The nineteenth-century French
romance or
mélodie, as opposed to the German
Lied, is a genre against which many hold a certain prejudice: a ditty produced by a second-rate composer to satisfy the demands of an increasingly middle-class public for a music readily performable at home. The genre deserves a second hearing. It was a vehicle for certain political sentiments that in other guises might have been subject to censure; it was a favored outlet for the sometimes formidable creative energies of women composers who did not compete in other musical arenas; and it was the music of the people in the very real sense of the sounds many Frenchmen thought of when they thought, if at all, of the art of music itself.
1 Locke, “The Music of the French Chanson”; and Caswell, “Loïsa Puget and the French Romance.” I use the word
genre because the distinctions between the
romance and the
mélodie do not hold firm. Schubert’s
Lieder were generally published in France in the early nineteenth century as
mélodies,
but Mendelssohn’s celebrated
Lieder ohne Worte became, in French,
romances sans paroles. Berlioz, who made some forty contributions to the category, used both terms without pedantic distinction. In the
Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung,
Berlioz’s
Nuits d’été,
it happens, were announce as
Gesänge (balladenartig)—“ballad-like songs.”
2 Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung (September 1, 1841): 718. The term
mélodie, does, in principle, suggest an element of musical gravity that was lacking in the more light-hearted and often sentimental
romance. The new seriousness was inspired by the choice of more substantial poetry, of which there was a great flowering from the Romantic generation in France. But for the musical term alone, we might simply consider the title page of the first edition of Berlioz’s Opus 2:
Neuf Mélodies imitées de l’anglais (Irish Melodies) pour une et deux voix, et chœur, avec accompagnement de piano […]
dédiées par les auteurs à Thomas Moore. The word
mélodie, in this issue of 1830, is used in the literary sense of a poetic text intended for recitation or singing: Thomas Moore, it probably needs saying, wrote
poetry,
not music. Berlioz’s collaborator, Thomas Gounet, wrote
poetry that
imitates Moore’s rather than translates it, because Gounet was obliged to write verses of regular meter and
rhyme,
which necessarily precludes literal translation. Furthermore, Berlioz and Gounet received equal billing as “les auteurs”—a practice that has faded: we do not commonly speak of even so celebrated a cycle as
Dichterliebe as by Robert Schumann and Heinrich Heine.
When the second edition of these songs was published, in 1849, the word
mélodie had become widely understood in its purely musical sense: the phrase “avec accompagnement de piano,” earlier useful, was now superfluous. Still, when he wrote to the publisher of the orchestral version, in 1856, Berlioz spoke of his “délicieuses
romances.”
3 CG 5:252. A leading French dictionary takes Berlioz’s
Irish Melodies of 1830 as the “point of departure” for the new genre of the mélodie.
4 Honegger, Dictionnaire de la musique, “mélodie.” The path leads, ten years later, to
Les Nuits d’été.
“Ten years later” takes us to 1840, the year during which these small compositions were conceived, although we cannot date
Les Nuits d’été with calendrical exactitude. In his correspondence of that year, Berlioz does not mention the collection. The autograph manuscripts of the songs are not dated. We know only that the titles “Absence” and “Le Spectre de la rose,” the eventual fourth and second numbers of the cycle, appeared in the
Revue et Gazette musicale on Thursday, November 5, 1840, as items on the program of the concert, sponsored by that journal, to be given on the following Sunday, November 8, 1840. But when the same periodical appeared on Sunday morning, these two songs did not figure on the printed program. From the detailed reviews of this concert that appeared in the
Revue et Gazette musicale itself, and in the elegant magazine
L’Artiste, reviews that discuss every item on the printed program of November 8, we can assert with confidence that the songs were not performed.
5 Revue et Gazette musicale (November 12, 1840); L’Artiste (November 1840): 316.It has been suggested that they were not performed because they were not yet written, but that is not the case, as we shall see. Indeed, there is one piece of evidence that suggests that Berlioz had indeed begun to set a series of poems by Théophile Gautier as early as March 1840: an autograph fair copy of the eventual first song of the cycle, “Villanelle,” now preserved in Darmstadt, in the Hessische Landesbibliothek.
6 NBE 25 [2nd ed.]:308. This manuscript is signed and carefully dated “Paris, 23 mars 1840.” It was reproduced some two and a half years later by the
Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, on November 16, 1842, in the journal’s intermittent series of facsimiles of composers’ manuscripts—with Berlioz’s signature, but without the date.
7 Beilage no. 8 zur Allgemeinen musikalischen Zeitung (1842); Facsimile der Handschrift von H. Berlioz. Berlioz was not in the habit of putting precise dates on his autograph manuscripts; when he did so, it was sometimes after the fact, and inaccurately. The date on the Darmstadt manuscript of March 23, 1840, looks suspicious, as I shall explain, as though it were added, to commemorate something important, at the time the composer sent the manuscript to Carl Ferdinand Becker, editor of the
Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, in 1842.
Becker had good reason to reproduce Berlioz in November of that year: in the issue of the 16th, he printed an excerpt from Karl Gutzkow’s
Briefe aus Paris, which had just appeared, apparently with a splash.
8 Gutzkow, Briefe aus Paris; Dresch, Gutzkow et la jeune Allemagne. Gutzkow was of course one of the important members of the Junges Deutschland movement, one of the more faithful painters of the Parisian scene, along with his better-known contemporaries Ludwig Börne and Heinrich Heine, and one of Wagner’s associates in Dresden in the eighteen-forties. In this excerpt he writes of the dramatic contrast he finds between the mind and the music of Hektor Berlioz:
His brow lacks the imprint of daring enterprise and the smoothness of serene resolve, though it expresses rather nobly a pensive seriousness and a certain brooding, melancholy spirit. […] To express the other-worldly harmonies that sound in his soul, he has been unable to find the right worldly technique, the right measure, the right notes.
9 Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung (November 16, 1842): 925.In 1842, Becker may have sent to Berlioz the paper he was to use to make the copy of “Villanelle” that appeared in November: three single sheets sewn together of a size and watermark, “GFJ,” elsewhere unknown in his œuvre. In March 1840, Berlioz himself would have had no reason to make the kind of careful fair copy of “Villanelle” that served the editor of the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung. He had finished Roméo et Juliette in September 1839 and would not receive the commission for what became the Symphonie funèbre et triomphale until, at the earliest, April 1840. Between March 17 and April 12, 1840, Berlioz wrote nothing for the Journal des débats; and for the Revue et Gazette musicale he reviewed only the orchestral concerts at the Conservatoire (on March 12 and 29, and April 9). I therefore suppose that the Darmstadt manuscript was indeed prepared in the autumn of 1842, shortly before its facsimile reproduction, and that the date Berlioz inscribed on it, March 23, 1840, represents either the composer’s recollection of the moment at which he had composed the song—he would have had time to do so at the time—or, more likely, as I shall indicate below, his mis-recollection of the date of a performance. Be this as it may, Nuits d’été—Berlioz’s title, not Gautier’s, and thus a bit of evidence by no means too obvious to consider—may tell us something of the season of its main composition. From an article to be cited in the final section, below, we know that the cycle was in fact completed by the end of October 1840.
As for the publication: The
Bibliographie de la France, primarily for literary publications, did have a regular section for artistic productions, including music, but
Les Nuits d’été nowhere figures in that semi-official periodical. Berlioz’s publisher, Adolphe Catelin, whose prints do appear in the
Bibliographie de la France in 1840 and 1841, seems neither to have registered nor to have advertised Berlioz’s newest collection. Catelin had had dealings with Berlioz since 1836, bringing out a second edition of the
Neuf Mélodies as
Mélodies irlandaises,
and the full score and parts of the overture
Le Roi Lear (both mentioned in the
Journal des débats of March 28, 1840), and the piano reduction of the cantata
Le Cinq Mai (mentioned in the
Débats as well as in
Le Constitutionnel of May 14, 1840). Some seven months later, in a letter of November 9, 1840, Berlioz specifically chastised Catelin for not advertising his works, saying that, after all, “the public cannot divine their existence”!
10 CG 2:664.Like many French publishers, Catelin kept changing addresses, and for a time he had more than one. From a plate number near to that of the Berlioz, it can nonetheless be established that
Les Nuits d’été appeared no later than August 1841.
11 The plate number of the Berlioz is Ad.C. 872. The plate number for a Menuet dans les bois by Alexis Roger is Ad.C. 841, listed in the Bibliographie de la France on August 28, 1841, and thus probably printed, given the bibliography’s slow-paced practice, in July. Indeed, though no advertisements of the Catelin edition have been found (when Simon Richault took over Berlioz’s publications from Catelin, in 1843, he did include
Les Nuits d’été in an advertisement he placed in
La France musicale on November 26, 1843), Berlioz’s cycle is mentioned in the feuilleton of the
Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung of September 1, 1841. More important, a review of the collection appeared in Paris, in the capital’s leading music journal, as early as July 4, 1841. I shall say a word about the substance of this review below. Here let me note simply that the author was the pianist-composer Stephen Heller, who later became one of Berlioz’s closest friends. A copy of the Catelin edition, with an autograph dedication to Heller (“à M. St. Heller, témoignage d’amitié et d’une vive admiration pour son grand et noble talent. H Berlioz”), has been preserved,
12 BnF, Musique, Rés. 1432 (27). and it is possible that, for his review, Heller worked from this very score. But it also is possible—since the publisher is not mentioned in Heller’s review—that in July 1841 he had only Berlioz’s autographs before his eyes.