In her thoughtful introduction to Thomas Moore’s Les Amours des anges et les mélodies irlandaises, Louise Swanton-Belloc, writing in 1823, composed a short treatise on the nature of translation. Belloc, born in France of an Irish father and French mother, raised and educated by English women, became a notable advocate for women’s education. Here she asserts that the English language is more suited to poetry than to prose—which would suggest that the French language, for her, was more suited to prose than to poetry. This is what is denied in the book I have mentioned by our forefather who art in heaven, Jacques Barzun, whose Essay on French Verse is in fact a defense of French poetry, which, like all poetry, loses in translation precisely the ingredients that make it poetry: compression, harmony, and singularity of expression.
But perhaps Berlioz agreed with Belloc. One day, when he returned home from a soul-searching walk in the country, he came upon Moore’s
Irish Melodies, as he describes the moment in chapter 18 of the
Mémoires:
“My eyes fell upon the poem that begins with these words: ‘Quand celui qui t’adore’ (When he who adores thee).” Berlioz gives the line in both French and English, then asserts that he immediately set the words to music. This was “the sole occasion,” he writes, “on which it seems that I was able to paint such an extraordinary emotion while still under its active and immediate influence. I believe that only rarely have I been able to achieve such a truly accurate and poignant melodic setting immersed in such a tempest of ominous harmonies.”
1 Mémoires, 226. In a letter written two months later,
2 February 6, 1830 (CG 1:306). Berlioz referred to the song as his
Élégie en prose. The suggestion is that it was as much Belloc’s
prose as it was Moore’s poetry that had a profound effect on the composer.
In her translation of Moore’s “When he who adores thee,” Belloc includes the footnote that appears in the first edition of Moore’s poem: “These words allude to a story, in an old Irish manuscript, which is too long and too melancholy to be inserted here.” In fact, when Berlioz was in England in 1847 and 1848, he learned the content of the story, and recited it in the preface to the second edition of the Élégie:
The profound emotion I felt on setting these lovely words to music led me to do research in England on the event to which they allude, and I am grateful to the celebrated English poet Leigh Hunt for the following information. The person who speaks in Moore’s poem in fact lived under the name of Emmet. He belonged to an honorable family. Of a dignified and noble character, high-minded intellect, of a warm and devoted heart, he was seduced by brilliant aspirations and disappointed by unfaithful friends. Highly active during the Irish Rebellion of 1803, he had therefore to endure the consequences of its failure; he was condemned to death, and was executed at the age of twenty-four. He appears to have loved Miss Curran, the daughter of the celebrated lawyer of that name [John Philpot Curran], and to have been loved by her in return. It is surely of Miss Curran that the youthful enthusiast wishes to speak in that passage, in his speech to the judges, of which we reproduce here only the proud conclusion. Miss Curran would remain forever faithful to Emmet; she died only a few years ago, in Rome. But what is the crime that Moore has Emmet accuse himself of committing as he addresses himself to Ireland and to Miss Curren? That is what I have been unable to discover.
In fact, Berlioz is wrong about Sarah Curren, who was not forever faithful to Emmet; she married a British officer and died, not in Italy, and not “a few years ago” (Berlioz wrote those words in 1849), but in Kent, in 1808.
3 Geoghegan, Robert Emmet, 24. And as to the “fault” ascribed to Emmet by Thomas Moore, which puzzled Berlioz, this was presumably a reference to Emmet’s having lied to the judges, during his trial, about the identity of Sarah Curran, who had long been aware of Emmet’s plans to lead an insurrection, and who would therefore, had her identity been discovered, have been judged an accomplice to a crime. Or perhaps it was simply a general reference to Emmet’s revolutionary sentiments, which Moore did not share.
Berlioz’s setting of the French translation of Moore’s “When he who adores thee,” published with his Neuf Mélodies in March 1830, is indeed emotionally charged; of that there is no question. But the piano writing is problematical because the effort to create an orchestral sonority via extended tremolo is, in my view, in vain. (This is surely what led Hugh Macdonald to orchestrate the piece; his arrangement, to the best of my knowledge, remains unrecorded.) Below I cite the text of the poem, essentially in anapestic tetrameter and trimeter, with the unrhymed and unmetered prose translation upon which I have imposed separate lines:
When he who adores thee has left but the name
Of his fault and his sorrows behind,
O say, wilt thou weep, when they darken the fame
Of a life that for thee was resign’d?
Quand celui qui t’adore n’aura laissé derrière lui que le nom
de sa faute et de ses douleurs,
oh! dis, dis, pleureras-tu s’ils noircissent la mémoire
d’une vie qui fut livrée pour toi?
Yes, weep, and however my foes may condemn,
Thy tears shall efface their decree;
For, heav’n can witness, though guilty to them,
I have been but too faithful to thee!
Oui, pleure, pleure! Et, quel que soit l’arrêt de mes ennemis,
tes larmes l’effaceront.
Car le Ciel est témoin que, coupable envers eux,
je ne fus que trop fidèle pour toi.
With thee were the dreams of my earliest love;
Every thought of my reason was thine:
In my last humble prayer to the spirit above,
Thy name shall be mingled with mine!
Tu fus l’idole de mes rêves d’amour;
chaque pensée de ma raison t’appartenait.
Dans mon humble et dernière prière
ton nom sera mêlé avec le mien.
Oh! bless’d are the lovers and friends who shall live,
The days of thy glory to see:
But the next dearest blessing that heaven can give,
Is the pride of thus dying for thee!
Oh! bénis soient les amis, oui, bénis soient les amants qui vivront
pour voir les jours de ta gloire!
Mais, après cette joie, la plus chère faveur que puisse accorder le Ciel,
c’est l’orgueil de mourir pour toi!
The first edition of Berlioz’s
Élégie gives the text only in French—another indication that what moved the composer was indeed the translation and not the original. In fact, when it first appeared, that translation was highly praised: “Madame Louise Belloc, initiated in childhood into all the mysteries of the English language, has captured in French all of the grace, coloring, originality, mannerisms, and, in a word, all of the genius of the Irish poet. Her translation is at once relaxed and scrupulously faithful. One has the impression that she is doing nothing but freely expressing her own ideas.”
4 Journal des débats (July 14, 1823). In the second edition, which appeared in 1849 under the new title of
Irlande, the original vocal line is supplemented with a second vocal line that sets the original English text because, as Berlioz puts it in chapter 18 of the
Mémoires, the French translation was so faithful that he was able to fit the music to the original text.
In the third edition, printed in the Collection de 32 Mélodies brought out by Simon Richault in 1863, the translation is ascribed to “anonymous” rather than to Louise Swanton-Belloc for reasons that are not clear, although I have seen other instances of the conspicuous absence of a woman’s name on a musical publication: one of the most egregious instances of this sin of omission concerns the five songs we now know as the Wesendonck Lieder, which Richard Wagner first published without setting down the name of his muse, the poet Mathilde Wesendonck.
In Berlioz’s setting of Moore’s Emmet poem, there are several places in which, his claim to the contrary notwithstanding, the English does not fit the melody. At the lines “O say, wilt thou weep, when they darken the fame,” the music seems to say, “O
say, wilt thou weep
when they dar-
ken the fame,” thus violating the anapestic meter of the original. Did Berlioz
feel those anapests? Later we get “For heaven can wit-
ness though guil-
ty to them,” another infringement upon the meter of Moore’s poem. However, even in Berlioz’s setting of the French translation we find abnormalities: for the words
when they darken the fame, that is, “s’ils noircissent la mémoire,” the
music seems to say: “s’ils noircis-
sent la mémoire,” with the mute
e falling on a strong beat. This, to a purist, is a demerit. Julian Rushton has well summed up the situation: “We are left,” in this song, “with one of the more uncomfortable results of [Berlioz’s] lack of cadential routine.”
5 Rushton, The Musical Language, 97. Indeed, this is one of those works that can disappoint Berlioz’s friends and comfort his foes.
In chapter 52 of the
Mémoires, the
Voyage en Dauphiné, Berlioz explains his continuing love for Estelle Fornier by means of a reference to “Believe me, if all those endearing young charms,” a poem by Moore that Berlioz felt encapsulated his own feelings. When we see the well-known photograph of the elderly Madame Fornier, taken in Geneva in 1865, we may wonder how it is that she was so readily able to reignite in the composer the sparks of youthful love. When we look at the little-known photograph of her in Lyon, by Frédéric Favre, taken some four years earlier, we get a better sense of the warmth and charm of her personality.
6 The picture is reproduced in Beyls, Estelle Fornier, 112.But whatever her appearance—Berlioz admitted to the Princess Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgenstein that “the years had destroyed nearly all of her outward allure; you have fully to use your imagination in order approximately to reconstruct her splendid beauty”
7 CG 7:136. —the composer’s feelings were surely encouraged by Moore’s delightful poem, which in its simple way, in the author’s characteristic anapests, reveals a profound truth about the nature of love. The written word, after all, had always had a larger-than-life impact upon the composer, who was initially inspired to pursue musical study, it must never be forgotten, by
reading in an encyclopedia the lives of Haydn and Gluck. Here, beneath the original English, we see the translation of the poem as it appears in the
Mémoires, and, beneath Berlioz’s French, the translation by Madame Swanton-Belloc.
Believe me, if all those endearing young charms [Moore]
Crois-moi, quand tous ces jeunes charmes ravissants, [Berlioz]
Ah! crois-moi, si tous ces jeunes charmes ravissants, [Swanton-Belloc]
Which I gaze on so fondly today,
que je contemple si passionnément aujourd’hui,
que je contemple si tendrement aujourd’hui,
Were to change by tomorrow and fleet in my arms,
viendraient à changer demain et à s’évanouir entre mes bras,
changeaient dès demain, et s’évanouissaient entre mes bras,
Like fairy gifts fading away—
comme un présent des fées,
comme les dons fugitifs des fées,
Thou wouldst still be adored as this moment thou art,
tu serais encore adorée autant que tu l’es en ce moment.
tu serais encore adorée comme tu l’es à présent.
Let thy loveliness fade as it will;
Que ta grâce se flétrisse,
À quelque heure que tes attraits se flétrissent,
And around the dear ruin each wish of my heart,
chaque désir de mon cœur ne s’enlacera pas moins,
autour de la ruine chérie,
Would entwine itself verdantly still.
toujours verdoyant, autour de la ruine chérie.
chaque désir de mon cœur s’enlacera plus ardent et plus tendre!
I cannot prove that Berlioz made his own translation of the poem, but if he did, he was nonetheless remembering phrases from the translation he read in 1830. Still, in line two, for “fondly,” Belloc chose “tendrement,” while Berlioz chose the more enflamed word “passionnément.” In line four, for “fairy gifts fading away,” Belloc chose “les dons fugitifs des fées”; Berlioz wrote “un présent des fees,” which lacks the element of “fading away.” In lines seven and eight, for each wish entwining itself around the poet’s heart, Belloc added the elements of “plus ardent et plus tendre” for Moore’s “still verdantly,” while Berlioz, more literally, wrote “toujours verdoyant.”