I have earlier mentioned the review of Les Nuits d’été that appeared in July of 1841 in Maurice Schlesinger’s Revue et Gazette musicale over the signature of Stephen Heller. This is one of only two contemporary reviews of the collection that I have been able to find. The second, signed “F,” appeared in La Quotidienne on November 27, 1841. Nearly eleven years later, in the Journal des débats of July 1, 1852, Joseph d’Ortigue would write at length of Berlioz’s songs, on the occasion of the publication of Tristia. These reviews provide us with important information about the work and its raison d’être. From Heller’s article, a spirited defense of Berlioz’s work in general, I should like to quote only two sentences: “In effect,” wrote Heller, “could anything have been easier for Berlioz than to write some of those insipid and perfumed melodies sought out by singers who are ‘a la mode’ and their fashionable clientele?” (Heller uses the English word fashionable, which was fashionable in French at the time.) “But Berlioz has never wanted to dishonor his art,” Heller goes on; “he venerates it as a sacred object, and with religious zeal pays it homage with his most profound thoughts.” From “F,” I quote one: “The composer of Roméo et Juliette, in the habit of masterfully commanding the many voices of the orchestra and used to customizing the gigantic contours of his admirable symphonies, has on this occasion determined to produce a work of exquisite finesse and serenity.” And, from d’Ortigue, a short paragraph: “Several of these melodies have been orchestrated, after the fact, by the composer. I say ‘after the fact’ and you can easily see why. Monsieur Berlioz’s musical imagination is constantly nourished by orchestral timbres. One will perhaps say to him, do for all what you have done for Le Jeune Pâtre breton, La Captive, Sara la baigneuse, and Absence. For my part, I would not be pleased, for I prefer the simplicity of the initial inspiration to the embellishment, though fully genuine, of the second thought. Parvoque potentem.” (D’Ortigue’s Latin quotation is from the Aeneid, 6:843; it has been rendered in French as “riche de peu” and may be taken to mean “and be a master through small things.”)
It is generally assumed that aside from “Absence,” orchestrated by Berlioz in 1843 for performance by his traveling companion, Marie Recio, the other five songs of
Les Nuits d’été were orchestrated shortly prior to publication, in 1856. D’Ortigue’s remark allows for the possibility that one or two songs beyond “Absence” had been orchestrally “embellished” by 1852, if not before. When Berlioz penned a letter of candidacy for a chair at the Académie des Beaux-Arts, for example, on March 6, 1851, he mentioned the six songs for voice and piano of
Les Nuits d’été, “
several with orchestra.”
1 CG 4:37. As for the thrust of d’Ortigue’s comment, that the voice and piano version has an inspirational freshness worth preserving, it is of course not to be underestimated, in spite of the historical appreciation with which Berlioz’s orchestration has been favored. Berlioz himself implied, as D. Kern Holoman puts it, “that the orchestration of a work occurred subsequent to what [he] believed to be its completion.”
2 Holoman, The Creative Process, 173. In prompting d’Ortigue to write something about his collection of songs, Berlioz said that he wanted “only that their existence be known, that they are not shoddy goods, that [the composer] has in no way had sales in mind, and that these ‘petites compositions,’ which have nothing formally or stylistically in common with Schubert’s, require for proper execution singers and pianists—musicians—of consummate artistry.”
3 CG 4:150–151. He would later commit the same notion to print:
The unfortunate thing about salon compositions such as these [praiseworthy songs by Jakob Rosenhain] is that to play the piano part you need a pianist, and to sing the voice part you need a singer. And—what makes the composer’s requirements even more obviously intolerable—both the pianist and the singer must be musicians.
4 Journal des débats (November 25, 1854).For Berlioz, then, small-scale compositions required more than small-scale musicianship. Parvoque potentem indeed.
Are we to believe Berlioz when he says of his songs that they were not commercially inspired? Some publishers at the time—Catelin was one—seem to have existed on such publications; their stable of composers was presumably well fed by such staples of the repertory. What other reasons might Berlioz have had for departing from his passion for the grandiose and taking up a genre in miniature? Beyond Ian Kemp’s suggestion that the work “must be regarded simply as a characteristic product of the Romantic temperament,”
5 NBE 13:xi. there were surely specific reasons for Berlioz’s undertaking
Les Nuits d’été for voice and piano in the spring of 1840, all of them no doubt overlapping.
(1)
He wished to write something for a particular singer whom he admired. As in literature, where so many fictional characters are modelled on friends and acquaintances of the author, here, too—and especially in vocal music, characteristic performers may be “inscribed” into the characteristics of a score. The Catelin publication of 1841 is marked for mezzo-soprano or tenor, but Berlioz—who describes himself as a “second-rate baritone” in chapter 12 of the
Mémoires (in fact he was a practiced vocal coach, as we know from, among other documents, his account of tutoring the young French tenor Victor-Hippolyte Delahaye, a potential successor to Gilbert Duprez)
6 CG 2:699.—surely had a preference for the former: Marguerite, in
La Damnation de Faust, is a mezzo; so, too, are his greatest heroines, Cassandra and Dido, in
Les Troyens, to say nothing of Béatrice, in
Béatrice et Bénédict. In July 1840, Berlioz criticized the hiring practices of the management of the Opéra by saying that if the theater continued to hire “only super-high sopranos, with no medium or lower registers, then I think it will be necessary to give up passionate scenes and dramatic music altogether.”
7 Journal des débats (July 19, 1840). Gautier, too, favored the lower female voice, which he praised in his 1847 poem “Contralto,” probably written for his long-time mistress, the contralto Ernesta Grisi. The Paris autographs of
Les Nuits d’été specify no vocal type, but the Darmstadt fair copy of “Villanelle” is carefully marked “Mezzo-Soprano.”
Berlioz’s ideal mezzo was Pauline Viardot, who was only nineteen years old in 1840 but who was even then recognized by connoisseurs as an artist. Meyerbeer would soon suggest that she be engaged by the Opéra, and Berlioz (who in 1838 called her a “diva manqué,” though more for her repertory than for her vocal resources) would later consider her one of the greatest artists in the history of music. The reigning mezzo at the Opéra at the time was Rosine Stoltz, who created the role of Ascanio in the 1838 production of
Benvenuto Cellini (and who created a stir after 1840 as the mistress of the new director of the Opéra, Leon Pillet). It may be that Berlioz’s relations with Stoltz were on the wane at the time of
Les Nuits d’été—and personal relationships, to say nothing of romantic attachments, were at the time (and continue to be) of no small consequence in the artistic world. Cornélie Falcon, who sang the first performance of the orchestral version of Berlioz’s
La Captive, in 1834, was also a leading mezzo of the period and, according to Berlioz, the repository of the current Opéra director’s hopes for success.
8 CG 3:635.We then come to what Annegret Fauser has called Berlioz’s larger “autobiographical project,”
9 Fauser, “The Songs,” 124. to the young lady who became Berlioz’s supportive mistress, and, in 1854, the singer who became his second wife. That so little is known about Marie Recio, that “devoted and intelligent woman” who, though ungraciously excluded from the
Mémoires, shared over twenty years of the composer’s life, “never for a day ceasing to lavish upon her husband the most tender and delicate attentions,”
10 From the obituary in La France musicale (June 22, 1862). has been one of the real lacunae of modern Berlioz scholarship. Marie Recio appeared on the scene—of the Opéra—in 1841, after the composition of
Les Nuits d’été. The archives indicate that she was hired at the Académie Royale de Musique on October 9, 1841; her contract was terminated on September 8, 1842, when she left Paris, with Berlioz, for Brussels. In those eleven months she sang in the house’s productions of Rossini’s
Comte Ory and Donizetti’s
La Favorite.
Until recently, her pre-operatic life was a mystery. We now know that before adopting the stage name of Recio, Marie-Geneviève Martin appeared in concert as Marie Willès, her adopted name clearly a Frenchified version of the name of the Spanish woman, Marie Sotera de Villas, who gave birth to her, in the Parisian suburb of Châtenay (now Châtenay-Malabry), in June 1814, as the consort of her father, a French military officer, Joseph Martin.
11 Pascal Beyls, “A Surprising Discovery,” 39–52. (That other mezzo, Rosine Stolz, also appropriated for her stage name the maiden name of her mother.) As a singer, Marie Willès first appears in the press at the beginning of 1840, as the dedicatee of “Vive l’hiver,” a
mélodie published in
Le Ménestrel on January 26, 1840,
by the then much in view composer-voice-teacher Giuseppe Concone. It is not clear how Marie Willès came to the attention of Concone, who settled in Paris in 1837, but perhaps she was among his first students in the French capital. (When Berlioz mentioned Concone’s new album in the
Journal des débats of January 14, 1838, he noted that it had been recommended to him by “une grande musicienne,” but did not name the woman in question.) Marie Willès next appears in the press in reviews of a
matinée musicale held in the concert rooms of the piano-making Richter brothers on March 26, 1840—precisely three days after the date that Berlioz inscribed on the “Darmstadt” manuscript of “Villanelle.” One month later, in his article for the
Revue et Gazette musicale of April 26, 1840, Berlioz himself mentions “Mademoiselle Willès” as having caused a sensation at the concert given by Adolf Schimon, the Vienna-born pianist who was studying at the Conservatoire and acting as accompanist in the voice classes of Davide Banderali:
This young woman has everything necessary to succeed in the theater and on the concert stage, once further practice has steadied her intonation, which is still sometimes insecure, and once further experience before the public has given her the poise and composure needed to master and project all of her vocal resources.
Several months later, in August 1840, Marie, accompanied by her mother and their chambermaid, joined the celebrated Norwegian violinist Ole Bull on his concert tour to Wiesbaden, Bad Ems, Mainz, and Baden-Baden, travelling by steamboat and rail. I have not found the raison d’être or the history of their partnership, and have found only one review, which appeared in La Sylphide:
Ole Bull was accompanied by a lovely young singer whom you heard on several occasions during the winter in the salons and in the concert rooms of Henri Herz. Mademoiselle Marie Willès very graciously enhanced the Norwegian violinist’s program. Especially at Wiesbaden, she was warmly applauded in the grand aria from [Donizetti’s 1838 opera]
Roberto Devereux, and in a duet from [Donizetti’s 1833 opera]
Torquato Tasso. I must not forget to mention that, among the Russian and English visitors to the Duchy of Nassau, Marie Willès’
toilette was appreciated nearly as much as her singing.
12 “Les Artistes à Baden-Baden” [August 25, 1840], La Sylphide (1840): 127.Writing to his French wife, Félicité, on August 10, 1840, Ole Bull mentioned that “les dames Willès” were valiantly weathering the storm of difficult travel and sent to her their warm greetings. On September 3, he wrote that “the Willès ladies are leaving for Paris,” that Marie and “her Spanish mother” hoped to see the Bulls’ new baby, that Félicité would find them “very endearing.”
13 The autographs of Bull’s letters to his wife of August 10 and September 3, 1840, are available online at the site of the Bergen Public Library, Norway. See also Ole Bulls Breve, 277.Berlioz—who, in 1840, it must be remembered, was troubled by a wife who was becoming increasingly dependent, isolated, prone to illness, sensitive, frustrated, resentful, and demanding, to employ the terms used by her biographer
14 Raby, Fair Ophelia. —would continue to praise the artistic talents of Marie Willès, nowhere more fully than in his account of the concert she gave on February 9, 1841, which he reviewed at length in the
Journal des débats of February 14:
Mademoiselle Willès, a student of Monsieur Banderali, who has already trained a number of skilled singers, possesses a soprano voice with a range slightly greater than two octaves, and a timbre that is pure, balanced, accurate, and capable of producing a great deal of power, especially in the upper register. She seems to be more attuned to broad, lyrical lines than to ornamental
roulades, although, in the cadenzas that she was called upon to execute, she sang with assurance and precision.
15 The review subsequently appeared in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung (April 2, 1841).One month later, we find Marie Willès participating in a concert at the Salle Pleyel, on March 23, 1841—
precisely one year after the date marked on the “Darmstadt” manuscript of “Villanelle.” On this occasion, which featured the ten-year-old Russian virtuoso Anton Rubinstein,
La Sylphide reported that “Mademoiselle Willès sang some
mélodies by Berlioz with perfect understanding.”
16 La Sylphide (1841): 208. Of the several reviews of this concert that I have located, only this one mentions the Berlioz. But this one is enough, it seems to me, to conclude a) that on March 23, 1841, Marie sang “Villanelle” and, probably, “Absence,” which Pierre-François Wartel had sung at Marie’s earlier concert of February 9, 1841, and which she would sing on tour with Berlioz in 1842-1843; and b) that the date on the “Darmstadt” manuscript of “Villanelle,” probably added in 1842, is an instance of Berlioz mis-remembering the year. What he intended,
it seems to me, is to set down the date on which he had first heard Marie Recio sing the opening song of his cycle.
Berlioz was obviously aware of the celebrity of Marie’s teacher, Davide Banderali, who had begun his tenure at the Conservatoire in 1828, when Berlioz was still a student there. And he knew of Giuseppe Concone, as we have seen, who may earlier have worked with Marie. Now, in 1841, infatuated with her, he would have presumably wished to help one of Banderali’s “best students,” as he referred to Marie, to obtain a contract at the Opéra, especially as he was on good terms with the recently appointed director, Léon Pillet. We have no evidence of any such preferential treatment, but Berlioz was on record as decrying the institution’s lack of mezzo-sopranos. It is in the announcement of Marie’s appointment to the Opéra, in
Le Ménestrel of October 24, 1841,
that we first discover the proof of her dual identity: “Mlle Marie Recio (Willèz) [
sic], déjà connue du public des concerts, vient d’obtenir un engagement de deux ans à l’Opéra”—“Mademoiselle Marie Recio (Willèz), already known to the concert-going public, has just signed a two-year contract at the Opéra.” (We find further confirmation in a communication from Auguste Morel sent, after Berlioz’s death, to the editor of
Le Ménestrel,
in which he casually mentions that Berlioz married “Mademoiselle Willès […] after the death of his first wife.”)
17 Le Ménestrel (October 31, 1869). In fact Marie Recio’s contract was for only one year, not two, but the identification is unmistakable.
The title page of the original edition of
Les Nuits d’été is also perfectly clear: the songs are for mezzo-soprano or tenor. In his first reviews, Berlioz speaks of Marie as a soprano. But when he published
La Belle Isabeau, shortely thereafter, and dedicated it explicitly to Marie Recio, he indicated that it was for mezzo-soprano. As Julian Rushton has demonstrated in his study of Berlioz’s understanding of the mezzo-soprano voice, the distinction between “soprano” and “mezzo-soprano” is not as clear-cut as we might like it to be.
18 Rushton, “Berlioz and the Mezzo-Soprano,” 64–88. Still, the “pitch center of gravity” of “Villanelle”—to use Rushton’s ingenious measure of tessitura, and to take as an example the song that by the date on the “Darmstadt” manuscript must now be associated with Marie Recio—is
higher than that of any other vocal number in Berlioz’s “mezzo-soprano” repertory. “Absence” lies high as well—and many singers transpose these songs down
. But Marie presumably had no trouble singing “Villanelle” in its original key of A major. (The contemporary French soprano, Véronique Gens, sings it in A as well. The mezzo-sopranos Janet Baker and Anne Sofie von Otter, to mention only two, sing it in F.) We know, from a letter from 1843, that Marie sang “Absence,” and sang it well, in its original key of F-sharp major.
19 CG 3:85. (Baker and Otter sing it respectively in E and E-flat.)
(2) He wished to write a work for a particular occasion. In the Revue et Gazette musicale of October 25, 1840, we find the following notice: “In recent days, we have been very happy to hear Wartel rehearsing six new mélodies that M. Berlioz has just composed on poems selected from the Théophile Gautier’s delightful volume La Comédie de la mort. We do not hesitate to say that never before, in this musical genre, has a composer achieved such originality or such profundity and grace of expression—a perfect marriage of melody and accompaniment, the one brought richly to life by the other.” This is the paragraph, clearly penned by the composer himself, that offers the proof I mentioned above that the six songs were in fact completed by October 1840.
In the subsequent issue of the magazine, dated incorrectly as “jeudi 4 novembre 1840”—in fact Thursday of that week fell on the 5th—we find the program of the concert sponsored by the
Revue et Gazette musicale that was to take place on the following Sunday, November 8, 1840. The seventh of the ten items appears as “
Absence, Le Spectre de la rose,
mélodies de Berlioz, paroles de Monsieur Théophile Gautier, chantées par Monsieur Wartel et accompagnées par Monsieur Gustave Collignon.” But when the program was reprinted on the day of the concert, the items by Berlioz were nowhere to be found. It is probable that the tenor, Pierre-François Wartel, at the time singing demanding roles in the several works on the boards at the Opéra in that month, was simply unable to learn the songs to the satisfaction of the composer. Wartel, known for having introduced Schubert’s
Lieder to French audiences, went on to a distinguished career in Paris and abroad as both singer and teacher. The scheduled pianist, Gustave Collignon, a first prize winner at the Conservatoire in 1837, is the man who accompanied Marie Willès in her début recital. He would pursue his career as a pianist, go into exile in September 1848, and become a mainstay of concert life in the American city of New Orleans: “Through the efforts of this one man, New Orleans experienced its first independent symphony orchestra, its first regular chamber and orchestral concert series, and its first systematic hearing of the greatest European instrumental works.”
20 Baron, Concert Life, 77.It is clear, from what we read in the Revue et Gazette musicale, that Berlioz had completed the songs and rehearsed them with Wartel in preparation of their performance at the magazine’s concert of November 8, 1840. If he had conceived the songs with only Wartel’s voice in mind, Berlioz would presumably not have published them “for mezzo-soprano or tenor.” (Wartel would indeed sing “Villanelle” and “Absence” on Marie Willès’s concert of February 9, 1841.)
Beyond performance at a concert sponsored by the journal with which he had been associated since 1834, Berlioz surely hoped for performances of the new mélodies at other venues as well, possibly at one of the soirées offered at the Palais Royal by the Duc d’Orléans. Berlioz had had contacts with the Orléans family since the early eighteen-thirties, and like other artists of the day, including Théophile Gautier, he was especially fond of this Duke, Ferdinand-Philippe, King Louis-Philippe’s eldest son and the heir to the throne. Indeed, as outlined in chapter 5, the Duc d’Orléans attended the performance of Berlioz’s major work of the year 1840, the Symphonie militaire soon to become funèbre et triomphale, and shortly thereafter accepted the dedication of the published score. There were, of course, numerous chamber music concerts in 1840 in the salons of the piano makers Érard, Herz, Pape, Pleyel, Bernhardt, Richter, Petzold, Couder, and others who had the requisite room and riches. Such soirées, though he liked the beverage, were not Berlioz’s usual cup of tea.
(3)
He wished frankly to make some quick, cold cash. Berlioz had lifelong financial problems. To the dismay and embarrassment of his middle-class family, these problems were sometimes emphasized by those who wrote about the composer in the daily and weekly press. In 1841, Berlioz wrote to his sister that “la grande musique” was ruining him.
21 CG 2:685. Perhaps he wished to recoup his losses with some potentially remunerative music that was “petite.” But despite the marketability of the
romance or
mélodie, the publisher of
Les Nuits d’été, Adolphe Catelin, was in marketing neither inventive nor aggressive. He went out of business only two years later. Furthermore, the Berlioz whom we know from the letters and the
Mémoires, while always fearful of imminent bankruptcy, was never really in the music business for profit: his regard for the sanctity of art—explicitly mentioned in Stephen Heller’s review of the song cycle, which appeared on July 4, 1841, and which we have cited—was well known, and genuine.
Indeed, in the other contemporary review of the new mélodies, the anonymous critic praises the “exquisite finesse and serenity” of Les Nuits d’été, but, as concerns marketability, expresses genuine doubts. Because the author of the review, “F,” has wrestled closely with the new score, we quote his review at length.
The first mélodie is entitled “Villanelle,” and this one, for us, is the most perfect of them all. The words, by Monsieur Théophile Gautier, are rich in grace and charm. Two springtime lovers wander through a cool and shaded valley, walk softly upon the fresh grass, relish the joyous cries of the blackbirds in the bushes, and find around them nothing but peaceful delight. These delicate feelings, these sweet and rose-tinted colors, these gentle dreams, are all captured by the composer with rare perfection. The melody is ravishing, the accompaniment, diaphanous. If you close your eyes and let your imagination wander, you will find yourself placed in a picturesque landscape, seated at the edge of a fountain, inhaling the wildflowers’ intoxicatingly perfumed aromas.
The music Monsieur Berlioz has written for the second poem is of great beauty, although a certain indecisiveness haunts the melodic contours and harmonic designs as a result of the composer’s desire very closely to follow the poet’s train of thought. In fact, that train of thought is rather odd: the ghost of a rose (if you can believe it) returns late at night to dance upon the bedside table of a young lady still dreaming of earlier ballroom delights. The poor rose complains not at all; it asks for neither a requiem mass nor a confessional psalm; it is perfectly happy to have died earlier in the evening, stripped of its petals while lying upon the alabaster breast of the insouciant maiden, now solaced by arrival in paradise. Here, then, is a rose that knows how to compose a verse—and here is a conception that is truly bizarre.
For the third and fourth poems, wistful and forlorn, Monsieur Berlioz has found the perfect musical equivalents. The fifth poem, entitled “Au cimetière: Clair de lune,” leaves us mystified. No doubt for Monsieur Berlioz, these misty, nebulous, and uninterrupted harmonies and rhythms—which rise and fall, come and go, intersect and intertwine, disappear in a distant haze—make perfectly good sense. But we have not been able to grasp them. Perhaps an irreproachable performance would eradicate the confusion we have felt. We should like to believe as much, and we would be very happy to revise our opinion.
The concluding mélodie, finally, is a delightful and carefree fisherman’s song, a sibling whose lively demeanor contrasts vividly with the soft and tender features of her melancholic sisters.
If we have dwelled at length on the work of Monsieur Berlioz, it is because he is an estimable and important artist and deserves a serious review. The author of Roméo et Juliette, used to commanding with expertise the powerful voices of an orchestra and to creating admirable symphonies of colossal proportions, has in this case attempted to accomplish a work of serene and exquisite finesse.
Nevertheless, these
mélodies,
undeniably polished from an artistic point of view, are not without fault as concerns the likelihood of public success. By attending to the most minute details, by going over his finely shaped melodies with a microscope and a sharpened chisel, Monsieur Berlioz has produced a score of such meticulousness that it risks seeming ever so slightly aloof. Because the listener finds it rather difficult to follow the composer’s thinking in the midst of so many arabesques that entwine and enmesh the melodies in a kind of web. In this respect, without insisting on the precision of the comparison, Monsieur Berlioz reminds us of the medieval artist who manages to sculpt the various stages of the Passion around the base of an ivory reliquary that is only a few inches in diameter. Here we find thousands of infinitesimal images, each of which assumes a different posture and appears to express a different emotion. This is highly commendable, but it requires very close observation. In the end, is not all of this work rather frivolous, or futile?
22 “F.,” in La Quotidienne (November 27, 1841).The final word above is
puérilité, which is not readily translated. Still, if for pecuniary reasons Berlioz wished to demonstrate that he was essentially a “normal” composer—normal, that is, in the sense of one prepared, not only to moderate his means, but also to submit to the supremacy of “words,” and in so doing, to recognize or acknowledge a desire to “entertain”—then it does indeed seem, if we take this essentially sympathetic reviewer’s comments to heart, that the composer failed to do so. For more than ten years, ever since the premieres of the overture to his first opera,
Les Francs-Juges, in 1828, and of the
Symphonie fantastique, in 1830 and 1832, Berlioz had been considered an oddity, an exception, a fantastic extremist. Even his good friend Stephen Heller understood why Adolphe Adam, the composer of the ever-popular
Postillon de Longjumeau and “a man who lacked neither intelligence nor talent, had not been able to see in Berlioz’s first symphony anything other than music from an insane asylum.”
23 Heller, “Une Lettre de Stephen Heller,” 65. Throughout his career, but particularly in the autumn of 1840, when he organized a “festival” at the Opéra, the first of its kind, Berlioz was reviewed in the press as a noise-maker and a madman. In October, the satirical
Charivari launched repeated diatribes. And in November and December, the theoretically respectable
Revue des deux mondes treated Berlioz to a no-holds-barred viciousness. Vindictive reviews and what we would consider to be libelous personal attacks were not limited to Berlioz, of course; Balzac, for one, suffered more than his fair share. Furthermore, in the same year, one of the most thoughtful contemporary journalistic analyses of any work by Berlioz appeared in the socialist newspaper,
La Phalange, from the pen of the aforementioned Allyre Bureau, the violinist-composer who was one of Théophile Gautier’s close friends and who, after playing an active role in the Revolution of 1848 (as well as the violin at the Theatre-Italien), finished his days in the utopian socialist colony at Kellum Springs, Texas. Bureau wrote that Berlioz is a composer “whom France would do well to glorify rather than to have fun degrading and diminishing as much as possible. But I suppose,” he continued, “that we are waiting until after he is dead to discover that he just possibly had a touch of genius.”
24 La Phalange (January 1, 1840): 16.These reviews, positive or negative, were often personally or politically inspired; they were prepared on the nudging of those who knew the critic (or the subject of his notice), and were in a position to tender thanks for services rendered; they were motivated by envy, by competition, by clique-ism. No opinion expressed in nineteenth-century French newspaper print was unprimed: “critics’ ideologies, and more specifically their political attitudes and personal acquaintances played a singularly important role in aligning them ‘for’ and ‘against’ an artist.”
25 Bellos, Balzac Criticism, 189. This is one of the overmastering messages we receive from Berlioz’s
Correspondance générale and from the letters of, among others, Théophile Gautier. It is the message Karl Gutzkow conveyed to German readers in his
Letters from Paris of 1842, when he said that it is impossible for a critic in Paris “to be completely independent, or, what is the same thing, to be completely honest.”
26 Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, 44 (November 16, 1842): col. 925. And it is a message of which one is constantly reminded in the France of today as well. Life and culture have been politicized in France to a degree difficult for Americans to imagine, or to accept, because Americans until recently have tended to believe in the myth of an “objective” press, and because in the United States the government’s contributions to culture have been minimal, while in France the great cultural philanthropist has from time immemorial been the government, the Maison du Roi, the Maison de l’Empereur, the administration, officialdom: indeed, it is not uncommon to see it remarked in the French press that “l’administration y fait toujours la pluie et le beau temps”—“it’s the administration that makes it rain or shine.” In the nineteenth century, it was not grants for the arts that the government was distributing, but rather subventions, indemnities, commissions,
encouragements, administrative posts, and sinecures, as we have seen in previous chapters, that permitted a number of artists to work much, if not most, of the time for themselves. Alexandre Dumas, as I remarked here in the prologue,
was librarian at the Palais Royal, as was Casimir Delavigne; Charles Nodier was librarian at the Arsenal; Alfred de Musset was librarian at the Ministry of the Interior; Berlioz was librarian at the Conservatoire; in 1868 Théophile Gautier became librarian for the Princess Mathilde. Filling out book orders and catalogue cards were for none of these men their primary occupation. Notices in the press, with the potential they offered of reaching “les dames du grand monde,” as Berlioz called them,
27 CG 2:722. and others in high places, were crucial: the talked-about were on the road to success. We must thus read critical notices against a (loosely defined) political backdrop, and with political questions—the force of central authority and of those behind it—in mind.
With Les Nuits d’été, Berlioz’s detractors were in a sense asked to reconsider. Just as they had been asked to reconsider in 1830, with the publication of the Neuf Mélodies, which François-Joseph Fétis, Berlioz’s first important critic, aware of the composer’s principled independence and yet presciently alarmed by the composer’s inclination to grandiosity, greeted with encouragement:
We can only congratulate Monsieur Berlioz for taking up in this new work a method of composition far more melodious than that of his earlier compositions. There is a great deal of charm in this new collection of
mélodies, and one sees clearly that Monsieur Berlioz need only
desire to do so in order to enter upon a more natural path, the only path that can lead to success.
28 Revue musicale (March 6, 1830): 160.That principled independence is also evoked in Stephen Heller’s review—whose content may have been known beforehand to the composer. “Do not accuse Berlioz of conspiring against the rules of art,” wrote Heller. “He does not work according to a system; he is neither an abolitionist nor a blind slave bound to ancient theories. Preeminent in his work is inspiration: he listens to what he thinks; he paints what he feels.”
29 Revue et Gazette musicale (July 4, 1841): 329. In a private conversation with Berlioz, Heller was rather more critical: “My dear friend,” Heller claims to have said to the composer, “you ask for too much, you want to have everything. You deride the people and yet you seek their admiration. You disdain the applause of the crowd, which is your absolute right as an artist of a noble and independent temperament, and yet you hunger for it nevertheless.”
30 Heller, “Une Lettre de Stephen Heller,” 73.The anonymous reviewer for La Quotidienne, whom we have quoted at length, opened his review with comments on the romance, whose commercial value, he recognized, was sadly opposite to its artistic merit. He went on—and this is crucial—to speak prophetically of the world’s greatest master of the Lied:
Fortunately, all rules have exceptions. Just as we were about to despair [about the prominence of the romance], there appeared in our midst, like a new and immense heavenly body, a great, indeed, immortal genius. Everyone now knows Schubert. Who amongst us does not revere La Religieuse [“Die Nonne”], Le Roi des Aulnes [“Der Erlkönig”], L’Attente [“Du bist die Ruh”], Le Départ [“Abschied”], and those other great masterpieces of truth and inspiration? In Schubert’s powerful hands, the romance has removed its borrowed apparel, it has stripped itself of its interminable series of couplets with their exasperatingly incessant repetitions, and it has become a kind of small-scale musical drama, in which all the poetic nuances and all of the poetic images are carefully replicated, now by melodic niceties, now by melancholic accents, here by soft and mysterious harmonies, there by graceful and delicate rhythms. It has become, in a word, a faithful mirror that reflects and embellishes the poet’s ideas, like the watery surface of a pond that reflects the dark silhouettes of the trees which lean over its shores.
Monsieur Berlioz’s six mélodies are written in the very same spirit, although by saying so I wish in no way to suggest that he is guilty of imitation or theft. For Monsieur Berlioz is above all else a proudly independent musician: he lends to some, but he borrows from none. If this spirit of originality, for which he has been frequently criticized, has sometimes led him astray, it has also led to the numerous wonders that abound in his works.
Despite what I have said about critics and their motives, I have unfortunately been unable to identify the writer of this notice. It is unlikely to have been penned by Berlioz’s friend and admirer, Joseph d’Ortigue, the regular music critic for
La Quotidienne,
who had earlier written a long piece on Berlioz, in
Le Temps of January 6, 1835, in which he did compare Berlioz, as a melodist, to Schubert, because d’Ortigue seems almost always to have signed his articles. In
La Quotidienne, I have found eleven articles published in the column “Revue Musicale” under the initial “F” on the following dates: 1841 (January 12, March 24, May 5, November 12); 1842 (February 13, March 2, April 13, May 14, August 27); 1843 (March 26, May 14).
Monsieur F reveals himself to be a learned musician, rigorous in his criticism of the Société des Concerts du Conservatoire, for example, and demanding in his expectations for singers. It is conceivable that he was Pier-Angelo Fiorentino, whose distinguished career as a music critic began at
La Presse in the autumn of 1836, a few months after Émile de Girardin founded that newspaper, celebrated for its first-in-the-nation use of advertising that allowed a subscription price far lower than that of any Parisian newspaper up to that time. The principal critic at
La Presse, and Fiorentino’s colleague in the early years, was Théophile Gautier—a reason for a possible association of Fiorentino with
Les Nuits d’été. But we know that Berlioz’s friend Léon-Charles-François Kreutzer did for a time write for
La Quotidienne,
31 Pougin, Kreutzer, 8. and it may well be his “François” that led to the mysterious initial in the pages of the newspaper and that concealed his identity as the nephew of the famous violinist-composer Rodolphe Kreutzer.
In his later review, Joseph d’Ortigue opened his remarks on Les Nuits d’été with irony:
“What?” some will say, “Monsieur Berlioz has composed
mélodies?
How very odd!” Yes, Monsieur Berlioz has indeed composed
mélodies,
even
romances,
and they are polished, pure, tender, majestic, nostalgic; they express with truth and nobility a particular state of mind. […] Whatever you may think of the poetic imagination of Monsieur Théophile Gautier, you certainly cannot deny the richness of his imagery or the assurance of his forms as they are manifested in a prodigiously instinctive vocabulary and a remarkable sense of color, the one reflected by the other. Nothing of this—the images, the colors, the forms, the reflections—has escaped the composer.
32 Journal des débats (July 1, 1852).Such praise, for mélodies conceived in 1840, would befit the soon to be celebrated Heine Lieder of Robert Schumann, Dichterliebe, which in fact Berlioz was studying at the time: “I am looking right now at the settings that Monsieur Schumann has made of the poems of Heine,” Berlioz noted in his feuilleton for the Journal des débats of October 18, 1840, at precisely the time he was completing Les Nuits d’été. The year 1840 was, of course, Robert Schumann’s Liederjahr or “year of song,” motivated by the composer’s increasing confidence that a wedding with his long-beloved Clara Wieck would soon take place—which it did, on September 12, 1840. On a much smaller scale, because Berlioz composed only six while Schumann composed over one hundred, 1840 was Berlioz’s Liederjahr as well.