Chapter Seven
Berlioz, Delacroix, and La Mort d’Ophélie
Oh! que ne puis-je la trouver, cette Juliette, cette Ophélie que mon cœur appelle!
—Berlioz, Lélio ou Le Retour à la vie
On December 7, 1846, in his regular column for La Presse, Théophile Gautier concluded a review of La Damnation de Faust, Berlioz’s new “légende dramatique” premiered the day before at the Théâtre de l’Opéra-Comique, with the sentence we quoted in the previous chapter, the sentence now become famous: “Hector Berlioz nous paraît former, avec Victor Hugo et Eugène Delacroix, la trinité de l’art romantique”—“Hector Berlioz appears to us to form, with Victor Hugo and Eugène Delacroix, the trinity of Romantic art.” It is not certain that the three artists would have read Gautier’s anointment as a consecration. Hugo, celebrated well before the bataille d’Hernani of 1830, was already pair de France. Delacroix, risen to public notice from successes in the salons of the eighteen-twenties, was, as we have seen, well commissioned by the administration of Louis-Philippe. Berlioz, junior to Hugo by one year and to Delacroix by five, could likewise stake a claim as a paragon of French officialdom, having received several grand commissions for the celebrations of the creation of the régime orléaniste, namely the Grande Messe des morts of 1837, whose performance on the seventh anniversary of the July Revolution was canceled, and the Symphonie militaire of 1840, whose performance on the tenth, as we have seen in chapter 5, actually took place.
But musical success required imagination and intrigue in proportions that Berlioz was not always quick to master. The composer had thus to earn more of his living than he would have liked as a drudge, writing criticism for the daily and weekly press that was brilliant and much remarked upon, but that made him neither venerated as a musician nor able to live high off the hog. Gautier’s sentence was thus hortatory, it seems to me, and it was prescient.
Writers on Berlioz’s relations with Hugo tend now to rely on the work of noted Hugo scholar
Arnaud Laster, who in an original article speaks of the impact upon the
Symphonie fantastique and
Le Retour à la vie of the early works of the celebrated poet, of their mutual admiration for Shakespeare, and of their common associations with the Bertin family, owners of the
Journal des débats.1 Laster, “Berlioz et Victor Hugo.” That the composer and poet parted company on the occasion of Louis Napoléon’s
coup d’état—a “chef d’œuvre” for Berlioz, a metaphorical
casus belli for Hugo—is not surprising. Hugo, the author of poetry and prose that Berlioz revered and devoured, held court in ways the composer long found excessive: to his friend Ferrand, as early as August 31, 1834, in a phrase difficult to capture in English, Berlioz wrote, “Hugo, je le vois rarement, il trône trop”—“I see Hugo on only rare occasion”; “he sermonizes [or moralizes, or preaches] too much.”
2 CG 2:197. Berlioz said much the same thing eight years later. Writing to his sister Nanci, on February 5, 1842, he mentions that he had run into Hugo that afternoon: “While discussing his latest book,
Le Rhin,
he made me follow him along the banks of the Seine and up the Champs-Élysées for such a long time that I’m now exhausted!”
3 CG 2:716. For Hugo, however, in a comment apparently made in exile in Guernsey in 1853 and recorded in his twenty-three-year-old daughter Adèle’s diary for that year, Berlioz was “a charming fellow”; “I have never found him to be anything but perfectly friendly.”
4 Cited by Laster, “Berlioz et Victor Hugo,” 32.On Berlioz and Delacroix, we turn to the more recent work of the
delacrucien Barthélémy Jobert, author of the one explicit study of the subject of the relations of the two artists.
5 Jobert, “Berlioz et Delacroix,” 231–248. In this chapter, I shall consider and expand upon Jobert’s findings, then further interrogate the relationship by turning briefly to the instructive example of the artists’ revealing reactions to
La Mort d’Ophélie.