Now

Cairns’s admiration of Barzun comes through, but his vision of Berlioz is of course not the same as that of the earlier master. On the Fantastique, for example, in those reflections I mentioned, Cairns rightfully wondered about the piece that we know as it was set down and heard on December 5, 1830, and how it differed when it was played again, after the Italian sojourn, on December 9, 1832, and in subsequent years. Did Berlioz have bells for the finale? Those bells are responsible for some of the astonishment we feel from the symphony as a whole. Should bells not be available, Berlioz provided a part for pianos: the effect, with pianos, I assure you, is startling. I do not know if the composer had bells in 1830 or 1832, but I do know that bells were used at his concert of December 13, 1840, because in the performance dossier for that concert preserved in the Macnutt Collection, now at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, there lies, I was pleased to discover, a ten-franc receipt from Nicolas Hildebrand “for the transportation of bells.” Hildebrand was a bell founder in the rue Saint-Martin; for his work in the eighteen-twenties he twice received medals of honor.4 Mémoires, 515. The enormous bells that he placed on exhibit in 1827 weighed approximately 450 kilograms (992 pounds) and 600 kilograms (1,322 pounds).5 Annales des mines, 2e série (Paris: Treuttel et Würtz, 1827), 2:510. We may never know if they sounded the notes C and G. But the existence of the 1840 receipt does suggest that bells were indeed available for Berlioz’s Paris performances of the symphony. I dwell on this because, if much of Wagner has become more famous than much of Berlioz, the bells of the Fantastique may yet outring the bells of Parsifal (which, in the beginning, were not really bells at all).

One of Barzun’s overmastering concerns was an “objective” reading of the Symphonie fantastique as a coherent work of art independent of any literary “program”: he emphasized what Berlioz wrote in a footnote to the printed programs for concerts in 1836 and 1838, that the composer “knows perfectly well that music can replace neither words nor the visual arts”; that “he never once had the absurd idea of expressing ‘abstractions’ or ‘moral qualities,’ but only feelings and emotions.”6 See NBE 17:171. Cairns, who seems to “know” Berlioz’s family and friends almost as well as the composer, concludes that “Berlioz himself saw the symphony in autobiographical terms.”7 Cairns, Berlioz, 1:365. These are differing, not opposite points of view. “Program music” and the “meaning of music” are subjects of infinite discussion and dispute. Berlioz insists that they remain in the curriculum.

After the outpouring Berlioz scholarship that accompanied the two-hundredth anniversary of the composer’s birth, in and around 2003 (I list the principal works in the note),8 The year 2003 saw the appearance of NBE 24 and NBE 26; CG 8; CM 4; the Dictionnaire Berlioz; L’Herne Berlioz; Berlioz: La Voix du romantisme, ed. Massip and Reynaud; and the papers from the first two of the five international conferences organized by the Comité International Hector Berlioz: Northampton, MA, 2000 (Berlioz: Past, Present, Future, ed. Bloom); and Bayreuth, 2001 (Berlioz, Wagner und die Deutschen, ed. Döhring et al.). The papers of the three subsequent conferences appeared later: London, 2002 (The Musical Voyager: Berlioz in Europe, ed. Charlton and Ellis); Grenoble, 2003 (Hector Berlioz: Regards sur un Dauphinois fantastique, ed. Ramaut); and Paris, 2003 (Berlioz: Textes et contextes, ed. Fauquet et al.). and after the appearance of two further collective efforts in anticipation of the one hudred fiftieth anniversary of his death,9 The Cambridge Berlioz Encyclopedia, ed. Rushton; Hector Berlioz 1869–2019: 150 ans de passions, ed. Ramaut and Reibel. you may fairly ask if there is anything more to say, if enough is now enough. But for enthusiasts, such as I, questions remain. Where, for example, are the autograph manuscripts of Sardanapale, the arrangement of La Marseillaise, and Le Carnaval romain? Are they forever lost? What might they tell us? Or: How did Berlioz speak to the members of his orchestras? Was he a strict disciplinarian, as I would suppose? Was he rather warm and fuzzy, as was the great Leonard Bernstein? And was he as brilliant as I suggest he was, in my edition of the Mémoires, after observing his remarkable recall of literature far and wide? Or did his “erudition not equal his genius,” as Camille Saint-Saëns rather uncharitably put it in a letter to the musicologist Henri Expert?10 Saint-Saëns to Henri Expert (June 24, 1921), quoted by Gérard, “Saint-Saëns musician-musicologue,” 559.

After his twentieth birthday, Berlioz was by royal edict required to participate in the draft lottery for military service. The drawing would have taken place in La Côte-Saint-André, would have opened in mid-January in 1823, and would have continued until early March, at which time those marked for conscription could, if finances allowed, find stand-ins.11 The rules are spelled out in L’Écho du Midi (December 9, 1822): 3. As the intrepid Berlioz explorer Pascal Beyls has discovered, Berlioz drew a low number and was thus obliged to report for duty. He was able to avoid the army by purchasing the services of a proxy, a practice that was common at the time for those from moneyed families, and, in times of peace, potentially advantageous even to those who chose to serve. Berlioz’s replacement, one François Charreton, born in the same year as the future composer, was a textile worker who hailed from the village of Vourey, twenty-five kilometers southeast of La Côte-Saint-André. We know nothing more about him other than that he died, in a military hospital, on July 18, 1829.12 Pascal Beyls to Peter Bloom (April 14 and November 9, 2020). Berlioz’s family is unlikely to have employed a substitute for their prodigal son solely in order that he pursue music. In early 1823, Berlioz must have been convincingly able to demonstrate, or grudgingly put forth, a continuing interest in medical study.

To what was Berlioz referring when he spoke to Camille Moke, his erstwhile fiancée, of a “chagrin affreux,” the terrible affliction that David Cairns believes might be the reason behind their broken engagement?13 Cairns, Berlioz, 1:438; CG 1:406–410. Who was the mysterious “Amélie” who, near the end of his life, and hers, encountered and enchanted Berlioz in the cemetery of Montmartre? To whom was Berlioz referring, in a letter, when he suggests that his son might have had more than one child? We know only of little Clémentine, born to Zélie Mallet and Louis Berlioz, in Marseille, on April 2, 1861.14 CG 7:59. And who is that fellow who called himself Berlioz’s “fils naturel,” that is, Berlioz’s illegitimate son, when he appeared on December 15, 1912, as the members of Henri-Martin Barzun’s Fondation Hector Berlioz made a pilgrimage to the house in Montmartre to celebrate what would have been, four days earlier, the composer’s one-hundred-ninth birthday?15 See Beyls and Bloom, “Berlioz’s ‘Natural’ Son,” 21–30. On film and in photographs, this gentleman, called “Charles Berlioz” in L’Événement and other newspapers printed on December 17, appears to converse with Barzun and others who knew a thing or two about Berlioz, including J.-G. Prod’homme, Adolphe Boschot, and Victor Chapot, the archeologist, library administrator, and member of the Institut de France, who was present at the ceremony in his capacity as a direct descendent of Berlioz’s sister Adèle. Chapot and the others would surely have protested had they believed this fellow was an imposter! Pascal Beyls and I have hypothesized that he might have been the unrecognized child of Berlioz and Marie Recio. Were he to have been born in 1842, he would have been seventy in 1912, as in the pictures he appears to be. I add that the actor Jacques Berlioz (1889–1969) claimed, in a letter printed in Comœdia on February 4, 1927, that his father, the amateur painter Charles Berlioz, bore an “extraordinary” resemblance to Hector Berlioz, and was in fact the grandson of the composer’s uncle.16 See Beyls, “Un imposteur.” Caveat lector: not everyone named Berlioz is related to the one we know.

Future biographers may wish to treat these small queries as they paint large canvases of their own. What we can do, now, is to make the fundamental source materials accessible to all who might wish to capture Berlioz in one guise or another. The Bibliothèque Nationale de France continues to upload the scores and the images to Gallica.bnf.fr. RetroNews.fr makes the newspapers and magazines for which Berlioz wrote ever more readily available. Monir Tayeb and Michel Austin faithfully render service to Berliozians everywhere by publishing on HBerlioz.com quantities of primary and secondary materials in both French and English. And now, a substantial grant from the city of Paris, funded in 2021, has enabled a small team of which I am a part to embark upon an online edition of Berlioz’s correspondence based on new readings of the autograph manuscripts, with links to facsimiles, explanatory documents, and extensive annotations unrestrained by publishers’ page limitations. The physical book will never die, but the future of scholarly research is online. It will not be long before we will be able to search the text of every document ever penned by or about Berlioz. The new availability will broaden horizons and bear new fruit. But “artificial intelligence,” so to speak, will not tell us what is the definitive version of the work of art or how, definitively, it is to be performed. It will not take the place of articulate speech, commanding discourse, aesthetic acumen, scholarly judgment, humor, or hubris.

Berlioz’s music—music “that thinks,” as it was labeled by a journalist at the funeral17 Pierre Véron, in Le Monde illustré (March 13, 1969).—will, one hopes, find its place in the work of those musical scholars in Europe and the United States who, now more than ever, justly debate the roles in the making of music history of race, ethnicity, class, and gender; who rightly insist upon the importance of hearing from the colonized, the marginalized, and the oppressed. Berlioz’s music will, I should like to believe, continue to be variously defended and depreciated, as is normal for vital works that remain in the repertory. But it will no longer be demeaned, I think, as somehow deficient in technique. That is a battle that has been won. The analyses of scholars active today, those by Julian Rushton and Jean-Pierre Bartoli in particular, have demonstrated with conspicuous clarity that Berlioz’s melodic and symphonic forms are not lesser versions of classic and contemporary models, as the sceptics used to say, but carefully premeditated structures with an inner drama and logic of their own.18 Rushton, Musical Language of Berlioz; Rushton, Music of Berlioz; Bartoli, “développement symphonique,” “forme,” “harmonie,” “modalité,” “symphonie,” “thèmes symphoniques,” “variation,” etc., in Dictionnaire Berlioz.

Let me conclude, therefore, with a response to the cogent critique of an anthology I had something to do with, the Cambridge Companion to Berlioz, which, the ever-vigilant Mark Everist observed, “gives the impression that Berlioz is the sole representative of French music” in the middle years of his century.19 Everist, review of The Cambridge Companion to Berlioz, 125. That is certainly not the impression I intended to give in the Companion, nor is it the impression I intend to give here. It is perhaps worth mentioning that the author of the opening essay in the Companion, also the author of Berlioz and the Romantic Century, was a founding father of modern cultural history, to which discipline my eminent colleague would seem to pay homage, and a scholar more alert than most to the particularities of the environment in which his chosen subject lived and worked. Janet Johnson’s subsequent essay, on “the musical environment in France,” goes so far as to identify the elephant in the room: “Berlioz in the Age of Rossini.” Everist’s remark may simply result from the enthusiasm of the Berliozians, Jacques Barzun among them, who may have felt that their fellow had been underrepresented, or rather “misunderestimated,” to use a wonderful word coined by the forty-third president of the United States. (In 2002, that president, George W. Bush, awarded America’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, to Jacques Barzun.) Berlioz’s French contemporaries—Fromental Halévy, Adolphe Adam, Louise Farrenc, Louise Bertin, Félicien David, Ambroise Thomas, Charles-Valentin Alkan, Charles Gounod, Jacques Offenbach, and Camille Saint-Saëns, to mention only those born between 1799 and 1835—deserve, have had, and will continue to enjoy their days in court. Berlioz interacted with all of these fine souls, as he did with the non-French composers—Rossini, Meyerbeer, Wagner, and Verdi—who of course became major players on the French musical scene. These same souls find a place in the Dictionnaire Berlioz, of which I was an editor, and whose mission was more broad than that of the Companion. Could it be, if Berlioz continues to kick his way to the fore, that his understanding of “the intellectual glamour of gloom,” to quote a phrase from Martin Amis’s 2020 novel Inside Story, gives him a leg up? Or that, despite our erudition, we still don’t know what to do with him?

For Bruno Messina, and those of an ethnomusicological bent, what remains to be reconstituted, for the better understanding of musical imagination of the composer of the Fantastique, is the sonic landscape, the “paysage sonore,” of Berlioz’s homeland, the Dauphiné, that “green and golden plain” lovingly traversed in the opening chapter of David Cairns’s great biography.20 Cairns, Berlioz, vol. 1, chapter 1; Messina, “À propos de l’enfance d’Hector.” For those who understand how the writing of history itself has been molded by men, the absent voices of Harriet Smithson and Marie Recio in particular (the sounds of which in both cases are said to have had an agreeable ring) would resound, if we could hear them, with special resonance. And for those for whom Rezeptionsgeschichte is the way of the future, the volume that remains to be written would be the Berliozian equivalent of the one that most resonated in musical circles during the gestation of the present book. Alex Ross’s Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music is a highly unusual compendium, a tour de force of recollections and reflections, intimations and inspirations, confrontations and exploitations of a kind uniquely generated—in music and art, in literature and philosophy, in politics and popular culture—by the life and work of Richard Wagner. Though far less fateful and fought about than the composer of Tristan and The Ring, Berlioz was no less of a genius than he. An admirer willing to look everywhere and read everything, as Ross did for Wagner, might find the material, not for a book of Berliozism—the expression is infelicitous—but for a broad-based investigation of Berlioz Beyond the Grave. In Berlioz in Time, my more limited purpose has been to revisit the precincts of its great subject, to relight rooms gone dim, to invite readers in.