Chapter Eleven: Berlioz’s “To be or not to be”

The ditty tells us something important: that by that time, August 1858, when Madame Bovary was new, when Tristan und Isolde was in utero, when Napoléon III was in full bloom, Hector Berlioz was known not only as the composer of the Symphonie fantastique, not only as the peripatetic conductor who for well over a decade had been promoting his music from London to Moscow, and not only as the sharp-tongued music critic for the Journal des débats, but also as the voice of authority among those in the know who cared to read and interpret Shakespeare.

Berlioz and the Bard is a long story. The composer’s final opera, Béatrice et Bénédict (1862), a version of Much Ado About Nothing, is the subject of the following chapter. La Mort d’Ophélie (1842), which we studied in chapter 7, is a heart-breaking setting of the tale of Ophelia’s demise as encapsulated in a text “imité de [that is, based upon] Shakespeare” by the composer’s playwright friend Ernest Legouvé. The dramatic symphony Roméo et Juliette (1839) is arguably the composer’s most avant-garde work. A sequel that he earlier wrote for the Fantastique—Le Retour à la vie (1832)—is a miscellany of musical numbers (including a fantasy on The Tempest) and monologues recited by a musician who, ailing with Hamlet’s angst and in the throes of artistic and amorous despair, considers suicide, only to decide that he must live on for the sake of his art. Berlioz’s remaining Shakespearean music includes a programmatic overture on King Lear (1831), an astonishing Marche funèbre pour la dernière scène d’Hamlet (1844), and a duet in his grand Virgilian opera Les Troyens (1858) whose words, “par une telle nuit” (“on such a night”), are lifted literally from the love scene in act 5 of The Merchant of Venice. The greatest might-have-been of Berlioz’s career is an opera on Hamlet, for which a commission was promised but, alas, never proffered. Even Berlioz’s reaction to Goethe’s Faust, which he discovered in the 1828 translation by Gérard de Nerval, was imbued with Shakespeare: not only is each of his Huit Scènes de Faust (1829) graced with a quotation from Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet, but the delightfully ironical text of last of them, the Sérénade de Méphistophélès—Goethe’s lines 3682–3697, Nerval’s Une Nuit, devant la porte de Marguérite—is freely adapted from Ophelia’s mad scene, “Quoth she, before you tumbled me, / You promised me to wed: / So would I ha’ done, by yonder sun, / An thou hadst not come to my bed” (act 4, scene 5), as Goethe himself, likening Gretchen to Hamlet’s would-be wife, acknowledged to his friend Johann Peter Eckermann.1 Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe, 1:281.

For Joseph Méry, then, the Berlioz who translated the poet was the composer. And indeed, in the music there is much that may be heard as Shakespearean, because the marriage of “contrastes et oppositions” (as he called them) that engendered the scores is the counterpart of the mixing of genres that Berlioz admired in the plays. But there is more, much more, because the composer was also a reader, going round in the later years to recite the plays aloud, in French, to friends and acquaintances whom he wished to infuse with his enthusiasm. And he was an advocate, joining in 1864 such luminaries as George Sand, Alexandre Dumas, and Théophile Gautier, as a member of the local committee formed to celebrate the quater­centenary of Shakespeare’s birth. From Guernsey, Victor Hugo assumed the honorary presidency of the group, something that caused such trepidation in the Emperor (in protest of whose ascendency Hugo had gone into exile) that he canceled the party. For Berlioz, birthdays were never terribly important, particularly his own, but Shakespeare’s provided an occasion to honor in public the quiet voice which long accompanied his writing and enlightened his life. Indeed, it is his unbroken forty-year fascination with the plays that sets Berlioz apart from his contemporaries as a Shakespearean of conspicuous note.

My purpose here is the small one of setting down an appreciation of the composer’s parody of Hamlet’s most famous monologue, and of registering Berlioz as a player in the nineteenth-century’s elevation of the Elizabethan writer to the status of a god. To do so requires preliminaries of various kinds, because we need to know something of Berlioz’s ability to read Shakespeare in English, and we need to know something of Shakespeare’s standing in France. When, on March 13, 1861, Berlioz published the parody in the Journal des débats, the leading newspaper of the French capital, he knew that it could function as parody because the soliloquy was now nothing if not a familiar tune. Despite his long war with Shakespeare, Voltaire, in 1734, had offered an adaptation of the “to be” speech, in rhymed alexandrines, in the eighteenth of the Lettres philosophiques. And Jean-François Ducis, in 1769, completed an adaptation of the entire play, no matter its distance from the original, which became the daily bread of the Comédie-Française until well into the nineteenth century. All of those who felt constricted by the canons of classicism, the knowledgeable and the newcomers in the age we call Romantic, adopted Shakespeare as the exemplar of freedom.

Berlioz cannot be said to have been gifted at languages other than his own, of which he became a master. As a boy in the Isère, in the eighteen-aughts (the noughties, our British friends would say), he was tutored in Latin by his demanding father, a learned country doctor. Virgil became the composer’s lifelong companion (ergo Les Troyens). Berlioz spent two years in Italy in his late twenties and picked up conversational Italian as do our students on their junior years abroad. He travelled extensively in Germany in his forties and learned nary a word. He twice visited Russia and there spoke exclusively French. He went five times to England between 1847 and 1855 and did on the first occasion mention to his father that he found himself able, to his surprise, to say what he needed to say. His love of Shakespeare derived, however, from no such practical experience. It rather developed—this is one of those things that cause us to see Berlioz as fanatique and excentrique—from love itself. Love for the Anglo-Irish actress Harriet Smithson, that is, who came to Paris when Berlioz was in his second year at the Conservatoire, and who, during an intensive but short-lived craze for Shakespeare in English, revealed the depths of the dramas and captivated the French public with her performances of leading roles in Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, King Lear, The Merchant of Venice, and Richard III.

All of the French Romantics were smitten by Smithson—Hugo and Gautier, Dumas and Delacroix, the list goes on—but only Berlioz made it his business relentlessly to pursue the actress, as we have seen in previous chapters, and eventually to persuade her, after a courtship whose vicissitudes forever confirm that truth is stranger than fiction, to become his wife. He could barely communicate with his Henriette, as he called her (to aspirate the h of Harriet, for a Frenchman, is hard); her French was nearly nil; and prurient, he would discover, she was not. The vogue of viewing the plays in English came to an end well before the marriage was celebrated, in October 1833, and her career became fatally foreshortened. Five and six years earlier, the vivid pantomime and posturing of the English actors, with their striking voices and intonations, had brilliantly enlivened Shakespeare on the stage. Now, amateurs in France would prefer to pursue their enthusiasm for Shakespeare on the page.

This meant dealing with printings in English of uncertain authority and translations in French whose relationship to the originals was unsure. Pierre Letourneur, the target of Méry’s admonitory alexandrines, published his renderings of the plays over a period of six years, from 1776 to 1782. His original edition (now rare) was reissued in 1821 in a version revised and reworked by the remarkably prolific historian and politician François Guizot, whose very championing of Shakespeare—seen in France as a breaker of rules—matched his opposition to the authoritarianism of the last of the Bourbons, Charles X, and his subsequent support of the more liberal Louis-Philippe, enthroned by the Revolution of 1830. By “Letourneur,” Joseph Méry and Berlioz and the others clearly meant “Guizot.” His thirteen volumes of Shakespeare went essentially unchallenged in the nineteenth century until Victor Hugo’s son François-Victor embarked upon another translation of the complete works: the first of the scion’s eighteen volumes appeared in 1859, the last in 1866.

Later I will offer a tiny sample from those and other competing editions, but let me now say who, in the minds of the opinion makers, was deemed competent to judge them. Of the members of the Shakespeare anniversary committee mentioned earlier, “I count only two,” wrote a reporter for Le Figaro on April 21, 1864, “who are capable of reading Shakespeare in his own language.” One was François-Victor Hugo himself. The other was Berlioz. The journalist, one Benoît Jouvin, thinking of the forthcoming banquet (Napoléon III had yet to order its nullification), then told a little story:

And yet, with reluctance, Berlioz needed them. “I have three editions of Shakespeare,” he wrote in 1856, “two in English, and one in French—a TRANSLATION,” the capital letters dripping with disdain.3 CG 5:379. The first two were probably The Dramatic works of W. Shakspeare [sic] from the text of Johnson, Stevens and Reed, with a biographical memoir and summary remarks on each play, published in Paris, by Baudry, in the late eighteen-twenties and early eighteen-thirties; and the one-volume Works of William Shakspere [sic], containing his plays and poems, edited by Charles Knight and published in London, by George Cox, in the late eighteen-forties and early eighteen-fifties. The translation was by Benjamin Laroche, in the Œuvres dramatiques de Shakspeare [sic] first published in Paris, by Marchant, in 1839 (volume 1) and 1840 (volume 2). “The translators are such asses!” Berlioz wrote in the letter of October 28, 1864, which I quoted in chapter 2. “I have corrected in my edition I don’t know how many absurdities by Monsieur Benjamin Laroche, and yet he is the most faithful and least ignorant of the lot.”4 CG 7:139.

Such exasperation is characteristic of much of Berlioz’s criticism. He earned his living as a writer, I remind you, working out of necessity (because his concerts rarely reaped what it cost to put them on) as a correspondent for the small-circulation musical press and as chief music critic for the large-circulation Journal des débats, producing a weekly column or feuilleton from the mid-eighteen-thirties to the mid-eighteen-sixties. He later published four collections of his journalistic writings, adjusting them to new surroundings and adding stories and yarns; he published a treatise on orchestration that was the first of its kind and that, as an aesthetics textbook, remains in contention; and he published a volume of Mémoires which, among the musical autobiographies, is unequivocally the best of the lot. He was a crusader for integrity and an opponent of fluff: vocal embellishment and vainglorious virtuosity were his bêtes noires. And when his emotions were high, when his hackles were raised—I come now to the point—he would typically cite Shakespeare. Confiding to his sister his frustration at having to live among so many souls simply incapable of appreciating the genius of his heroes, he writes: “To know those Gods”—Beethoven and Shakespeare in this instance (and most of the time)—“and yet to have to live among so many miserable animals who grovel about in the real world!” Everywhere nothing but “anti-music” and “anti-poetry”; “everywhere the opposite of the beautiful and the true, everywhere the effrontery of the ugly and the absurd.” He adds: “Ah, qu’Hamlet a raison! qui voudrait rester en ce monde si l’on savait quels seront nos songes dans cette contrée inconnue d’où nul voyageur ne revient!”—“Ah, how right was Hamlet! Who would want to remain in this world if he knew what will be our dreams in that unknown country whence no traveler returns.”5 CG 9:463.

This sounds familiar. Perhaps I should have translated by using what Shakespeare actually wrote in act 3, scene 1—

In Laroche, Berlioz would have found a more prosaic formulation, with the uncommon contrée replaced by pays, and the emphatic nul become the commonplace aucun. In Letourneur he would have seen “cette contrée inconnue des bords de laquelle nul voyageur ne revient,” adding the not inappropriate notion of banks (“bords”) to Shakespeare’s bourn, which (for the OED) means “stream.” Three different translations from the mid-eighteen-thirties offered three different alternatives: “cette contrée inconnue, d’où ne revient aucun voyageur”; “cette contrée ignorée dont nul voyageur ne revient”; and “cette contrée inconnue de laquelle ne revient nul voyageur.” In fact Berlioz was quoting the version that he came to know first, and best—the one issued at the time of those thrilling Smithson performances, the iPhone-sized libretto printed in two languages by the publisher Madame Vergne, in the Place de l’Odéon, in 1827.

A full accounting shows that Berlioz knew and quoted from twenty-three of the thirty-eight plays, including ten of the twelve tragedies. That is a more than honorable score for even a professor of English literature. The one he cited, loved, and identified with the most was Hamlet. He saw the play in London, in 1848, and in a letter set down what he took it to mean:

And yet, through it all, Berlioz maintained a certain distance, a certain irony, a certain humor. We see it in his word play, in his banter with friends, and in this article from the Journal des débats of March 13, 1861, which was theoretically a review of a forgettable and now forgotten opéra-comique, but which led off with the far more important “paraphrase,” as he called it, of what would become the most parodied, pirated, parroted, and even pantomimed passage in all of English literature.

How, in French, do you say “to be, or not to be”—that is the question! In 1734, Voltaire, claiming that the letter kills and that only spirit gives life, worried not a whit about the original construction, writing simply (that is, not simply), “Demeure; il faut choisir, et passer à l’instant / De la vie à la mort, ou de l’être au néant” (“But wait, we must choose, and must at once pass from life to death, or from being to nothingness”). In 1769, Ducis, too, sacrificed Shakespeare’s two infinitives to the twelve syllables of the alexandrine: “Je ne sais que résoudre… immobile et troublé… / C’est rester trop longtemps de mon doute accablé” (“I know not what to resolve… Yet to remain unsettled and frozen is to remain too long stricken by doubt”). The infinitive construction reappeared in 1821, when Guizot, following Letourneur, wrote “Être ou n’être pas, c’est la question” (which sounds like “that’s the question”). In 1827, the anonymous translator for Madame Vergne’s pocket publication wrote “Être ou n’être pas, telle est la question” (“such is the question”). In 1839, Benjamin Laroche, whose version Berlioz acquired and assailed, set down “Être ou n’être pas, voilà la question” (“there’s the question”). In 1865, when he got around to Hamlet, François-Victor Hugo decided upon “Être ou n’être pas, voilà le problème”—“there’s the dilemma,” or, as Hamlet says a moment later, “there’s the rub.”

On the matter of denoting not, I am put in mind of what Jacques Barzun wrote, with characteristic mirth and economy, in his remarkable Essay on French Verse for Readers of English Poetry (which I cited in chapter 2): “No two languages are closer and farther apart than English and French.”7 Barzun, An Essay on French Verse, 8–9. While the English infinitive requires two words, the French one, the English negation requires one word, the French two. “Not to be,” in English, is the only possibility; “to not be” is… to err. (Let us not be concerned with the zero infinitive—the base, without to. Shakespeare did not, after all, write “to be or not be,” although that is… a question.) French offers both “n’être pas,” which these translators adopted, and “ne pas être,” which became Berlioz’s choice. The difference would seem to reflect the translator’s sense of what the question is. But the Académie Française admitted, and continues to admit, the validity of both.

Here, if I may, is what Shakespeare wrote:

Shakespeare goes on:

When his eyes fall upon Ophelia—

The conversation, as the composer gives it, is close to the original:

After the powerful line “Get thee to a nunnery”—the word cloître, which the French translators used, does not obviously carry nunnery’s double sense of “convent” and “brothel”—Berlioz adds a riff: “Get thee to a nunnery. What wouldst thou want? A famous name, a lot of money, the applause of the mob, a titled husband, the rank of duchess? Yes, yes, they all dream of marrying a prince.”

Hamlet’s tirade against Ophelia continues with pointed visual imagery:

More tender and more touching is the music Berlioz wrote for the death of Ophelia, which we have touched upon in chapter 7: a setting of Ernest Legouvé’s lyrical summation of the tale in four strictly constructed stanzas, as the poet assumed the music would require, each with seven octosyllabic lines, each with a rhyme scheme of ababccb. The first reads as follows:

Indeed, Shakespeare’s bawdy was inevitably lost in translation. One specialist has asserted that Pierre Letourneur, François Guizot, and after them Benjamin Laroche “completely obliterated any trace of ribald pun.”8 Martin, “The Untranslatability of Shakespeare’s Bawdy Puns,” 8. When Ophelia resists his request to lie in her lap, Hamlet asks, in a famously vulgar pun, if she thought he meant “country matters.” In French, the question is whether she thought he was employing a boorish expression—“un propos de manant.” Her reply—“I think nothing my lord”—also contains a word then generally understood to refer to pudenda femina. In French, “rien” carries no such implication. Berlioz and his countrymen may have been deprived of such lascivious word play, but they took no less delight in the essence of the Shakespearean line: verbal contrast on the microlevel and inexorable intermingling of the comic and the sublime. At the approach of the tragic separation of Dido and Aeneas, for example, in the final act of Berlioz’s epic opera, prior to the departure of the Trojan hero and the self-immolation of the Carthaginian Queen, we find ourselves momentarily in the company of two Trojan soldiers perfectly content to remain on the Mediterranean shore and perfectly happy to forsake founding Rome. “To my pretty Carthaginian, I can already speak Phoenician,” sings the one, to an intentionally waggish tune; “Mine obeys me with devotion,” sings the other, “and speaks a little Trojan.” The moment is nothing if not Shakespearean. Like the gravedigger scene in Hamlet, it delivers the wisdom of simpler souls; it offers humble realities, not tragic harangues. A tiny two-minute march, a walking, pizzicato bass beneath two chuckling clarinets and two chortling bassoons, with two sentries trudging back and forth and muttering, to paraphrase, “to leave, or not to leave…”

The French composer wishes rather to air—and not for the first time, for it was the idée fixe of his career as a critic—the frustrations of his fate. In the “to be” paraphrase, he derides the abuses of the star system, still young but fast growing. Elsewhere, long before Twain, he deplores the benightedness of the public. At the scene in the tomb, the most imaginative moment of his own dramatic symphony, Roméo et Juliette, a note in the score says it all: “The public has no imagination. Works addressed solely to the imagination, therefore, have no public.” He urges that the scene be played only when the audience is replete with sensitive listeners and readers of the play. That is to say, “it ought to be omitted ninety-nine times out of a hundred.”

In one of his earliest efforts at journalism, a three-part biography of Beethoven based on popular anecdotes, press reports, and the recollections of his teachers and friends, Berlioz attempted to explain how to come to grips with what many now take to be the greatest of the “late” works, the String Quartet in C-sharp minor, op. 131—at that time regarded, on the rare occasions of its performance, as the product of a deranged mind. “You have to be of a mindset in sympathy with that of the composer,” wrote Berlioz; “you have to have experienced the kinds of feelings that this music embodies; you have to have felt the devastation that Shakespeare speaks about [quoting now in English]:‘The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely, the pangs of despised love, the law’s delay, the insolence of office, and the spurns that patient merit of the unworthy takes.’”9 Berlioz, “Biographie étrangère: Beethoven,” Le Correspondant (October 6, 1829); CM 1:57.

That was written in 1829. The paraphrase we have examined came thirty-two years later. Hamlet accompanied the composer throughout his mature existence, acting in the darker days as a beacon of hope. “Vivons donc,” he cries, as the alter-ego of the hero of The Return to Life, resuscitated from the execution he suffered in the Fantastique and determined now to carry on: “que l’art sublime auquel je dois les rares éclairs de bonheur qui ont brillé sur ma sombre existence, me console et me guide dans le triste désert qui me reste à parcourir”—“Let us live, then, and may the sublime art to which I owe the rare moments of happiness that have brightened my gloomy existence console me and guide me upon that sad desert that it remains for me to traverse.” Berlioz, an atheist, concludes with a prayer to the singular divinity he worshipped: “May Shakespeare protect me”—“Que Shakespeare me protège.”