That Berlioz was a man of passion there is no doubt. That he chose to portray himself absent the tones of the flesh speaks to… chastity? diffidence? discomfiture? The right word, I think, is discretion. Like his music, which can be tempestuous, asymmetrical, unpredictable, but never unpremeditated, Berlioz’s Mémoires—enthusiastic, selective, heterogeneous—always remain composed. They are a counterpoint of sound and silence. “I have nothing to say, and I am saying it,” quipped John Cage in a poem Berlioz might have liked. Yes, Berlioz does refer to “the frenzied enthusiasm of the whores” in his famous description of Paris in the immediate aftermath of the July Revolution. Yes, he does give a recipe to awaken the desires of Italian chamber maids—“a melancholy expression and white trousers”—in a comment on the life of the prize winner in Rome. And yes, as we observed in chapter 3, he does mention his wife’s virginity, to Liszt, in the immediate aftermath of his long-delayed wedding to Harriet Smithson. But of Berlioz’s indulgence with an inamorata in Nice, which put an end to an unnecessary fidelity to an unworthy fiancée, of his liaisons in London, which caused Edouard Silas to diagnose the composer with “petticoat fever,” and of his affairs with chorus girls—one whom fate had thrown into his arms when, he told Humbert Ferrand, in frustration over Harriet Smithson’s hesitancy to marry, he planned abruptly to leave Paris for Berlin; one whom he took as a mistress sometime after the first performance of the Requiem in 1837 (if my suspicion is correct about the identity of the “Mademoiselle Martin” in the chorus—Marie Geneviève Martin, the daughter of Joseph Martin, would at that time have used her father’s surname before adopting the stage names of Marie Willès and Marie Recio); one whom he pursued in Saint Petersburg, in the spring of 1847, when his love of love got the better of him—of these women, in the Mémoires, we hear little or nothing at all.
Much more of importance—to the life, to the work—is simply left out. A recent scholarly biography of Beethoven opens with “The Death of Beethoven’s Mother,” taking the event as one of far-reaching consequence. The death of Berlioz’s mother, and for that matter the death at nineteen of his younger brother, must have affected the mature composer, but the former, in the Mémoires, is mentioned only in passing; the latter is mentioned nowhere at all. What Berlioz does offer in the book that ensures his lasting literary reputation is a series of episodes and anecdotes, observations and assessments, that he knew would act to shape the future’s memory and knowledge of the man he was and hoped to be. This objective, usually unspoken, is one most autobiographers share. Berlioz went so far as to articulate it, at least indirectly, by seeing to it that the book was printed—precisely as he had written it—before and not after his death.
The Mémoires have been much written about. They are aptly seen—for he was a critic, an arbiter of taste, a conductor of opinion—as the composer’s ultimate effort to shape his legacy. They are frequently quoted for their delightfully ironic takes on French and European musical life in the romantic era. Their author was usually able to convey the image of what he saw along with an awareness of the lens through which he saw it. Still, certain facts need amplification, certain questions and themes need more air. Such are the goals of this chapter.