Milan Kundera, in Le Rideau, a collection of essays, writes that there are now so many writers at work that literature itself is committing a kind of suicide. Only literature that is essential should be published. He goes on:
But there are not only authors, hundreds, thousands of authors, there are also scholars, armies of scholars, who, guided by some opposite principle, accumulate everything they can possibly find in order to present the Totality, their supreme goal. The Totality, that is, an additional mountain of drafts, of crossed-out paragraphs, of chapters rejected by the author but published by the scholars in editions called “critical” under the perfidious name of “variants”—which means, if words still have meaning, that everything written by the author would be valuable and would be equally approved by him.
Here Kundera, almost always right, is magnificently wrong. Few scholars take the list of readings for das Ding an sich. And if space is not an issue—it is in this book but not in every book—then why not show what we can of the compositional process?
In chapter 51 [5] of the Mémoires, in Berlioz’s account of his encounter in Dresden with Richard Wagner, the Frenchman admires the German composer, who was ten years his junior, but reserves his keenest accolade for the King of Saxony, who has munificently ensured the existence of a deserving artist of “précieuses facultés.” In the original version of this text, the following sentence occurs after those two words: “Richard Wagner, above and beyond his dual literary and musical talents, is also a gifted conductor. I saw him direct his operas with uncommon energy and precision.” For Berlioz, in 1843, Wagner was not yet Wagner. But in the eighteen-fifties and -sixties, when Berlioz was revisiting and revising the Mémoires, Wagner’s star was rising in ways that neither man could have predicted: Berlioz’s deletion of that sentence—Milan Kundera’s vilification of variants to the contrary notwithstanding—suggests in a small way the heat of competition; it suggests the politics of art.
At the end of chapter 8, Berlioz interrupts the narrative of his youth in order to express revulsion over the consequences of the 1848 revolution in Paris, which include the suicide of his once wealthy and lately ruined friend, Augustin de Pons, the man who, in July 1825, had lent him twenty-five hundred francs to cover the cost of the performance of the Messe solennelle. That sad turn of events leads Berlioz to lament: “Oh! malheureux! pauvres abandonnés artistes! République de crocheteurs et de chiffonniers!”—“Oh, unhappy, wretched, abandoned artists! [Damn this] republic of pickpockets and scandalmongers!” Presumably because of their potentially inflammatory nature, Berlioz or his editor removed these words, and other comments regarding Paris in the aftermath of the June days, before the text appeared, on November 6, 1858, in Le Monde illustré. In fact the aftermath of the June days fills the pages of Berlioz’s writings from 1848, especially the Voyage musical en France—which he might have included in the Mémoires but eventually transferred to Les Grotesques de la musique—and two lesser-known tirades on the droit des pauvres, “that tax on pleasure for the benefit of the poor” against which Berlioz railed for decades, and on the impoverished state of the art of music in France. The Mémoires might, in other words, have been an even more politically charged book.
But politics was not the point. Indeed, it is pleasant to mention one moment in the Mémoires in which, my overemphasis on Berlioz’s antirepublicanism notwithstanding, the composer sets down what is a non-negative remark about the 1848 government, on the page he devoted to Pierre-Jules Hetzel, the celebrated publisher of Balzac, Hugo, and George Sand, who served in the ministry of foreign affairs during the Cavaignac administration (June–December 1848). On the eve of the composer’s departure for Russia, in late March 1847, Hetzel mentioned the cost of such a trip to Berlioz and offered him a gift, or a loan, of a thousand francs, hoping in return to receive from Berlioz a piece for his new Revue comique à l’usage des gens sérieux. Introducing this anecdote in chapter 54 of the Mémoires, Berlioz notes in passing, and without a sneer, that Hetzel played a “very honorable role in the republican government.” The Cavaignac government (whose foreign minister was Alphonse de Lamartine) is remembered for its violent suppression, in June 1848, of the revolt of the workers and the radical republicans. Berlioz would have had no patience for the extremists who staged that revolt, but he seems also to have had little regard for Cavaignac, the moderate republican, who was the candidate favored to win the presidential elections scheduled for December of that year. When Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte was elected to the presidency, on December 10, 1848, Berlioz wrote delightedly to his sister, employing one of his most original (and untranslatable) neologisms: “Paris est en fête, il est ravi d’être dénationalisé, désencanaillé, désencavaignaqué”—“All Paris is celebrating, simply thrilled to be denationalized, de-gangsterized, and de-Cavaignacked”!
In the excerpts of the Mémoires that appeared in Le Monde illustré, we find a number of “political” suppressions, such as that of the final lines of chapter 24, where Berlioz sarcastically explains the delights of living in France: “Comme l’esprit y pétille! Comme on y danse sur la phrase! Comme on y blague royalement et républicainement!… Cette dernière manière est la moins divertissante…” (“How sparkling our ingenuity! How brilliant our way with words! How royally we poke fun, and how republicanly we do so, although the latter manner is hardly amusing”). The last sentence, its invented adverb seething with contempt, occurs only in the Mémoires.
Suggesting the opposite tendency—approval of the July Revolution—is the richly textured description, in chapter 29, of Les Trois Glorieuses:
I shall never forget the physiognomy of Paris during those much celebrated days: the fanatical bravery of the teenagers, the enthusiasm of the adults, the frenzied excitement of the whores, the grim resignation of the Swiss and the Royal Guard, the curious pride of the factory workers in being, as they said, the masters of Paris yet stealing nothing; and the preposterous braggadocio of some of the young men who, having manifested genuine courage, managed—by dint of exaggerated recitation and exaggerated ornamentation engarlanding the truth—to make that courage seem ludicrous.
Was Berlioz thrilled by the events of that summer? We have earlier noted his later reference to the “little heroes of July.” And in his distant recollections of his friendship with Berlioz, Ferdinand Hiller emphasized Berlioz’s explicit avoidance of expressing platitudes about freedom. In Le Monde illustré, the text of the paragraph quoted above is more sober: the passage from “fanatical bravery” to “stealing nothing” and the remark about the whores have been removed.
The publication in the Magasin des demoiselles in 1855–1856 of what in the Mémoires became the Voyage en Russie (chapters 55, 56, and [57], the last-mentioned numbered by me because Berlioz neglected to do so) is a story in itself, for it raises questions of genre—what is this travelogue doing in a fashion magazine otherwise concerned with young women’s conduct and personal hygiene?—as well as of politics: we are in the midst of the Crimean War, France, in a struggle against Russia, is allied with England for the first time in a thousand years, but of the “enemy” Berlioz has only good things to say. His introductory letter to the editor of the Magasin des demoiselles, which appeared in the issue of November 25, 1855, has provoked little attention:
To the Editor:
Monsieur,
You have asked me for an article about the trip I made to Russia eight years ago, and you suppose that such a narration, different from the subjects you usually treat, might interest your gentle readers. May God will that it be so! As for myself, I find it difficult to believe. If we are highly preoccupied by the Russians at this hour, interest in “harmony” has absolutely nothing to do with that preoccupation. Indeed, it may even be inappropriate for a Frenchman to speak of the Russians without malice. And yet, far from wanting to speak ill of the Russians—something, you must admit, that would at this moment be crudely platitudinous—I must in fact express to them my gratitude for the cordial and heartwarming reception which they offered me during my sojourn.
But you wish to have my piece… Thus, if I offend the patriotism of your youthful subscribers, if I fail to interest them and rather bore them to death, if my recitation is neither tasteful nor graceful nor in the least bit appealing, you shall be the truly guilty party—and I shall do my best to pardon you.
To whom is this letter addressed? The de facto editors of the Magasin des demoiselles were quite appropriately two women: Joséphine Desrez and Caroline Genevay. But by French law, the de jure editors had to have been their husbands, Eugène-Louis Desrez, the director of the Journal des connaissances utiles, and Antoine-Joseph Genevay, the journalist, critic, and early feminist who had earlier edited a Journal de femmes. Berlioz knew Genevay as a fellow member of the Association des Artistes-Musiciens. Given the composer’s gentle sarcasm, it is presumably Genevay who is the “Monsieur” of Berlioz’s salutation.
By the time of the last installment of Berlioz’s Russian series, which appeared in the Magasin des demoiselles on April 25, 1856, the Treaty of Paris had concluded the business of a conflict that had never been popular in France, most historians agree, in part because photographic journalism had for the first time graphically demonstrated the true horrors of war. Still, instead of concluding the series in the way it appears in chapter 56 [1] of the Mémoires, with a remark about the King of Prussia, Friedrich-Wilhelm IV—“The King of Prussia is no longer the sole European sovereign interested in music. There are two others: the young King of Hanover [George V], and the Grand-Duke of Weimar [Carl Alexander]. In all, three!”—Berlioz rather concluded with what we might regard as a profession of faith:
There you have, Monsieur le Directeur, everything I can say of my travels in Russia. And yet, if, since my return to France, I have often reflected nostalgically upon that ardent and intelligent public, upon those splendid musical soirées, upon those grandiose performances in Saint Petersburg, and upon the gracious hospitality of the Russian people, you must believe me when I say that I am no less a patriot than you, and that I am proud to be French.
Berlioz made no secret of his admiration for Russian cultural life. It is not surprising that Meyerbeer, when asked about potential candidates for the directorship of a not-yet-established conservatory in Saint Petersburg, wrote in 1858 to the Russian diplomat Count Vladimir Sollohub—in Paris to study the question—to recommend François-Joseph Fétis, Jacques-Fromental Halévy, and Hector Berlioz.