Lamento

Berlioz’s song is through-composed. Parsing the melodic phrases is no simple matter, as it is, by contrast, in the contemporary setting of the poem by Félicien David (published in 1840 and listed in the Bibliographie de la France on January 2, 1841), where Gautier’s first four lines are set to two four-bar phrases of patently obvious symmetry. In the Berlioz, those four lines encompass fifteen bars: saying that they comprise phrase units of 4 + 4 + 7 fails to do justice to Berlioz’s always originally inflected rhythmic imagination. David does write ad libitum at the head of the refrain, he does set “Ah, sans amour, s’en aller sur la mer” in five bars rather than four, and he does choose an appropriately minor key, in this case G minor, for his setting as a whole. (The setting of the same poem by Charles Lenepveu, of 1870, is in F minor; the setting by Charles Gounod, of 1872, is in E minor.) Berlioz’s “Lamento,” too, is in a minor key: following on the heels of “Le Spectre de la rose,” in D major, G minor here can sound like the second member of a logical progression. But the sequence of the keys of the six songs—A, D, G minor, F-sharp, D, F—is hardly suggestive of a largescale tonal design. The unity of the “cycle,” such as it is, turns upon the poetic narrative and imagery, the vocal style that revolves around melodic recitative and lyrical arioso, and the presence of repeated musical gestures.

“Sur les lagunes” is built—this is its most outstanding feature—upon a recurring motive, a kind of ostinato, even a leitmotif, if I may use the term loosely: a musical response to Gautier’s haunting refrain, “Ah, sans amour, s’en aller sur la mer.” The leitmotif occurs some fourteen times in the piano part; though it is echoed in the vocal line, it occurs there literally only twice—at “pleure, pleure” (bars 57–58), one of the few words of the original poem repeated by the composer, and at the final sigh, “Ah,” another Berliozian textual addition and a dramatic touch that is both fitting and lovely. The linear half-step motif is initially presented (bars 1–2; 5–6) as a sustaining of the fifth degree of G minor briefly inflected by the flattened sixth. In the course of the song, the sustained D functions variously as the fifth, the third (major and minor) and the root of a triad. In bars 13–14, the D figures in an inversion of the harmony we now know as the “Tristan chord,” although in this case Berlioz is concerned less by vertical simultaneities than by changing colors produced by the process of reiteration. Indeed, we have here one of a privileged group of movements, or moments, controlled by a systematically repeated gesture that by its very strictness calls attention to all that is free and imaginative in Berlioz. Such an expressive scenario is used to sublime effect in the septet in act 4 of Les Troyens, which is linked to the love duet that follows, in G-flat major, by the insistent oscillation of the fifth and flattened sixth degrees of F major. It was used by Berlioz as early as 1834, for the tolling of the evening bells in the “Pilgrims’ March” of Harold en Italie; it was used again in the “Funeral March” of the dramatic symphony, Roméo et Juliette; and it was used in what is the true forerunner of the compositional procedure employed in “Sur les lagunes,” the Offertorium of the Requiem, which won for Berlioz the “priceless approval” of Robert Schumann: “This Offertorium,” said Schumann to the composer, “surpasses everything.”4 Mémoires, 532.

The choral psalmody in the Requiem, which Berlioz called a “chorus of souls in Purgatory,”5 NBE 9:156. surely had a direct bearing on the significance, for the composer, of the ostinato in “Sur les lagunes.” The significance would be identical to that of Juliet’s “Convoi funèbre,” whose ostinato Berlioz also called a psalmody: it is a spiritual significance, suggested by the “heavens” and “angels” of Gautier’s poem, which adds the deity to the typically Romantic constellation of love, night, and death, that motivates this lamentation on the soul of the departed lover.

At the end of “Sur les lagunes” we are left poised on the dominant, longing until “infinity” for our “belle amie.” Only on one other occasion did Berlioz end a movement with a similarly unresolved harmony, namely, in “La Harpe eolienne—Souvenirs,” the single instrumental movement of Lélio ou Le Retour a la vie, the sequel to the Symphonie fantastique, as revised in 1855.6 NBE 7:68. The poetic, or dramatic, circumstances there are similar, and there, as in the song, Berlioz reworked the ending with particular care. Indeed, for “Sur les lagunes,” there are even slight differences between the corrected autograph and the first edition, suggesting further adjustments to the ending in proof.

Chopin and Schumann essayed unresolved endings in certain multisectional works (the Prelude in F major from op. 28, for example, and “Bittendes Kind” from Kinderszenen), and in this case, as in those, the technique of avoiding closure—in a sense the most obvious of all representational practices of the Romantic era in music—signals the composer’s larger structural conception. I earlier suggested, on the basis of differences among the Paris and Geneva manuscripts of Les Nuits d’été, that “Sur les lagunes” was separately composed and subsequently incorporated into the six-song collection published in 1841. It is on the one hand logical to assume that the decision to end this song on the dominant was a part of the larger determination to publish the six songs in what became their final, progressive arrangement as—there is no other word for it—a “cycle.” On the other hand, this ending on the dominant is not as expectant, or anticipatory, as others. The seventh degree of the final chord is not present. The chord, with the third in the tenor register, has a life of its own. Its “yes and no” quality, which I hear as a forerunner of the exquisite closing of the slow movement of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony, is as expressive as it is vague; its message could be one of irony, or of hope, or of despair.

Indistinct and ambiguous though it may be, there is nonetheless a message here, which filters through the works of artists as diverse as Carl Wilhelm Kolbe the Younger, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Lord Byron, Eugène Delacroix, Casimir Delavigne, and Gaetano Donizetti. Let me be precise. That lovely, incantatory line, the line that encapsulates the gloom of life in the shadow of death and thus a quintessential element of Gautier’s collection, “Ah, sans amour, s’en aller sur la mer,” did not simply come to Gautier from the recesses of his poetic imagination. It is in fact a translation of the first two lines of what is apparently an old Venetian verse:

It is obvious, then, that the subject—the arrogant old doge who is executed for breaking with his patrician class and favoring “the people”; the aged aristocrat who is married to the young and beautiful daughter of one of his former comrades-in-arms—was in the air. The interrelationships and anxieties of influence among these iterations of the legend cannot long concern us here. For Byron and Delacroix, the high tragedy of the political actor is preeminent, and the youthful wife remains faithful. Indeed, Balzac, in Les Martyrs ignorés of 1837, has a character congratulate Byron for having her do so: “Lord Byron had a great idea in having her remain faithful to her husband.”8 Balzac, “Les Martyrs ignorés,” in Études philosophiques, 208. For Delavigne, the youthful wife succumbs to a young lover, then later, before his execution, asks her husband’s forgiveness. For Bidera and Donizetti, it is simply not clear whether the young lovers consummate their guilty passion.9 Gossett, “Music at the Théâtre-Italien,” 347. For Hoffmann, the love intrigue takes precedence: the wife of the doge returns the affections of her youthful admirer but remains faithful to the old man until his demise. Then, in a kind of pre-Wagnerian “Liebestod,” the lovers are united—only to have their gondola swallowed up by a storm that arises in the aftermath of the execution of the doge. The lovers are drowned in revenge by what is, of course, the traditionally metaphorical wife of the doge—the sea itself.

It is earlier, while riding with the doge in the channel before St. Mark’s Square, that the dogaressa hears “the notes of a soft male voice, gliding along the waves of the sea” and singing the verses we earlier learned were inscribed on the picture frame, “Ah! senza amare, andare sul mare”—“Ah, sans amour, s’en aller sur la mer.” In Hoffmann, these verses crystallize the young woman’s emotions: upon hearing them, she feels the anguish of the lovelessness of her marriage to the doge and the temptation of lust for her handsome young admirer. More broadly, for the reviewer of the French translation, these verses capture “the risk of the unequal marriage of youth and old age, the inevitable misery of the couple, the sadness of the bride, the apprehension of the groom.”10 Journal des débats (January 27, 1830).

We know that Théophile Gautier was familiar with these verses from Hoffmann’s tale. In his novel Les Deux Étoiles, serialized in La Presse (from September 20 to October 15, 1848), he sets them down: “La chanson vénitienne, dans son admirable mélancolie, dit qu’il est triste de s’en aller sur la mer sans amour”—“The Venetian chanson, it its admirable melancholy, tells us how sad it is, without love, to set out upon the sea.”11 Gautier, Les Deux Étoiles, La Presse (October 5, 1848). In 1851 the novel appeared as Partie carrée. We know that Berlioz devoured Hoffmann when the tales first appeared in French in 1829—the impact of Hoffmann is a major focus of Francesca Brittan’s Music and Fantasy—and that he was friendly with Pauline Richard, one of Hoffmann’s translators.12 CG 1:293, 301, 348. We know, furthermore, that Berlioz was familiar with the play by Byron. He might well have seen the Delacroix. And it would have been difficult for him not to have seen or known the Delavigne, as it saturated the theatrical press in 1829 and 1830. He reviewed the Donizetti in Le Rénovateur of March 29, 1835, and said of the subject that it was too well known to require retelling. The sea, finally, had always been the scene of his dreams: he qualified the Mémoires themselves as “le livre de loch de [son] pénible voyage”—the log, or log-book, of his arduous journey. We may safely assume, then, that Berlioz took up these verses—not only a tale of a doge and a dogaressa but an encapsulation of stressfully conflicting emotions to which at the time he was acutely sensitive—with a full awareness of their historical, poetic, and musical resonance.

In “Sur les lagunes,” with its musically open-ended conclusion and its ostinato so effortlessly demonstrating “the complex character and function” of only one note, achieving a myriad of expressive possibilities with a miraculous economy of means, Berlioz, in what I have called a privileged moment, reveals “something of the inner process of Romanticism itself.”13 Primmer, The Berlioz Style, 97. He begins with a text that calls itself a romance. But instead of doing with it what a “normal” composer might have done, and despite what might have been a fleeting reason for turning his attention to song in the spring and summer of 1840, namely a desire to show a certain public that in fact he was a “normal” composer, he rather applies to that text, as he does to the others of the collection, each in its own way, a compositional technique of both obvious premeditation and apparent spontaneity that leads us now to view putatively “normal” works in the shadows of Les Nuits d’été.