The autographs of five of the six songs of
Les Nuits d’été are preserved in the Fonds du Conservatoire of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.
1 BnF, Musique, mss. 1179, 1180, 1181, 1182, and 1183. The autograph of the sixth was sold at Sotheby’s in 1947 and is listed in the
New Berlioz Edition as untraced.
2 NBE 13:122. I was pleased to locate it in the little-explored music collection of the Fondation Martin Bodmer, in Cologny, near Geneva, Switzerland. These autographs, undated, tell us nothing of the moment of composition. But they do suggest something of the order of composition, and they do offer fascinating glimpses of the composer in the workshop. The Paris manuscripts are all of the same twenty-four-stave paper carrying the embossed octagonal emblem of Dantier
fils, the man from whom Berlioz began purchasing materials in 1838. The Geneva manuscript—“Sur les lagunes,” the eventual third song of the cycle—is of larger, thirty-stave paper, embossed with a somewhat different emblem from the same dealer. The Paris manuscripts (each a separate bifolium) are numbered at the tops of the first pages of their respective bifolia, and while the titles of the poems are written out, the name of the poet is not. The Geneva manuscript, on the other hand, is headed “Lamento / Paroles de Th. Gautier.” From this admittedly limited evidence, it is my supposition that the initial project included four songs: “Villanelle,” no. 1 (I follow the numbering of the Paris manuscripts); “Absence,” no. 2; “Le Spectre de la rose,” no. 3; and “Barcarolle” (“L’Île inconnue”), no. 4. “Au Cimetière” (“Clair de lune”) is numbered 6 in the Paris collection, but by a different hand, or at a different moment. The Geneva manuscript—without number, with the poet’s name—would seem originally, if only for a short while, to have been conceived for separate publication. It was not long, apparently, before Berlioz decided to make a six-song compilation, or
recueil,
as he later called it,
3 CG 5:602. keeping “Villanelle” as the overture, removing the coda, “Barcarolle,” from fourth to sixth position, and arranging the interior songs in what became their definitive order. Such rethinking, however rapid, provides strong evidence that the work, whose original version, let us not forget, was to be performed by a single singer, is logically viewed as a “cycle”—that is to say, as a gathering of songs which unfolds in a fashion that is to be heard as coherent from the point of view of both poetic discourse and musical continuity.
4 Rushton, “Les Nuits d’été: Cycle or Collection,” in Bloom, Berlioz Studies, 112–135.In his authoritative catalogue of Berlioz’s autograph musical documents, D. Kern Holoman calls the Paris manuscripts “autograph fair copies.”
5 NBE 25 [2nd ed.]:308–321. My examination suggests, from placement and penmanship, that “Reinschrift” or “fair copy” is a fair description of “Le Spectre de la rose” and “Barcarolle”; but that the other manuscripts are “Urschriften,” carefully corrected working copies with paste-overs for subsequent use by the publisher. And—the point is unrelated—whereas the manuscript of “Le Spectre de la rose” is headed “Andante un poco lento e dolce assai,” a later album leaf with the opening nine bars of song is marked “Adagio.”
6 BnF, Musique, ms. 382. The slower marking may well represent Berlioz’s definitive conception of the tempo after having heard the song in performance.