Chapter Seven: Berlioz, Delacroix, and La Mort d’Ophélie

This letter, assigned to the spring or summer of 1840 by the editors of Berlioz’s Correspondance générale, could in fact belong to the summer of 1839, when Eugène Scribe and Berlioz do indeed seem to have begun to discuss various operatic subjects, when Berlioz was putting the finishing touches on Roméo et Juliette (whose genre Berlioz described as a “symphonie dramatique”), and when Meyerbeer would indeed have attended some of the rehearsals of that great work.5 Meyerbeer, Briefwechsel und Tagebücher, 3:209. It could also belong to the summer of 1838, as it was dated by the man who first published it,6 Georges Duval, in L’Événement (June 21, 1884). perhaps with a quip of Heine’s in mind (and not Meyerbeer’s), about Berlioz’s “symphonie sauvage”—the Fantastique—having been inspired by his passion for Harriet Smithson. Heine’s account of Berlioz’s concert of December 9, 1832, was first published in the Allgemeine Theaterrevue of late December 1837, then in an anonymous French translation in the Revue et Gazette musicale of February 4, 1838—with a note from Heine that reveals his limited musical understanding: “This letter [the last of Heine’s ten ‘confidential letters’ on Paris, addressed to his friend August Lewald, the editor of the German periodical] was written in the early spring of 1837. Since that time Berlioz’s musical style has undergone a significant transformation, as we know from his far more gentle and melodic second symphony, and from his most recent composition, the Requiem (in honor of those killed during the sack of Constantine), whose style is quite different from that of his earlier works, and whose renown has echoed across Europe.”

In 1834, the expression “symphonie sauvage” was applied to the overture to Les Francs-Juges.7 Vert-Vert (October 13, 1834). But the word sauvage in Berlioz’s letter would perhaps more logically pertain to the Symphonie militaire, which occupied Berlioz in the early summer of 1840 and which, as we earlier observed, soon became the Symphonie funèbre et triomphale (which Meyerbeer did hear at the Opéra on November 1, 1840.)8 Meyerbeer, Briefwechsel und Tagebücher, 3:520. The letter also seems to imply some sort of communication between Meyerbeer and Delacroix, but there is no reference to Delacroix in Meyerbeer’s diaries for these years. In Delacroix’s collected correspondence, however, the single mention of Berlioz regards his “symphonies en cuivres”: though plural, the reference, sardonic, is clearly to the original version of that Symphonie militaire, which is indeed scored uniquely for wind, brass, and percussion.9 Delacroix, Correspondance générale, 2:258.

The date of this letter—which we dwell upon because it is unique—cannot therefore be established with certainly, even if Berlioz’s witty and informal banter suggests a relationship with Delacroix rather more personal than the “purely formal” one adumbrated by Jobert.10 Jobert, “Berlioz et Delacroix,” 232. Curiously, Jobert neglects to speculate upon why, in the first place, Delacroix might have been waiting for Berlioz. Is it not logical to suppose, as did Jacques Barzun many years ago, that the painter had in mind a portrait of the musician?11 Barzun, Berlioz and the Romantic Century, 1:405. Delacroix did make a painting of Chopin in 1838, and could, conceivably, have imagined a portrait of Berlioz at that time. If so, despite Berlioz’s preposterous failure, a few years later, to appreciate the magnificent portrait by Courbet—even if what he saw was only its first version12 Gunther Braam, “Courbet,” in Dictionnaire Berlioz, 127, and NBE 26:121.—we would be in the presence of one of the great historical might-have-beens of Berlioz’s career.

One final question about this letter, which was first published by the writer, translator, and theater critic Georges Duval, on June 21, 1884, in “Mon Carnet,” his regular column for the Parisian newspaper L’Événement. Is it authentic? We do not possess the autograph manuscript. And we have no other record of the two artists having known each other prior to 1838, which is the date Georges Duval assigns to the letter. Did Duval see the autograph? The closing formula, “à bientôt,” is one I find Berlioz using on only two other occasions. His overwhelmingly common closing, with acquaintances, is “tout à vous.” Still, despite my misgivings, apparently not shared by Julian Tiersot, Jacques Barzun, Pierre Citron, or Jean-Claude Yon, the letter—perhaps because the rustic idea of Berlioz as a straw-hatted fisherman was so strikingly different from the romantic idea of Berlioz as an egg-headed composer—has been reprinted with exceptional frequency. We find the text from L’Évènement reproduced in Le Moniteur universel of the same day, June 21,1884; in the newspapers La Justice and Le Moniteur du Puy-de-Dôme on the following day, June 22; in Le Mémorial de la Loire on June 24; in Le Guide musical (Brussels) in the issue dated August 7–14, 1884; in Le Ménestrel on August 10, 1884 (at which time there were several members of the editorial staff who had known Berlioz, among them Benoît Jouvin and Louis Bourgault-Ducoudray); in Paris on August 12, 1884; in Le Rappel on May 14, 1890; in Le Monde artiste on January 4, 1903; in Le Figaro on January 5, 1903; in Julian Tiersot’s anthology of Berlioz’s letters, Les Années romantiques (1904), where it is dated “summer 1841”;13 Tiersot, Hector Berlioz. Les Années romantiques, 424. in Le Matin on August 22, 1905; and yet again, because Arthur Pougin found it remarkable, in Le Ménestrel, on June 21, 1913. After printing the letter, in L’Événement, Georges Duval added a postscript: “Delacroix was surely not surprised by Berlioz’s bad luck as a fisherman, because he himself had suffered a quite similar fate. I was told that, one day, fishing with Baron Gros [Antoine-Jean Gros, whose heroic canvases Delacroix admired], and catching nothing, Delacroix cried out, after three hours spent in vain: ‘Je crois que mon genre les dégoûte’ [I think that my style disgusts them].” The painter’s bon mot turns on the double meaning of genre as “my style of fishing” and “my style of painting.” Ha ha.

Delacroix’s well-known admiration of Mozart was shared by Berlioz. But while the painter’s love was unconditional, the composer’s was reserved.14 Macdonald, “Berlioz and Mozart,” 211–222. Delacroix’s now-celebrated Journal also reveals his enthusiasm for Spontini’s La Vestale, one of the operas Berlioz treasured the most.15 Delacroix, Journal, 1:779. If such mutual approbation suggests artistic kinship, the text of a newly discovered letter, relating as it does to the painter’s elevation to the Institut de France, suggests elective affinity. Like Berlioz, who failed five times, in 1839, 1842, 1851, 1853, and 1854, to penetrate the doors of the Académie des Beaux-Arts before finally entering that exclusive sanctuary, to his tremendous relief and satisfaction, on June 21, 1856, Delacroix was seven times denied entrance before gaining access. Berlioz knew the number and remarked upon it on several occasions.16 Bloom, “ ‘Berlioz à l’Institut’ Revisited,” 171–199. After a series of fruitless attempts that had begun in 1837, the painter submitted an eighth letter of candidacy to the then president of the Académie des Beaux-Arts, the sculptor Henri Lemaire, on December 26, 1856.17 Delacroix, Nouvelles Lettres, 81–82. Two weeks later, on January 10, 1857, he found himself elected to the much-caricatured yet much-coveted national honor society.18 The date of January 10, 1857, is set down in the Annuaire of the Institut de France (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1865), 107. It is certain that one of those who voted in his favor was Berlioz, who already in December 1856 mentioned his hope for Delacroix’s election to his confidante at the time, the Princess Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgenstein.19 CG 5:401. A few days before the balloting, on January 6, 1857, Delacroix, apparently ill, yet nonetheless expected to make the rounds of visits to current members required of all aspirants to the academy, sent this note to the composer:

As I have demonstrated elsewhere,21 In “‘Berlioz à l’Institut’ Revisited.” Berlioz was remarkably assiduous in attending meetings of the Académie des Beaux-Arts. When he was in town, he enjoyed walking down to the river, crossing the Pont des Arts, reading in the great library of the Vielle Dame du quai de Conti (as the building was known), then signing the feuille de présence before the session began. These sheets served the paymaster who prepared the supplementary stipends for members who actually attended. Berlioz’s assiduousness was such that when Jacques-Fromental Halévy died, on March 17, 1862, and the post of Secrétaire Perpétuel of the Académie des Beaux-Arts became vacant, colleagues at the Institut—apparently impressed by his oratory and his commitment to the organization, ostensibly persuaded of his ability to conduct the meetings, present the prizes, compose the eulogies, draft the reports—insisted that Berlioz propose his candidacy, which he did. On April 12, 1862, after several rounds of voting, the majority nonetheless settled upon the archeologist Charles-Ernest Beulé, an outsider, from the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres. Berlioz, whom Sainte-Beuve applauded at the time as a “high-minded artist and thinker,” albeit “somewhat dark and solitary,”22 Sainte-Beuve, Nouveaux Lundis, 2:244. was busy with Béatrice et Bénédict, and expressed relief.

Delacroix, who knew Halévy and found him beleaguered by the work of Secrétaire Perpétuel, as he noted in his Journal on February 5, 1855, presumably wished to serve the Academy upon his election and thus to contribute to one of its great projects, the Dictionnaire de l’Académie des Beaux-Arts; the first volume—long after the birth of the project in 1806 and the new impetus given to it by Halévy after his own election in 1836—finally appeared in 1858. (Five more volumes, through the letter G, were published between 1868 and 1909.) It is surely no coincidence, however, that Delacroix began to think rigorously about his own Dictionnaire des Beaux-Arts in the immediate aftermath of his arrival at the Palais de l’Institut. The draft of his preface, dated March 7, 1857, is a theme with variations on the difference between a dictionary in the normal sense of the word—which the painter saw as a consensual gathering of intelligent interpretations of the meanings of words, a banal compendium, that is, of the sort upon which the Academy was industriously at work—and a dictionary of an entirely new kind, in which a single artist might immodestly express his own personal and pointed opinions.23 Delacroix, Journal, 1082, 1782–1787.

In 1857, because of illness, Delacroix was unable regularly to attend the Saturday afternoon sessions of the fraternity of which he was the newest member. But he did appear at the meeting of March 21, and at nine further meetings before the end of the year.24 The count is based on the signed attendance sheets preserved in the archives. Cf. Delacroix, Journal, 1161. Poor health, more pressing matters on Saturday afternoons, and perhaps persistent feelings of isolation from his peers, as suggested by the editor of his correspondence,25 Delacroix, Correspondance générale 3:v. kept Delacroix’s attendance over the years from being perfect. But as the signed attendance sheets demonstrate—these are catalogued in table 7.1 below—his attendance was not as sparse as some of the specialists have believed.

In his Journal, Delacroix first refers to Berlioz in an entry dated April 8, 1849—on which day, in a passage in which he seems to be explaining to himself what Chopin had told him about counterpoint, the painter sets down his frankly absurd yet oft-quoted criticism, “Berlioz plaque des accords, et remplit comme il peut les intervalles,” which, if it is to make sense, must be translated loosely as: “Berlioz strikes a series of chords, and fills the intervals between them as best he can.”26 Delacroix, Journal, 439. On April 23, 1849, Berlioz, like Hugo, appears to the painter as a destructive or spurious “réformateur”; on February 19, 1850, Berlioz, like Beethoven, is said to be disjointed; on February 15, 1852, Berlioz, like Mendelssohn, is said to lack musical ideas; on January 17, 1856, Berlioz is said to make a fool of himself by excoriating excessive vocal fioriture; and again on April 13, 1860, by having opposed the sounds of trombones [in the Hostias of the Requiem, though the work is not mentioned] to the sound of flutes.27 Delacroix, Journal, 443, 489, 579, 991 (regarding Berlioz’s bête noire, Donna Anna’s act 2 aria “Non mi dir”), 1345. On January 22, 1858, when Berlioz made a public reading of the libretto of Les Troyens, at the home of his colleague at the Institut, the architect Jacques-Ignace Hittorf, Delacroix, a good friend of the host’s, was in attendance. In the Journal, the painter merely takes note of the occasion; in a letter to his son, Berlioz reports that the reading was a grand and encouraging success.28 CG 5:535. Despite his censorious remarks, Delacroix must have interested himself in the opera because he found it preposterous that the leading role should be taken by Madame Carvalho, the wife of the impresario who had opened his new Théâtre-Lyrique to a performance of Berlioz’s as yet unperformed opera. To his sister, in a letter dated September 29, 1859, Berlioz quoted the painter’s bon mot: “Didon chantée par une mésange!”—“Dido sung by a chickadee!”29 CG 5:35. Indeed, that Delacroix often made sport with words is something Berlioz surely appreciated. At the time of the English Shakespeare company’s arrival in 1827, which so astonished both of them, Delacroix, after seeing Hamlet and Othello, wrote with irony to Hugo: “Well! It’s an invasion! […] The Academy really ought to declare any such imported product incompatible with public morality. Good taste, good-bye!”30 Delacroix, Correspondance générale, 1:198.

The notes in Delacroix’s Journal reveal the workings of a mind long concerned with questions of artistic growth, appreciation, and value—a mind whose “conservatism,” if that is the appropriate word, would be demonstrated by his condemnation as illusory both Berlioz’s “fiery and impetuous genius” and the “progress,” after the mid-century revolutions, that brought the French nation to “edge of the abyss.”31 Delacroix, Journal, 579, 443. The difficulty of such an easy association of art and politics is that Berlioz, too, radical though Delacroix may have perceived him to be, was as appalled as was the painter, if not more so, by the uprisings and the aftermaths of February and June 1848, as I have had too frequent occasion to mention in this book. Looking across the channel from London, on March 21, 1848, Berlioz wrote in the preface to his Mémoires that “the art of music, long since dragging itself about in the throes of dying,” was now “stone dead.”32 Mémoires, 122. It is for this reason that Berlioz greeted Louis-Napoléon’s coup d’état of December 2, 1851, as a “coup de maître,” and as a “chef d’œuvre complet.”33 CG 3:92. He soon recognized that the Emperor “hated music as much as ten Turks,” as he put it, and suffered from “harmonophobia”;34 CG 5:239, 434. but he nonetheless remained a loyal subject and went so far as to hang a lithographic portrait of the Emperor on his living room wall.

Delacroix’s notes also tell us, I would suggest, that an unconstrained giant in the world of art can, in the world of music, be a man of unexceptional stature. Writing on April 23, 1863, Delacroix mentions a conversation about music that he has had with the poet and critic Antony Deschamps, who happens to have been one of Berlioz’s close friends in the eighteen-thirties, a great admirer of the composer’s journalism, and the author of the words sung by the optional chorus in the Apothéose that forms the final movement of Berlioz’s Symphonie funèbre et triomphale. Deschamps is the only man with whom Delacroix enjoys discussing music because, writes the artist, “he loves Cimarosa as much as I do.” (Berlioz once quipped that he would like to see “Cimarosa’s lone and eternal Secret Marriage go to hell,” because he found the opera “almost as boring as the Marriage of Figaro, without being nearly so musical”!)35 Mémoires, 562, a passage renewed from the Journal des débats (October 8, 1843). “I told [Deschamps],” Delacroix goes on, “that the main problem with music is the absence of the unexpected once one has come to know a piece.”36 Delacroix, Journal, 1409 (my emphasis). Now, the “unexpected” is precisely the quality of his own music that Berlioz prized the most: “The overmastering qualities of my music,” he wrote in the post-scriptum of his Mémoires, “are passionate expression, interior ardor, rhythmic momentum, and the unexpected”37 Mémoires, 796.—“l’imprévu”—the very word, with all of its implications for Romantic aesthetics, that Delacroix had used. Delacroix’s point concerns rehearing music, of course, and it is profound. But had he been as sincerely devoted to the unforeseen and the unpredictable in music as he was to those qualities in painting, he would presumably have been somewhat more understanding of Berlioz’s. Michèle Hannoosh has pointed out that, privately, Delacroix could be drawn to those of whose work he was sometimes publicly critical, citing in particular the cases of Byron and Baudelaire.38 In private correspondence, for which I am very grateful. And there is indeed some reason to believe that this could be the case for Berlioz as well. Nonetheless, a professional musician would not be wrong to suggest that, for Delacroix, music—despite his close friendship with Chopin, his relations with other musicians of distinction, his sincere curiosity, and his prodigious intelligence—was no more and no less than a “violon d’Ingres.”

Painting, for Berlioz, was no such “serious pastime” (as was violin playing for Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres). His second wife, Marie Recio, dabbled in the art, but he, beyond music, was far more a reader than a viewer—with one notable exception. In the quintet that marks the beginning of the end of act 4 of Les Troyens—Quintette, Septuor, Duo, fifteen minutes of the most sublime and inspired music that Berlioz ever composed—we find the following stage direction: “With Dido’s left arm draped over his shoulder such that her hand hangs before the child’s breast, Ascanius, smiling, draws from the queen’s finger Sichæus’s ring [the ring of her husband, Sichæus, murdered for his wealth by her brother, Pygmalion], which Dido distractedly takes back from him and then, rising, leaves upon the couch.”39 NBE 2b, 559. In the libretto, Anna, Dido’s sister, explicitly mentions this pantomime to Narbal, Dido’s Prime Minister, and to Iopas, her bard. The scene, of a wit more Shakespearean than Virgilian, derives explicitly from the painting completed in 1815 by the neoclassical painter Pierre-Narcisse Guérin, Énée racontant à Didon les malheurs de la ville de Troie. An expert might have guessed as much, but no guessing is needed, for Berlioz—who surely knew that Guérin was Delacroix’s teacher, and who surly knew the painting from the version hanging in the Louvre (another version from 1819 now hangs in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Bordeaux)—actually reveals his source, albeit in a private letter, when writing to his sister, on March 12, 1856.40 CG 5:438.

On one other occasion, in a letter to Liszt of January 14, 1853, Berlioz expressed unusual enthusiasm for a painting by another of Guérin’s pupils, Delacroix’s friend and contemporary Ary Scheffer. Of Scheffer’s now famous tableau, Paolo et Francesca, which first appeared in 1835, Berlioz exclaimed simply: “Dieu que c’est beau!”41 CG 4:266. (He had been looking at the original tableau, returned to Scheffer for cleaning and repair by its then owner, Prince Anatole Demidoff.)42 Grote, Memoir of the Life of Ary Scheffer, 155. One may be permitted to wonder if an admirer of Scheffer’s highly polished surface, which features one of the most sensuous Francescas that we have, could be equally attracted to the more pungent style of Delacroix, whose nudes, with rare exception, exhibit what Victor Hugo uncharitably called “une laideur exquise”—“an exquisite ugliness.”43 Charles Hugo, Victor Hugo à Zélande, 210. Berlioz himself, in his first Rome Prize Cantata, La Mort d’Orphée, painted what he called a “tableau musical,” an unexpected instrumental coda that depicts the calm after the storm of the Bacchantes’ murder of their tormentor. A note in the score tells us that “one can no longer hear the sound of their steps, the wind moans sadly and causes the strings of Orpheus’s largely destroyed lyre to resonate. In the distance, a Thracian mountain shepherd, recalling Orpheus’s earlier song, attempts to reproduce it on his flute. Little by little the wind dies down, the music it carried disappears, the lyre emits nothing more than a few incoherent vibrations.”44 NBE 6:59. This could be a description of an Orpheus painting that Berlioz might have seen—by Titian, or Poussin, or even Delacroix himself—but nothing we have found quite fits.

Over the years, Berlioz and Delacroix composed out many of the same themes. As I mentioned in chapter 1, their concern with the wars of Greek independence led to such works as Delacroix’s Massacre de Scio (1824) and Berlioz’s cantata on La Révolution grecque (1826). Their infatuation with Goethe’s Faust led to the seventeen lithographs that Delacroix published with the second edition of Albert Stapfer’s translation in 1828 and the Huit Scènes de Faust that Berlioz published in the following year, inspired as he was by the 1828 translation by Gérard de Nerval. The enthusiasm for Walter Scott that they shared with others of the generation of 1820 led to Delacroix’s Self-Portrait as Ravenswood (1821) and Rebecca and the Wounded Ivanhoe (1823), among other tableaux, and to Berlioz’s first independent concert overture, Waverley (begun in 1826), as well as to his later Intrata di Rob-Roy MacGregor (1831). Their common love of Byron led to Delacroix’s great Mort de Sardanapale of 1827 and, albeit indirectly, to Berlioz’s Sardanapale, the cantata for the 1830 competition that secured for him the Prix de Rome. In July 1830, Berlioz was sufficiently stirred by the bravery of those who overthrew Charles X to make a setting for double chorus and orchestra of Rouget de Lisle’s Hymne des Marseillais. That same courage led to Delacroix’s contemporary and eternal monument to freedom, La Liberté guidant le peuple.

Such mutual interests strike us today as the stuff of a potentially special friendship. At the time, however, the two artists were hardly unique in responding to contemporary literature and current events. Now, the legends of their greatness, which make the “real” Berlioz and Delacroix difficult to see, have perhaps intensified their apparent correspondence. We do, of course, have the autobiographical documents of crucial interest—Delacroix’s Journal; Berlioz’s Mémoires—but these are not factual narratives, nor are they writings of the same kind. Berlioz’s book—a mosaic of anecdotes and critiques, of tiny stories and travel pieces, of selected episodes in the life of the artist in roughly chronological order—was, at the beginning, as we shall detail in chapter 13, intended only for posthumous publication. Desire to let the cat out of the bag, and fear that his heirs might refashion the final product (which is a portrait of the artist as he wished to be remembered) led Berlioz to have excerpts printed in the weekly press, and to oversee the printing of twelve hundred copies, in 1865, of which he then gave two dozen to family and friends before depositing the rest in his office at the Conservatoire for postmortem recovery. The story of Delacroix’s diary is considerably more complex: the Journal advances an aesthetic doctrine, while Berlioz eschewed the mere word “aesthetics”; the Journal proceeds in a free and sometimes circuitous order, while the Mémoires move sequentially; and although neither book was intended for publication during the author’s lifetime, Delacroix’s did not appear until some thirty years after his death, while Berlioz’s was formally published one year after the funeral.45 Delacroix, Journal, 38–56; and Hannoosh, Painting and the Journal of Eugène Delacroix, 3–26.

As men of letters and broad general culture, Delacroix and Berlioz had in common the profession of writing (which both said they did with difficulty) and the production of prose of liveliness and exactitude. Berlioz, of course, set down not only Mémoires but nearly a thousand newspaper articles (the modern edition fills ten substantial volumes), three collections of articles and stories old and new, and a treatise on orchestration that is the first important work of its kind. Both artists, Jobert reminds us, were prolific correspondents.46 Jobert, “Berlioz et Delacroix,” 246–247. In fact Delacroix’s published correspondence gives us “only” several hundred letters, while Berlioz’s, with new letters continuing to appear, gives us well over three thousand. As men of character, Delacroix was “always distant and reserved,” while Berlioz, for Jobert, was “too enthusiastic or too easily carried away.”47 Jobert, 246. Berlioz was of course a man of many moods, as this touching recollection from the poet Auguste Barbier, who stood with Berlioz at the burial of a mutual friend, would suggest:

All of Berlioz’s writings—the private letters, the newspaper criticism, the collections of articles, and the Mémoires—are colored by quotations from Shakespeare in both English and French, as I have elsewhere demonstrated in detail.4 Bloom, “Berlioz,” in Berlioz, Verdi, Wagner, Britten, 7–76. No play more affected him than Hamlet, as we shall see again in chapter 11. In May 1834, he was optimistic about a commission for an opera on the subject, but this failed to materialize. Beyond the Hamlet-like moments in various works, the only explicit music he set down for the play is the surprising Marche funèbre pour la dernière scène d’Hamlet, completed in 1844 for performance during a production of the verse translation by his old friend Léon de Wailly, one of the librettists of Benvenuto Cellini, and the song, La Mort d’Ophélie, which—because Delacroix, too, was at least four times concerned with the subject—we shall consider here.

Berlioz’s autograph score, for voice and piano, is a setting of a “ballade imitée de Shakespeare” by his friend the dramatist Ernest Legouvé. Dated May 7, 1842, the song did not appear in print until 1848, both as an item in the Album de chant that came out on January 1, 1848, as a supplement to the weekly Revue et Gazette musicale now published in Paris by Louis Brandus, and as a separate issue from the same house. These printings follow the manuscript in being dedicated to Marie d’Agoult, Liszt’s longtime companion and the mother of the virtuoso pianist’s three children. On July 4, 1848, Berlioz, at the time in London, completed an orchestral version of the song, with the vocal part now set for a small chorus of sopranos and contraltos. This version—identical to the original in form and content—was published four years later, in 1852, as the second of the three items that comprise the collection known as Tristia. (A piano reduction of the orchestral setting appeared at the same time.) For publishers, piano scores were more practical and more profitable than orchestral scores; for critics, Berlioz’s piano writing seemed to cry out for instrumentation. In this case we know that an orchestral setting was his goal from the beginning: on May 8, 1842, one day after dating the autograph, Berlioz said to Legouvé that “if you like this music, I shall rewrite the piano part for a charming little orchestra and shall be able to perform the whole thing at one of my forthcoming concerts.”5 CG 8:197–198. For the original version (voice and piano), see NBE 15; for the version for sopranos, contraltos, and orchestra, see NBE 12b.

This small space is not the place to consider the constellation of beauty and madness and gender that post-Shakespearean representations of Ophelia bring to the fore, especially among feminist theoreticians, of whom the most cited is Elaine Showalter.6 Showalter, “Representing Ophelia.” But it is relevant to mention that Ernest Legouvé, author of plays in which women’s roles are conspicuously strong, and drawn as we see here to Ophelia, was one of the early and important male feminists in France in the nineteenth century: the course that he was invited to give at the Collège de France, in 1849, for example, appeared as a book later that year under the title of Histoire morale des femmes, in which he shows himself to be an advocate of equal rights for women.7 Offen, “Ernest Legouvé,” and Moses, French Feminism, 136–139.

Delacroix’s Journal is rich with references to Shakespeare, but the collected correspondence contains very few. The artist nonetheless painted and illustrated themes and characters from five of the plays, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, and, of course, Hamlet, of which we need here itemize only four representations of La Mort d’Ophélie. The first, now in the Neue Pinakothek, Munich, was completed in 1838 (see figure 7.1, below). With its broad strokes, vaporous lines, and darkly suggestive colors, it would appear to be a preparatory version of the painting now in the Oskar Reinhart Collection (see figure 7.3). The second (see figure 7.2) came to fruition in Delacroix’s series of thirteen Hamlet images lithographed by Édouard-Auguste Villain and published by Michel-Ange Gihaut in 1843–1844 (to which three more lithographs, purchased posthumously, were added in 1864).8 Delacroix, Journal, 1385n. The quotation at the bottom of the meticulously drawn panorama—“ses vêtements appesantis et trempés d’eau ont entraîné la pauvre malheureuse” (not shown here)—derives from Gertrude’s description of the drowning in act 4, scene 7 (“But it could not be / Till that her garments, heavy with their drink, / pulled the poor wretch from her melodious lay / To muddy death”) in the translation by Letourneur as revised by François Guizot and Amédée Pichot.9 Shakespeare, Œuvres complètes, traduites de l’anglais par Letourneur, 1:337. Beyond the precision of the image, Ophelia’s head, in the lithograph, is parallel to her torso, and not falling toward the water, as though the neck muscles (our impression from figures 7.1 and 7.3) could no longer support the weight.

The third representation (from the Oskar Reinhart Collection; figure 7.3) is a polished version of the first (in Munich): the pose is the same, but the brushstrokes are now veiled, the left foot is visible, the flowers are fresh, the leaves are vivid, the erotic aspect is intensified. The flesh, despite the nearness of death, is alive. Once thought to have been painted in 1844, the Winterthur painting has recently been reassigned to 185310 Delacroix, Journal, 1634. —the same year in which Delacroix seems to have completed his best-known rendering of the drowning Ophelia, now preserved at the Louvre (see figure 7.4), with Ophelia clinging to the branch not with the left hand, but with the right. In all four pictures, the subject seems to levitate above the surface—this, Delacroix’s take on Gertrude’s explanatory line: “Her clothes spread wide, / And mermaid-like awhile they bore her up.”

Harriet Smithson, Berlioz’s wife of not quite twenty-one years, died at home, in Montmartre, on March 3, 1854. The composer, who despite living elsewhere for more than a decade had always provided for her, was heartbroken: “We could neither live together nor leave one another,” he told his sister; “she enabled me to understand Shakespeare and great dramatic art.”11 CG 4:468. In a nostalgic recollection of his musician friend’s wife, Jules Janin set down these gentle words, which Berlioz later quoted in the Mémoires:

What is of particular interest here is Janin’s constellation of Berlioz, Smithson, Ophelia, and Delacroix. Like Berlioz, Delacroix had seen Harriet Smithson as Ophelia in the productions of Hamlet given by the English theater in 1827 and 1828, but neither did he fall head-over-heels in love with the actress, nor did he spend five years of his life in quest of her hand. When he made his first Ophelia painting (figure 7.1), apparently at Frédéric Villot’s villa at Champrosay, in 1838,14 Johnson, The Paintings of Eugène Delacroix, 3:84. he was encumbered by no breakdown of psychical distance and by no anguished craving for the living incarnation of Shakespeare’s deceived princess. He was drawn to the subject, according to the editor of his Selected Letters, by recollections of Smithson’s acting, including, perhaps, the freely swaying movements of her arms.15 Delacroix, Selected Letters, 139. The art historians, who have debated the dates of Delacroix’s four renderings, seem rarely to have asked the naïve question that has long occurred to me: Did Smithson’s face and figure serve as Delacroix’s distant models? Is that the meaning of Janin’s remark? We know that Delacroix worked from life, we would not be rash in assuming that, for certain aspects of the 1838 tableau, he would have employed a model, even had he had in mind earlier artists’ renderings of the subject, and even if he felt, later on, that artists ought equally to rely upon their imaginations.16 Lathers, Bodies of Art, 54, 111–114. Like a modern specialist, who has closely examined Delacroix’s four representations,17 Paes, “Les quatre représentations de ‘La mort d’Ophélie,’” 274. I cannot claim to see in the faces of Delacroix’s portraits a clear reflection of the woman who became Berlioz’s wife. But in the shapes of the head, the mouth, the nose, and even the body, there does seem to me to be a resemblance.

When Berlioz turned to the subject of the death of Ophelia, in May 1842, not quite nine years into his marriage with Harriet, he had to feel nostalgia for her glory days of an earlier decade. For Berlioz’s greatest modern biographer, the song, for soprano or tenor and piano, unmistakably “marks the symbolic end” of the composer’s marital bond.18 Cairns, Berlioz, 2:231. It is true that by 1840, long unable to practice her art, Smithson had entered into what became a long physical and mental decline. As we discussed in chapter 6, Berlioz took up with Marie Recio, a soprano eleven years his junior (Smithson was three years older than he), and at the end of 1842 he and Marie left on a European tour that did indeed mark the material end of the composer’s star-crossed union with the Anglo-Irish actress.

Such autobiographical interpretation, always tempting to the music historian, whose dreary alternative is speechifying about harmony and counterpoint, is particularly compelling in the case of Berlioz, of whose life we know many intimate details. How could this gently melancholic work—punctuated after the first and last stanzas with vocalises on the syllable “ah” that seem to render Ophelia herself present, as Heather Hadlock has nicely put it, in what is otherwise a recitation, not by a queen, but by an anonymous narrator—not be autobiographical?19 Hadlock, “Berlioz, Ophelia, and Feminist Hermeneutics,” 126.

Legouvé’s poem—imité de Shakespeare, it is worth repeating, and not a translation, as some of the program writers wrongly have it—is in four stanzas, each consisting of seven octosyllabic lines with a strictly maintained rhyme scheme of ababccb. Knowing that Berlioz’s setting extends to one hundred sixty bars, you might think that the regularity of the poetic model would have caused him to compose four like stanzas in periods of forty bars each. Not so. The four segments are irregular (of forty-eight, thirty-seven, twenty-eight, and forty-seven bars)—and, while each stanza begins in the tonic key of B-flat major, each ends upon the different and more or less distant harmonic plateaus of, respectively, F minor, D minor, G minor, and the dominant of C minor. It is the vocalise, or the implied vocalise (because, after the second and third stanzas, the piano alone renders the chromatically inflected line of the first), which each time returns us to B-flat major.

This skeletal analysis tells us something, not about Berlioz’s emotional autobiography, but about his musical persona: that he was allergic to regularity and predictability and addicted to originality in the service of the central idea he wished to express. Ophelia’s tragedy—her suffering, our compassion—is here embodied in the carefully regulated tonal migration, and in the tiny but affecting appoggiatura for the first “ah,” from the note F, which does not belong to the local harmony and thus resolves quickly down to the note E, which does, and in all of its subsequent iterations in the song.

By Delacroix, Ophelia’s tragedy is conveyed by her acquiescent facial expression, especially poignant in the lithograph of 1843—which is different from the other “Hamlet” lithographs, as one specialist has noted,20 Endenbaum, “Delacroix’s ‘Hamlet’ Studies,” 346. for having abandoned the visual convention of an imagined stage, although it is to be remembered that the scene pictured never in fact takes place on the real stage. Ophelia’s tragedy is furthermore conveyed by the exaggerated tilt of her head in the gloomy grisaille of the first painting of 1838, as well as in its more subtly tinted and polished version of 1853 (if the Hannoosh dating of the Winterthur painting is to be accepted), where the forest shadows and Ophelia’s fair skin are in sharp contrast, and where her now more openly bared breasts heighten the painting’s emanation of “erotic trance” that Elaine Showalter attributes to the lithograph.21 Showalter, “Representing Ophelia,” 84. The small canvas in the Louvre seems less sexual and more objectified: the colors have been brightened, the left breast is now concealed by the garland, and the head (as in the lithograph) is now rendered parallel to the surface of the water. In the Munich and Winterthur images, Ophelia’s head hangs sadly and frailly downwards, perfuming the atmosphere with the imminence of death. That in the Louvre painting Ophelia’s position is reversed such that she now drifts leftward, grasping the branch in her right hand rather than in her left, is perhaps due, although I cannot prove it, to the potential function of these small paintings as preparation for, or further developments from, lithography, where the image on the stone is reversed in the print.

In fact, Baudelaire, aware of Delacroix’s particular affection for Shakespeare, gives us what is perhaps the best view of these images, noting (as did Hugo) that the painter generally refrains from painting beautiful women. “Almost all of them are sickly, and glow with a certain interior beauty. It is not only suffering that Delacroix knows how to express, but especially—and this is the most exquisitely mysterious aspect of his painting—moral suffering. Such serious and elevated melancholy vibrates with overwhelming gloom, especially from the colors, broad, simple, rich in harmonic mass like that of all the great colorists, but equally plaintive and profound, like a melody by Weber.”3 Baudelaire, Salon de 1846, 115–116. If only he had said “a melody by Berlioz,” our mission would be accomplished.

In a later age, when Claude Debussy imagined the works that became the Nocturnes (Fêtes, Nuages, and Sirènes), he spoke of the “impressions” and of the “lumières spéciales” that that word implies. “Whistler’s nocturnes acted by suggestion upon Debussy,” the American-born painter’s first biographer wrote, “in such a way as to have led him to produce his own.”4 Duret, Histoire de J. Mc N. Whistler, 176–177. But even in this more compelling case of inner interaction between a music-loving painter who, at some of Mallarmé’s Tuesday evening soirées, would have enjoyed the company of the visually inspired composer of the Prélude à l’Après-midi d’un faune, the best case that can be made is that, in the works by both, a shadowy and indistinct atmosphere envelopes the lines that provide the underlying continuity.5 Lesure, Claude Debussy, 436. This is hardly synesthesia.

Like Debussy, who in the end smiled with irony at the notion that he was “the Whistler of music,”6 Debussy, Nocturnes, xiii. Berlioz, too, was surely an agnostic in Gautier’s Trinitarian church of romanticism, and an atheist in the temple of the alliance of the arts. “I no longer believe in those various theories that would have us imprison the art of sound,” he wrote in response to a speculative dissertation submitted for review to the Académie des Beaux-Arts and Académie des Sciences. “La musique est libre; elle fait ce qu’elle veut, et sans permission”—“Music is free; it does what it wants—and without permission!”7 Archives de l’Académie des Sciences, cited by Bloom, “‘Berlioz à l’Institut’ Revisited,” 197.