Byron first appears in Berlioz’s correspondence in a letter to Humbert Ferrand of June 28, 1828, when the composer mentions to his friend a conversation he has had with a musician by the name of Jean-Baptiste Pastou (1784–1851)—a violinist, guitar instructor, and music theory teacher whose new-fangled methodology led to his hiring at the Conservatoire as professor of solfège and of what was called
harmonie orale.
1 Fauquet, Dictionnaire de la musique en France, 943. “I’m happy to see you,” Pastou said to Berlioz; “I went to hear your concert [on May 26, 1828]. Do you know something? You are the Byron of music! Your overture to
Les Francs-Juges is a
Childe Harold […].”
2 CG 1:199. We know that over the next several years, Berlioz read Byron, and we know that he read Thomas Moore’s biography of Byron,
3 CG 1:293. translated by Louise Swanton-Belloc in 1830 as
Les Mémoires de Lord Byron. Indeed, in 1831, in the libretto of
Le Retour à la vie, Berlioz cites Byron’s famous remark about a version of
Antony and Cleopatra as
“une salade de Shakespeare et de Dryden.”
4 NBE 7:236, citing Moore, Mémoires de Lord Byron, 188. In the
Journal des débats of April 13, 1850, Berlioz calls Heinrich Wilhelm Ernst “the Byron of the violin.” Six years later, in 1856, Berlioz would tell his then biographer, Eugène de Mirecourt, that Byron was one of the poets who had influenced him the most.
5 CG 3:719. But what, exactly, was he reading?
Here we see the opening stanza of
The Corsair,
with the French translation by Amédée Pichot:
6 Byron, Œuvres de Lord Byron, 9.O’er the glad waters of the dark blue sea,
Sur la plaine riante de la mer azurée,
Our thoughts as boundless, and our souls as free,
nos âmes sont libres comme elle et nos pensées n’ont point de limites.
Far as the breeze can bear, the billows foam,
Aussi loin que peuvent nous porter la brise et les vagues écumantes,
Survey our empire, and behold our home!
nous contemplons notre empire et notre patrie.
These are our realms, no limit to their sway,-—
Voilà nos états qu’aucun terme ne borne…
Our flag the sceptre all who meet obey.
Notre pavillon est un sceptre obéi par tous ceux qui l’aperçoivent.
The problem with the translation is that no matter the form of the original—Spenserian stanzas, blank verse, octosyllabics, ottava rima, or heroic couplets (lines strictly paired by rhyme, in iambic pentameter), as here—Pichot turns Byron’s poetry “into the same bland and rhythmically neutral prose.”
7 Cardwell, Reception of Byron, 35. Actually, the first-line expressions “plaine riante” and “mer azurée” are very attractive, as are others. Further, even without the rhythms and the rhymes, Berlioz’s analysis of the character of the Corsair—“that character at once tender yet obstinate, generous yet ruthless, that bizarre amalgamation of two apparently opposite sentiments: love for women; hatred for mankind”
8 Mémoires, 336. —is not at all off the mark.
In other writings, Berlioz reveals that he has read Byron’s play Marino Faliero, his poem Lara (1814), and of course Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, published in English between 1812 and 1818 and in French beginning in 1819. Many commentators have been far too quick to associate Berlioz’s second symphony with Childe Harold. The original inspiration, as it was reported on January 26, 1834, in the Gazette musicale de Paris (a report necessarily authored by Berlioz), was for a Fantaisie dramatique for solo viola, orchestra, and chorus, on the final moments of the life of Mary, Queen of Scots, “Les Derniers Instants de Marie Stuart.” This, had the idea persisted—one supposes that it was sparked by Schiller’s drama, which existed at the time in several French translations, and which was the subject of a lengthy chapter in Madame de Staël’s De l’Allemagne—would have meant that the second symphony, like the first, would have included a dramatic musical beheading. Only later, we know not when, did Berlioz determine to associate the work with Byron’s poem. When he announced the first performance of the new symphony, in Le Rénovateur of November 3, 1834, he was in a highly ironic mood, and spoke of the symphony as a “tissue of absurdity and extravagance of a sort not even imagined in the insane asylum.” “What in the world is a symphony that calls itself ‘Harold?’” he asked. He then answered his own question: during the various scenes presented in the score, one could always find “the solo viola, the Harold, a daydreaming wanderer, like Byron’s hero, characterized by an annoying and longwinded melody that is repeated with hopeless uniformity.” “That,” he said, “is what is Harold.”
This comical and self-deprecatory bit is not usually quoted in the biographies, which prefer to cite the perfectly serious description of the work found in chapter 45 of the
Mémoires. It is not impossible that Berlioz sometimes found the quintessential Byronic hero—Harold, or Byron himself—to be something of a bore. I add, however, that at least one medical doctor has taken Berlioz’s Byronic “spleen” or “mal d’isolement” (isolation illness), seen in his descriptions of
Harold and of his own wanderings, as evidence not of an essentially aesthetic
malaise but of a genuine physiological malady: juvenile myoclonic epilepsy or “Janz syndrome.”
9 Altenmüller, “Hector Berlioz and His Vesuvius.” (Such
d’outre-tombe medical diagnoses may or may not be accurate—we will probably never know—but they are certainly appealing products of the physicians’ professional… creativity.)
Let me again remind you of what Berlioz actually read, by comparing the opening of
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage to the French translation by Amédée Pichot:
10 Le Pèlerinage de Childe Harold, in Œuvres complètes de Lord Byron 2:237–238.Oh, thou! in Hellas deem’d of heavenly birth,
O toi, à qui Hellas donna une origine céleste!
Muse! form’d or fabled at the minstrel’s will!
Muse, qui reçois ta forme ou ton nom fabuleux de l’invention capricieuse du ménestrel,
Since shamed full oft by later lyres on earth,
les lyres modernes t’ont si souvent humiliée sur la terre
Mine dares not call thee from thy sacred hill:
que la mienne n’ose pas t’invoquer sur ton mont sacré;
Yet there I’ve wander’d by thy vaunted rill;
cependant j’ai erré sur les bords de ta source fameuse;
Yes! sigh’d o’er Delphi’s long deserted shrine,
oui, j’ai soupiré sur l’autel depuis longtemps abandonné de Delphes,
Where, save that feeble fountain, all is still;
où tout est muet, excepté le faible murmure de l’onde;
Nor mote my shell awake the weary Nine
mais non, ma lyre ne doit pas réveiller les neuf sœurs fatiguées
To grace so plain a tale — this lowly lay of mine.
pour embellir une histoire aussi simple… un humble poème tel que le mien.
The translator notes: “We believe that what Byron means is that modern lyres have profaned the name of the muse”—that Byron here deems as decadent the state of modern English poetry. But the translator is not certain of Byron’s irony, and thus adds a defensive and self-protective note. He has of course made no effort to replicate Byron’s Spenserian stanzas (eight lines in iambic pentameter followed by one line in iambic hexameter, with a rhyme scheme of abab bcbc c). Did Berlioz know something of the original? Would he have appreciated the comments, in The British Review and London Critical Journal, of an early reviewer of the great poem?
His lordship has managed the stanza with poetical skill; and in the distribution of the pauses, and particularly in the cadence of the closing line, has given the expanded melody, of which the verse is susceptible, without the monotony to which it is liable. The caesura which is generally placed on the sixth syllable of the last line, is varied in the other parts of the stanza with considerable delicacy of ear; and upon the whole, we cannot but think that the rhythm of the stanza has received some improvement under his lordship’s hands.
11 British Review and London Critical Journal (June 1812), 298.Had he wished to set the poem to music, Berlioz would indeed have had to concern himself with rhyme and meter, cadence and caesura. But that is something he seems never to have imagined. In fact, the composer was acquainted with Byron’s translator, Amédée Pichot, who in 1833 was the editor of the
Revue de Paris. In February of that year, Berlioz gave Pichot an article for the
Revue,
writing to his friend Joseph d’Ortigue on February 5, 1833, that he had “something to give to Pichot, which could suffice for a first article.”
12 CG 2:73. But I find in that magazine only notices and reviews of Berlioz’s various Parisian concerts, and no piece by Berlioz in the issues published between 1830 and 1844. I note in passing that in that letter to d’Ortigue, Berlioz closes by saying in English, “God bless you!”—this no doubt because he was at that very moment seeing a good deal of Harriet Smithson and planning with her both a benefit concert and a marriage. When she fell from her carriage and broke her leg, on March 1, 1833, plans for both events were ruptured.