The Poets

Gautier was probably among those who came to Berlioz’s lodgings in Montmartre in 1835 for the celebration of his son Louis’ first birthday. Louis’ mother, Harriet Smithson Berlioz, was long admired by the young writer, and in his feuilletons that appeared regularly in Émile de Girardin’s new, inexpensive, and thus for the first time widely circulating newspaper, La Presse, Gautier—with cues and clues from the composer—regularly praised Berlioz’s concerts and compositions. When the popular song composer Hippolyte Monpou died suddenly in 1841, at the age of thirty-seven, Gautier praised him as “Le Berlioz de la ballade”; when the Société des Concerts du Conservatoire performed excerpts from La Damnation de Faust, on April 15, 1849, Gautier referred to the composer (in his column for La Presse of the following day) as “the only symphonist that we have in France”; and when Berlioz himself died, Gautier prepared a long and laudatory article that appeared on March 16, 1869, in the Journal official, and again in Gautier’s celebrated Histoire du Romantisme of 1874. For Gautier, Berlioz was “the most literary musician in existence.” More famously, he formed, with Victor Hugo and Eugene Delacroix, “the great trinity of French Romantic art.”1 Gautier, Correspondance générale, 1:2271; 3:298, 119. For Berlioz, Gautier was a poet of moonlight, melancholy, and, to paraphrase Henry James, a clear and undiluted strain in the minor key. In 1844, when he was negotiating a new contract with Alexandre Dujarier, owner of La Presse, Gautier went so far as to style himself the journal’s Jules Janin (drama critic), Étienne Delecluze (salon critic), and Hector Berlioz (music critic).2 Gautier, 2:195. In 1847, when Berlioz was engaged by the half-mad impresario Louis-Antoine Jullien as conductor of the concerts at the Drury Lane Theatre, in London, he requested a new ballet scenario from Gautier, whose excellent reputation in the genre had been earlier created by Giselle (1841). Gautier prepared a scenario, based on Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, but with the demise of Jullien’s enterprise, the project—for which Berlioz was not going to compose the music—came to naught. Apart from this non-venture, their only artistic collaboration occurred with Les Nuits d’été.

Is “collaboration” the applicable word? Gautier left Paris for Spain on May 5, 1840, and returned to the French capital five months later, on October 7. He and Berlioz could have spoken about the settings before Gautier’s departure, and I would assume they did. In August 1837, Victor Hugo wrote a note to Berlioz that introduces “some lovely verses which a young poet, my neighbor, has written for you and asked me to send along.” The neighbor in question was in all likelihood Gautier; the verses, some of those later set as Les Nuits d’été.3 CG 2:311–312. Katherine Kolb informed me that the letter is postmarked August 3, 1837, and that the Hugo scholar Jean Gaudon was certain that the “young poet” was Gautier. But apart from this letter, we have no document that attests to Berlioz and Gautier having worked actively together. As to Gautier’s way of working with musicians, however, documents there are. A number of his poems were written expressly for musical setting, including the “Barcarolle” that eventually became the finale of Berlioz’s cycle. This poem, drafted in 1834 for the composer Allyre Bureau, was several times revised by Gautier before its definitive publication in La Comédie de la mort, which Louis Desessart brought out in Paris in 1838—a collection to which Berlioz would have been attracted by the irony of the title, and from which he would make his own selections in 1840. The title of the volume applies to the opening, two-part poem, “La Vie dans la mort,” and “La Mort dans la vie.” This is followed by fifty-seven separate and unnumbered poems, of which Berlioz selected nos. [27], “Le Spectre de la rose”; [28], “Lamento. La Chanson du pêcheur”; [38], “Absence”; [44], “Lamento; [45], “Barcarolle”; and [56], “Villanelle rythmique.”

Beyond “Barcarolle,” written for Bureau, published in 1834 as “Le Pays inconnu” and in 1835 as “Mirage (Barcarolle),” other songs, too, were drafted prior to 1840, as perhaps Berlioz was aware. “Le Spectre de la rose” appeared on May 7, 1837, in the magazine Don Quixote; “Villanelle rythmique,” written for Xavier Boisselot, also appeared in 1837;4 According to a note on the autograph manuscript, BnF, Musique, ms. 4383. so, too, did “Lamento,” as “Sur la mer.”5 Poésies completes de Théophile Gautier, 1:lv-lxiii. Berlioz’s own selection from the complete publication includes two “pairs” of poems; and his final ordering, with many interstices, follows Gautier’s, except for the removal of the “Villanelle” from last position to first. It is almost as though Berlioz warmed to the idea of making musical settings as he read progressively through Gautier’s collection and began to compose, as he did the music for Les Troyens, with a “scene” near the end that moved him the most.

For Allyre Bureau, the first musician with whom Gautier collaborated, the poet drafted what he called his “chanson” in two ways, with and without refrain; he told the composer to use the version he thought was best for musical setting.6 Gautier, Correspondance générale, 1: 42–43. Gautier was more explicit with his friend François Bazin (winner of the Prix de Rome in 1840), to whom he sent a poem with the following advice: “Treat my poetry as you wish; if something [in the text] displeases you, I shall change it. I am sending it in two versions, with and without refrain. You may choose. And write to me if you have any other particular musical idea to which my poetry might be adapted.”7 Gautier, 1:248. When he sent a poem to Meyerbeer, in the spring of 1839, Gautier went so far as to provide a monstre—a schematic outline indicating the scansion of the text, the separate poetic feet, and the long and short syllables of each—something rarely done in French poetics, where analysis is based on syllable count and on the rhythm and intensity of the line as a whole. To the German composer, Gautier added: “If you find this pattern acceptable, I shall try to improve the verses while maintaining the present form. If you would prefer some other meter, please let me know. I have maintained a rigorous symmetry in these lines; if they are not yet worth much as poetry, they are, I think, appropriate for musical setting.”8 Gautier, 1:146.

From these examples—one could give more—it is clear that Gautier did not belong to that group of poets whom Berlioz considered completely lacking in musical sensibility. On one occasion, when he was assisting Louise Bertin in the preparation of her opera, La Esmeralda, mentioned in chapter 4, he wrote of the librettist, rather snarkily, that “[Victor] Hugo expects a great success. He judges music as do all the poets, which is to say that he is completely devoid of musical sensitivity.”9 CG 2:285. Gautier, on the contrary, was aware of what he referred to as the “double exigencies of poetry and music,” as he put it in a review of Roméo et Juliette in La Presse of December 11, 1839. He was willing to adapt his poetry to the needs of the musician. He seems to have preferred to do the adapting himself but would presumably have agreed with Berlioz that in some instances, “it is better to upset the progression of the poetry than it is to alter the musical continuity.”10 CG 2:183. Unlike Goethe, who preferred music that in no way challenged the supremacy of his verse, Gautier appears to have viewed the mélodie as a mutually creative venture. It is for this reason, no doubt, that so many composers, including Bizet, Fauré, and Duparc, found inspiration in the poems of La Comédie de la mort.

Of the fifty-seven poems in this collection, sixteen were sooner or later set by one or more composers during the nineteenth century. “Villanelle,” written for Boisselot, was set by Berlioz and at least twenty-three others; “Le Spectre de la rose” was set by eight others; “Sur les lagunes,” by twenty others; “Absence,” by sixteen others; “Au cimetière,” by only three others; “Barcarolle,” by eighteen others. Two further poems from La Comédie de la mort, “Romance” and “Les Papillons,” were set by eleven and twenty-one composers respectively.11 Spœlberch de Lovenjoul, Histoire des œuvres de Théophile Gautier, 1:123, 152–153, 155. These dry-as-dust statistics tell us that, except for “Au cimetière,” Berlioz chose poems that were already or soon became widely considered appropriate for musical setting. If we did not believe that his eventual song is a small miracle, we might be inclined to ask why, instead of setting “Au cimetière,” Berlioz did not set “Romance,” or even “Les Papillons”!

A partial answer is provided by our knowledge of Berlioz’s own thoughts about composing a mélodie, or romance, expressed succinctly in a letter to the editor of the Journal des jeunes personnes, a popular young women’s magazine, who had asked him to set a poem by the children’s book author Léon Guérin. Writing on October 10, 1834, to “Monsieur Duplessis” (I believe the man in question is Joseph Duplessy, editor of, among other things, a collection of writings by women),12 Trésor littéraire des jeunes personnes, 2nd ed., ed. Joseph Duplessy (Tours: A. Mame, 1862). he declined the editor’s request, saying that “the character of each couplet [of the poem] would require a different music—something that would make the dimensions of the piece simply incompatible with those of a work appropriate to your journal.” “Furthermore,” he adds, “I am at the moment so busy that I simply do not see how I could find an entire day and devote it exclusively to this little composition.” And he concludes with a credo: “Such things ought really to be improvised, so to speak, and when one fails [to find the appropriate setting] on first encountering the poem, in my opinion, one really ought to abandon the effort.”13 CG 2:203.

Here, then, is indirect evidence of Berlioz’s presumably immediate attraction to Gautier’s poetry. As for his title, perhaps he found “Les Nuits d’été” both euphonious and appropriate to the theme of melancholy longing that runs through the verse. “De belles nuits d’été” and other forms of that locution, including Le Songe d’une nuit d’été—Shakespeare’s play and Mendelssohn’s overture—are found on frequent occasion in the titles of the publications and in the pages of the press of the day. Considerations of euphony were obviously important to his choice of titles for the individual songs: Gautier’s “Villanelle rythmique” became Berlioz’s “Villanelle”; “Le Spectre de la rose” remained unchanged by the composer; what for Gautier was “Lamento. La Chanson du pêcheur” became for Berlioz “Lamento” (in the Geneva manuscript) and “Sur les lagunes. Lamento” (in the printed edition); “Absence” remained unchanged; Gautier’s second “Lamento” was entitled by the composer “Au cimetière. Clair de lune,” although the second part of Berlioz’s title seems to have been an afterthought. For the final song, Berlioz used Gautier’s title, “Barcarolle,” in the manuscript, but adopted “L’Île inconnue” for the printed edition. It is furthermore possible—the point is of no small significance—that some of these emendations (“Sur les lagunes”; “Au cimetière”; “L’Île inconnue”) were made by the composer with a view toward inspiring the scenic imagination of the artist who might eventually be charged with making title-page illustrations: these, as the reviews of the day make abundantly clear, were objects of appreciation equal in importance to that of the songs themselves. Unfortunately, Les Nuits d’été appeared from Catelin, and later from Richault, with neither engraved portraits nor lithographed vignettes. Those by Louis Boulanger and Barathier that grace the Boieldieu jeune edition of Berlioz’s Le Montagnard exilé (1823) and the Schlesinger edition of Neuf Mélodies (1830), for example, to say nothing of the later ones by Frédéric Sorrieu and Georges Staal that decorate the Richault editions of Berlioz’s La Captive (1849) and Sara la baigneuse (1850), provide a treat for the eye that some might have found more tempting than the music inside.