Moral Reason and Literate Values Applied to Cultural Meltdown

As an American, and indeed as a Westerner, one is thoroughly programmed to view every sequence of events as either progressive or decadent. Things don’t just stay the same. Indeed, lines such as, “It hasn’t changed in the past twenty years!” usually pop up in public discourse as spirited criticism, their outrage considered to be self-justifying. For a people which can place a man on the moon to permit any mass-transit system’s or chronic health problem’s unaltered persistence through two decades smacks of incompetence, if not malfeasance. Why, we must be losing ground: if we still do something—anything at all—the same way that our parents did it, our society must be embarked upon a decline.

And the sensation of decline is very real. Because we make money by changing things and amuse ourselves by changing things, the experience of the unchanging alarms us. How will we survive? How will we avert boredom? The incomparable author of The Revolt of the Masses, José Ortega y Gasset, has been much on my mind lately and often appears among my citations (as in my piece for this issue); yet I have come to recognize upon re-reading Ortega y Gasset this summer that he presupposes the presence of a great void just beyond all human affairs and, for that matter, beyond all terrestrial existence of any kind. It’s a familiar theme in authors who came of age just after the Great War. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, about whom I once wrote a book many years ago, gropes in his writings toward just such an “arbitrarism”—a worldview, that is, in which value begins in the arbitrary declaration of some founding group that this ritual is reverent, this mountain holy. The savants of our own day have carved notches into their academic six-shooters by blasting away lustily at human culture’s whimsical origins; but before World War II, one finds that the very vulnerability of our institutions and beliefs to the iconoclast’s assault rendered them more precious. They were like delicate plants that required a highly artificial environment.

Specifically, Ortega y Gasset builds his case for a new United States of Europe upon the notion that societies must be inspired with a sense of common endeavor—of mission—if they are not to wilt and perish. Saint-Exupéry’s literary hymns to technological advance (such as the early Vol de Nuit) are fully in step with such an outlook. The trouble here is that human values cannot be arbitrary, after all, if vast numbers of people are not to be beguiled by a very small elite of paternal nihilists pledged to shield them from the void: the creed of Ivan Karamazov’s Grand Inquisitor. For why would an entire society race to the moon or dedicate itself to colonizing a new planet if its members understand full well that croquet on a Martian Sunday afternoon would end up being as boring as croquet on a Sunday afternoon in mid-American suburbia? The masses would have to be kept busy, kept too preoccupied to think. The President or Emperor or People’s Choice would have to resemble the Duke of Marlborough in the English nursery rhyme: “He marched his soldiers up the hill / And marched them down again.”

The impression grows upon me daily that we are being marched in any number of directions by drill instructors who themselves can foresee perfectly well the sterility of each particular destination. We are being kept busy—with war, with pleasure, with neurotic anxiety, with drooling ambition. We are being handled quite deliberately so that we may not stop and think any of it through.

My own inclination, as must be quite apparent, is to see such trends as degenerative… but then, degeneracy is the flip side of progress. If I really believed in the vast downward turn of things, why would I be so committed to the work of The Center for Literate Values? Why would I be so delighted to report that we have just received a grant of $1,000 from the Earhart Foundation—the first four-figure donation in our brief history? Our position as a society is unstable, to say the least; but this journal and those who create and read it are proof that the will to resist unpromising trends lingers on. Despite the very best efforts of our surroundings to keep us from it, some of us are indeed thinking very hard about where we’re going.

My own suspicion, revealed in this issue for the first time, that our communications technology is dumbing us down primarily by emphasizing the visual came to me recently and as rather a shock. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed to explain. Another happy accident occurred when Tom Bertonneau, quite unprovoked by me, decided to train his vast learning and keen understanding in the direction of music—real music, the kind which can only be appreciated after several hearings in a quiet, still environment; the kind that has been supplanted by highly lucrative racket. Can it really be complete accident that our declining taste in music has paralleled our declining familiarity and facility with the written or printed word?

Yet as our own creative artists remind us in these pages, high expectation and bitter disillusionment are a substantial part of what stays the same in human affairs. If there is not much cause to hope in this world, there’s plenty of cause to smile… and the expectation of a smile is not at all an uncivilized hope.

The “New” Berlioz: Musical High Romanticism in an Age of Technical and Ideological Correctness

Thomas F. Bertonneau

Berlioz was not merely a composer mis-heard by… critics and neglected by… conductors; he was not merely an extraordinary artist fighting the usual losing battle with his contemporaries and early posterity; he was also an archetype whose destiny, when retold, was the story of an age; he was the incarnation of a style and spirit that we can no more expunge from the history of western man than one can expunge a stretch of years from one’s own past. 1

– Jacques Barzun

Before he became a Teutonic enormity and an artistic prophet, before he had made his own mark in the world of music and well before he had conceived his monumental Ring of the Nibelungs, while writing during his Paris sojourn of the early 1840s, a sharp-witted Richard Wagner (1813-1883) declared keenly of the Gallic composer Hector Berlioz (1803-1869) that he stood out against the prevailing un-musicality of the French capital both as a phenomenon and a paradox. “Berlioz is no incidental composer,” Wagner writes in a dispatch for the Dresden Abendzeitung; “he is in no way related to and has nothing whatever to do with the pompous and exclusive art institutions of Paris: the Opéra as well as the Conservatory hurried to close their doors at the very first sight of him” (Wagner 129). As for Berlioz’s not being “incidental,” this means for Wagner that he boasts no organic relation to metropolitan musical life but constitutes rather something sui generis within it—“within it,” one might say, spatially or phenomenally while yet existing spiritually apart from and artistically entirely beyond it. Wagner hesitates to call Berlioz either a Parisian or even a Frenchman, since he seems so antithetical to his scene: “Berlioz was forced to become and to remain an absolute exception to long-established rules, and such he is and always will be, both inwardly and outwardly… You will hear Berlioz’s compositions only at the concerts which he himself gives once or twice a year” (129).2 Wagner notes that “nowhere else will you hear anything by Berlioz, except perhaps in the streets or in the cathedral, where he is summoned from time to time to take part in some politico-musical state occasion” (129). Not even Republican or Imperial acknowledgment, however, served to guarantee critical respect; it could exacerbate critical hostility. Conservatory professor F.-J. Fétis wrote meanly of Berlioz in 1837: “His rare melodies are deprived of meter and rhythm; and his harmony, a bizarre assemblage of sounds, not easily blended, does not always merit this name.” In Fétis’ snide opinion, “What Monsieur Berlioz writes does not belong to the art which I customarily regard as music, and I have the complete certainty that he lacks the prerequisites of this art” (Slonimsky 57).

Wagner’s “rules,” which Berlioz fought to dissolve lest they dissolve him, were those associated with the operatic activity of the Italian-born composers who supplied the steady fare beloved and patronized by concert-going bourgeois custom in the City on the Seine . The names of Gasparo Spontini (1774-1851) or Luigi Cherubini (1760-1842) emerge nowadays only in musicological investigation, but in 1840, along with Daniel-François Auber (1782-1871), they dominated the lyric stage; and opera as a genre dominated Parisian musical life to the virtual exclusion of instrumental and orchestral concerts, notwithstanding a few visits in the 1780s and 90s by Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Music historian Martin Cooper in effect seconds Wagner’s characterization of Berlioz as a creative sport, hard to apprehend directly but describable by reference to that from which he so radically differs, by placing him hors de continuité in the chronicle of the Gallic muse. Cooper thus begins his classic account (1951) of French music with Berlioz’s death, just before the Franco-Prussian War, and carries it forward to Gabriel Fauré’s demise some fifty-seven years later. In Cooper’s thinking, first there is Berlioz and only then comes along something identifiable as “French Music”; the latter is unthinkable without the former, who gradually eclipsed the Italians and opened a space, but the former may not be conflated with the latter, for it absorbed no influence from the master, who indeed offered it none. Cooper judges that “Berlioz was fortunate to die without witnessing the miseries of the Prussian War and the Commune… The complete failure of [his opera] Les Troyens had finished him; he could struggle no longer against indifference and misunderstanding” (8). Cooper contrasts Berlioz’s philosophic attitude with “the deliberate frivolity of the Second Empire, the shameless place-seeking and corruption of Napoleon III ’s régime,” and he links Berlioz with the poet Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867), as an instance of “the serious artist” who “turned his back on public life in a gesture natural to those who inhabit and cultivate exclusive, ‘private’ universes” (8).

Nativity explains Berlioz’s lifelong eccentricity and privacy somewhat, for his birth was eccentric in the sense that it was provincial; then again his boyhood was often solitary despite his sisters. La Côte St. André, more village than town, lies almost adjacent to the Swiss canton of Grenoble , where relatives of the Berlioz family lived; the nearest French city of significance is Lyons . The district’s ingrained cultural conservatism meant that it remained moderately royalist in temperament after 1789 despite the imposition by the Directorate of a Revolutionary government. The Revolution temporarily confiscated the family property, although the Consular government soon restored it. La Côte St. Andre also escaped the worst distortions of the First Empire, again because of its remoteness from the political center. In the early Nineteenth Century, parents did not speak of home-schooling, but Berlioz learned at home, with his physician-father as general tutor, even after he turned ten years old and began to participate in a day academy in the town. Berlioz père approached education unsystematically but enthusiastically and humanely, stressing literature, history, geography, and science. In his Memoirs, knowing the answer, Berlioz asks, “How much tenderness must a man feel for his son to undertake to carry through such a task?” (Berlioz 34).3 The young Berlioz balked at committing lines from Horace by rote, but he delighted in maps and surveys. He records how he “would spend hours poring over the atlas, examining the intricate system of islands, straits and promontories in the South Seas and the Indian Archipelago, pondering on the origins of these remote regions, their climate and vegetation and the people who lived there, and filled with an intense desire to visit them” (34). The father also made a gift to the son of a flute and a guitar, to which the budding musician applied himself with natural eagerness, and which he soon mastered. A charcoal sketch of Berlioz with guitar exists showing him at age fifteen or sixteen seated alone in deep concentration over the instrument.

Cooper alludes to Berlioz’s late masterwork, Les Troyens, produced in truncated form in 1863 at the Théâtre-Lyrique, which can trace its origins to the days of childhood tuition. Berlioz étudiant felt his reluctance about Latinity suddenly diminish when he graduated from the sententiousness of Horace to the romance of Virgil’s Aeneid, which inspired him, as he read it aloud, with a sense of large action and high-pitched emotion conveyed in the loftiest diction. He would recite from the text, a quaint exercise that has dropped out of the pedagogical repertory. “How often,” he writes, “construing to my father the fourth book of the Aeneid, did I feel my heart swell and my voice falter and break!” (35). Berlioz recalls a particular incident involving Virgil’s line, at Regina gravi jamdudum saucia cura, which “disturbed [him] from the outset of the lesson:

Somehow or other, I struggled on till we came to the great turning point of the drama. But when I reached the scene in which Dido expires on the funeral pyre, surrounded by the gifts and weapons of the perfidious Aeneas, and pours forth on the bed—“that bed with all its memories”—the bitter stream of her life-blood, and I had to pronounce the despairing utterances of the dying queen, “thrice raising herself upon her elbow, thrice falling back,” to describe her wound and the disastrous love that convulsed her to the depth of her being, the cries of her sister, her nurse and her distracted women, and that agony so terrible that the gods themselves are moved to pity and send Iris to end it, my lips trembles and the words came with difficulty… I was seized with a nervous shuddering and stopped dead. I could not have read another word. (Berlioz 35)

The Memoirs address the rest of Berlioz’s childhood bibliography less specifically than one would hope, but they do cast forth a few hints, which the biographers help in piecing together. Jacques Barzun, in Berlioz and His Century, mentions François-René de Chateaubriand (1768-1848) and his Genius of Christianity (1802), from which a teenaged Berlioz transcribed a passage into his commonplace book. This concerned André Chenier, the young poet, a kind of Gallic Chatterton, whom Robespierre condemned and sent to the guillotine.

Berlioz’s religiosity always takes its bearings from his sense that personal integrity is morally superior to anything that might call itself official justice; that, indeed, the individual’s decency is always at odds with civic institutions. Just so, the solitary knight of the medieval centuries is Chateaubriand’s paragon of Christian temperament, acting on conscience rather than on social cue. Berlioz’s intense reaction to Aeneas’ betrayal of Dido foreshadows his interest in the case of Chenier, as narrated by Chateaubriand, and undoubtedly informs it; Chateaubriand discusses the case of Dido as foreshadowing Christian suffering in The Genius of Christianity, for she becomes innocently a victim to Aeneas’ imperial destiny. An Imperium or a Révolution by its nature tramples the subject’s conviction that he is an autonomous person not at the service of an arbitrary and libidinous collective. Decent men honor Love over Fate; Love is self-guaranteeing while Fate is only so much nebulous verbiage—a claim on the future as worthless as a junk bond. Another source for Berlioz, Bernard Gavoty, mentions Jean-Jacques Rousseau, an individualist in his qualified way, but names no titles Gavoty, 57). The posthumous Rêveries du promeneur solitaire, an account of Rousseau’s Swiss exile, seems to have exercised some attraction over Berlioz and the chapters plausibly assert themselves in the composition that established the young composer’s reputation, for good and for ill, in 1830. In the Symphonie fantastique, the Rousseauvian influence especially inveigles the lonely idyll of the third and middle movement in a music contemplative and almost static. Rousseau would have sharpened Berlioz’s sensitivity to nature, to which the finely tuned idyllic aspects of Virgil’s poetics had already awakened him. Hellenistic pastoral is the background of the Carthaginian sequence in the Aeneid; the orchestral interlude from Les Troyens called Chasse royale et orage echoes the “Scene in the Country” from thirty years later. One may speculate additionally, on the basis of the Symphonie, that Berlioz had some acquaintance with Thomas de Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821).

By his late teens or early twenties, Berlioz must have encountered Lord Byron, Thomas Moore’s Irish poems, Gérard de Nerval’s translation of Goethe’s Faust, and the first-generation French Romantic poets such as Alphonse de Lamartine (1790-1869) and Alfred de Vigny (1797-1863). He would later make vocal-orchestral settings of Moore and Goethe, although regrettably he made none of Lamartine or Vigny; his second symphony, Harold en Italie (1834), takes its program from Byron. Barzun remarks that Berlioz became who he was early through intensive reading. Berlioz had thus put his period of intellectual formation behind him by the time the Parnassians and Symbolists came on the scene, but as Théophile Gautier began to publish, Berlioz began to read him; he would eventually set six of Gautier’s poems under the collective title of Les nuits d’été (1856). One of the poems, “L’isle inconnue,” has an obvious geographical character to supplement its amorous main trope.

Another of the poems, “Sur les lagunes,” perfectly exemplifies the resignation to exile of the one who prefers a “private” to an étatist dispensation. “Sur les lagunes” is almost a Symbolist poem, as is “L’isle inconnue”; neither one is a public oration. Gautier and Nerval would have made Berlioz aware, in any case, of Baudelaire and the Bohemian poetics. As we have seen, Cooper sees similar creative psychologies in Berlioz and Baudelaire. One, like the other, fixed his direction by pure meaning, by correspondence, by signatures and the stars, turning his back on la foule, while becoming morbidly conscious of ambiant hypocrisy and philistinism.

Of novelists, the evidence suggests that Berlioz read Alexandre Dumas and Victor Hugo. He regarded Sir Walter Scott’s work in translation with fondness and wrote a Waverly Overture (1827). Much later he would keep current with Gustave Flaubert, whose Salammbô (1862) he particularly liked; the composer indeed consulted the novelist on the topic of Carthaginian attire for the production of Les Troyens, Part Two. Yet the life-altering—the cataclysmic—literary experience descended de haut en bas, not to say rather incongruously, on Berlioz while he reluctantly pursued medicine in Paris in the mid-1820s, obeying the wishes of his father. One writes “incongruously” because the French had always disdained the Hamlet playwright, Voltaire having described, or rather condemned, him as violating capriciously all the Aristotelian canons; of course, that was just the kind of fixed opinion to provoke Berlioz into an opposite frame of mind and incline him to unqualified receptivity. “Shakespeare,” he testifies, “coming on me unawares, struck me like a thunderbolt,” revealing at once “a whole heaven of art,” in which the percipient “recognized the meaning of grandeur, beauty, dramatic truth… and the pitiful narrowness of our worn-out academic, cloistered traditions of poetry” (Berlioz 95). Berlioz’s devotion to Shakespeare can take on features of religious veneration: “Shakespeare! Shakespeare! I feel as if he alone of all men who ever lived can understand me, must have understood us both; he alone could have pitied us, poor unhappy artists, loving yet wounding each other… It is you that are our father, our father in heaven, if there is a heaven” (462).

One stresses the literary background of Berlioz’s creative impulse and the particular bookish influences on it because his oeuvre, from its earliest items to its last, always aims at a fusion of two things: the moral specificity that one associates with poetry or narrative and the abstract beauty inherent in purely instrumental expression, which bypasses the concept to speak directly to the subject’s moral apprehension. One reason for calling Berlioz a Romantic, despite the frequent classicism of his subject matter, is that he believes in the morally transfiguring and potentially redeeming power of music. For Berlioz, music answers the deformation and dissatisfaction of the public world, twisted by lunatic political schemes and blighted by the false piety of preening egos in official positions. Conservatory director Cherubini, whose heavy Italian accent Berlioz mocks, once actively schemed to prevent Berlioz from giving a concert of his own works at his own expense for which event the Secretary of Fine Arts M. de la Rochefoucauld had already granted permission. “So you are planneeng an insult for the Academy,” Cherubini posed rhetorically, adding: “I will not ‘ave it, I will not. I will write to the Secretary and ask heem to withdraw his permission” (Berlioz 99). It fell out otherwise. Cherubini especially resented the fact that Berlioz intended to perform a cantata, La mort d’Orphée, which the Prix-de-Rome Committee, whose members vetted aspiring composers, had rejected. For Berlioz, as for many an artist, the antique figure of Orpheus stood for the socially antithetic character of the creative person, doomed to be misapprehended and to compensate misapprehension by his own spilt blood. It was no mere theory. In the revolutionary convulsions of the French nation between 1789 and 1870, Parisians and their countryman saw plenty of spilt blood and it was always the mob, egged on by its leaders, spilling it or shouting for it to be spilt; the victim was more likely than not a dissenter, a person of conscience.

The Symphonie fantastique, inspired by the advent in Paris of a traveling Shakespeare company, while not a vocal work, nevertheless has a “text” or, notoriously, a “program.” This program, compounding Shakespeare, Goethe, and de Quincey, is nevertheless every bit from Berlioz, who wrote both it and the score on which it comments in a caloric seizure to attract the attention of one of the traveling players in particular. Harriett Smithson performed as Ophelia in Hamlet, sweeping the admirer off his proverbial feet; she would become, after a prolonged suit, the composer’s first wife. Franz Liszt and Heinrich Heine would stand witness at the nuptials. Like the Orpheus cantata, the Symphonie comments directly on the passion, in the sense of his suffering, of the artist and on the implacable opposition of society to the individual, as individual, rather than as docile, obedient citoyen. The Symphonie fantastique’s program reaches its climax, moreover, in an explicitly sacrificial scene where the artist himself, like a new Orpheus, succumbs to the hysteria of an orgiastic crowd.

Subtitled An Episode in the Life of an Artist, Berlioz’s Symphonie remains a controversial work even while contemporary high-profile musicians argue over its character and meaning and—the erudite question lying at the center of a technical debate—whether the string band should play it with vibrato or without. Berlioz dreamed up for his opus fantasticus a palette of orchestral sonorities unprecedented in the symphonic literature; and he insisted that a purely instrumental score could mediate a complicated semantic intention. Early criticism set the long-sustained tone—with even Berlioz’s admirers admitting a measure of ambiguity into their appreciations. “Hearing the Fantastic Symphony,” Wagner writes, “one has the feeling of being confronted with an unparalleled wonder.” Berlioz’s score, “at which Beethoven would have laughed,” declares “a huge inner richness, an imagination of heroic strength” that “hurls out passion like an erupting volcano… Everything is huge, bold, but infinitely desolating.” Yet Wagner also says, “beauty of form is nowhere to be seen [in the score] and nowhere a quiet and majestically flowing current to whose steady movement we could gladly abandon ourselves” (Wagner 130). Fétis had said as much in nastier terms.

By an irony, Fétis and Wagner got it descriptively right even as they got it judgmentally wrong, for agitation of the soul, constant intellectual disequilibrium, and unpleasant contingency are experiences that the Symphonie aims to convey. Thirty years later, the Bostonians reacted in a similar fashion to Fétis and Wagner, their representative critic referring to “a nightmare or the delirium tremens set to music” and concluding that “we must protest against the idea of endeavoring to reproduce repulsive scenes by sound.”[i] (Slonimsky 60). One imagines the fellow looking down his nose as he penned the period. Wilfrid Mellers, however, calls the same work “one of the most tautly disciplined… in early nineteenth century music” (183). Hugh MacDonald, a dean of Berlioz studies, assesses the Symphonie fantastique as “at once the most bewildering, the most novel, and the most popular of [Berlioz’s] works” (30). He praises “the uncanny translation into sound of mental images… the resourcefulness of the instrumentation, [and] the modernity of [Berlioz’s] sense of color” (38). Time has not resolved these contradictions.

Only well into the Twentieth Century did the Symphonie fantastique begin to gain a foothold in standard repertory, with other items in the Berlioz catalogue slowly and belatedly catching up. A current controversy, fired by a kind of antiquarian passion among musicologists and orchestral players, picks up a thread from Barzun and hinges on the question whether, after one hundred and seventy-five years, anyone but Berlioz has ever interpreted the music as he intended it to be interpreted; or on the question whether modern orchestral practice adequately reflects the materiality (gut strings and pre-modern woodwinds and brass) of the early-Nineteenth Century orchestra on which the composer founded his conception of how the score should sound. In simple, is Berlioz heard or mis-heard? And what does it mean to say that we mis-hear him? If modern orchestral practice had diverged significantly from early-Nineteenth Century fashion, as the antiquarians posit, then Twentieth Century representations of the Symphonie would not have gotten it right. Audiences beyond those that heard Berlioz himself conduct would never have heard the “real” score; they would have apprehended him, as it were, from an obtuse angle. One writer cites performances after 1870 or so by acolytes of Wagner as the source of troubles, as these technicians of the baton, inappropriately translating from Wagner to Berlioz, applied a surplus of rubato to a score that remains classically rigorous in its indication of tempi, even as, with Romantic audacity, it tests tame notions of scope and color. Berlioz’s Idée fixe is not Wagner’s Leitmotiv; Berlioz’s textures tend to openness while Wagner’s tend to saturation. Post-Berliozian performances of Berlioz would be, by these lights, paradoxically too Romantic. It seems abundantly evident that criticism cannot separate the Symphonie fantastique either from the many-layered circumstances of its conception or from its provocative “program,” also tied up in the same tangled knot of place and persons. This too belongs to its paradigmatic Romanticism. In deference to Berlioz, one looks again to the Memoirs.

A group of itinerant players had come to Paris to perform at the Odéon, including the fetching Miss Smithson. “The impression made on my heart and mind by her extraordinary talent, nay her dramatic genius, was equaled only by the havoc wrought in me by the poet she so nobly interpreted” (Berlioz 95). So powerfully did Hamlet affect Berlioz that “a feeling of intense, overpowering sadness came over me, accompanied by a nervous condition like a sickness, of which only a great writer on physiology could give an adequate idea” (95). During sleepless days, Berlioz wandered in a stupor through the streets of Paris and along the Seine . In his rooms one evening, he found Moore’s Irish Melodies open on his desk at the “Elegy,” a poem to hopeless love, in which the poet testifies that, “a sorrowing heart will find its own likeness” (96-97). Unable to fulfill his ascetic promise to himself to stay away from the Odéon, so as “not to expose myself a second time to the flame of Shakespeare’s genius,”[ii] he returned for a performance of Romeo and Juliet. “At the time,” he writes, “I did not know a word of English; I could only glimpse Shakespeare darkly through the mists of Letourneur’s translation…

But the power of the acting, especially that of Juliet herself, the rapid flow of the scenes, the play of expression and voice and gesture, told me more and gave me a far richer awareness of the ideas and passions of the original than the words of my pale and garbled translation could do. An English critic stated in The Illustrated London News last winter that after seeing Miss Smithson as Juliet I exclaimed, “ I shall marry that woman and write my greatest symphony on the play.” I did both, but I never said anything of the sort. (Berlioz 97)

Contemporaneous illustrations preserve for posterity Smithson’s effective posture and gesticulation; Delacroix later painted her from memory as Ophelia. Berlioz first responded to the fiery provocation by arranging the concert of his own works that Cherubini tried to prevent; he calculated (wrongly) that publicity would call him to Smithson’s attention. He then rapidly wrote the Symphonie fantastique, incorporating some already existing material, including the Idée fixe and the entire fourth movement, or Marche au supplice, a discard from an unfinished (a hardly begun) opera. Again, he hoped to become public enough for Smithson to notice him. What the British journalist of the time refers to as Berlioz’s “greatest symphony” is not the Symphonie fantastique but rather the later symphony with chorus and vocal soloists entitled Roméo et Juliette (1839), another generic hybrid that continues to inspire controversy. The Memoirs passage quoted above in description of the dual revelation of Shakespeare and Harriett Smithson employs a vocabulary intimately related to the one that informs the program of the Symphonie fantastique. Perhaps the Memoirs, being retrospective, merely absorb the earlier text. One suspects, however, that in his autobiography Berlioz engages in a real exercise of disciplined anamnesis and that inquirers can trust the account.

Phrases from the autobiography such as “the rapid flow of scenes” and “the play of… ideas and passions” offer themselves as especially pertinent. They suggest, as a number of commentators have remarked, the “vague des passions,” a coinage of Chateaubriand’s in The Genius of Christianity, which Berlioz himself cited in explanatory connection with his Symphonie. This “wavering” or turbulence of affect Chateaubriand associates with the disestablishment by Christianity of the old, comparatively more stable, pagan emotions; modernity, he says, has disgruntled human emotions even more, rendering them motile in the extreme and hypersensitive to all chance provocations. Modern passion has no fit object, as medieval passion had, in saintliness or Godhead, to provide it with direction. The modern subject’s faculties, “confined in the breast, act only upon themselves” and receive fresh nervousness from a deluge of “knowledge without experience” (Chateaubriand 296), which implies journalism and popular fiction. In addition, while we live in unprecedented material affluence, full of stimulation, “our existence is poor, insipid, and destitute of charms” (296). The problem becomes exacerbated with each passing year. “The more nations advance in civilization,” writes the Viscount, “the more this unsettled state of the passions predominates” (296). Formerly, when a sensitive soul reacted in this way to the world, he or she might seek refuge in a cloistered life, “but nowadays, when those ardent souls have no monastery to enter, or have not the virtue that would lead them to one, they feel like strangers among men” (298).

The program of the Symphonie suggests radical discomfiture with the world leading to a psychological crisis. It begins with a narrative “frame” that puts the rest into a unified sequence: “A young musician of morbid disposition and powerful imagination poisons himself with opium in an attack of despairing passion. The dose of the drug, too weak to kill him, plunges him into a deep sleep accompanied by strange dreams in which sensations, feelings and memories are transformed in his sick brain into musical images and ideas” (MacDonald 33). Berlioz appends separate titles to the five movements of his Symphonie: (I) “Reveries—Passions”; (II) “A Ball”; ( III ) “Scene in the Country”; (IV) “March to the Scaffold”; and (IV) “Dream of a Witches’ Sabbath.” Each carries an additional weight of programmatic verbiage. Thus, for (I) Reveries—Passions: “The beloved herself appears to him as a melody, like an Idée fixe, an obsessive idea that he keeps hearing wherever he goes. He first recalls the sickness of the soul, the flux of passion, the unaccountable joys and sorrows he experienced before he saw his beloved; then the volcanic love that she suddenly inspired in him, his delirious raptures, his jealous fury, his persistent tenderness, and his religious consolations” (MacDonald 33). It is not only in the rhetorical supplement to the score, however, that listeners encounter the expression of arch-Romantic inner turbulence and disequilibrium of the spirit. The music represents these states even more vividly—that is Berlioz’s point—than do the words. MacDonald writes of the Idée fixe, one of the most striking melodies ever written: “The contrast of passionate legato and gruff angularity is deliberate, and though we may not admire the melody as a beautiful entity in its own right (Berlioz did not intend that we should), the rise and fall of its phrases, the violent expression marks, and the insidious chromaticisms perfectly serve his purpose” (34). Mellers sees it this way: “This initial arpeggiated phrase, with its rising sixth, suggests a Beethovenian challenge; but it is asymmetrically extended in declamatory style, always aspiring upwards but straining back to the F which droops to E natural. This aspiring phrase is balanced by a clause falling through a seventh, followed by the original sixth inverted, with the chromatic intrusion creating a change to a triplet rhythm” (182).

Mellers’ reference to Beethoven brings up the question of what relation, if any at all, the Symphonie fantastique bears to the Viennese composer’s Sixth or Pastoral Symphony (1808). The Pastoral’s five-movement layout and its quasi-literary, rather Rousseauvian program together suggest that Beethoven’s score anticipates that of Berlioz, perhaps even by supplying a model. Berlioz had in fact heard the Pastoral when the Société des Concerts traversed eight of Beethoven’s mighty nine in 1828. Berlioz would also probably have had heard Liszt’s piano reductions of the symphonies. The Pastoral would have suggested to Berlioz the possibility of purely instrumental music as the medium for apprehensible narrative, although Christoph von Gluck’s opera-interludes already do this in the mid-Eighteenth Century—and Berlioz knew Gluck’s scores intimately. Beethoven’s symphony purports to convey the emotions inspired by a day spent walking in the country, listening to the sounds both of nature and of rural society, and giving oneself to the non-civic immediacy of it all. The first movement, for example, would represent the “awakening of cheerful feelings upon arrival in the country” and the second movement a “scene by a brook.” As in Berlioz, the idea is to capture by purely instrumental means intense subjective reactions by a sensitive or poetic soul to the sights and phases of country life, some entirely natural and others having to do with peasant rituals, such as a village dance with pipers and a hymn of thanksgiving offered in prayer after the passage of a thunderstorm.

Beethoven’s musical material nevertheless differs entirely from that of Berlioz. Despite its folksong-like character, the first subject of Beethoven’s first movement functions, without any preliminaries, as the main theme of a clear sonata-allegro; whatever the undoubted subtleties of the working-out, listeners immediately grasp the direction of the musical argument. A crisis comes with the thunderstorm—the effects are vivid, even cinematic—but the crisis also passes: the experience for the listener is positive and restorative. In Mellers’ words, nature constituted for Beethoven “a refuge from people” so that the Pastoral becomes “a deliberate study in innocence by a sophisticated consciousness”; and “by making his modulations simply an effect of color,” Beethoven creates an idyll in which “there is no conflict” (65 and 66).

The Symphonie fantastique, by contrast, is all conflict; Berlioz allows no reconciliation of subject with object-world, and he permits no restorative assimilation to the natural scene. Starting from critical premises about the modern Self, Rousseau’s and Chateaubriand’s, and building on his own experience of impossible desire, Berlioz tells the story musically in his Symphonie of the subject’s inevitable annihilation, of his sacrifice by a demonic world that despises integrity and authenticity and mocks them ruthlessly until they are humiliated. The listener’s vicarious experience of the Symphonie fantastique must correspond more to that implied by De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater than it does to that implied by Rousseau’s Reveries. While one might analyze the first movement as a sonata-allegro, it behaves almost as though Berlioz conceived it as an anti-sonata; for always and everywhere, by abrupt modulation, rhythmic displacement, and bizarre instrumental timbres, he subverts one’s expectation about what the music ought to do and where it ought to travel. Even the Haydn-like slow introduction to the Allegro Agitato proper of the movement challenges inherited form, since it borrows its basic intervals from the very thematic stuff to which it is supposed to serve as a mere preamble. The Idée fixe, always present, tends to retain its shape, but the accompaniment renders this shape unstable by attacking its elegance through offbeat nervous figurations, like thromboses, in the bass. It is as though a subject apprehends an object but only under fitful strobe-like illumination among twilight and shadows. The fact that the Idée fixe, although an integral melody, is also an extended one makes it difficult to apprehend in another way: on its initial appearance (violins), it stretches through forty bars of plastic unpredictable motion; it thereby exceeds the ability of any ordinary “listening memory” to record it and in this sense it possesses just the sublimity that Berlioz requires it to have.

The “subverted melody,” as one might call it, recurs in the Berlioz oeuvre, operating like a structural principle. The gripping Act I aria from Les Troyens, “Du Roi des Dieux,” sung by Cassandra while the Trojans fatuously drag the wooden horse into their city, pits the anxiety ridden minor-key desperation of the prophetess against the major-key exuberance of a triumphal march in the nationalist idiom. In the “Ride to the Abyss” in Part IV of La damnation de Faust, the steady gallop of the horses, represented by the celli and basses, trips constantly against offbeat bleating interjections in the high woodwinds, culminating in the condemned man’s affrighted shout of, “Il pleut du sang,” just before he plummets into the pit.

The Symphonie fantastique also illustrates Berlioz’s concern for spatial effects as an enhancement of the musical meaning. In the third-movement Adagio, the “Scene in the Country,” for example, a lonely shepherd pipes a simple song, given to the Cor Anglais, which invites an answer; the response comes from an oboe that the score explicitly positions backstage of the orchestra so that the effects of distance and separation strike listeners realistically. MacDonald notes that in the “Scene in the Country,” more than elsewhere in Berlioz’ score, “the debt to Beethoven’s Pastoral is… most obvious” (36). But Beethoven gives out nothing in the Pastoral so desolate as Berlioz’ forlorn piper; even the storm, when it passes, does so distantly, mixing fragments of the Idée fixe with the tremolos on the muted drums. When at last the Cor Anglais plays its plaint again, no answer comes. The fourth movement, or “March to the Scaffold,” masses a military instrumentarium, with prominent trumpets and side drums with snares attached. The program tells how “the artist,” in his opiate delirium, “dreams that he has killed his beloved, for which he has been condemned to death and led to execution… At the end, the Idée fixe reappears for a moment like a last memory of the beloved before being cut short by the fatal blow” (MacDonald 36). The fifth-movement finale, “Dream of a Witches’ Sabbath,” calls for offstage bells that intone the medieval plainsong Dies Irae, subsequently taken up and distorted by various combinations of instruments all playing in extreme registers. Here, the spirit of the deceased finds itself, like Faust in Goethe’s drama, condemned to hellish tortures, completing the victimary trajectory of the supplementary story. The subject of the drama discovers his Orphic fate and succumbs to his tormenters in a sparagmatic tableau. The movement is partly fugal, fugue being the musical procedure par excellence for bringing a crisis to its head. MacDonald refers to the “Witches’ Sabbath” as “a scene of chaos and a Bosch-like profusion of ungainly figures,” in which “the orchestra is exploited in an altogether revolutionary way” (37). Again, a number of later musical moments in the Berlioz catalogue plausibly stem from this movement, most especially the Dies Irae of his Grande Messe des Morts (1838), with its four brass bands deployed north, south, east, and west around the orchestra and chorus, and the final sequence (Part IV) of the “Légende dramatique,” La damnation de Faust (1842), with its demon-chorus and weird instrumental effects.

As a lure to snag Harriett Smithson as his wife, the Symphonie fantastique proved slow-acting; the marriage needed four years after the premiere to happen—and it was a less than satisfactory match despite its producing a son, Louis, whom both parents loved even when he tested that love severely. As prophecy, however, the Symphonie fantastique proved canny, as though Berlioz had predicted (he had!) how the critics would pillory his autobiographical-expressionist appropriation of the hitherto genteel musical form known as the symphony. Beginning the first movement of the Symphonie fantastique as a slow introduction on the model of Haydn is probably a calculated gesture to make the subsequent disruption of inherited form all the more shocking. Shocked listeners were. We have sampled contemporary Parisian reaction. Foreign reaction employed terms no less harsh. The London Athenaeum opined in March 1839 that the Symphonie “is a Babel , and not a Babylon of music” (Slonimsky 57). The Dramatic and Musical Review registered its judgment in January 1843 that “Berlioz, musically speaking, is a lunatic,” a view echoed by another London paper, which called the composer “a daring lunatic” (Slonimsky 57). An anonymous New York reviewer wrote in November 1868: “The third movement [of the Symphonie] ends with what the programme calls ‘the sinking of the sun—a distant roll of thunder—silence.’ The thunder is well imitated, and the silence is delicious” (Slonimsky 59). At least orchestras were playing the score. A second symphony, Harold en Italie after Byron, appeared from Berlioz in 1834, rather more conventional than its precursor, but with the novelty of requiring a solo viola in an obbligato or concerted role. A third symphony (1839), involving vocal soloists and choruses as well as a large and variegated orchestra, sets portions of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, and has obvious links to the original Smithson-cataclysm of 1827. Wagner liked a fourth and final symphony, the Symphonie funebre et triomphale, scored for a massive military wind-band or harmonie to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the 1830 Revolution. Berlioz financed his own orchestra concerts, as Wagner reported, and he struggled to get his operas performed, pulling strings, entering into exchanges of favors that typically fell into delinquency once Berlioz had delivered on his side of the bargain. Benvenuto Cellini (1832) failed through active sabotage by its reluctant producer; theaters pronounced La damnation Faust unperformable, and Les Troyens could only be mounted, shorn of its first two acts, in the inadequate Théatre-Lyrique five years after its completion in score.

The Old Berlioz, as we might call him, held the status at the end of the Nineteenth Century and the beginning of the Twentieth of a sport or a curiosity, to be sampled on rare occasions for his outrageous and possibly entirely non-musical qualities, while being otherwise safer to ignore. The practical demands of his scores, such as the three on-stage brass ensembles required for Les Troyens, baffled and irritated his contemporaries; but the very challenge constituted by these demands would eventually attract to the composer’s posthumous cause the advocates of a new technology, recording, that became adequate to symphonic and choral music with the arrival of the electrical process in the mid-1920s. French critics of the 1840s despised Berlioz—or welcomed the rhetorical opportunity to pretend that they did—but stereo “buffs” of the 1950s and 60s learned to love him. In the 1980s a battle took shape with competitors claiming laurels for having set down digitally the “definitive” enrigistrement of the Symphonie fantastique or the Requiem. The name of Berlioz even got swept up in debates over what falls outside the limits, not just of musical, but also of political correctness, with ministers of state and descendants of Richard Wagner weighing in on the issue.

The “Berlioz Phenomenon” raises a number of esthetic and epistemological questions in acute form. What do we mean when we speak of Romanticism in music? How is Romantic music different from the “Classical” music that preceded it? Can music, especially instrumental music, convey meaning, as the “program” describing the “action” of the Symphonie fantastique implies? Or can music express the events that generate a cluster of emotions, as the Symphonie fantastique is supposed to express Berlioz’s emotions on being bowled over by Harriett Smithson playing Ophelia? What constitutes a “correct” or “authentic” performance of a particular score? And what, given the inevitability of temporal distance, are the chances of recovering from one hundred and seventy years in the past the composer-intentions that would permit a “correct” or “authentic” performance? Do the criteria of musical beauty change or are they related to Platonic ideals whose being is changeless and eternal? If the criteria of musical beauty do change, then what forces bring about the changes? What does representation mean in the realm of music? Does music really represent anything except itself? How does technology influence musical reception? Does technology—recording—remove listeners even farther from the composer-intention than a live performance given many decades or even a century after a score’s composition and premiere? Or does a recording in fact produce intimate knowledge impossible in the distracting conditions of a public concert?

Consider the question concerning how one defines Romanticism as applied to music rather than literature. For Jacques Barzun, Berlioz epitomizes the entire Romantic Movement, exhibiting on the one hand a Shelleyite or Byronic “fire” and on the other hand a “cool self-criticism”: “From the first he displayed a rational conservatism, a prudent regard for the significant proprieties, which in any man doubles the offense of his revolutionary acts” (61). Barzun compares Berlioz to Vigny, remarking that “aristocratic self-control” signally characterized both men, each of whom knew how to balance “now his intellectual good breeding, and now his daemon” (61). Hence the weirdness, melodically speaking, of the Idée fixe as against the studiously polite clarity of the orchestral textures that it inhabits—or rather haunts. The balance that we locate in the man we may, moreover, also locate in the music where, in Wilfrid Mellers’ summation, “the asymmetry of the [melodic] clauses is complemented by a tonal precariousness created by chromatic intrusions in the melody, and by a dialogue between the melody and the bass” (185). We might think again of that Gothic arch of a melody in the first movement of the Symphonie funebre et triomphale as against the Prussian Army of wind-players assembled by the score to give it voice. And while Berlioz is always expressive he is never narcissistic.

If, as Mellers says, “Wagner’s grandeur is the apotheosis of the personal,” then Berlioz by contrast “thinks melodically in vast phrases that acquire a more than personal grandeur” (185). The scale of Berlioz’s works would derive, on the convergent accounts of Barzun and Mellers, from the scale of his melodies, each being conceived in a kind of liberation from any preordained harmonic scheme and each therefore requiring a new conception of harmonic architecture. The work grows organically from the melodic seed, to invoke a botanical metaphor; and it is with the seed that Berlioz always starts. “Organicism” belongs with Romanticism. Not by coincidence was Berlioz an early and a lifelong devotee of Goethe. Veteran Berlioz specialist Sir Colin Davis goes so far as to claim for the composer the title of “the first and only genuine Romantic.” But—here’s the rub—in almost the same breath Davis also says that Berlioz “remained a Classicist all his life; his roots were firmly there with Gluck, Beethoven and Weber.”4

To assess Berlioz’s Romantic qualities, one might compare his work with the work of his (inevitably younger) contemporaries, all of whom are Germans. Robert Schumann (1810-1856) and Franz Liszt (1811-1886), with both of whom Berlioz maintained friendly and mutually edifying contact, gravitated to the same literary sources as Berlioz and both, like Berlioz, made ambitious settings of Goethe’s Faust. A random few bars of any of Schumann’s orchestral compositions reveal a world of difference from Berlioz. Schumann’s Rhenish Symphony, like the Symphonie fantastique, follows the five-movement pattern of Beethoven’s Pastoral, but there the resemblance ends. Schumann orchestrates in a famously “thick” manner, with many octave doublings; the French horns provide the dominant coloration at the climaxes, supported in the Finale by the trombones. The rhythms, once established, roll on predictably. In fact, Schumann in the Rhenish coins the archetypal sound of German Romantic Music, a sound we hear also in his one-time protégé, Johannes Brahms. Liszt, like Schumann a pianist, also tends to score in a “thick” manner, writing piano chords for large ensembles. His thirteen “Symphonic Poems” take a cue from the Symphonie fantastique in that they aim to narrate a story or expose an idea by purely instrumental means. The most Berliozian of them, Héroïde Funèbre (1854), probably directly imitates the Symphonie funèbre et triomphale, but like the others it consists of a single movement, and it creates a sound as much anticipatory of Wagner’s as it is dissimilar to that of Berlioz. Neither Schumann nor Liszt is ever detached from his treatment, as Berlioz almost invariably is from his; they are perfervid (gloriously so) where he is cool and, at least some of the time, ironic. Listeners sense this irony or distancing strongly in Harold en Italie, where the solo viola stands apart from orchestral incident and “comments” on it. Both Schumann and Liszt entered the repertory swiftly, despite controversy—and there is no doubt but that they both are much more “listener friendly” than Berlioz. Their appeal, finally, is less intellectual than that of Berlioz. Then again, just as Davis says, Berlioz, while more audacious formally than his peers, keeps a stronger orientation than they do to Eighteenth Century music, especially to the formalism and nobility of Gluck’s operatic ethos.

In the early days of recording, Beethoven, Wagner, Schumann, and Liszt had their advocates. Large chunks of Wagner, a difficult and challenging composer, had entered the discography as early as 1914 when Karl Muck (1859-1940) made acoustic recordings of the Bayreuth Master’s ultimate opera, Parsifal; in the same year, Arthur Nikisch (1855 -1922), Chefdirigent of the Berlin Philharmonic, made an acoustic recording of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, complete. Oskar Fried (1871-1941) committed Liszt’s Preludes to disc by the same rudimentary process. As far as I know, no one ever recorded Berlioz acoustically, but Felix Weingartner (1863-1942) made platters of the Symphonie fantastique using the new electrical process as early as 1925. The British composer Sir Edward Elgar (1854-1934), a pioneering gramophone “buff,” preferred Weingartner’s Fantastique to the one set down the following year with the Orchestre des Concerts Colonne under Gabriel Pierné (1863-1937), omitting the first and third movements. The founder of the Concerts Colonne, Edouard Colonne (1838-1910), knew Berlioz and sought his counsel about how to interpret the score; Pierné used Colonne’s score, with its composer-sanctioned annotations. Another conductor associated with Colonne, Pierre Monteux (1875-1964), tackled the Fantastique in 1930, leading his specially constituted Orchestre Symphonique de Paris in the advantageous sonic environment of the Salle Pleyel. He too used Colonne’s annotated score.

Weingartner and Pierné belonged to the Nineteenth Century; neither of the two men trafficked much with Twentieth Century music. Monteux, on the other hand, had the reputation of being avant-garde. Not only had he stood on the podium at the scandalous 1913 Paris premiere of Igor Stravinsky’s Le sacre du printemps, a concert ending in a riot that required the police to put down, but he had also made the first recording of that same Red Banner of musical modernism, with the Orchestre Symphonique, in 1929. Monteux’s 1930 Fantastique has survived in two forms, the recording itself and a documentary film of the studio sessions, including the Finale in dress rehearsal. On the basis of these, Monteux clearly regarded Berlioz neither as Classic nor as Romantic but rather as a modernist of the same order as Stravinsky.

Building on their experience of recording Le sacre, Monteux and the studio technicians spent much time and effort in finding the optimal deployment-pattern for their multiple-microphone setup. Multiple microphones served the aim to make the clearest master-disc representation of the important inner parts of the Fantastique’s score; Monteux understood that, although Berlioz calls for close to 140 players (about equal to the number specified by Stravinsky for Le sacre), the Symphonie’s textures run toward those of chamber music except in the climaxes. At nearly eighty years of age, the 1930 Monteux Fantastique remains revelatory, not only of Berlioz’s music, but of the conductor’s certainty that he deals with a modern composition and of his conviction that this Episode in the Life of an Artist speaks directly to the alienated, shell-shocked, demon-haunted world of the Twentieth Century as much as the Russian’s pagan ballet. Connections bind Le sacre to the Symphonie. Berlioz made several forays into

Russia

, playing concerts of his music and establishing contact with Russian composers, like Peter Tchaikovsky and Nicolas Rimsky-Korsakov. The latter translated the Frenchman’s Traité sur l’art d’instrumentation into Russian; Stravinsky, Rimsky-Korsakov’s student at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, studied the Traité and spoke candidly of his debt to it. Technical features of Le sacre reflect a Berliozian influence: one is Stravinsky’s fondness for combining instruments at their extreme range, so that the double basses stomp like elephants while the flutes skirl out their highest notes. The general scenario of these “Scenes of Pagan Russia” is ritualistic and sparagmatic, as though Stravinsky had taken the idea of Berlioz’s “Dream of a Witches’ Sabbath” and expanded it to embrace the entire score.

One might hazard that Monteux has divined the following common “moral” in the two scores: in seeking the erasure of inherited belief—of Christian restraint on desire, for example—every self-consciously revolutionary age unwittingly opens a space for the resurgence of beliefs that antedate the eradicated creedal inheritance and which it had previously obviated. Modernity thus seen resembles a great stumbling parade advancing drunkenly toward the tumbrels and guillotines upon which the intoxicated worshippers must die. The Dies Irae, made into a grotesque of itself in the “Dream of a Witches’ Sabbath,” symbolizes the subject’s wrath, as turned against itself perversely; and so it reminds us of the viciousness of our resentments and the vanity of our contradictory desires.

In purely musical terms Monteux deserves praise for bringing out the inner voices—which in Berlioz usually means the woodwinds—of the polyphony. Monteux’s tempi are fairly steady, with just a bit of rubato in the “Rêveries—Passions” where the various apparitions of the Idée fixe justify nuances of acceleration and deceleration. The second-movement valse is suitably brilliant and flottante,

Ends of the West

Mark Wegierski