Chapter Six: In the Shadows of Les Nuits d’été

In the shadows of Berlioz’s Nuits d’été are persons, places, paintings, and poems once a part of the richly textured fabric of its genesis, now obscured, in the musical world, by the brilliance of the aesthetic object, the enduring artistic entity itself. This is not always the case. Many listeners know something of the scandale surrounding Le Sacre du printemps, for example, while knowing nothing of its substance; many shudder at Schoenberg prior even to the sounding of the “set.” It is my intention here to examine some of the paths that lead to and from a work whose prior reputation provokes no such aural paralysis, for it is one of Berlioz s works “to treasure most,” in Hugh Macdonald’s words, though one about which Berlioz himself was “shy to the point of silence,” the song cycle Les Nuits d’été.1 Macdonald, Berlioz, 38. I wish to consider, not the orchestral version—frequently performed, often recorded, well known indeed, but the original version for voice and piano—rarely performed, rarely recorded, not well known at all. In the five sections that follow, I consider, in the first, the question of the date of the first Nuits d’été; in the second, the autograph manuscripts; in the third, the relationship between Berlioz and the poet, Théophile Gautier; in the fourth, the reviews of the cycle and what they tell us of the work’s raison d’être; and in the fifth, the third song of the cycle, “Sur les lagunes,” in the attempt to construct what Berlioz might have called an “admirative” critique.