Chapter Two: Berlioz and the Translators

A highly important second point is this: that Berlioz was living at a time of an explosion of interest in English literature, when such successful booksellers as John and William Galignani could publish in Paris a daily newspaper and a weekly literary magazine in English, and when English-language publications were increasingly available in reading rooms known as “cabinets de lecture,” which we can be sure Berlioz frequented, as did thousands of his contemporaries.3 Barber, “Galignani’s and the Publication of English Books,” 273.

We know that Berlioz was a fluent reader of Latin; we know that he learned enough Italian to manage simple conversations during his sojourn in the Eternal City and its environs; we know that despite his many crossings of the Rhine, he never learned a word of German, perhaps suffering from the prejudice common at the time that the language (not the music or the literature) was “Gothic” or “Vandalesque,” as Gérard de Nerval humorously put it in his Études sur les poètes allemands: “C’est l’irruption des Goths et des Vandales!”4 Nerval, Études sur les poètes allemands, 3. Many of us have wondered more seriously about Berlioz’s competence in English. In speaking, he would have found most difficult what my French wife and French friends find most difficult: the matter of accentuation. Some definite stress is part of every English word, while gentle inflection is rather the norm in French. In reading, what may have stymied the French composer are the faux amis, the words that look the same in French and English but do not mean the same thing. At the time of his marriage to Harriet Smithson, Berlioz’s reading knowledge of English was more than adequate. His translation of the gentle letter of thanks that his wife wrote to his sister Adèle—apparently the sole member of the family to maintain contact with the composer in the months following the wedding—is at once entirely faithful and entirely idiomatic, which is to say not at all literal. (I find it amusing that when he published this letter in the Correspondance générale, Frédéric Robert mistook Berlioz’s freedom of expression for lack of comprehension.)5 CG 2:146. By the eighteen-fifties, after several visits to England, Berlioz seems to have developed a certain degree of mastery. I say this in particular because of the wordplay that we find in a letter dated July 3, 1855, and sent to his young friend Théodore Ritter, who had come to London with his father, Toussaint Benet, to hear Berlioz’s performance of Roméo et Juliette, on June 13 of that year. Ritter apparently spoke enough English to understand Berlioz’s joke: “We have no pineapples” wrote Berlioz—“pas d’ananas”; we’ve been deprived of them—“nous sommes volés”; but we have a lot of strawberries—“mais force fraises”; indeed we have so many strawberries, fraises, that we even have fraises de veau— “calf’s ruffles”—which of course have nothing to do with fraises, except in name. Berlioz goes on to say: “vile phrase, calembourg anglais”— that is, “vile phrase, English pun.” All of this turns on Polonius’s remark to Gertrude, in act 2, scene 2 of Hamlet, that “‘beautified’ is a vile phrase”; it turns on knowing that Shakespeare’s vile, pronounced with a French accent, becomes the English word veal (the French veau), and on knowing that Shakespeare’s phrase, pronounced with a French accent, becomes the French word fraises (strawberries); it turns, finally, on the recurrence of fraises in fraises de veau, which is the connecting membrane of veal intestines and a culinary delicacy for carnivores in the know.

In other words, if you followed all of that, you might think, as I do, that Berlioz was by then sufficiently in command of English to do wordplay on vile, vile, phrase, and fraise, and that he was of course still very interested in food, despite digestive misery provoked by what we now believe was Crohn’s disease, which poisoned the later years of his life. In what follows I want to say a word about Berlioz’s literary appetite for Walter Scott and James Fenimore Cooper, and then touch upon some of the other authors—especially Byron and Moore—who came to have a memorable impact on the composer’s life and work.

On June 4, 1827, Berlioz complained to his twenty-year-old sister Nanci: “You never speak to me about what you are reading; I think well enough of you to suppose that you know by heart your Walter Scott, that giant of English literature; but Cooper, do you know Cooper, the American Walter Scott?”4 CG 1:155. There are one hundred ninety-six pages on Scott in the catalogue of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France; these list hundreds of Scott’s publications, many in English, that were brought out in France during the Scottish writer’s lifetime. It would seem that the first of his novels to be translated was Guy Mannering, published in English 1815 and translated immediately, in 1816, by a gentleman whose name will sound familiar, Joseph Martin. This, however, is not the army officer Joseph Martin, who fathered Berlioz’s second wife, Marie-Geneviève Martin, whom we know as Marie Recio. In chapter 57 of the Mémoires, Berlioz imitates the schoolmaster Dominie Samson’s many-times repeated word, “prodigious”—which proves that he did indeed read Guy Mannering.5 Mémoires, 753. The second Scott novel to be translated was The Antiquary of 1816; it was rendered into French in 1817 by Sophie de Maraise, a novelist in her own right. The third was Rob Roy (1817), translated in 1818 by Auguste-Jean-Baptiste Defauconpret. Defauconpret would go on to translate the complete works: his “complete” Scott, many times reissued, began to appear in 1820, one year before Berlioz departed for Paris from the family home in La Côte-Saint-André.

The Talisman, published in English in 1825, is a novel Berlioz must have read later that year, as soon as it appeared in French (as Le Talisman, ou Richard en Palestine) since he was almost immediately involved with the opéra-comique I have mentioned—whose French title, we note, comes from the subtitle of the French translation; in the Furne edition of 1830, the title is Richard en Palestine, the subtitle, Le Talisman. (The English edition had only the single title.) The first translation, by Defauconpret, was published in Paris by a man whose business became very famous when he began to bring out the works of Balzac and Victor Hugo. In fact, between 1822 and 1830, Charles Gosselin would bring out a nearly complete edition of the works of Scott in sixty compact volumes, whose contents (substituting the original English titles for the French while following the occasionally gapped numbering in the catalogue of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France) are as follows:

On the title page of the autograph manuscript of his own Grande Ouverture de Waverley, Berlioz cites eight separate passages from the novel. The question we would ask is: Was he citing a French translation that he knew? Or was he translating himself? Before attempting an answer, let me take note of the carefully scripted dedication set down on that title page: “À Monsieur Brown, témoignage d’une vive et inaltérable amitié, Hector Berlioz, ce 16 avril 1839.” “A rich and immutable friendship” is no small thing—which makes it doubly odd that there is no other mention of a “Monsieur Brown” in Berlioz’s preserved writings. This fellow, not yet identified in the Berlioz literature, was a certain Jean-François-Adolphe Brown, who lived in Paris in the eighteen-thirties and -forties at 20, rue des Fossés du Temple, and at 15, Quai Bourbon. He was a translator, interpreter, professor of English at one of the secondary schools of the capital, and he gave lessons at home.8 Almanach-Bottin du commerce de Paris, 1842. In 1837, he seems to have entered into an association with the watchmaker Pierre-Charles Leclerc at 2, rue des Enfants rouges—an association formalized on November 4, 1840, according to the Gazette des Tribunaux of November 15, 1840—to form the enterprise of “Leclerc et Brown” for the purpose of manufacturing a musical instrument that was patented on July 31, 1837, as having “two wind chambers, keys, and strings,” and that was known as a mélophone.9 http://www.europeana.eu/portal/en/record/09102/_CM_0852470.html. A detailed description of this instrument first appeared in the Revue et Gazette musicale de Paris on May 26, 1839, in an article (by Berlioz’s colleague and Richard Wagner’s friend Gottfried Engelbert Anders) on the current exhibition of French industrial products in the Champs-Élysées, where the mélophone would win a silver medal.

How can I be sure that “Monsieur Brown” of the mélophone is the “Monsieur Brown” of the Waverley Overture? Because Berlioz himself mentions the instrument in his article for the Journal des débats of May 28, 1839, noting that, in Halévy’s opera Guido et Ginevra, one hears the mélophone of Monsieur Leclerc. “This instrument at once resembles the flute, the horn, the clarinet, and the basset horn. We cannot explain its interior mechanism because until now Monsieur Leclerc has preferred to keep its secret to himself.” Berlioz was always fascinated by new instruments; he was particularly taken with hand-held instruments such as this one and the English concertina, to which he consecrated an entire chapter of the second edition of his orchestration treatise. He always befriended instrument makers, including two who became lifelong friends: Adolphe Sax, of the saxophone, and Édouard Alexandre, of the orgue-mélodium. Perhaps the co-inventor of the mélophone, “Monsieur Brown,” the professor with an English surname and a French Christian name, had family relations in London; perhaps he had something to do with the performance of the Ouverture de Waverley that took place in London on March 23, 1839, only three weeks before Berlioz offered the autograph manuscript to this hitherto unknown gentleman. Perhaps the man, who seems to have annotated French translations of Shakespeare,10 Coriolane: Expliqué littéralement (1850), “with French notes by A. Brown,” is listed in Thimm, Shakespeariana, 105. and who, as a teacher, insisted that “no word of the student’s native language” be used in the teaching of English, was in fact teaching English to Berlioz! Be all of this as it may, “Monsieur Brown” is most certainly the Jean-François-Adolphe Brown we have identified:11 Bulletin de la société pour l’instruction élémentaire, 35. if we knew more about his friendship with Berlioz, we might know more about Berlioz’s study of English.

Comparisons of the French and English texts of the eight quotations Berlioz affixed to the title page of the Waverley Overture, in French, can be instructive.

Are the differences between Berlioz’s version and the Defauconpret translation due to Berlioz’s unbelievable but sometimes unreliable memory? Or are they rather due to his conviction that his own renderings were more accurate? “Habits of abstraction” is not readily rendered in French: “caractère distrait” is perfectly fine; “caractère mélancolique” is more expressive. “Love” of solitude is literally “amour” for solitude; “goût” for solitude is better reflective of the psychological reality. Berlioz’s use of the old-style spelling (“étoit”) of the imperfect tense, here and elsewhere, is characteristic of his usage in the eighteen-twenties; it is also what we find in Defauconpret’s translation. The composer’s reversal of the order of the expressions with “habits” and “love” is also characteristic, not of Berlioz, but of French sentence structure in general, although I have not seen this rule of transposition in the official guides: in Moore’s “When he who adores thee,” cited below, “lovers and friends” become, in the translation, “les amis” and “les amants,” in that order; the colors of the flag of the United States, for an American, are “red, white, and blue”; the colors of the flag of the French Republic (the same), for a Frenchman, are “bleu, blanc, [and] rouge”!

That translator, Auguste Defauconpret, was born in Lille in 1767 and worked successfully in Paris as a notaire until a reversal of fortune led him to emigrate to England. There he remained for some twenty-five years, translating and writing novels of his own. He returned to France in or around 1840, where he died, at Fontainebleau, in 1843. Defauconpret is credited with as many as four hundred translations.12 Hersant, “Defauconpret,” 83–88. His philosophy of translation displeased some of those whom he translated, among them the Irish writer Lady Morgan, the author of Florence Macarthy, published initially in 1818 and in Defauconpret’s translation in the following year. In fact, Lady Morgan rejected Defauconpret’s unauthorized translation, which led to a rejoinder from the translator, dated January 31, 1819, that was printed on February 8 of that year, in French, of course, in the Journal des débats:

Defauconpret’s translation of The Pioneers carries many footnotes, which explain to the French reader aspects of the English text, including “la culture de l’érable,” or the making of maple syrup, about which the French know very little. (Most French people I know like neither American peanut butter nor American maple syrup.) Indeed, the very notion of “Pioneers” was something curious to French readers, who inhabited a country whose pioneers presumably arrived with Julius Caesar in 52 BC.

I add one further word about Berlioz’s reading of Cooper—concerning a sentence from The Pathfinder, published in English in 1840 and, as mentioned above, translated by Defauconpret in the same year. The passage describes the death of a Delaware Indian who attempts to paddle out to an island in the rushing waters of a lake situated above a torrential waterfall.

Furthermore, on the subject of Cooper and the Mémoires, Berlioz invokes The Last of the Mohicans in the fourth letter of the Voyage en Allemagne, which of course forms the centerpiece of that book. There he includes a transcript of the letter he sent to Felix Mendelssohn when the German composer suggested an exchange of their conducting batons. “Mendelssohn’s musical scepter was immediately brought to me,” writes Berlioz. “The very next day, I sent to him my heavy oak cudgel, with the following letter, which ‘the last of the Mohicans,’ I should like to hope, would not disavow.” There follows Berlioz’s letter, addressed to “chief Mendelssohn,” which evokes the exchange of the “tomahawks.” Our composer wrongly thinks that a tomahawk is some kind of club, when in fact it is hatchet, but he correctly remembers that the “real” last of the Mohicans, the character Uncas, is particularly adept and throwing the tomahawk. “The last of the Mohicans,” in the Mémoires, is at any rate not the title of Cooper’s book but rather the fellow to whom the title refers.

When Berlioz returned to Nice in September 1844 (he had stayed there in 1831), he sketched an overture that he christened La Tour de Nice. This was first performed in January 1845. He then rebaptized the work Le Corsaire rouge, using the title of Cooper’s The Red Rover, which was first published in Paris, in English, in 1827, and subsequently in England, and in the United States, in 1828—the year it appeared in French, in Defauconpret’s translation. There is, in Cooper’s novel, a tower on a rocky coast, like the tower in Nice. When he determined to publish the overture, however, Berlioz changed the name to Ouverture du Corsaire, thereby transferring the literary reference from the American Cooper to the Englishman Byron, whose The Corsair, published in English in 1814, had been translated into French, by Amédée Pichot, the man most responsible for the dissemination of Byron’s work in France.

Here we see the opening stanza of The Corsair, with the French translation by Amédée Pichot: 6 Byron, Œuvres de Lord Byron, 9.

In other writings, Berlioz reveals that he has read Byron’s play Marino Faliero, his poem Lara (1814), and of course Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, published in English between 1812 and 1818 and in French beginning in 1819. Many commentators have been far too quick to associate Berlioz’s second symphony with Childe Harold. The original inspiration, as it was reported on January 26, 1834, in the Gazette musicale de Paris (a report necessarily authored by Berlioz), was for a Fantaisie dramatique for solo viola, orchestra, and chorus, on the final moments of the life of Mary, Queen of Scots, “Les Derniers Instants de Marie Stuart.” This, had the idea persisted—one supposes that it was sparked by Schiller’s drama, which existed at the time in several French translations, and which was the subject of a lengthy chapter in Madame de Staël’s De l’Allemagne—would have meant that the second symphony, like the first, would have included a dramatic musical beheading. Only later, we know not when, did Berlioz determine to associate the work with Byron’s poem. When he announced the first performance of the new symphony, in Le Rénovateur of November 3, 1834, he was in a highly ironic mood, and spoke of the symphony as a “tissue of absurdity and extravagance of a sort not even imagined in the insane asylum.” “What in the world is a symphony that calls itself ‘Harold?’” he asked. He then answered his own question: during the various scenes presented in the score, one could always find “the solo viola, the Harold, a daydreaming wanderer, like Byron’s hero, characterized by an annoying and longwinded melody that is repeated with hopeless uniformity.” “That,” he said, “is what is Harold.”

This comical and self-deprecatory bit is not usually quoted in the biographies, which prefer to cite the perfectly serious description of the work found in chapter 45 of the Mémoires. It is not impossible that Berlioz sometimes found the quintessential Byronic hero—Harold, or Byron himself—to be something of a bore. I add, however, that at least one medical doctor has taken Berlioz’s Byronic “spleen” or “mal d’isolement” (isolation illness), seen in his descriptions of Harold and of his own wanderings, as evidence not of an essentially aesthetic malaise but of a genuine physiological malady: juvenile myoclonic epilepsy or “Janz syndrome.”9 Altenmüller, “Hector Berlioz and His Vesuvius.” (Such d’outre-tombe medical diagnoses may or may not be accurate—we will probably never know—but they are certainly appealing products of the physicians’ professional… creativity.)

Let me again remind you of what Berlioz actually read, by comparing the opening of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage to the French translation by Amédée Pichot:10 Le Pèlerinage de Childe Harold, in Œuvres complètes de Lord Byron 2:237–238.

But perhaps Berlioz agreed with Belloc. One day, when he returned home from a soul-searching walk in the country, he came upon Moore’s Irish Melodies, as he describes the moment in chapter 18 of the Mémoires: “My eyes fell upon the poem that begins with these words: ‘Quand celui qui t’adore’ (When he who adores thee).” Berlioz gives the line in both French and English, then asserts that he immediately set the words to music. This was “the sole occasion,” he writes, “on which it seems that I was able to paint such an extraordinary emotion while still under its active and immediate influence. I believe that only rarely have I been able to achieve such a truly accurate and poignant melodic setting immersed in such a tempest of ominous harmonies.”1 Mémoires, 226. In a letter written two months later,2 February 6, 1830 (CG 1:306). Berlioz referred to the song as his Élégie en prose. The suggestion is that it was as much Belloc’s prose as it was Moore’s poetry that had a profound effect on the composer.

In her translation of Moore’s “When he who adores thee,” Belloc includes the footnote that appears in the first edition of Moore’s poem: “These words allude to a story, in an old Irish manuscript, which is too long and too melancholy to be inserted here.” In fact, when Berlioz was in England in 1847 and 1848, he learned the content of the story, and recited it in the preface to the second edition of the Élégie:

Berlioz’s setting of the French translation of Moore’s “When he who adores thee,” published with his Neuf Mélodies in March 1830, is indeed emotionally charged; of that there is no question. But the piano writing is problematical because the effort to create an orchestral sonority via extended tremolo is, in my view, in vain. (This is surely what led Hugh Macdonald to orchestrate the piece; his arrangement, to the best of my knowledge, remains unrecorded.) Below I cite the text of the poem, essentially in anapestic tetrameter and trimeter, with the unrhymed and unmetered prose translation upon which I have imposed separate lines:

In the third edition, printed in the Collection de 32 Mélodies brought out by Simon Richault in 1863, the translation is ascribed to “anonymous” rather than to Louise Swanton-Belloc for reasons that are not clear, although I have seen other instances of the conspicuous absence of a woman’s name on a musical publication: one of the most egregious instances of this sin of omission concerns the five songs we now know as the Wesendonck Lieder, which Richard Wagner first published without setting down the name of his muse, the poet Mathilde Wesendonck.

In Berlioz’s setting of Moore’s Emmet poem, there are several places in which, his claim to the contrary notwithstanding, the English does not fit the melody. At the lines “O say, wilt thou weep, when they darken the fame,” the music seems to say, “O say, wilt thou weep when they dar-ken the fame,” thus violating the anapestic meter of the original. Did Berlioz feel those anapests? Later we get “For heaven can wit-ness though guil-ty to them,” another infringement upon the meter of Moore’s poem. However, even in Berlioz’s setting of the French translation we find abnormalities: for the words when they darken the fame, that is, “s’ils noircissent la mémoire,” the music seems to say: “s’ils noircis-sent la mémoire,” with the mute e falling on a strong beat. This, to a purist, is a demerit. Julian Rushton has well summed up the situation: “We are left,” in this song, “with one of the more uncomfortable results of [Berlioz’s] lack of cadential routine.”5 Rushton, The Musical Language, 97. Indeed, this is one of those works that can disappoint Berlioz’s friends and comfort his foes.

In chapter 52 of the Mémoires, the Voyage en Dauphiné, Berlioz explains his continuing love for Estelle Fornier by means of a reference to “Believe me, if all those endearing young charms,” a poem by Moore that Berlioz felt encapsulated his own feelings. When we see the well-known photograph of the elderly Madame Fornier, taken in Geneva in 1865, we may wonder how it is that she was so readily able to reignite in the composer the sparks of youthful love. When we look at the little-known photograph of her in Lyon, by Frédéric Favre, taken some four years earlier, we get a better sense of the warmth and charm of her personality.6 The picture is reproduced in Beyls, Estelle Fornier, 112.

But whatever her appearance—Berlioz admitted to the Princess Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgenstein that “the years had destroyed nearly all of her outward allure; you have fully to use your imagination in order approximately to reconstruct her splendid beauty”7 CG 7:136. —the composer’s feelings were surely encouraged by Moore’s delightful poem, which in its simple way, in the author’s characteristic anapests, reveals a profound truth about the nature of love. The written word, after all, had always had a larger-than-life impact upon the composer, who was initially inspired to pursue musical study, it must never be forgotten, by reading in an encyclopedia the lives of Haydn and Gluck. Here, beneath the original English, we see the translation of the poem as it appears in the Mémoires, and, beneath Berlioz’s French, the translation by Madame Swanton-Belloc.

The same anonymous translator made a number of cuts in Romeo and Juliet, just as she or he did in Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, Lear, and Richard III, and these would have infuriated the composer, even though the aesthetic and ethical matters regarding the “updating” of Shakespeare, now more fiercely debated than in Berlioz’s day, will never be settled once and for all. (In Ian McEwan’s witty novel Nutshell, published in 2016, the author has the Hamlet story narrated by an omniscient fetus alive in Gertrude’s womb! What would Berlioz—or Shakespeare—make of that?) Let me say that I have been surprised that the Shakespeare scholars have not yet identified the translator of the Madame Vergne editions that were so important to Berlioz’s bewitchment by the Bard. That translator’s identity was apparently well hidden at the time, because if he had been able to do so, Berlioz would surely have outed him or her, no doubt with rage. “The translators are such asses,” wrote Berlioz to his old friend Humbert Ferrand on October 28, 1864, in a letter I shall have occasion to quote again; “I’ve corrected in my copy I don’t know how many silly errors of Monsieur Benjamin Laroche, and yet it is he who is the most faithful and least ignorant of the lot.”2 CG 7:139.

“Suit the action to the word, the word to the action”: Hamlet’s advice to the players, imitated in Lélio ou Le Retour à la vie, would have been Berlioz’s advice to the translators, too. Easier said than done.