Coincidence

All of Berlioz’s writings—the private letters, the newspaper criticism, the collections of articles, and the Mémoires—are colored by quotations from Shakespeare in both English and French, as I have elsewhere demonstrated in detail.4 Bloom, “Berlioz,” in Berlioz, Verdi, Wagner, Britten, 7–76. No play more affected him than Hamlet, as we shall see again in chapter 11. In May 1834, he was optimistic about a commission for an opera on the subject, but this failed to materialize. Beyond the Hamlet-like moments in various works, the only explicit music he set down for the play is the surprising Marche funèbre pour la dernière scène d’Hamlet, completed in 1844 for performance during a production of the verse translation by his old friend Léon de Wailly, one of the librettists of Benvenuto Cellini, and the song, La Mort d’Ophélie, which—because Delacroix, too, was at least four times concerned with the subject—we shall consider here.

Berlioz’s autograph score, for voice and piano, is a setting of a “ballade imitée de Shakespeare” by his friend the dramatist Ernest Legouvé. Dated May 7, 1842, the song did not appear in print until 1848, both as an item in the Album de chant that came out on January 1, 1848, as a supplement to the weekly Revue et Gazette musicale now published in Paris by Louis Brandus, and as a separate issue from the same house. These printings follow the manuscript in being dedicated to Marie d’Agoult, Liszt’s longtime companion and the mother of the virtuoso pianist’s three children. On July 4, 1848, Berlioz, at the time in London, completed an orchestral version of the song, with the vocal part now set for a small chorus of sopranos and contraltos. This version—identical to the original in form and content—was published four years later, in 1852, as the second of the three items that comprise the collection known as Tristia. (A piano reduction of the orchestral setting appeared at the same time.) For publishers, piano scores were more practical and more profitable than orchestral scores; for critics, Berlioz’s piano writing seemed to cry out for instrumentation. In this case we know that an orchestral setting was his goal from the beginning: on May 8, 1842, one day after dating the autograph, Berlioz said to Legouvé that “if you like this music, I shall rewrite the piano part for a charming little orchestra and shall be able to perform the whole thing at one of my forthcoming concerts.”5 CG 8:197–198. For the original version (voice and piano), see NBE 15; for the version for sopranos, contraltos, and orchestra, see NBE 12b.

This small space is not the place to consider the constellation of beauty and madness and gender that post-Shakespearean representations of Ophelia bring to the fore, especially among feminist theoreticians, of whom the most cited is Elaine Showalter.6 Showalter, “Representing Ophelia.” But it is relevant to mention that Ernest Legouvé, author of plays in which women’s roles are conspicuously strong, and drawn as we see here to Ophelia, was one of the early and important male feminists in France in the nineteenth century: the course that he was invited to give at the Collège de France, in 1849, for example, appeared as a book later that year under the title of Histoire morale des femmes, in which he shows himself to be an advocate of equal rights for women.7 Offen, “Ernest Legouvé,” and Moses, French Feminism, 136–139.

Delacroix’s Journal is rich with references to Shakespeare, but the collected correspondence contains very few. The artist nonetheless painted and illustrated themes and characters from five of the plays, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, and, of course, Hamlet, of which we need here itemize only four representations of La Mort d’Ophélie. The first, now in the Neue Pinakothek, Munich, was completed in 1838 (see figure 7.1, below). With its broad strokes, vaporous lines, and darkly suggestive colors, it would appear to be a preparatory version of the painting now in the Oskar Reinhart Collection (see figure 7.3). The second (see figure 7.2) came to fruition in Delacroix’s series of thirteen Hamlet images lithographed by Édouard-Auguste Villain and published by Michel-Ange Gihaut in 1843–1844 (to which three more lithographs, purchased posthumously, were added in 1864).8 Delacroix, Journal, 1385n. The quotation at the bottom of the meticulously drawn panorama—“ses vêtements appesantis et trempés d’eau ont entraîné la pauvre malheureuse” (not shown here)—derives from Gertrude’s description of the drowning in act 4, scene 7 (“But it could not be / Till that her garments, heavy with their drink, / pulled the poor wretch from her melodious lay / To muddy death”) in the translation by Letourneur as revised by François Guizot and Amédée Pichot.9 Shakespeare, Œuvres complètes, traduites de l’anglais par Letourneur, 1:337. Beyond the precision of the image, Ophelia’s head, in the lithograph, is parallel to her torso, and not falling toward the water, as though the neck muscles (our impression from figures 7.1 and 7.3) could no longer support the weight.

The third representation (from the Oskar Reinhart Collection; figure 7.3) is a polished version of the first (in Munich): the pose is the same, but the brushstrokes are now veiled, the left foot is visible, the flowers are fresh, the leaves are vivid, the erotic aspect is intensified. The flesh, despite the nearness of death, is alive. Once thought to have been painted in 1844, the Winterthur painting has recently been reassigned to 185310 Delacroix, Journal, 1634. —the same year in which Delacroix seems to have completed his best-known rendering of the drowning Ophelia, now preserved at the Louvre (see figure 7.4), with Ophelia clinging to the branch not with the left hand, but with the right. In all four pictures, the subject seems to levitate above the surface—this, Delacroix’s take on Gertrude’s explanatory line: “Her clothes spread wide, / And mermaid-like awhile they bore her up.”

Harriet Smithson, Berlioz’s wife of not quite twenty-one years, died at home, in Montmartre, on March 3, 1854. The composer, who despite living elsewhere for more than a decade had always provided for her, was heartbroken: “We could neither live together nor leave one another,” he told his sister; “she enabled me to understand Shakespeare and great dramatic art.”11 CG 4:468. In a nostalgic recollection of his musician friend’s wife, Jules Janin set down these gentle words, which Berlioz later quoted in the Mémoires:

What is of particular interest here is Janin’s constellation of Berlioz, Smithson, Ophelia, and Delacroix. Like Berlioz, Delacroix had seen Harriet Smithson as Ophelia in the productions of Hamlet given by the English theater in 1827 and 1828, but neither did he fall head-over-heels in love with the actress, nor did he spend five years of his life in quest of her hand. When he made his first Ophelia painting (figure 7.1), apparently at Frédéric Villot’s villa at Champrosay, in 1838,14 Johnson, The Paintings of Eugène Delacroix, 3:84. he was encumbered by no breakdown of psychical distance and by no anguished craving for the living incarnation of Shakespeare’s deceived princess. He was drawn to the subject, according to the editor of his Selected Letters, by recollections of Smithson’s acting, including, perhaps, the freely swaying movements of her arms.15 Delacroix, Selected Letters, 139. The art historians, who have debated the dates of Delacroix’s four renderings, seem rarely to have asked the naïve question that has long occurred to me: Did Smithson’s face and figure serve as Delacroix’s distant models? Is that the meaning of Janin’s remark? We know that Delacroix worked from life, we would not be rash in assuming that, for certain aspects of the 1838 tableau, he would have employed a model, even had he had in mind earlier artists’ renderings of the subject, and even if he felt, later on, that artists ought equally to rely upon their imaginations.16 Lathers, Bodies of Art, 54, 111–114. Like a modern specialist, who has closely examined Delacroix’s four representations,17 Paes, “Les quatre représentations de ‘La mort d’Ophélie,’” 274. I cannot claim to see in the faces of Delacroix’s portraits a clear reflection of the woman who became Berlioz’s wife. But in the shapes of the head, the mouth, the nose, and even the body, there does seem to me to be a resemblance.

When Berlioz turned to the subject of the death of Ophelia, in May 1842, not quite nine years into his marriage with Harriet, he had to feel nostalgia for her glory days of an earlier decade. For Berlioz’s greatest modern biographer, the song, for soprano or tenor and piano, unmistakably “marks the symbolic end” of the composer’s marital bond.18 Cairns, Berlioz, 2:231. It is true that by 1840, long unable to practice her art, Smithson had entered into what became a long physical and mental decline. As we discussed in chapter 6, Berlioz took up with Marie Recio, a soprano eleven years his junior (Smithson was three years older than he), and at the end of 1842 he and Marie left on a European tour that did indeed mark the material end of the composer’s star-crossed union with the Anglo-Irish actress.

Such autobiographical interpretation, always tempting to the music historian, whose dreary alternative is speechifying about harmony and counterpoint, is particularly compelling in the case of Berlioz, of whose life we know many intimate details. How could this gently melancholic work—punctuated after the first and last stanzas with vocalises on the syllable “ah” that seem to render Ophelia herself present, as Heather Hadlock has nicely put it, in what is otherwise a recitation, not by a queen, but by an anonymous narrator—not be autobiographical?19 Hadlock, “Berlioz, Ophelia, and Feminist Hermeneutics,” 126.

Legouvé’s poem—imité de Shakespeare, it is worth repeating, and not a translation, as some of the program writers wrongly have it—is in four stanzas, each consisting of seven octosyllabic lines with a strictly maintained rhyme scheme of ababccb. Knowing that Berlioz’s setting extends to one hundred sixty bars, you might think that the regularity of the poetic model would have caused him to compose four like stanzas in periods of forty bars each. Not so. The four segments are irregular (of forty-eight, thirty-seven, twenty-eight, and forty-seven bars)—and, while each stanza begins in the tonic key of B-flat major, each ends upon the different and more or less distant harmonic plateaus of, respectively, F minor, D minor, G minor, and the dominant of C minor. It is the vocalise, or the implied vocalise (because, after the second and third stanzas, the piano alone renders the chromatically inflected line of the first), which each time returns us to B-flat major.

This skeletal analysis tells us something, not about Berlioz’s emotional autobiography, but about his musical persona: that he was allergic to regularity and predictability and addicted to originality in the service of the central idea he wished to express. Ophelia’s tragedy—her suffering, our compassion—is here embodied in the carefully regulated tonal migration, and in the tiny but affecting appoggiatura for the first “ah,” from the note F, which does not belong to the local harmony and thus resolves quickly down to the note E, which does, and in all of its subsequent iterations in the song.

By Delacroix, Ophelia’s tragedy is conveyed by her acquiescent facial expression, especially poignant in the lithograph of 1843—which is different from the other “Hamlet” lithographs, as one specialist has noted,20 Endenbaum, “Delacroix’s ‘Hamlet’ Studies,” 346. for having abandoned the visual convention of an imagined stage, although it is to be remembered that the scene pictured never in fact takes place on the real stage. Ophelia’s tragedy is furthermore conveyed by the exaggerated tilt of her head in the gloomy grisaille of the first painting of 1838, as well as in its more subtly tinted and polished version of 1853 (if the Hannoosh dating of the Winterthur painting is to be accepted), where the forest shadows and Ophelia’s fair skin are in sharp contrast, and where her now more openly bared breasts heighten the painting’s emanation of “erotic trance” that Elaine Showalter attributes to the lithograph.21 Showalter, “Representing Ophelia,” 84. The small canvas in the Louvre seems less sexual and more objectified: the colors have been brightened, the left breast is now concealed by the garland, and the head (as in the lithograph) is now rendered parallel to the surface of the water. In the Munich and Winterthur images, Ophelia’s head hangs sadly and frailly downwards, perfuming the atmosphere with the imminence of death. That in the Louvre painting Ophelia’s position is reversed such that she now drifts leftward, grasping the branch in her right hand rather than in her left, is perhaps due, although I cannot prove it, to the potential function of these small paintings as preparation for, or further developments from, lithography, where the image on the stone is reversed in the print.