To the question of whether there is anything
musical about Delacroix’s Ophelia images—in the play she does sing mad songs and die chanting “snatches of old lauds”?—or if there is anything
painterly about Berlioz’s musical settings, I would reply as follows: Berlioz was as aware of the existence of visual representations of
Hamlet as was Delacroix of musical settings deriving from the play. But in creating their versions of
La Mort d’Ophélie, Berlioz made music, Delacroix made images, and both artists employed the same professional techniques of melody and harmony and line and color that they employed elsewhere and every day. That is to say that the words
melody and
harmony, like the words
line and
color, are metaphors in one medium and realities in the other. Barthélémy Jobert’s formulation—that the true coincidence of the artists may be found “beyond strict historical reality,” in some sort of “posthumous encounter” of the two spirits, who were perhaps closer in nature than either wished or knew how to admit
1 Jobert, “Berlioz et Delacroix,” 248.—sails well upon the sea of theory that permeates the question of the interrelationship of the arts, but doesn’t float my pedestrian boat. Baudelaire, the man who opened the locks, put it this way: “In music, as in painting […], there is always a void that is filled by the percipient’s imagination.”
2 Baudelaire, Richard Wagner et Tannhäuser à Paris, 10.In fact, Baudelaire, aware of Delacroix’s particular affection for Shakespeare, gives us what is perhaps the best view of these images, noting (as did Hugo) that the painter generally refrains from painting beautiful women. “Almost all of them are sickly, and glow with a certain interior beauty. It is not only suffering that Delacroix knows how to express, but especially—and this is the most exquisitely mysterious aspect of his painting—moral suffering. Such serious and elevated melancholy vibrates with overwhelming gloom, especially from the colors, broad, simple, rich in harmonic mass like that of all the great colorists, but equally plaintive and profound, like a melody by Weber.”
3 Baudelaire, Salon de 1846, 115–116. If only he had said “a melody by Berlioz,” our mission would be accomplished.
In a later age, when Claude Debussy imagined the works that became the
Nocturnes (
Fêtes,
Nuages,
and
Sirènes), he spoke of the “impressions” and of the “lumières spéciales” that that word implies. “Whistler’s
nocturnes acted by suggestion upon Debussy,” the American-born painter’s first biographer wrote, “in such a way as to have led him to produce his own.”
4 Duret, Histoire de J. Mc N. Whistler, 176–177. But even in this more compelling case of inner interaction between a music-loving painter who, at some of Mallarmé’s Tuesday evening
soirées, would have enjoyed the company of the visually inspired composer of the
Prélude à l’Après-midi d’un faune, the best case that can be made is that, in the works by both, a shadowy and indistinct atmosphere envelopes the lines that provide the underlying continuity.
5 Lesure, Claude Debussy, 436. This is hardly synesthesia.
Like Debussy, who in the end smiled with irony at the notion that he was “the Whistler of music,”
6 Debussy, Nocturnes, xiii. Berlioz, too, was surely an agnostic in Gautier’s Trinitarian church of romanticism, and an atheist in the temple of the alliance of the arts. “I no longer believe in those various theories that would have us imprison the art of sound,” he wrote in response to a speculative dissertation submitted for review to the Académie des Beaux-Arts and Académie des Sciences. “La musique est libre; elle fait ce qu’elle veut, et sans permission”—“Music is free; it does what it wants—and without permission!”
7 Archives de l’Académie des Sciences, cited by Bloom, “‘Berlioz à l’Institut’ Revisited,” 197.