TABLE OF CONTENTS
The Language of Prophecy in Les Troyens -Sarah Hibberd
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226837659.003.0001
[Hector Berlioz;Alexandre Brierre de Boismont;Alfred Maury;Virgil;Les Troyens;Cassandra;hallucination;prophecy;apparition;psychiatry]
Les Troyens (1858) is an opera about the future. Cassandra dominates the first two acts with her prophetic visions of the fall of Troy and brings this part of the story to a horrifying conclusion in a collective suicide as the city is destroyed by the Greeks. Her visionary experiences and psychological collapse are vividly conveyed in a manner that not only suggests the familiar world of quasi-religious or ancient visions but also engages with debates of the new science of psychiatry. Drawing on the work of Alexandre Brierre de Boismont (1797–1881) and Alfred Maury (1817–1892),this essay sketches out some key ideas about apparitions and precognition and how they were understood by scientists of the day—ideas with which Berlioz would have been familiar—and then follows Cassandra’s psychological journey in this light. It argues that Berlioz embraced a combination of medical and more imaginative references in his larger-than-life characterization of her mental state, which spoke powerfully to modern audiences in the opera house by offering a sonic exploration of the hallucinatory mind.
“Ossianic Sounds”: Berlioz on Memory -Carmel Raz
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226837659.003.0002
[Hector Berlioz;Lelio, ou Le retour a la vie;Aeolian harp;memory;sensibility;resonance;Johann Wolfgang von Goethe;Faust;James Macpherson;Ossian]
This essay explores Berlioz’s use of the Aeolian harp as a metaphor for processes of memory. Through closely reading his critical writing, fiction, and compositions, it examines how his depictions of the instrument reflect contemporaneous theories of sensibility, affect, and memory as represented in the literary culture of his day. It argues that the composer’s references—at once highly specific and culturally ubiquitous—were familiar symbols of late eighteenth-century sensibilité that would have continued to convey neurophysiological resonances to educated listeners. Bringing these intertextual associations to light thus helps us gain a clearer understanding of how Berlioz understood and depicted the relationship between memory and emotion in his work.
Berlioz contra Rousseau: Nature, Culture, and La Musique descriptive -Alexandra Kieffer
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226837659.003.0003
[Hector Berlioz;Jean-Jacques Rousseau;descriptive music;musical imitation;musical anthropology]
In his critical writings, Berlioz repeatedly expressed derision for both the musical compositions and the musical philosophy of the late eighteenth-century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. This essay examines the incongruence between Berlioz’s and Rousseau’s ideas about music as they pertained to musical imitation, a topic that exposes essential differences in their understandings of how music is embedded, or not, within human culture. Whereas Rousseau had insisted on a special, primordial link between music and language that indelibly lodged all musical expression in the particularities of a specific culture, Berlioz, on the contrary, elaborated a view in which modern Western European music was a neutral medium for imitating the sounds of nature, uniquely capable—unlike the musical traditions of past cultures or those outside of Europe—of transcending stylistic, and therefore cultural, particularity. Stemming from a basic divergence in their imaginings of music’s action on the human person, these differences speak to a persistent tension in the modern European colonial imaginary with respect to music and cultural difference.
Berlioz’s Virgil -Ellen Lockhart
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226837659.003.0004
[Hector Berlioz;Virgil;The Aeneid;Les Troyens;book history]
Berlioz had a lifelong passion for Virgil’s poetry. Quotations run through his Mémoires and correspondence, and Les Troyens is an adaptation of the Aeneid. This Object Lesson examines Berlioz’s own copy of the Aeneid, which survives at the Bibliothèque-musée de l’Opéra in Paris, and considers how it may have shaped his understanding of the text. The volume’s ownership history and marginalia, read alongside Berlioz’s writings and the relationships contained in the Aeneid, generate a compelling story of paternity and complicated father-son relationships—just one of the many stories that remain to be told about the book.
Inevitable Antagonists: Berlioz and Donizetti -Roger Parker
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226837659.003.0005
[Hector Berlioz;Gaetano Donizetti;Paris;opera;musical journalism]
The fraught relationship between Gaetano Donizetti and Hector Berlioz is for the most part an unedifying tale, best told briefly. It took place mostly via the Parisian press. Berlioz (in his deuxième carrière as a music critic) was clearly the aggressor, but neither composer emerges with much credit. The underlying tides, in particular a newly strident form of cultural nationalism, take center stage; the more tranquil waters of artistic influence and Romantic-Era historicizing are only distantly on the horizon.
Hearing the Hostias, Rehearing the Requiem -Jennifer Walker
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226837659.003.0006
[Hector Berlioz;Requiem;reception studies;sincerity;sacred music;orchestration;hermeneutics]
The Hostias from the Requiem (Grande Messe des morts) has been described as bizarre, strange, eccentric, and even nasty on account of Berlioz’s idiosyncratic orchestrations. Modern critics and listeners have spilled a lot of ink deciphering the interpretative meaning of the pairing of high-range flutes and trombone pedals. Critics during Berlioz’s time, however, were more concerned with legitimizing the passage as appropriately sacred. Examining the nineteenth-century reception of this short passage reveals the extent to which we might rehear it—and, indeed, the Requiem itself—outside the narrow bounds of Romantic excess and dramatic theatricality.
Orchestral Futurisms: Berlioz and Science Fiction -Francesca Brittan
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226837659.003.0007
[Hector Berlioz;orchestra;Orchestration Treatise;Euphonia;utopianism;science fiction;Charles Fourier;Etienne Cabet;Yefim Zozulya]
This essay situates Berlioz as a central contributor to the genre of “orchestral futurism,” a species of science fiction drawing on metaphors of the orchestra and orchestration to construct utopian social-political worlds. Among the pioneers of the form was Charles Fourier (1772–1837), an eccentric and prolific writer who, in the 1810s, conceived of “Harmonie,” an ideal human collective modeled on an orchestra of five billion instrumentalists. His proto-socialist vision was inherited by Etienne Cabet (1788–1856), whose novel Voyage en Icarie describes a utopia—Icarie—so tightly concerted that all inhabitants participate in spontaneous choral-orchestral rituals. Berlioz (1803–1869), responding to both authors, gave specifications for an enormous “ideal” orchestra in his Grand traité d’instrumentation et d’orchestration, which formed the basis for a futuristic musical city in his tale “Euphonia.” And several generations later, Yefim Zozulya, in his 1923 story “Gramophone of the Ages,” extended and reoriented the tradition by imagining an orchestral Soviet future. In all of these works, orchestras operate as ideological templates allowing for a reimagining (or retuning) of the foundations of social life: the relationship between individuals and collectives, the formation of communication networks, the ethics of human-machine interface, and the performance of social harmony.
Passing the Baton: Conducting Masculinity in La damnation de Faust -Inge van Rij
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226837659.003.0008
[Hector Berlioz;conducting;Edouard Colonne;masculinity;Faust;reception]
The posthumous gift of Berlioz’s baton to Edouard Colonne in 1877 acknowledged the significant role of Colonne in reviving Berlioz’s fortunes through his conducting of highly successful performances of La damnation de Faust. However, the passing on of the baton also symbolized both continuity and transition in the role of the conductor, particularly as it was shaped by changing conceptions of French masculinity in the second half of the nineteenth century. Drawing on reviews and iconography, this essay considers how Colonne responded to Berlioz’s conducting legacy, and how the reception of Colonne as a Jewish conductor was shaped by France’s crisis of masculinity, as exemplified by the Dreyfus affair. Berlioz’s La damnation de Faust is revealed to be a particularly significant work for Colonne’s navigation of the crisis of masculinity, for Berlioz’s ‘légende dramatique’ creates a distinctive alliance between the subversive masculinity of Mephistopheles and the orchestral conductor. Considering La damnation de Faust through the lens of its two most significant conductors in the nineteenth century thus sheds new light both on Colonne’s contribution to the reception of Berlioz’s music, and on the role of the conductor itself.
On Berlioz’s Subterranean Operations: Toward a Nineteenth-Century Media Logic -Shaena B. Weitz
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226837659.003.0009
[Hector Berlioz;media logic;music criticism;mediatization;nineteenth-century journalism;Journal des debats;Revue et gazette musicale de Paris]
Berlioz’s writings have contributed to a growing awareness that nineteenth-century music criticism rarely presented the true unfettered ideas of the signed author. This growing poses several methodological and conceptual challenges because it threatens to undermine the twin projects of legitimizing the critical output of Berlioz and critics like him and appreciating historical music journalism as an archive more broadly. Indeed, analyzing music criticism for what it imparts about reception and aesthetics, while also accounting for bias, corruption, or even “fake news,” is a formidable task, and the tools to examine a record of potentially false information have thus far been elusive. As a remedy, this essay reconfigures a foundational concept in media studies—media logic (Altheide & Snow 1979)—for the cultural specifics of the nineteenth-century music press by focusing on some traditionally problematic comments in Berlioz’s voluminous writings. Establishing a working nineteenth-century media logic will not only help us better understand Berlioz’s work as a critic, but also has significant potential to generate a more accurate and nuanced interpretation of historical journals’ content. In this way, better connecting music journalism to broader cultural studies helps to illuminate Berlioz’s world.
Euphonian Sound and Fury, Signifying Something -Benjamin Walton
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226837659.003.0010
[Hector Berlioz;Euphonia;silence;noise;sonic biography;Harriet Smithson]
In the novella “Euphonia, or the Musical Town” (1844), the inhabitants of Berlioz’s imagined twenty-fourth-century utopia devote themselves single-mindedly to the production of beautiful music. This Object Lesson seeks to treat Berlioz’s tale as a fragment of “sonic biography,” to catch echoes of Berlioz’s tragic relationship with his first wife, Harriet Smithson, and to reflect on his vexed association with musical “noise.” In this reading, sounds can communicate and elicit overwhelming feelings, good and bad, yet they end—like the tale of “Euphonia” itself—with absolute silence.
Berlioz: Conductor and One-Man Band -Jacek Blaszkiewicz
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226837659.003.0011
[Hector Berlioz;caricature;conducting;homme-orchestre;military bands;orchestration;organicism;street music]
Two caricatures of Berlioz depict the composer in a frenetic state of creativity. We see familiar Berliozian tropes: wiry hair, exaggerated nose, long arms and legs. What is unusual is what the two Hectors are doing. They strike drums and blow into reed instruments, while cymbals and bells jingle from their sleeves. These two caricatures portray Berlioz as an homme-orchestre, a street musician familiar throughout nineteenth-century Europe. This Object Lesson indulges in the analogy between composer-conductor and one-man-band, reviews the critical reception of Parisian street music, and interprets Berlioz’s essay on conducting via a hypothetical treatise, “The homme-orchestre and his Art.”
“Je crois en vous” -Nathan Dougherty
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226837659.003.0012
[Hector Berlioz;romance;domestic song;gender;women’s education;fashion journals]
Studies on Hector Berlioz tend to focus on his compositional innovations and larger forms. In this Object Lesson, however, I shift attention to a far more conventional work: his 1834 romance “Je crois en vous,” published as a supplement in the fashion journal Le protée. Reading it within the context of women’s journals and writings about girls’ education more broadly, I argue that both Berlioz’s music and Léon Guérin’s lyrics participate in a debate around women’s desire and expression by satirizing contemporaneous efforts to strip eroticism from the genre of the romance.
American Episodes in the Life of the Artist -Jonathan Kregor
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226837659.003.0013
[Hector Berlioz;American reception;criticism;cultural transfer;adaptation;Leopold de Meyer;Louis Moreau Gottschalk;Bernard Ullman;Theodore Thomas]
Although he never ventured across the Atlantic, Berlioz was a well-known, albeit controversial figure in North America from the early 1830s. From Maine to São Paulo, his compositions, writings, and life were regularly chronicled in local periodicals, while performances of his music—whether original, excerpted, or arranged—by Leopold de Meyer, Louis Moreau Gottschalk, Bernard Ullman, Theodore Thomas, and others were met with sincere curiosity and open-mindedness. American critics ultimately judged Berlioz the composer an indelible musical craftsman, yet few considered him a true genius. On the other hand, his detailed reviews, humorous anecdotes, and authoritative insights on instruments and instrumentation reached countless American readers, critics, and artists. Given that Berlioz essentially self-embargoed his most ambitious works—a situation exacerbated by a partisan extremism around mid-century that stunted efforts to entertain his more ambitious pieces—American listeners could only come away with a skewed, incomplete profile of his oeuvre during his lifetime. Nevertheless, his indirect involvement in shaping the direction of the nineteenth-century American musical landscape was critical.
A Comet in the Musical Sky: Ferdinand Hiller on Hector Berlioz -Ralph P. Locke and Jürgen Thym
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226837659.003.0014
[Hector Berlioz;Ferdinand Hiller;musical biography;musical criticism;Johann Nepomuk Hummel;Robert Schumann;Clara Schumann;Felix Mendelssohn;romanticism]
Ferdinand Hiller (1811-85) was a widely respected pianist-composer-conductor who also headed the Cologne Conservatory. His 1880 book Künstlerleben includes an eighty-page essay-memoir entitled “Hector Berlioz.” This remarkable mini-book is rich in insights, deriving from the fact that Hiller and Berlioz had been close friends for several years in Paris around the year 1830, shared certain musical enthusiasms (e.g., Beethoven), and supported each other’s efforts at times in the ensuing decades. The pages on the two young men’s years together in Paris have been quoted in numerous biographies of Berlioz, but the entire document deserves to be better known. This essay draws attention to some of its most interesting points, including Hiller’s admiring but not uncritical remarks about Berlioz’s personality, career, and—perhaps most revealingly—compositions. Hiller had been trained by Johann Nepomuk Hummel (himself a student of Mozart) and was closely allied with Felix Mendelssohn and Robert and Clara Schumann. Not surprisingly, his essay expresses admiration for some relatively conservative Berlioz works (L’Enfance du Christ) and disapproval of more genre-defying ones (Roméo et Juliette).
Intimate Beauty and Sublime Grandeur: Sound and Space in the Music of Berlioz -Leon Botstein
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226837659.003.0015
[Hector Berlioz;Hans Makart;John Martin;Horace Vernet;Edmund Burke;Heinrich Heine;sublime;monumentality;Richard Wagner;Gustav Mahler]
Berlioz lived through profound social, political, and economic changeas Paris emerged as a world metropolis. His aesthetic ambitions responded both to the novelties and technological advances of the modern world and to classical ideals from the past, and he made new demands on a new listening public. This essay first traces some of Berlioz’s aesthetic inspirationsfrom the worlds of literature, philosophy, and the visual arts, as well as music. It draws connections between the theatricality and sublimity of Berlioz's music and the overwhelming effects of the paintings of Hans Makart (1840–1884) and John Martin (1789–1854), and between the composer’s orchestral immediacy and the drama of canvases by Horace Vernet (1789–1863). Berlioz’s legacy after his death is examined through comparisons with Richard Wagner and Gustav Mahler. Ultimately, the essay argues that musical modernism and postmodernism helped to transform his reputation and elevate him to canonic status in a new political age.
