Love, etc.
In chapter 18, Berlioz comes to the “supreme drama” of his life—the encounter with Shakespeare and Smithson. The plot is set down with supreme economy: “In the role of Ophelia I saw Harriet Smithson, who, five years later, became my wife. The effect upon my heart and upon my imagination of her stupendous ability, or, I should say, her dramatic genius, is comparable only to the cataclysm to which I was exposed by the poet whom she so superbly interpreted. Of this, I can say nothing more.” These three sentences, which do not appear in the chapter as published in Le Monde illustré on January 1, 1859, are more rational than emotional—although it may be emotion that caused Berlioz to say “five years” rather than six, the distance between the Hamlet première of September 1827 and the wedding of October 1833. Only in the final addition to the book, the Voyage en Dauphiné, do we find a more effusive expression of affection. Indeed, it is here, in the Estelle episode, that we find the only love letters of Berlioz that have been preserved. “Mes adorations seront discrètes,” he assured the object of his attentions. But in the autograph draft of this page, before the citation from Thomas Moore’s Irish Melodies that captured for Berlioz the ardency of his feelings for Madame Fornier, the composer let himself go: “I adore her! How bitter the laughter of fate! How immeasurable the caprices of this monster we call the human heart!” This chapter reveals a side of the man’s soul that he had in many ways explicitly attempted to conceal. His usual mode was ironic. In London in 1847, for example, he took that sincere line from The Divine Comedy—“There is no greater sorrow than to recall happiness in times of misery”—turned it around—“There is no greater pleasure than to recall misery in times of happiness”—and set it to music, lento et grazioso, in G major.
Working closely with the texts and variants of the Mémoires leads to new appreciation of Berlioz’s playfulness, erudition, and verbal craftsmanship. The great Balzac scholar Pierre Citron, in the annotations he provided for the Mémoires, the Correspondance générale, and the Critique musicale, demonstrated that forging neologisms was not the least of Berlioz’s pleasures as a writer. In fact the numerous neologisms of Balzac and Berlioz and their contemporaries are merely a symptom of what has been called “a mild obsession” of the Romantic generation in France. But for Berlioz there is more. “As for my literary style, to the extent that I have one,” he wrote with a soupçon of false modesty, “it is that of a writer who seeks but always fails to find the word capable of rendering precisely what he feels. I am too full of violence; I have tried to calm down but I have not succeeded. This causes the flow of my prose to be unbalanced, or titubatious, rather like the gait of a man who is drunk” (“cela donne aux allures de ma prose quelque chose d’inégal, de titubant, comme la marche d’un homme ivre”). The word I italicize forces into English something from the Latin titubare, “to stagger,” from which French gets the verb tituber and participle titubant—a word which Berlioz may have been one of the first to employ. All of this to say that Berlioz has in a sense contradicted himself, because in titubant he found the word that renders fastidiously what he felt.
Berlioz began his literary career as a polemicist, in retaliation to what he saw as others’ stupidities: the first article he published, in the August 23, 1823, issue of Le Corsaire, fell under the rubric of Polémique musicale. A polemicist, it has been said, is happiest when he has an enemy. Berlioz had many: Cherubini, Fétis, Mainzer, Scudo, and more, as one learns from reading the reviews: the Fantastique and Harold en Italie drew relatively little immediate reaction, but the two operas premiered in France, Benvenuto Cellini and Les Troyens, and the composer’s most avant-garde works, Roméo et Juliette and La Damnation de Faust, drew a great deal. Reacting to the première of Faust, Adolphe Adam cited Rossini’s putative witticism: “How fortunate that that fellow knows nothing of music, for, were he to write some, it would be appalling. Because he is everything you might like him to be—a poet, an idealistic dreamer, a talented man with unusual and inventive ideas—but never a musician” (“Quel bonheur que ce garçon-là ne sache pas la musique. Il en ferait de bien mauvaise. Car il est tout ce qu’on voudra, poète, rêveur idéal, homme de talent, de recherche et parfois d’invention dans certaines combinaisons, mais jamais musicien”). Rossini may never have said such a thing, but Adolphe Adam enjoyed imagining that he had. Today, yesterday’s assassins, Adam and the others, simply seem asinine. The assaults and those who emitted them, however, while serving in the Mémoires to put into relief the portrait of a man not known for his smile, were good neither for his reputation nor for his health. A part of Berlioz’s personal biography is his medical biography: “Berlioz,” his doctor said to him, prescribing distractions and baths, “you are ill more from anger than from fatigue.” He possessed a dram of it, we saw some in his comments on Harold en Italie (cited in chapter 2), but humor of the self-deprecatory sort was not his fort. Had he been able to muster more, he might have felt less unwell.
Berlioz felt the need for self-historicization—“Ma vie est un roman qui m’intéresse beaucoup” (we have quoted the phrase above)—and the need to set the record straight. That is why he set down Mémoires that are a compendium of his extraordinary experience and his astonishing knowledge of music, literature, and history. They are a demonstration, unequaled by any other composer, of his sweeping intelligence and his unadulterated, unsurpassed, unforgiving wit.