I add one further word about Berlioz’s reading of Cooper—concerning a sentence from The Pathfinder, published in English in 1840 and, as mentioned above, translated by Defauconpret in the same year. The passage describes the death of a Delaware Indian who attempts to paddle out to an island in the rushing waters of a lake situated above a torrential waterfall.
For a few moments his efforts were so frantic that he actually prevailed over the power of the cataract; but nature has its limits, and one faltering stroke of the paddle set him back, and then he lost ground, foot by foot, inch by inch, until he got near the spot where the river looked even and green, and as if it were made of millions of threads of water, all bent over some huge rock, when he shot backwards like an arrow and disappeared, the bow of the canoe tipping just enough to let us see what had become of him. I met a Mohawk some years later who had witnessed the whole affair from the bed of the stream below, and he told me that the Delaware continued to paddle in the air until he was lost in the mists of the falls.
I take note of this passage, colorfully and faithfully translated by Defauconpret, because only eight years later Berlioz would set down a quite similar image at the close of the préface to the Mémoires, which is dated March 21, 1848—when he himself was depressed by having to paddle against the current of a revolution in France which, he believed, would send the art of music over the waterfall.
Who knows what will have become of me only a few months from now?… My resources, for myself and my family, are hardly assured. Let me therefore make the most of the minutes that remain to me, even though I may soon have to adopt the stoic resolution of those Indians of the Niagara Peninsula, who, after struggling heroically against the raging river, recognize the futility of their efforts and in the end abandon themselves to the current. Contemplating courageously the short distance that separates them from the abyss, and singing aloud up to the very moment of their seizure by the cataract, they swirl and whirl with the waters into eternity.
2 Mémoires, 123.There were other literary descriptions that the composer might have known of the terrible force of Niagara Falls, but it is reasonable to suppose that Berlioz’s image here derives from his reading of James Fenimore Cooper. We know that Berlioz continued to read Cooper into the eighteen-fifties: in an unpublished and as yet unstudied account book for the years 1849 through 1851, preserved in the Macnutt Collection, at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, we see, among other things, that he bought two new books by the celebrated American writer.
Furthermore, on the subject of Cooper and the Mémoires, Berlioz invokes The Last of the Mohicans in the fourth letter of the Voyage en Allemagne, which of course forms the centerpiece of that book. There he includes a transcript of the letter he sent to Felix Mendelssohn when the German composer suggested an exchange of their conducting batons. “Mendelssohn’s musical scepter was immediately brought to me,” writes Berlioz. “The very next day, I sent to him my heavy oak cudgel, with the following letter, which ‘the last of the Mohicans,’ I should like to hope, would not disavow.” There follows Berlioz’s letter, addressed to “chief Mendelssohn,” which evokes the exchange of the “tomahawks.” Our composer wrongly thinks that a tomahawk is some kind of club, when in fact it is hatchet, but he correctly remembers that the “real” last of the Mohicans, the character Uncas, is particularly adept and throwing the tomahawk. “The last of the Mohicans,” in the Mémoires, is at any rate not the title of Cooper’s book but rather the fellow to whom the title refers.
When Berlioz returned to Nice in September 1844 (he had stayed there in 1831), he sketched an overture that he christened La Tour de Nice. This was first performed in January 1845. He then rebaptized the work Le Corsaire rouge, using the title of Cooper’s The Red Rover, which was first published in Paris, in English, in 1827, and subsequently in England, and in the United States, in 1828—the year it appeared in French, in Defauconpret’s translation. There is, in Cooper’s novel, a tower on a rocky coast, like the tower in Nice. When he determined to publish the overture, however, Berlioz changed the name to Ouverture du Corsaire, thereby transferring the literary reference from the American Cooper to the Englishman Byron, whose The Corsair, published in English in 1814, had been translated into French, by Amédée Pichot, the man most responsible for the dissemination of Byron’s work in France.