By dint of his own rather peculiar version of lively narration, Adolphe Boschot, more than any other turn-of-the-century biographer, was responsible for inscribing Berlioz into the annals of French history. He was born into the post-Darwinian world of 1871, into the disorder of the fledgling Third Republic, into the revanchist atmosphere that prevailed after France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, into an ironically Wagnerian environment stimulated by such admirers of the Meister as Charles Baudelaire, Charles Lamoureux, Ernest Reyer, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Joris-Karl Huysmans, and into a world soon to be brutally polarized by the Dreyfus Affair, which broke out in 1898, when Boschot was twenty-seven years old, and which blunted much of what was
belle in the so-called
belle époque. The reason for his enterprise, Boschot tells us in his introduction, is this: “Berlioz seems to us to be a perfect subject for a lively biography: he was the most accomplished of the romantic heroes. Musset and Vigny merely experienced crises of passion; Delacroix and Hugo were methodical artists whose productions were as routinely systematic as those of a bureaucrat. Only Berlioz had a true crater in his heart; only Berlioz was truly volcanic. And, to boot, his volcanism was intentional.”
1 Boschot, La Jeunesse d’un Romantique, x–xi.Did Adolphe Boschot, amateur pianist and violinist, journalist, cofounder in 1901 of the Société Mozart, actually revere the
music of Berlioz? This is not certain. Indeed, despite his silly remark about Delacroix, it seems, according to his daughter,
2 Henriette Boschot told the story of her father’s indecision to Thérèse Husson, mastermind of the Association Nationale Hector Berlioz, and Thérèse Husson told it to me. that, for some time, Boschot hesitated between Berlioz and Delacroix as subjects for his biography, because for both artists the archives were rich with documentary material. Indeed, the fact that for Berlioz he disposed of “at least one document per week,” for the more than two thousand weeks that created history between 1822 and 1864, was by no means “the least important reason” that he undertook, “with Berlioz as hero,” his
Histoire d’un Romantique.3 Boschot, La Jeunesse, 519. This seems a bit cold, does it not? But have no fear: I was also told that when he reached the end of the third volume of his
opus maximum, his apparent disinterest had been transformed into devotion. Again, according to his daughter, Boschot returned from his study to the salon, weeping, to say that he had just recounted Berlioz’s demise. In the book, we read of the funeral that took place at the Église de la Trinité on March 11, 1869, and of the “radiant and ultimate farewell” played by the organist: “the shadowy and nostalgic adagio from
Harold en Italie.”
4 Boschot, Le Crépuscule, 660. The phrase—“le crépusculaire et nostalgique adagio”—is touching. But the
Marche de pèlerins—which is what was played by the organist, Charles-Alexis Chauvet, seated at the keyboard of La Trinité’s spanking new Cavaillé-Coll—is marked
allegretto:
the march is perhaps introspective; it is hardly crepuscular.
Boschot’s peculiar style, especially as displayed in La Jeunesse d’un Romantique, was well analyzed by the then director of the Conservatoire, Théodore Dubois, who won the Rome Prize in 1861, when Berlioz was a member of the jury, and who, now an academician, reported on the book to his colleagues at the Institut de France:
This volume is obviously quite interesting, and even endearing. It has the advantage of situating the reader smack in the middle of the quite singular romanticism of 1830. The author studies Berlioz in this atmosphere, and I have to say that he leads us to see Berlioz in a light different from the one in which he is usually cast, namely, as a Berlioz who is not at all likeable, a Berlioz who is very much a social climber, highly idiosyncratic, and highly egotistical. Does this represent the celebrated composer’s true character? We are certainly led to think so on reading the documents upon which the author has depended. The humorous and ironic tone he has adopted, and his anecdotal style, render his work highly attractive and seductive. But, on further reflection, one begins to question his motives for writing this book. Did he wish to glorify Berlioz, to cause us to like and admire him as an artist and as a man? Or, on the contrary, by emphasizing his weaknesses, did he rather wish to belittle him, to diminish him, or indeed to subject him to ridicule? On this subject, we are not quite sure what to believe.
5 Archives de l’Académie des Beaux-Arts, procès-verbaux des concours, 1 H 16 [1906].Théodore Dubois is not the only person to have reacted to Boschot in this way. Listen to the well-known critic Émile Vuillermoz, known as a champion of Fauré and Ravel, who, after reading Boschot’s first volume, wrote to the author on January 18, 1906:
I am proud to be one of the musicians whom your work has most profoundly enchanted, more, even, than you might have wished. It happens that I was preparing a series of articles on the very subject that you have now magnificently illuminated, and, despite the bitterness I might have felt at your annihilation of my project, I was rather delighted, after reading your volume, to tear up my notes. For many years I have dreamed of dismantling the web of preposterous legends that Berlioz so cleverly wove around his life and work with truly abusive pretention, because the Berliozians who accept blindly the truth of the letters and the Mémoires of their god have long caused me hours of impotent exasperation. I was therefore going to attempt to raze this monument of untruth. But now I find that you have totally pulverized it. You will thus understand my glee and the ease with which I now renounce undertaking a task whose purpose, today, has been entirely achieved.
Because—and here I must admit, at the risk of finding myself deprived of your sympathy—I do not like this musical braggart, neither as an artist nor as a man, and this will surely spoil any expression of understanding on your part, because, despite your extensive research, you have nonetheless remained a
Berlioziste. I find it honestly troubling to see your persistent and even heroic faith… which is hardly the faith of a simple coal merchant! How have you managed to remain so indulgent and respectful of a man so difficult to indulge and respect? But let us not tarry, for I wish not at all to proselytize for my point of view. Besides, I am perfectly convinced that the time has now come for musicians to see that the volcanic Hector is the great imposter of the century, that he has blessed the art of music with nothing new and nothing more than the clumsy writing of an ignorant amateur, even as concerns his famous orchestration, which appears to me to become more and more tiresome, despite the composer’s pretentions to the terrifying and the sublime.
6 Boschot (Henriette), “Une Lettre inédite d’Émile Vuillermoz, 28–29.Citing Vuillermoz, whose later sympathies for Adolf Hitler are disconcerting, to say the least, gives me no pleasure.
7 Broche, Dictionnaire de la collaboration, 885–886. Doing so demonstrates what even Boschot was up against, and underlines the respect he deserves for his labors, apparent from the copious notes and thousands of manuscript pages that have been preserved.
8 BnF, Musique, Rés. 2714 (1–3). Boschot wrote on only one side of his large sheets, leaving the other for subsequent additions and revisions. I did not study the differences between the autograph and the edition (I would have done so had Boschot been Berlioz), but some things became obvious. For example, when recounting Berlioz’s contemplation of suicide, which he did on learning of his fiancée’s marriage to another man, Boschot spoke ironically of a “
faux suicide”—“a
phony suicide on the part of a fashionably Byronic jilted lover,” citing the letter that Berlioz wrote on April 18, 1831, to Horace Vernet, director of the Villa Medici and master of the students on scholarship there as winners of the Prix de Rome: “I continue to struggle between life and death, but I shall remain standing, of that, on my honor, you may be certain.”
9 CG 1:429. Thinking he might have gone too far, Boschot removed the sarcastic words “byronien” and “fashionable” (we have seen in chapter 6 that the English word was fashionable in French), but not the expression “faux suicide.” We conclude that he read the crucial sentence in Berlioz’s letter to Vernet—“at Genoa, in a moment of giddiness, I gave in to childish despair. An inconceivable weakness got the better of my will. But my sole punishment was to swallow a lot of salt water and be yanked out like a fish” (“à Gênes, un instant de vertige, la plus inconcevable faiblesse a brisé ma volonté, je me suis abandonné au désespoir d’un enfant; mais enfin j’en ai été quitte pour boire l’eau salée, être harponné comme un saumon”)
10 CG 1:429.—as calculatedly
implying that an attempt at suicide had taken place, that once again Berlioz was gilding the lily. D. Kern Holoman’s comment on the matter—as “a possibly fanciful explanation concocted for Horace Vernet”
11 Holoman, Berlioz, 116.—is not entirely different from Boschot’s. For David Cairns, Berlioz simply “felt himself
slipping;
and, suddenly without will to resist, fell into the sea.”
12 Cairns, Berlioz, 1:459. For Jacques Barzun, however, whose translation I use here, and with whose view I concur, what took place was indeed a “clumsily attempted suicide.”
13 Barzun, Berlioz and the Romantic Century, 1:205. When we read the whole story of Berlioz’s project of revenge, we smile at its comic mastery, even knowing, as we do, that revenge, “vengeance,” was as dear to Berlioz as liberty, love, and lucre.
14 CG 2:25. Furthermore, Boschot to the contrary notwithstanding, suicide is no laughing matter. As to the vituperativeness of Vuillermoz, who goes so far as to criticize Boschot for insufficient skepticism, let it remind the reader of what Jacques Barzun and the new Berliozians were attempting to assuage.
It was perhaps out of some kind of revenge (of whose
raison d’être we are ignorant) that Boschot, in collaboration with Charles Malherbe (co-editor with Felix Weingartner of the first monumental edition of Berlioz’s complete works), waged a campaign against Julien Tiersot on the subject of the
Marche au supplice of the
Symphonie fantastique. Tiersot, never having seen the autograph, was wrongly certain that there was no link between the march in the symphony and the
Marche des gardes of Berlioz’s opera
Les Francs-Juges. Could he have been one of those benighted souls who, unaware that it was the practice of some of the greatest of the greats, sees a composer’s borrowing of earlier material as some kind of compositional weakness? Be this as it may, the title page, which Boschot and Malherbe actually possessed, makes it clear for all to see that the march was originally a part of Berlioz’s first finished opera.
15 NBE 16:183–184.As his three volumes took shape, and as they began to circulate, Boschot became the oracle of “la pensée berliozienne.” It is for this reason that, in 1921, when a production of
Les Troyens in its entirety was for the first time in rehearsal at the Paris Opéra, the then director, Jacques Rouché, wrote to Boschot, on January 16 of that year, to ask for “les coupures à faire,” taking it for granted that even a theoretically complete performance would have to bear cuts sufficient to perform the work in one evening, and to have the evening end at the customary hour. To his credit, Rouché had earlier consulted Camille Saint-Saëns, who urged a return to the original score but with certain notes altered (because “Berlioz understood nothing of the mechanism of the voice”), with the prologue that Berlioz had added to
Les Troyens à Carthage when it became clear, in 1863, that only acts 3–5 of the opera were going to be performed, and
without the Anna-Narbal duet, the
Danse des esclaves,
and the
Chant d’Iopas from act 4.
16 Yves Gérard, “Saint-Saëns,” Dictionnaire Berlioz, 494. In June 1921, one week before the opening, Rouché told Boschot that he had indeed made the cuts that the critic had suggested: “I wished to do nothing without being entirely in agreement with you, who have so fully understood Hector Berlioz’s intentions.”
17 Bibliothèque de l’Opéra; lettres autographes (Jacques Rouché). Rouché may be credited with bringing to the attention of the public Berlioz’s unitary five-act French grand opera, thus dismissing the two-headed monster of 1863 that Berlioz had created with reluctance and regret. Nonetheless, to hear a properly complete execution of
Les Troyens (and passing over my promotion, in chapter 10, of the original ending), the world had to wait until Covent Garden put it on properly, on November 17, 1969, some eight months and one hundred years after the composer’s death.
Adolphe Boschot was elected to the Académie des Beaux-Arts, seventy years after Berlioz, in 1926. In 1939, he was furthermore elected Secrétaire Perpétuel, the honored post for which Berlioz, too, had been a candidate, in 1862, after the death of the incumbent, Fromental Halévy, on March 17 of that year. For Berlioz, such a post would have been “far too official and far too academic”; it would have “flattened his mane of revolutionary hair” and “dissolved his halo of despondency,” as Boschot puts it, revving up his ridicule as he arrives near the end of his road.
18 Boschot, Le Crépuscule, 554. The composer would have enjoyed free lodgings in the Palais de l’Institut and avoided “vegetating, in his fourth-floor flat in the rue de Calais, for which he paid rent of eleven hundred francs per month.”
19 Boschot, 553. While Boschot’s account of the matter is based on a close reading of the archives of the Académie des Beaux-Arts, his explanation of the reason for Berlioz’s failure to be elected—the “deplorable” behavior of his wife, Marie Recio—remains, as always, without evidence. “This bitter woman, who darkened his gloom, led Berlioz to his true destiny—the destiny of woe.”
20 Boschot, 555. To which I say (in this chapter on the Bs): bunkum and balderdash!