Writing to his sister of his arduous work on Les Troyens, Berlioz explains that his musical identity is quite different from his identity as her brother: “Le moi musicien est bien différent du moi que tu connais.” The title of this chapter attempts to put distance between the author of the Mémoires d’Hector Berlioz, his “moi écrivain,” and the subject of that book. Serving as it has for one hundred fifty years as a primary source for the particulars of his life, Berlioz’s final masterpiece is nonetheless best regarded as a work of art. Facts it contains, of course, most of them accurate. But more essential truths about the man and the musician emerge from the means he employs to spin the tales he wishes to tell. Memories (and thus mémoires) transform reality, as Berlioz knew and did not fear. He trusted his extraordinary memory because the reality he was after did not really depend on exact numbers and particular dates.
The particulars of the printing of the book, generally known for years, were not set down with the kind of precision that modern scholarship requires until the publication of my edition in 2019. As most people know it, this is the work of which we speak:
MÉMOIRES / DE / HECTOR BERLIOZ / MEMBRE DE L’INSTITUT DE FRANCE / COMPRENANT / SES VOYAGES EN ITALIE, EN ALLEMAGNE, EN RUSSIE / ET EN ANGLETERRE / 1803–1865 / Avec un beau portrait de l’Auteur / M.L. / PARIS / MICHEL LÉVY FRÈRES, ÉDITEURS / RUE VIVIENNE, 2 BIS, ET BOULEVARD DES ITALIENS, 15 / À LA LIBRARIE NOUVELLE / MDCCCLXX.
This is the title of the book as it was issued approximately twelve months after the composer’s death, in March 1870, at a price of twelve francs, by the firm of Michel Lévy frères, the still prominent Parisian publishers now styled Calmann-Lévy. Michel Lévy, Calmann’s younger brother, with whom Berlioz had had cordial business relations since 1852, when he brought out Les Soirées de l’orchestre, had in fact suggested to Berlioz, in 1855, when he learned of their existence, that his firm be charged with the publication of the Mémoires. Indeed, on May 10, 1855, Berlioz told Franz Liszt, at the time in possession of the manuscript, that in the event of his death, Liszt should arrange publication with Michel Lévy, “who proposed it.”
Lévy’s title emphasizes three points: first, Berlioz’s identity as a member of the Institut de France—an institution he had frequently mocked but profoundly appreciated when he finally joined its ranks in 1856; second, the importance of his travels abroad—which, representative of the always popular literary genre of the voyage or travel narrative, provide the content of at least thirty-five of the book’s seventy-nine chapters (the latter number arrived at by this editor, not by the author, who was unfussy about such things as chapter numbers); third, the portrait of the artist—the work of François-Marie-Louis-Alexandre Godinet de Villecholle, a photographer of some importance in the early era of photographic portraiture, who was known simply as Franck. Berlioz sat for this portrait at some point after August 15, 1864—as we gather from the rosette of Officier de la Légion d’honneur in his lapel, awarded to him on that date, another honor, as correspondence recently published suggests, of which he was understandably quite proud—and before the book was finally produced, in the spring of 1865.
When the book was first advertised, in Le Ménestrel of March 27, 1870, Lévy added a phrase to the title: Mémoires d’Hector Berlioz / comprenant: / ses voyages en Italie, en Allemagne, en Russie / et en Angleterre (1803–1865) / Souvenirs, Impressions, Anecdotes / Un beau volume grand in-8o, 12 fr. (envoi franco) / avec portrait de l’auteur. I cannot discover if “Souvenirs, Impressions, Anecdotes,” which we find nowhere else, helped early sales. In fact sales, and the impact of the book as a whole, were immediately compromised by the clouds of war. Four months after the volume became available for purchase, trickery on the part of Otto von Bismarck and overconfidence on the part of Napoléon III led to the outbreak, in July, of a ten-month conflict that would prove disastrous for both the Emperor and for the nation of France.
The front wrapper of the book as Berlioz sent it to the printers in 1865 reads as follows:
MÉMOIRES / D’HECTOR BERLIOZ / MEMBRE DE L’INSTITUT DE FRANCE / CORRESPONDANT / DE L’ACADÉMIE DES BEAUX-ARTS DE BERLIN, DE CELLE DE SAINTE-CÉCILE DE ROME / OFFICIER DE LA LÉGION D’HONNEUR / CHEVALIER DE PLUSIEURS ORDRES ÉTRANGERS, ETC., ETC. / PARIS / CHEZ TOUS LES LIBRAIRES / MDCCCLXV
Here we find attention drawn, not to the travels, but to the tributes of which the mature composer was a frequent recipient. (He notes his honorary memberships in musical organizations in Berlin and Rome; he could also have included those in Grenoble, Hechingen, Leipzig, London, Rio de Janeiro, Rotterdam, Saint Petersburg, Stuttgart, and Vienna.) As half-title, in that 1865 publication, we find:
MÉMOIRES / D’HECTOR BERLIOZ / DE 1803 À 1865 / ET SES VOYAGES EN ITALIE, EN ALLEMAGNE, EN RUSSIE ET EN ANGLETERRE / ÉCRITS PAR LUI-MÊME
Apart from “d’Hector”—which is correct (the h of Hector, like the h of other Latinate names, is muet, and requires elision), and which differs from the “de Hector” that results uniquely from a later designer’s time-honored decision to set the preposition on a separate line—what we notice, what was removed from the publication in 1870, are the words écrits par lui-même—“written by himself.” Berlioz was too careful a writer to set down a silly tautology; he rather wished doubly to emphasize the fact that no other cook had spoiled the stew. The locution was conventional: the Mémoires de Voltaire, écrits par lui-même went through dozens of editions in the mid-nineteenth century; Alexandre Dumas, in 1849–1850, edited the Mémoires de Talma, écrits par lui-même; and Jules Michelet, in 1854, published the Mémoires de Luther, écrits par lui-même. What may have sparked Berlioz’s use of the expression was the publication, in 1844, of the Mémoires de Benvenuto Cellini, écrits par lui-même, which appeared from Jules Labitte, the publishers in that very year of Berlioz’s Voyage musical en Allemagne et en Italie. In 1903, when J. M. Dent brought out Katharine Boult’s abridged English translation of the Mémoires, they, too, used the title of The Life of Hector Berlioz, as written by himself. The curious absence of “écrits par lui-même” on the outer wrapper of Berlioz’s 1865 book led me to adopt as the title of my own edition the wording of Berlioz’s half-title cited above. For this editorial decision, I was debunked by the distinguished German Berliozian Klaus Kohrs.
Berlioz’s 1865 “edition” is technically the first printing of the volume that Berlioz himself had produced, privately, by a nearby print shop. In fact, as we learn from slight differences among the three copies of the 1865 book now preserved at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, there were several tirages (impressions) of the original text, something that was perfectly normal, since first impressions served as proofs. (The same process may be observed in the case of the Grand Traité d’instrumentation et d’orchestration modernes: the first impressions were made in 1843, the definitive impressions in 1844. To which year should we assign the treatise?) It may be that what we call the half-title (found on p. [3] of the pristine copy in the Macnutt Collection, at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France) was originally set down for the outer wrapper and only later removed to an inner page. The title page of that copy, on p. [5], has a text that is identical to that of the outer wrapper but with the date marked as “1865,” not “MDCCCLXV.” Here, as at the heads of certain chapters, Berlioz hesitated between using Roman and Arabic numerals. Ralph Waldo Emerson, in his essay on Self-Reliance, of 1841 (seven years before Berlioz began to set down the Mémoires), wrote famously that “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” The composer would agree: consistency, foolish or other, was clearly less important to Berlioz than it is to the prose mavens of the present.
This first printing, of some twelve hundred copies, was set in type by compositors at the Imprimerie Valée in the rue Bréda—a short walk from Berlioz’s domicile in the rue de Calais—at a cost, he told his son Louis on July 18, 1865, of forty-eight hundred francs. It was the author’s intention, we know, to keep all twelve hundred volumes in his office in the library at the Conservatoire until his death. In fact, he was unable to resist sending copies to various members of his family and friends, first among them Estelle Fornier, who, Berlioz tells us, was his first and last love. Others who appear to have received the first printing include Estelle’s daughter-in-law, Suzanne Fornier, whom Berlioz came to know and admire; the Princess Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgenstein, Berlioz’s confidante during the years around Les Troyens; Humbert Ferrand, Berlioz’s oldest and dearest friend; the Grand-Duchess Yelena Pavlovna, who persuaded Berlioz to make his second and final voyage to Russia; Ernest Reyer, Berlioz’s colleague and successor at the Journal des débats; and a number of others whom I identify in my edition.
It had been his earlier plan, we are entitled to presume, that the Mémoires be published posthumously under the supervision of his son: as early as May 10, 1858, Berlioz explained to his sister Adèle that, for safekeeping, he was about to send the autograph of the book to her husband, Marc Suat, and that he anticipated bequeathing it to his son, Louis, with the request that Louis publish all “three volumes” as is (“tels qu’ils sont”), with no modification whatsoever. Nine years later, in a hospital in Havana, which Caribbean port of call, as a marine captain, he had come to know well, Louis Berlioz died of the yellow fever, shortly before his thirty-third birthday, on June 5, 1867. In the wake of the tragedy, which nearly broke his will to live, Berlioz wrote out a last will and testament urging his heirs and executors to bring out the Mémoires—now printed and stockpiled in his office—“by selling the rights to only the first [extant] edition, or by selling the rights to the work in their entirety, to a bookseller in Paris: Monsieur Michel Lévy, or Monsieur Hachette, or someone else.”
It is curious that Berlioz mentions Louis Hachette, who founded his publishing house in 1846 and who was, by the eighteen-sixties, one of the major publishers of the capital; perhaps he did so because, as one who liked to take the train, Berlioz was aware of Hachette’s celebrity as the founder of a highly successful chain of railroad-station bookstores. It was nonetheless with Michel Lévy frères that, on January 31, 1870, the representatives of Berlioz’s family—Édouard Alexandre, the executor of the composer’s estate, and Maurice-Edmond Masson, the notary acting in behalf of the heirs—signed the contract that gave to those publishers the rights in their entirety to the Mémoires. In fact, the contract, for six thousand francs, gave to Michel Lévy frères the rights to all of Berlioz’s published writings (“tous les volumes et feuilletons publiés par Hector Berlioz”), demonstrating the publishers’ long-term plan to enjoy the benefits of Berlioz’s literary œuvres complètes, including Les Soirées de l’orchestre, Lévy’s first transaction with Berlioz, of 1852. In 1870, however, Michel Lévy frères contented themselves with issuing only the Mémoires: this they did by taking possession of the copies of the book that Berlioz had stored away, by removing Berlioz’s title page and replacing it with one of their own, and by putting the volume on sale in March, a full year after the composer’s death—a delay that, for Ernest Reyer, was unconscionable. Oddly enough, Lévy included at the back of the book the same printed errata that Berlioz had had inserted in the summer of 1865. Only in 1878, when they reset the text in two volumes, did Michel Lévy frères incorporate into the main text the errata noted by Berlioz himself. Calmann-Lévy continued to advertise the one-volume publication from time to time, but the two-volume set became the standard edition. In the Berlioz dossiers of the publisher’s archives, which I visited in 1994, we find the print runs of those two volumes as follows: March 1878 (1,500); May 1881 (1,000); March 1887 (1,000); September 1896 (1,000); February 1904 (1,000); March 1919 (500); June 1921 (1,000); June 1926 (750); November 1930 (1,000). A note tells us that the book went out of print after 1938. (The original two-volume edition is available online.) The first modern edition, in one volume, was published in Paris by Flammarion in 1991, with learned editorial commentary and notes by Pierre Citron. I am guilty of presenting the first “critical” edition—based on all extant manuscript and printed sources, showing variants, and freighted with copious annotations and a lengthy introduction—which was published in Paris, by J. Vrin, in 2019.
In his last will and testament, Berlioz stipulated that a German translation be negotiated with the Leipzig publishers Gustav Heinze, who in 1863–1864 had brought out Richard Pohl’s long-delayed translations of Berlioz’s Les Soirées de l’orchestre, Les Grotesques de la musique, and À travers chants in a four-volume Gesammelte Schriften. (Heinze furthermore brought out Alfred Dörffel’s translation of the Traité d’instrumentation, in 1864, and, in 1866, a piano-vocal score of Gluck’s Orphée that conforms to the version Berlioz prepared in 1859 for the Théâtre-Lyrique.) In keeping with his lifelong desire to publish what he wrote as he wrote it, Berlioz insists that the translation of the Mémoires not be undertaken by Pohl, whose volumes “fourmillent de contre-sens”—“crawl with absurdities”—as Berlioz, who did not speak German, seems to have learned shortly after their publication. As early as 1855, Pohl had told Berlioz that he would be happy to translate the Mémoires, but apart from publishing excerpts in translation, he never completed the task. Fearful of Pohl’s limitations, Berlioz told Liszt that the Mémoires were saturated with words, allusions, and locutions that would be utterly unintelligible to his German friend, and asked that Liszt explain them to the would-be translator. In the will, Berlioz rather urges that the translation be undertaken by the sister of the man who had been his most faithful German translator, Peter Cornelius. Now, Cornelius had two sisters, Auguste and Susanne, but in view of her subsequent publication of a series of excerpts from the Mémoires, Auguste Cornelius would seem to be the sister Berlioz had in mind. The first complete German translation, by Elly Ellès, was not published until 1903, when the first of ten volumes of Berlioz’s Literarische Werke appeared in Leipzig, from Breitkopf und Härtel, in a series completed in 1912. A second translation, by Hans Scholz, was published in 1914, in Munich, by C. H. Beck. Of the latter, my colleague Gunther Braam issued a modern edition, in 2007, with comprehensive notes and commentary that are elsewhere unavailable.
The prepublication story of the Mémoires, the composition and recomposition of texts old and new, is equally complex and, for those who feed on such facts, fascinating. Dating the pieces of the puzzle is no easy matter: some chapters are dated with precision; others were written and revised at moments we cannot specify. Only for chapters 2, 4–31, 54, 57, and [62], in whole or in part, do we have autograph manuscripts. The number in square brackets represents my editorial numbering of the final part of the book, which includes the Post-Scriptum [60], the Postface [61], and the Voyage en Dauphiné [62]. For ease of reference, I have also numbered (in editorial brackets) the separate letters that comprise Berlioz’s voyages musicaux: in today’s world, Berlioz’s charming habit of numbering some sections and only naming others is, to me, disconcerting, although I recognize that others more diplomatic than I think that we ought to allow the original text to stand untouched. In the Traité d’orchestration, Berlioz numbered the first six chapters and left the numbering of the next sixty or so to us. When he published excerpts from the Mémoires in Le Monde illustré, Berlioz included under “chapter 55” bits from four different chapters of the actual book. One wonders if this casual attitude is an overblown reaction to the maniacal orderliness of his nemesis, Cherubini, who, in a surprising portrait of the old man by Berlioz’s young friend Ferdinand Hiller, is said to have numbered even his handkerchiefs!
For many chapters of the Mémoires, we have versions printed in the daily, weekly, and monthly press. These sources, in addition to the publication of the Voyage musical en Allemagne et en Italie, in 1844, invite the gathering of significant variants. On January 24, 1854, Berlioz told Liszt that he had not sent him the autograph manuscript of the Mémoires because he “did not yet have a copy of this voluminous manuscript.” That copy, if it was actually made, would, with the variants we have, help to provide better answers to the questions of precisely What was written When.
When reusing previously published material, Berlioz’s usual procedure—with the important exception of the Voyage musical en Allemagne et en Italie—was to copy the text into the autograph manuscript of the Mémoires, and to revise as he carried out what was otherwise a mechanical process. This may be seen in a striking way in chapter 24, where, in the autograph, we find the text of the anecdote first published in the Journal des débats of October 7, 1846: “Le Droit de jouer en fa dans une symphonie en ré” (“The Right to Play in F in a Symphony in D”). Readers familiar with Berlioz’s books will recognize this as the title of the first regular chapter of Les Grotesques de la musique. Berlioz originally intended to include the anecdote in the Mémoires; he changed his mind in late 1858 or early 1859 when assembling materials for Les Grotesques, which appeared in March 1859. We cannot be certain, because we do not possess autographs for all chapters of the Mémoires, but it is reasonable to assume that other chapters of Les Grotesques were likewise selected from texts at first designed for inclusion in what became Berlioz’s ultimate book.
Recopying is always inexact; the “scribal errors” that mesmerize musicologists are not limited to the lapsus memoriae of medieval monks. When reusing material from his voyages musicaux, however, Berlioz tried to minimize the problem by pasting pages from the earlier publication onto the larger pages of the manuscript, as I mentioned in chapter 8, and by making marginal corrections by hand. It is almost tautological to say that the small changes we observe among the versions of the chapters of the Mémoires give evidence of Berlioz’s lifelong concern for the melody and pace of his prose.