Epilogue
Berlioz and the Bs— Boschot, Barzun, and Beyond
Adieu, mes amis! Je suis souffrant; laissez-moi seul!
—Berlioz, Lélio ou Le Retour à la vie
It goes without saying, as many have
said, that the personality of the biographer of the painter, of the writer, of the musician, has always colored the portrait of the artist. Because of the natural tendency to extend one’s own way of thinking to the thinking of others, “any biography,” in the words of the Shakespeare scholar Paul Murray Kendall, “uneasily shelters an autobiography within it.”
1 Quoted in Kimber, “The ‘Suppression,’” 125. Furthermore, since the dawn of the Romantic era, the archetypical trajectory of the life-narrative of the artist has been, not that of a titan laid low or of a rookie raised high, but that of a “genius” who has suffered—for reasons, variously, of health, finance, family, philistinism, misunderstanding, social or political disapprobation. One thinks of Mozart’s indebtedness, Beethoven’s deafness, Schubert’s poverty, Chopin’s tuberculosis, Schumann’s madness, Tchaikovsky’s homosexuality, Mahler’s oppressive jealousy, Schoenberg’s burdensome Jewishness, Shostakovich’s Stalin-inspired anxiety. And one thinks, obviously, of Berlioz’s ill-fortune and illness that have caused some to see his life, too, as an Iliad—a series of disasters. Franz Liszt confided to Richard Pohl that Berlioz tended to exaggerate the martyrdom of his existence, yet Pohl took Berlioz to be an exemplar of the tragic hero.
2 Liszt to Pohl (October 24, 1884), cited in Lenneberg, Witnesses and Scholars, 126. Berlioz’s acute awareness of his own mortality did indeed tinge with tragedy his portrait of himself as well as his portrait of those around him. What separates Berlioz from the usual suspects, however, is his indomitable humor, which found a way to flash or flicker, even in the darkest of times. “Je suis mort,” he wrote to a friend on finishing one or another of his grand projects, “I am dead”; “mais ça commence à aller”—“but things are beginning to look up”!
3 Facsimile of the unpublished note on argosybooks.com (consulted April 21, 2020).In music, the genre of the scientific biography, as opposed to the anecdotal account, took root in the second half of the nineteenth century, with the works on Handel, Mozart, Bach, and Beethoven by such biographers as Friedrich Chrysander, Otto Jahn, Philipp Spitta, and Alexander Wheelock Thayer, who constructed their edifices on foundations of original documents and who constituted something of a golden age. When Adolphe Boschot decided to pick up his pen in defense of Berlioz, he had already witnessed the performance of the two halves of
Les Troyens,
in 1891–1892, and the extended Berlioz Cycle undertaken by Édouard Colonne, in 1894–1895, and he had observed the appearance of Edmond Hippeau’s conscientious
Berlioz intime in 1883 (not by design, the title of the book you are reading, with one fewer space, would be indistinguishable from Hippeau’s), the grandly illustrated volume by Adolphe Jullien in 1888, and, in 1904, the monographs by Jacques-Gabriel Prod’homme and Julien Tiersot, the immediate predecessors of what became his own trilogy,
L’Histoire d’un Romantique.4 Hippeau, Berlioz intime; Jullien, Hector Berlioz; Prod’homme, Hector Berlioz; Tiersot, Hector Berlioz; Boschot, L’Histoire d’un Romantique. In France, where it was sometimes said that from the death of Rameau up to about 1870, “French music ceased to exist,”
5 Jean-Aubry, An Introduction, 30. Boschot’s biography became the quasi-official work of reference for nearly a century, unquestioned in part because Berlioz left no direct descendants to keep the torch accurate and alive. In this epilogue, I shall speak briefly of the project of Boschot, the industrious begetter of a Berlioz pro-and-contra, and of the work of Jacques Barzun, the unrelenting mastermind of modern Berlioz scholarship. Barzun determined, not only to explicate the life and times of a beloved subject, but also to correct what he took to be the misimpressions transmitted by that same Boschot. I shall conclude with a word about the present state of Berlioz studies.
But before turning to the celebrated Bs among the Berlioz biographers, I should like to mention a more recent A, Jean-Pierre Angremy, a member of the Académie Française, who, under his
nom de plume of Pierre-Jean Rémy, completed well over fifty volumes (novels, poems, biographies), and who, as president of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, presided over the Comité International Hector Berlioz that promulgated most of the international celebrations of the two-hundredth anniversary of the composer’s birth, in 2003, which I mentioned in the Prologue. Angremy’s biography is the work of a novelist whose interests circle inevitably around love. It draws the outlines of the life based on the standard secondary sources, and enhances the narrative with the fictionalizing flair of a connoisseur. For example, of Berlioz’s flight to the woods of Vincennes, with Camille Moke, on June 6, 1830—the date is derived from Berlioz’s letter of May 6, 1831, where, with uncommon precision, he mentions putting an end to an abstinence endured since that very day, eleven months earlier—we really know nothing at all.
6 CG 1:445. Angremy, however, sees “Camille, in her sheer cotton nightgown, standing before Berlioz, who is imagining the experience of her thinly disguised figure. Oh, that figure, those breasts, those thighs….”
7 Angremy, Berlioz; 138. The prurient biographer would surely have gone further had he known of the note about Mademoiselle Putifar, which I mentioned in chapter 13, and which suggests that the devilry in Vincennes was preceded by dalliance in town.
Biographies of this sort, which fill the historical vacuum with invented detail, are of course nothing new. In the Mémoires, Berlioz himself employs the technique: to love scenes, in that book, he only alludes. But elsewhere he gives what a naïve reader might accept as literal transcriptions of his conversations with, among others, Cherubini and Fétis, the Viscount de La Rochefoucauld and the King of Prussia. These conversations represent one of the most effective weapons in Berlioz’s literary arsenal. They are not mathematical equations! They are poems in prose; they quite literally bring the narration to life. So convincing do they seem that some of yesterday’s blinkered observers were boondoggled into believing that they were reading the author’s sworn testimony in a court of law—and thus into considering him guilty of a felony, when the facts turned out to be fictitious.