“The remarkable thing,” wrote David Cairns in 1968, is that Berlioz’s volume “is not more bitter.” Indeed, those who shaped the Berlioz renaissance of the twentieth century have tended to see the composer’s behavior, in extremely difficult circumstances, as having been admirable in the extreme. In general, as Cairns put it in 1999, “he was courteous and conscientious to a fault.” Even lofty men have their lowlier attributes, however, and some of these become magnified on looking closely at the texts of the Mémoires.
The famous portrait of Luigi Cherubini that emerges from Berlioz’s last book is anything but complimentary. Here in particular the author succeeded in casting an enduring shadow upon the reputation of a man who, apart from his accomplishments as a composer, was of singular importance in establishing the Paris Conservatoire as the leading music school in Europe. When, in Le Monde illustré of November 6, 1858, Berlioz first published his hilarious if admittedly cruel description of being chased from the Conservatoire library by the director and his assistant, he modified the autograph manuscript, before sending it to the editor of the magazine, such that all of the words distorted in order to imitate Cherubini’s sputtering expression now appeared in unsullied French. In the posthumous publication, of course, the imitation of the Italian accent becomes the crucial comedic element. From beyond the grave Berlioz had no compunctions about lampooning one of those who, he was certain, had inhibited his early success. In fact we find in the autograph of the Mémoires that Berlioz’s original intention was to address Cherubini as “vieux maniaque, vieux fou!” and to include at the end of that discourteous outburst the following sarcastic note:
No, no, calm thy spirits, O ye respectful admirers of this Father of the Church of Music; it is the thrust of my narrative that made me set down such irreverent words. I slander myself. I never called Cherubini an old fool or lunatic, although it frankly surprises me that I did not do so, because I was at that time, as Philip of Macedon dubs them, one of those foul-mouthed fellows who calls everything by its rightful name.
These remarks did not find their way into the 1865 printing. I hope it does not spoil the fun to point out that this celebrated contretemps was provoked by Cherubini’s true-to-life edict, which ordered the women to enter and to exit the Conservatoire in the rue Bergère, the men, in the rue du Faubourg Poisonnière. The document—dated May 1, 1822, only ten days after the great Italian composer took office as director—is preserved in the archives, along with another, dated June 21, 1822, which reiterates the point in such a way as to make it pertain in particular to our composer: “The male students at the school are expressly prohibited from entering and exiting this door [in the rue Bergère], whether for the purpose of attending classes or on the pretext of going this way to the library. The officer at this door is specifically charged with enforcing this edict with exactitude and with escorting to the security office anyone who would disobey.” It is thus that we learn not only of the truth of Berlioz’s anecdote, but also the date of his crime. Cherubini’s negative appreciation of Berlioz’s bibliographical industry (he had gone to the library, you will recall, to study the scores of Gluck) may have led him, at a later date, to place the young man into the music theory course of Anton Reicha, whose teaching Cherubini found less efficacious than that of François-Joseph Fétis (as we know from a letter preserved in Fétis’s file in the archives of the Conservatoire). Of the many “what if’s” of Berlioz’s career, this one—Berlioz as a student of Fétis—is especially suggestive. For Fétis, librarian at the Conservatoire as well as professor of counterpoint and fugue, tended to promote his students with conspicuous generosity. Fétis was initially supportive of Berlioz’s incipient career. When he became chapel master to the King of Belgium and director the Brussels Conservatoire, in 1833, he might have offered to Berlioz something of the musical run of the realm—had it not been, of course, for the unpleasantness of 1832, when, in the freshly squeezed sequel to the Symphonie fantastique, premiered on December 9, 1832, Berlioz openly satirized the self-assured professor for having taken it upon himself to “correct” the musical language of Beethoven. This public humiliation is what led Fétis to shout, in the Revue musicale of December 15, 1832, that Berlioz represented a most singular phenomenon in the history of music: “an artist who has caught a fleeting glimpse of original ideas he is himself incapable of bringing to fruition, for want of knowing precisely what it is that he wishes to do; a creative fellow whose conceptions lead inevitably to abortion, not birth; a man, finally, whose impotence betrays his desires.” Berlioz did not forget the sexual allusions in Fétis’s attack when he revised the text of Le Retour à la vie: in 1832 he excoriated the professors as “moderates, who want to reconcile everything, who believe they are thinking rationally about the arts because they speak of them with composure”; in 1855, when the work was newly baptized Lélio, he spoke of those professors as “fossilized libertines, of whatever age, who insist that music divert them, caress them, never admitting that the chaste muse might in fact have in mind a more noble mission.” It is not inconceivable that the erotic electricity of the initial exchange resulted from Fétis’s prurient interest in the prodigious pianist who became Berlioz’s momentary fiancée in the autumn of 1830.
The portrait of Camille Moke, painted in chapter 28, where we meet the fiery young woman, and in chapter 34, where we learn of her betrayal, is also skewed and selective, partly because the remarkable pianist in question—who certainly earned the composer’s animosity—became one of the great virtuosos of her generation. Berlioz tells of yielding to her sexual advances by inventing a verb—“je finis par me laisser Putipharder”—that resists literal translation. “At the end of the day I allowed myself to be Potifered” would mean that he finally ceased to “play Joseph to her Potiphar’s wife,” as David Cairns has decorously put it. In the autograph manuscript, the biblical personage is also mentioned in chapter 31, where Berlioz explains in a note his reason for wanting to profit from his Prix-de-Rome stipend in Paris: “Mademoiselle Putifar [sic] me rendait fort agréable le séjour de Paris”—“Mademoiselle Potiphar rendered my life in Paris highly satisfying.” The note (in which it suited Berlioz to use “Putifar” rather than “Potifar” because “Putefar” includes the offensive syllable pute—“whore”) was never printed. But Berlioz did fictionalize his revenge upon Camille, as Katherine Kolb shows, in such stories as Le Suicide par enthousiasme (1834), Le Premier Opéra (1837), and especially in the utopian tale of Euphonia (1844). He may even have urged his friends to pursue his reprisal. In 1849, in a review of her concert of April 28 of that year, La France musicale demoted her from “Queen of the piano” to “President of the piano”: “what glacial indifference you must have felt around you, in front of you, in back of you! Oh, the public forgets very quickly, does it not, Madame la Présidente?” This was an obvious allusion to a well-known courtesan, Apollonie Sabbatier, whose sobriquet, apparently invented by Théophile Gautier, alluded to the many suitors, admirers, and lovers over whose attentions she presided. Camille herself, now celebrated as Madame Pleyel (though separated from Pleyel since 1835), was not secretive about her incendiary nature: she signed her letters to Gautier, for example, as “your phosphorous”!
A less-celebrated personage whose portrait is darkened in the Mémoires is Narcisse Girard, who became Habeneck’s successor as conductor of the orchestra at the Conservatoire in October 1848. A good friend of Berlioz’s in the earlier eighteen-thirties, Girard seems to have fallen from grace for having on several occasions poorly conducted Harold en Italie, thus deciding the composer thereafter to conduct his works himself. In chapter 59, speaking of one of the rare occasions on which his music was performed by the Société des Concerts du Conservatoire, Berlioz writes that Girard had “very clumsily and very prosaically conducted the performance” (“fort maladroitement et fort platement dirigé l’exécution”). Yet in a letter to his sister Nanci of April 25, 1849, ten days after that very concert, Berlioz said the opposite: Girard “had done a very good job” (“s’en est bien tiré”). Berlioz himself may have given us the reason for the sour public version when he spoke revealingly to Juliette Adam about Wagner: “Wagner bitterly hates everyone who has humiliated him by rendering him a service. I know something about that myself.” The comment in the Mémoires simply continues the downward sweep of the book’s account of the talents of maestro Girard.
Indeed, a downward sweep may be said to characterize much of Berlioz’s narration: most of the comical scenes occur in the earlier part of the book, while the original ending (at chapter LIX) was bitter indeed: “As for you, maniacs and dim-witted bulls and bulldogs, and you, my Rosencrantzes and Guildensterns, my Iagos, my little Osrics, snakes, and pests of every kind: farewell, my… friends; I despise you! And I hope not to die before having eradicated you from my memory.” When we read such vituperation, now, we smile: its intensity seems more literary than real. In its own day, however, such artifice produced little cozy amusement. Philarète Chasles’ commentary rings true: “It is quite specifically polemics—fiery, violent, acid-tipped, vengeful, militant, stark and striking; it is partiality; it is the use of the newspaper as an offensive and defensive weapon; it is epigram, satire, irony—it is all of these things that weakened and undermined Berlioz.” “Everything hurt the great artist, poor fellow, everything irritated him,” wrote another French reviewer. “At every turn, for the slightest wrong note, he called for the executioner or the hitman!” An English critic was even less sympathetic: Berlioz told his life “with such an agony of self-exaltation that it is impossible to withhold pity, akin though that be to contempt.” Nor was his private behavior regarded as eternally scintillating. Even in his thirties, Berlioz was rarely warm and fuzzy: describing Sainte-Beuve’s efforts to engage Berlioz in conversation, Marie d’Agoult wrote to Liszt, November 18, 1839, that this was “something difficult, something impossible! All you get out of him is a boar’s growl.”
Is there the hint of a scowl in the photograph that Berlioz affixed to the first edition of the Mémoires? Had he wished to present a softer image, would he not have used one of the pictures shot by Pierre Petit in 1863, where the pose, with his head resting on his hand, is the long traditional one of meditation-cum-melancholy? One of the best explanations of Berlioz’s bitterness comes from Camille Saint-Saëns: “Given his superior nature, he found it impossible to approve of so much vulgarity, rudeness, ferociousness, and egoism, which play such important roles in this world, and by which he was so often victimized.” Reviews of the Mémoires have yet to be the object of extended study—the number is limited because the book was published in time of war—but their authors would perhaps charitably accept the truth of an aphorism found in Théophile Gautier’s Mademoiselle de Maupin: “Toute grande haine sert de contrepoids à un grand amour”—“all great hatred acts as a counterbalance to great love.”