Berlioz, (Louis-)Hector

(b La Côte-Saint-André, Isère, 11 Dec 1803; d Paris, 8 March 1869). French composer. He stands as the leading musician of his age in a country, France, whose principal artistic endeavour was then literary, in an art, music, whose principal pioneers were then German. In many senses the Romantic movement found its fullest embodiment in him, yet he had deep Classical roots and stood apart from many manifestations of that movement. His life presents the archetypal tragic struggle of new ideas for acceptance, to which he gave his full exertions as composer, critic and conductor. And though there were many who perceived greatness in his music from the beginning, his genius only came to full recognition in the 20th century.

HUGH MACDONALD

Berlioz, Hector

1. 1803–21.

Louis-Hector Berlioz was the eldest child of Louis-Joseph Berlioz (1776–1848), a doctor of some distinction and a prominent, well-to-do citizen of La Côte-Saint-André, 48 km north-west of Grenoble in the département of Isère. The family had belonged to the region for many generations, and the countryside, especially the grandeur of the Isère plain against its distant background of the Alps, cast a lasting spell on the young composer. His father was a man of liberal outlook and broad intellectual range, an inspiring mentor for his son, and though the dispute over Hector’s career and marriage damaged their relationship for some years, there was a profound bond between them. His mother, Marie-Antoinette (née Marmion), was a Catholic of sharper temper and narrower outlook. Five more children were born, of whom two, Nanci and Adèle, lived to maturity, and enjoyed Berlioz’s permanent affection.

At about the age of ten Berlioz briefly attended an infant seminary at La Côte, but thereafter his education was entirely in his father’s hands. He took most keenly to French and Latin literature and to geography, especially travel books, which implanted in him a longing for distant, sometimes exotic shores that his later travels around Europe scarcely satisfied. Of Latin authors his favourite was Virgil, and in his Mémoires (the major source for knowledge and understanding of his life) he recounted how his father’s reading of the episode of Dido and Aeneas reduced him to tears. His father also gave him rudimentary instruction on the flageolet, and he later learnt the flute with a local teacher, Imbert, and the guitar with another, Dorant. There is no doubt that his ability on the flute and guitar quickly became more than adequate, and it satisfied not only social demand but the deep-rooted sensitivity to music of which Berlioz had first become aware as a small boy when attending Mass. A tune from Dalayrac’s Nina, pressed to the service of religion, first evoked a sense of wonderment mingling with an ardent but short-lived religious sense. He never studied the piano and never learnt to play more than a few chords.

Berlioz also linked his first steps in music, learning the flageolet, with his boyhood passion for Estelle Duboeuf, when he was 12 and she 18. He called her his stella montis, associating her with the mountains behind Meylan where she lived and with Florian’s Estelle et Némorin which he had already ‘read and reread a hundred times’. He was teased for his admiration from afar, but it proved to be deeper than anyone suspected. He found a copy of Rameau’s Traité de l’harmonie at home and also procured Catel’s Traité d’harmonie. These provided the basis for a knowledge of harmony, learnt entirely without reference to a keyboard, with which he began to compose more ambitiously, probably at the age of 13 or 14. He wrote a potpourri on Italian melodies, and then two quintets for flute and strings, all now lost but for a melody from one of the quintets that became the second subject of the overture to Les francs-juges. Similarly, a setting of one of Florian’s poems Je vais donc quitter pour jamais made at this time survives as the first theme in the opening section of the Symphonie fantastique. ‘It seemed to me exactly right for expressing the overpowering sadness of a young heart caught in the toils of a hopeless love.’ He made copies of popular romances by Dalayrac, Boieldieu, Berton and others, sometimes with his own guitar accompaniments, and his own romances were in the same mould. In 1819, when he was 15, he wrote to two (and probably more) Paris music publishers offering a sextet and some songs with piano accompaniment, but none seem to have been published at that time.

When he reached 17 a decision had to be made about his career, and though an irresistible instinct drew Berlioz to music, his father’s wish that he should follow him into the medical profession prevailed, and he was sent to Paris to the Ecole de Médecine, having obtained his bachelor’s degree in Grenoble in March 1821. At this stage his horizons were still narrow; his knowledge of the world was more literary than real, and his profoundest impressions were probably the child’s absorption of his natural surroundings and of the echoes of the Napoleonic convulsion. Much of his experience was vicarious, for he found in Bernardin de St Pierre and Chateaubriand an outlet for his still dormant capacity for intense feeling. In music only the slightest works by minor composers were known to him and he had never seen a full score; Pleyel’s quartets were the most sophisticated music he had heard. In physique he was of middle height, with a mass of fiery, tawny hair; his eyes were blue and deep set, and a distinctive aquiline nose surmounted wide, thin lips.

Berlioz, Hector

2. 1821–30.

Even before Berlioz’s departure from La Côte his aversion to medicine was plain.

Become a doctor! Study anatomy! Dissect! Take part in horrible operations – instead of giving myself body and soul to music, sublime art whose grandeur I was beginning to perceive! Forsake the highest heaven for the wretchedest regions of earth, the immortal spirits of poetry and love and their divinely inspired strains for dirty hospital orderlies, dreadful dissecting-room attendants, hideous corpses, the screams of patients, the groans and rattling breath of the dying! No, no! It seemed to me the reversal of the whole natural order of my existence. It was monstrous. It could not happen. Yet it did.

With his cousin Alphonse Robert, with whom he shared lodgings, he attended medical school and pursued his studies for two years, with interruptions, at least until his baccalauréat de sciences physiques which he took in January 1824.

But medicine was fighting a losing battle against the overpowering strength of Berlioz’s musical impulse now inflamed a hundred times more strongly by the musical experience and opportunity offered by the capital, which was to remain his home for the rest of his life. Within a month of his arrival he began to attend performances at the Opéra. Gluck, whose Iphigénie en Tauride was one of the first operas he heard, made a deep and lasting impression and remained the composer he admired most wholeheartedly of all. He also heard operas by Salieri, Sacchini, Méhul, Spontini and Boieldieu, a repertory that supplied a stylistic basis for his own initial attempts at large-scale composition. There survive copies in his own hand of extracts from Gluck’s operas made in 1822 in the Conservatoire library, which he frequented as often as his studies allowed, but he soon felt the need to supplement his musical technique; at the end of 1822 he gained an introduction to Le Sueur through a pupil, Gérono, and was admitted to his class. By this time he had attempted for the first time a work for full orchestra, the cantata Le cheval arabe on a text by Millevoye (now lost). Six romancesfor one or two voices with piano had appeared separately in print since his arrival in Paris, but one effect of Le Sueur’s tutelage was that Berlioz published no further music for about six years, concentrating instead on larger works, with orchestral accompaniments. In 1823 he composed an opera on Florian’s Estelle et Némorin referring to childhood memories and doubtless childhood melodies too. This, like the two works that followed – a scene for bass from Saurin’s Beverley and the Latin oratorio Le passage de la mer rouge – was later burnt, on Berlioz’s confession. The first important work to have survived is the Messe solennelle composed for the church of St Roch in 1824. A first rehearsal under Valentino on 27 December 1824 was a fiasco, but a successful performance the following July, under the same conductor, restored Berlioz’s confidence in himself and strengthened his resolve to be, in Le Sueur’s words, ‘no doctor or apothecary but a great composer’.

Since his abandonment of medicine he had had to face the entrenched opposition of his parents and their curtailment of his funds. His father had always assumed that his son would inherit the responsibilities of the family estate in which he had invested so much of his own energies, and resisted any suggestion that Berlioz's career might take him elsewhere. Family disputes persisted for years and the visits he paid to La Côte only deepened the estrangement. With his father’s allowance reduced and intermittently refused, Berlioz was forced to borrow from his friends, and he was to suffer severe hardship for at least five years. He depended on whatever sources were at hand – a few pupils, a short period as a chorus singer at the Théâtre des Nouveautés, and occasional articles for the press, the beginnings of what was later to be his principal source of income. His closest friend at this period was a law student with literary inclinations, Humbert Ferrand, who supplied the text for La révolution grecque, set to music in 1825, and also for an opera Les francs-juges (1826) of which six fragments and the overture remain. It owed much to his teacher Le Sueur but also reflected the dark colours and sinister tones of Weber’s Der Freischütz(introduced to Paris as Robin des bois in 1824). Although Les francs-juges was completed, none of Berlioz’s efforts to secure a performance succeeded, and after at least two attempts to rewrite it, he discarded or re-used some of it in later works, notably the Marche des gardes, incorporated in the Symphonie fantastique as the ‘Marche au supplice’ in 1830.

In 1826 Berlioz entered the Conservatoire: here he was in Le Sueur’s class for composition, which he had been attending for some time, and Reicha’s class for counterpoint and fugue. Les francs-juges and the overture to Waverley, which followed it, revealed a growing individuality and a marked confidence in his own powers, especially in the handling of instruments. In 1826 he also entered for the Prix de Rome for the first time, getting no further than the preliminary round. The following year, though, he passed the first test and entered en loge for the first of four times to compose the cantata prescribed by the regulations of the competition. La mort d’Orphée, the cantata set in 1827, was declared unplayable by the judges (though Berlioz had it played in rehearsal in 1828 with some satisfaction). For the 1828 competition he composed Herminie, which contains the melody later used as the idée fixe in the Symphonie fantastique, and won second prize. In 1829 he wrote the most individual and dramatic of these cantatas, La mort de Cléopâtre, and no prize was awarded, probably to avoid bestowing official approval on a composer who ‘betrayed such dangerous tendencies’. At the fourth attempt, in 1830, Berlioz was finally successful, although only a fragment of the cantata, La mort de Sardanapale, survives. His tactic had been to restrain his more individual mode of expression in order to provide a conventionally acceptable style.

Meanwhile the emotional and artistic elements of his being had been set alight by a series of thunderstrokes. The capacity for absorbing powerful external impressions and transmuting them into high artistic form placed him in the avant garde of the generation of 1830, and implanted in the soil of his imagination the seed of great works, many of them to remain beneath the surface of realization for many years. The first was the simultaneous impact of Shakespeare and the actress Harriet Smithson on 11 September 1827. On that day Berlioz attended Hamlet presented by an English company at the Odéon theatre, with Charles Kemble playing Hamlet and Miss Smithson playing Ophelia. ‘The impression made on my heart and mind by her extraordinary talent, nay her dramatic genius, was equalled only by the havoc wrought in me by the poet she so nobly interpreted.’ Though the performance (of the Garrick version) was in English, of which Berlioz knew virtually nothing at that time, he grasped the grandeur and sublimity of Shakespeare’s language and the richness of its dramatic design, and he joined the ranks of those under Hugo’s leadership who extolled Shakespeare as a challenge to French Classicism and a model for the new Romantic theatre. For Berlioz Shakespeare represented the pinnacle of poetic utterance; his veracity of dramatic expression and freedom from formal constraints picked up direct resonances in Berlioz’s spirit. Shakespeare’s plays were to supply the basis of three major works, Roméo et Juliette, Béatrice et Bénédict and the Roi Lear overture. In addition, there were at least three pieces inspired by Hamlet, a fantasy on The Tempest, and some direct borrowings in Les Troyens. More profoundly Shakespeare provided a framework for the structure of both Roméo et Juliette and Les Troyens and was a source, in the form of dramatic truth, of Berlioz’s fundamental notion of expressive truth. Berlioz was to read and quote Shakespeare avidly for the rest of his life, putting him alongside Virgil in his literary pantheon.

This seminal discovery worked itself out more profoundly and more slowly than that of Miss Smithson, whom he referred to as his Ophelia, or Juliet, or Desdemona. His emotional derangement was immediate and violent. For the next two years he was obsessed by her, waiting for her return to Paris, vainly seeking a means to approach her. When in 1830 his love for her eventually turned sour, the accumulation of emotional tension broke out in the Symphonie fantastique, which describes and transmutes into artistic form the artist’s passions, dreams and frustrations. For Berlioz there was no clear distinction between the real Harriet Smithson and the idealized embodiment of Shakespeare’s heroines, so that when, later, he was to secure an introduction to her and ultimately marry her, a relationship that had begun on an ideal level could only spoil in the glare of everyday reality, and the wholly Romantic conjunction of the artist with the ideal woman came to a bitter end.

Two further discoveries at this time rank as of supreme importance: in March 1828 Berlioz heard Beethoven’s Third and Fifth Symphonies, played by Habeneck and the Société des Concerts at the Conservatoire. ‘Beethoven opened before me a new world of music, as Shakespeare had revealed a new universe of poetry.’ For the first time his horizons widened from the exclusively vocal genres of opera, cantata and romanceto the expressive potential of pure instrumental music. That Berlioz wrote symphonies at all is entirely due to his obeisance to Beethoven, and the Symphonie fantastique can be seen as a deliberate and conscious attempt to work out dramatic and poetic ideas in the framework of a Beethoven symphony. More important, Berlioz discovered that instrumental music has an expressive and articulative force far more penetrating than vocal setting, a discovery shown palpably in the ‘Scène d’amour’ of Roméo et Juliette, in the Hamlet funeral march, and at certain points in Les Troyens. Just as Berlioz hardly set any of Shakespeare’s poetry to music, similarly Berlioz rarely adopted the precise tone and timbre of Beethoven. He absorbed this impact at a deep level, seeing Beethoven as a supreme dramatist in music, more poet than craftsman.

Goethe’s Faust reached Berlioz through Gérard de Nerval’s translation, published in December 1827, and again its impact was profound and immediate. The Faustian conception of man struck numerous echoes in Berlioz’s breast. In a letter of 1828 he described Shakespeare and Goethe as ‘the silent confidants of my suffering; they hold the key to my life’. He went on to say that he had just set the ballad of the King of Thule to music, the first of what were to be eight scenes, settings of the verse portions of Nerval’s translation. The Huit scènes de Faust were published at Berlioz’s expense in the following year, an op.1 of exceptional originality and invention. Each scene bears a quotation from Shakespeare, and each has its appropriate musical setting, varying from the Concert de sylphes for six solo voices and orchestra to the Sérénade in which Mephistopheles is accompanied by a guitar. But despite its remarkable character Berlioz found the work ‘crude and badly written’. He collected all the copies he could and destroyed them. Dimly he may have realized that the music would eventually find its due place in the larger scheme of La damnation de Faust, completed in 1846.

Literary influences of a less overwhelming kind were numerous, chief among them being the works of Moore, Scott and Byron. All three inspired compositions. He submerged himself, too, in Chateaubriand, Hoffmann, Fenimore Cooper, and the work of his own compatriots and contemporaries, Hugo, de Vigny, de Musset and Nerval. Later he was to absorb and admire Balzac, Flaubert, and Gautier, whose poems supplied the text of Les nuits d’été.

The ferment of Berlioz’s mind in the late 1820s was astonishing. Instead of wilting under a constant onslaught on his sensitivities, he broke out in gusts of creative energy. The Waverley overture, the Huit scènes de Faust, the nine settings of Thomas Moore (the Irlandecollection), composed in 1829, and above all the Symphonie fantastique, composed in early 1830, are testimony to this. He was active too as a proponent of his own music. The Messe solennelle had been played at St Roch in 1825 and 1827, and on 26 May 1828 Berlioz gave his first orchestral concert in Paris. His intention was to bring himself to the attention of the public, especially Harriet Smithson, and he succeeded in his aim in that the press, particularly the influential Fétis, was favourable. Much of his time in the next 15 years was devoted to planning, organizing and, after 1835, conducting his own concerts in Paris, a task that made heavy demands on his energy and usually his purse, but which provided the sole outlet for his orchestral works.

His eventual success in winning the Prix de Rome in 1830 was important to him as a means of convincing his parents that his musical bent was serious, as well as a source of income for the next few years. The prize required residence in Italy, but before he left he had important concerts to give in Paris. At the prize-giving ceremony at the institute on 30 October his cantata La mort de Sardanapale (with an additional conflagration scene written after the prize had been awarded) misfired completely. His fantasy (or ‘overture’) on The Tempest for chorus and orchestra was heard for the first time on 7 November at the Opéra and on 5 December the Symphonie fantastiquereceived its first performance in a concert of Berlioz’s works conducted by Habeneck. Liszt, who was present, made Berlioz’s acquaintance on that occasion (fig.2).

Berlioz’s reputation as a composer of startling originality was by now confirmed and his progress in the musical world of Paris was not to be furthered by enforced removal to Italy. He made several requests to be exempted from going, giving as his reasons his need to pursue his career in Paris and the state of his health, which had certainly not been good. A more pressing reason, in Berlioz’s mind, was his attachment to Camille Moke, a 19-year-old pianist of exceptional gifts whom he had met earlier in the year at a school where she taught the piano and he the guitar. She replaced the unresponsive Miss Smithson in his affections and their ardent affair led even to betrothal on the eve of his departure for Italy.

Berlioz, Hector

3. 1831–42.

Berlioz spent a month at La Côte-Saint-André, where his parents were at last delighted with their son’s success. At the back of his mind he had a large-scale composition that was to haunt him for a number of years, while his immediate thoughts were entirely with Camille, already, according to Ferdinand Hiller (her previous attachment), cooling in her affections. His journey to Italy and the 15 months he spent there were crucially formative. His mind was constantly alive to the impressions, both inspiring and disappointing, of the country and the people, their customs and way of life. He was supposed to draw inspiration from the relics of classical antiquity. These certainly intrigued him, especially where they touched upon Virgil, but his musical output was relatively small and haphazard, and his official submissions from Rome were not especially remarkable. Italy was nonetheless to work upon his music in more gradual fashion, with far-reaching influence on his style. Henceforth there was a new colour and glow in his music, both sensuous and vivacious. These derive not from Italian art, which touched him little, or Italian music, which he despised, but from the scenery and the sun, and from his acute sense of locale. Harold en Italie, Benvenuto Cellini and Roméo et Juliette are the most obvious expressions of his response to Italy: both Les Troyens and Béatrice et Bénédict reflect the warmth and stillness of the Mediterranean, as well as its vivacity and force.

Berlioz’s descriptions of Italy in the Mémoires and the abundant accounts of his travels in letters to his friends and family are wonderfully evocative; he seems here to have discovered his gifts as a writer. In Italy he came face to face with experiences he had previously only read about or idealized. Byronism, so fashionable at that time, became reality as he encountered brigands, corsairs, revolutionaries, lazzaroni and pifferari, and as he sampled the harshness of a storm at sea or the Carnival in Rome or sleeping in the open air in the mountains. He met sailors, peasants, sculptors and travellers, but, with the notable exception of Mendelssohn, few musicians. The Villa Medici at Rome housed the institute prizewinners under the tutelage of Horace Vernet, but Berlioz greatly disliked the city: ‘Rome is the most stupid and prosaic city I know: it is no place for anyone with head or heart’. Florence, on the other hand, he adored: ‘Everything about it delights me, its name, its climate, its river, its palaces, its air, the style and elegance of its inhabitants, its surroundings, everything, I love it, love it’. At Rome he composed little, mostly because of the stifling atmosphere of the Villa, but on his travels he achieved much more.

Three weeks after his arrival in Rome Berlioz set off back to France, jeopardizing his pension, in order to discover why he had heard nothing from Camille. At Florence, where he suffered a serious attack of quinsy, he learned the truth: that she had abandoned him for a new and more prosperous suitor, Camille Pleyel, the piano manufacturer. In a torrent of rage and wounded pride, Berlioz determined to return to Paris to kill the two Camilles, her mother and finally himself. Although he reached Nice, his resolve wavered and his better sense persuaded him to give his passions time to cool. Vernet was prepared to pardon him; Berlioz was prepared to spare his victims. The experience was traumatic, with emotional recovery very closely related to the recovery of his health. He felt that he had ‘survived’, and that he could live again to compose the music still dormant in his mind. Here was born Le retour à la vie, a half-literary, half-musical work that folded a variety of experiences together under the title ‘mélologue’ taken from Thomas Moore. Much of the text reflected thoughts and ideas found in his letters of the time, while the music was almost entirely drawn from works written earlier in Paris. Although the work was always designed as a sequel to the Symphonie fantastique and referred directly to Harriet Smithson, it was a different unrequited love that originated it. It was not renamed Léliountil its revival in 1855.

Resting for three weeks in Nice – the three happiest weeks of his life, Berlioz said – he gave priority to another pressing inspiration, an overture on Shakespeare’s King Lear, which he had read in Florence, and started another on Scott’s Rob Roy. On the return to Rome he worked further on Le retour à la vie and revised the Symphonie fantastique. He moved out of Rome as often as possible, especially to the Abruzzi mountains, Tivoli and Subiaco, where he finished Rob-Roy. Antoine Etex, the sculptor, recalled how he and Berlioz went for long walks together, singing Guillaume Tell, bathing, searching for brigands and playing practical jokes. In September Berlioz went to Naples, visited Pompeii and the island of Nisida, and then returned to Rome on foot.

The only musical product of the rest of his stay in Italy was the song La captive (in its strophic form), written in Subiaco in February 1832. Impatient to get back to Paris and to have his new works performed there, he secured six months’ dispensation and left in May 1832. He was later exempted from the required residence in Germany. After some months at La Côte-Saint-André, he reached Paris in November and immediately organized a concert of his own music, including the revised Symphonie fantastique with its sequel Le retour à la vie. Thinly veiled references to Fétis’s ‘corrections’ of Beethoven symphonies earned Berlioz a bitter notice in the Revue musicale and the animosity of an influential critic, but he was more concerned by the fact that Harriet Smithson was in Paris at the time. Her performances were far from the fashionable success they had been five years earlier, but an intermediary secured her attendance at the concert and subsequently an introduction. Despite their respective accumulated debts and difficulties and objections from both families, especially his own, Berlioz soon proposed marriage. After a bizarre and stormy courtship, they were married on 3 October 1833. It was perhaps characteristic of Berlioz to take his idealized love for his Ophelia to the point of marriage and perhaps, too, no surprise that the marriage was happy for scarcely more than six years. A son, Louis, was born to them in August 1834, and the picture of the young ménage living at the top of Montmartre, where their friends went to visit them, is a touching one. But with a language barrier between them and the strains of temperament and material deprivations always acute, it is hardly surprising that by 1842 or earlier they had drifted apart. Harriet’s last years are a distressing tale of misery and decline, and she died in 1854. Berlioz supported her to the end and retained a warmth of affection for what she had meant to him and for her inspiring qualities as an artist.

Berlioz’s career in the 1830s is, despite its astonishing achievements, essentially a tragic one. Conscious of his own genius and of the springs of invention within him, he failed to win the recognition that alone assured him even the barest means of existence. As a composer he earned virtually nothing. The general view of his music was that it was eccentric and ‘incorrect’. His admirers were passionate but few, and no worthy official post, such as a teaching appointment at the Conservatoire, came his way; he became merely its assistant librarian. He secured two government commissions (for the Grande messe des morts in 1837 and the Grande symphonie funèbre et triomphale in 1840), but neither of these was particularly profitable or helpful to his artistic standing. He was compelled to earn a living in a profession at which he excelled but which he abhorred – as a critic. He wrote for L’Europe littéraire in 1833, Le rénovateur from 1833 to 1835, and principally from 1834 for the Gazette musicale (later to become the Revue et gazette musicale) and the Journal des débats, an influential newspaper whose proprietors, the Bertins, were his staunch supporters. He was soon to be better known to Parisians as a critic than as a composer.

Journalism took him away from composing and from its essential adjunct, performance. Gladly would Berlioz have devoted more of his time to giving concerts, even though the financial burdens were always severe. The record of his concerts in Paris is as follows: in 1832 he gave two, in 1833 five, in 1834 four, in 1835 six, in 1836 two, in 1837 the official performance of the Grande messe des morts, in 1838 two, in 1839 three, in 1840 five (see Paris, fig.28), in 1841 one and in 1842 four. The programme was normally made up of his own music interspersed with vocal and instrumental solos and occasionally works by Beethoven, Weber, Spontini and others. Liszt, Chopin, Hallé and other members of the richly cosmopolitan circle of musicians who then inhabited Paris took part. After 1835, when Girard bungled a performance of Harold en Italie, Berlioz resolved to conduct his own works himself. This led in turn to an illustrious career as one of the first specialist orchestral conductors, in wide demand outside France for his skill and interpretative insight.

Discouragement could not stem the flow of major compositions. Harold en Italie was composed in the summer of 1834 in response to a request from Paganini for a work in which he might display a fine Stradivari viola. Berlioz used the opportunity to devise an unusual symphony with concerto elements in which echoes of his Italian journey are presented in the cloak of Byron’s Childe Harold. As in the Symphonie fantastique, a recurrent theme again serves to unify the four movements, but the modest role of the viola solo deterred Paganini from ever playing it.

If the image of Beethoven was still vivid in Berlioz’s mind at this time, his primary concern, for professional as well as artistic reasons, was to win success at the Opéra. Only thus was real recognition to be sought; only thus, too, could Berlioz prove himself in the noble line of Gluck and Spontini. Les francs-juges had already been revised once before he left for Italy. After his return he made a further attempt, with Thomas Gounet’s help, to refashion it into a single act, but it still aroused no interest. After abandoning it, he considered a comic opera on Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing (this eventually materialized as Béatrice et Bénédictin 1862) and briefly contemplated Hamlet before persuading Léon de Wailly and Auguste Barbier, with Alfred de Vigny’s assistance, to make a libretto out of Benvenuto Cellini’s Vita (Memoirs), a book whose abundant incident appealed strongly to him. It provided, too, the irresistible local colour of Renaissance Italy. First written as an opéra comique with dialogue, the libretto was refused in 1834, but by elevating the tone and expanding the action Berlioz was able to offer it to the Opéra. It was accepted in 1836 and performed in September 1838. At that time the music of Meyerbeer and Halévy held such sway at the Opéra that few members of the company were able or prepared to consider Berlioz’s bewilderingly original and inventive music with real seriousness. At all events, the three performances of 1838 were a clear failure (fig.3), and the management had little interest in the few fragmentary revivals the following year. Berlioz described the experience with bitterness as being ‘stretched on the rack’, for it not only humiliated him as an artist, it also closed the door of the Opéra to him, except as the arranger of other men’s works, for the rest of his life.

Berlioz was preoccupied at the same time with a half-Revolutionary, half-Napoleonic conception on the grandest scale, which took various forms. Remnants of the 1824 mass, a military symphony sketched out on the journey back from Italy, and a preoccupation with the Last Judgment all contributed to plans for a huge work in seven movements commemorating France’s national heroes, of which two movements were completed in 1835. These do not survive, although they were probably included in the Requiem commissioned by the minister of the interior and performed in the Invalides on 5 December 1837, and also perhaps in the Grande symphonie funèbre et triomphale, another government commission, performed during the tenth anniversary of the 1830 Revolution on 28 July 1840. Both works exploit Berlioz’s interest in grandiose spatial effects and in the appropriate matching of instrumental forces to the occasion and the place for which a piece was intended. The Symphonie funèbrewas originally written for large military band and performed out of doors. Berlioz later added parts for strings and for chorus. Traces of his Napoleonic leanings may be seen in his setting for solo bass, chorus and orchestra of Béranger’s Le cinq mai, first performed in 1835.

In contrast to these, many compositions of the 1830s were delicate and intimate. He continued to write songs, of which some were orchestrated, such as La captive and Le jeune pâtre breton. Sara la baigneuse, an exceptionally refined setting of a Hugo poem, was first heard in 1834. Les nuits d’été, six settings of Gautier poems with piano accompaniment, appeared in 1841: all six were later orchestrated.

Paganini’s unexpected gift of 20,000 francs in December 1838, a token of his admiration for Harold en Italie, made possible the composition of Roméo et Juliette, and consoled Berlioz for the failure of Benvenuto Cellini. ‘My one idea was to put it to a musical purpose. I would give up everything else and write a really important work, something splendid on a grand and original plan, full of passion and imagination, worthy to be dedicated to the glorious artist to whom I owed so much.’ Berlioz wrote movingly of the ardent months of composition and he came to regard the ‘Scène d’amour’ as one of his finest things. The critics accused him of failing to understand Shakespeare, although for Wagner at least, who was present at one of the first performances, it was a ‘revelation’.

Berlioz, Hector

4. 1842–8.

About 1841 Berlioz reached a turning-point in his career. In that year the only music of his publicly performed in Paris was the set of recitatives composed for Weber’s Der Freischütz in order to make it acceptable to the Opéra’s ban on spoken dialogue. At the same time reports of performances abroad were increasingly common. The Requiem, for example, was heard in St Petersburg, while smaller works, such as the overtures, especially Les francs-juges, were becoming more frequently heard in England and Germany. He still withheld publication of the symphonies to prevent performances outside his control, so that it was growing urgent to go abroad in person, and to reinforce a developing international reputation. At the same time the frustrations of Paris made themselves more keenly felt, with the brighter enthusiasms of 1830 already receding and bourgeois tastes daily more evident, especially in the theatre. His marriage was perhaps already strained. For the first time his musical creativity waned, with no major works appearing for five years. He worked intermittently and unenthusiastically on a Scribe libretto for the Opéra, La nonne sanglante, which was never completed. On the other hand his literary activity was extending beyond the regular demands of his newspaper criticisms to a comprehensive study of orchestration, which began to appear in 1841 in the Revue et gazette musicale and which was published as the Grand traité d’instrumentation et d’orchestration modernes in 1843.

For the next 20 years much of Berlioz’s time was spent on peregrinations of Germany, Austria, Russia and England. Curiosity about advanced music was more evident in such places than in Paris, and the administrative and financial problems of promoting concerts were fewer. The more he travelled the more bitter he became about conditions at home; yet though he contemplated settling abroad – in Dresden, for instance, and in London – he always went back to Paris.

His first concert abroad was on 26 September 1842 in Brussels. His two concerts there were, in Berlioz’s words, ‘merely an experiment’, but sufficiently successful to justify the more ambitious tour that followed shortly afterwards. He was abroad from December 1842 to the end of May 1843, and his tour took in visits to Brussels, Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Hechingen, Mannheim, Weimar, Leipzig, Dresden, back to Leipzig, Brunswick, Hamburg, Berlin, Hanover and Darmstadt. The tour was vividly recounted in open letters to his friends published initially in the Journal des débats, then collected in the Voyage musical en Allemagne et en Italie in 1844 and finally forming part of his Mémoires. He met new friends, including Schumann, revived his acquaintance with old ones – Mendelssohn and Wagner, for example – and made a study of orchestral playing in the different cities he visited. Generally his reception was wholeheartedly warm, a foretaste of many enthusiastic welcomes he was to receive in Germany. To his reputation as a new and original voice as composer was added that of being a leading modern conductor, even though he conducted few works by other composers on his first tour. His return prompted the following reflections:

Paris is where music one moment lies moribund and the next moment seethes with life; where it is sublime and second-rate, lordly and cringing, beggar and king; where it is at once glorified and despised, worshipped and insulted. In Paris music too often speaks to morons, barbarians and the deaf. You see it walking freely and without restraint, or barely able to move for the clammy fetters with which Routine shackles its powerful limbs. In Paris music is a god – so long as only the skinniest sacrifices are required to feed its altars.

Berlioz was accompanied on the German tour by a singer of mixed French and Spanish birth, Marie Recio, who sang in most of his concerts. For her he orchestrated the song Absence, from Les nuits d’été, which she sang in Leipzig for the first time. His feelings for her had none of the passionate élan he had felt towards Harriet Smithson, indeed he tried to escape her pursuit on a number of occasions. On this relationship his letters and writings are more or less silent, yet prosaic or not, it was to last 20 years, until her death. After his separation from Harriet in 1844, Berlioz was confronted with supporting two households and with the even more distressing spectacle of Harriet’s acute decline. Yet for his son, Louis, Berlioz felt an affection that was to grow stronger until it became the very focus of his emotional life.

The two years that elapsed before undertaking another concert tour were unremarkable, especially since he was now 40 and nel mezzo del cammin of his life. They were not unproductive, but were devoted far more to journalism and publication of his music and of his two first literary works than to composition. The Mémoires dwell on his endless obligations as feuilletoniste and on his concerts, the largest of which was on 1 August 1844 as part of the Grand Festival de l’Industrie, with over 1000 performers (fig.5). Four concerts early in 1845 formed a festival promoted by the Théâtre Franconi and were also given with large orchestra and chorus. From this period originates Berlioz’s unfortunate reputation as a noisy composer, and the cartoonists were not slow to exploit the image (fig.6). The finest composition of this period is the Corsaire overture, sketched in Nice immediately after the exertions of the Grand Festival de l’Industrie in 1844 and given at first with the title La tour de Nice. The broad and majestic Hymne à la France also dates from this year. Earlier he had arranged parts of his opera Benvenuto Cellini into a brilliant overture, Le carnaval romain, played for the first time on 3 February 1844, and an arrangement of Leopold de Meyer’s Marche marocaine had a notable success a year later. He saw both the Symphonie fantastique and the Symphonie funèbre et triomphale through the press at this time.

In 1845 began a more intensive and varied succession of concert tours. The first was to Marseilles and Lyons, followed by a visit to Bonn for the Beethoven festival organized by Liszt and attended by leading musicians from all over Europe and a number of crowned heads. There followed a lengthy tour of Austria, Bohemia and Hungary that brought his name and music even more decisively into the forefront of European attention. Once again he recounted the details of his travels in the Journal des débats two years later and subsequently in his Mémoires. His itinerary was as follows: by carriage to Linz and thence by steamer to Vienna, where he stayed over two months and gave five concerts. He added two new songs to his repertory, Zaïdefor soprano and Le chasseur danois for bass, and his concerts, which included at least parts of all his major works to date, were a ‘grandissime succès’. One concert was devoted to a complete performance of Roméo et Juliette, and he had no need to exaggerate his reports of applause and enthusiasm; it was a reception entirely different from anything he had ever experienced in Paris. He then gave three concerts in Prague in as many weeks and then another back in Vienna. In February 1846 he gave three concerts in Pest, including a new arrangement of the Rákóczy March, rapturously received by an audience conscious of its national aspirations. He gave a concert in Breslau, then three more in Prague, where he found the musicians ‘generally speaking the finest in Europe’ and where he enjoyed success and admiration greater even than in Vienna. On his way back to Paris he gave one concert in Brunswick, on 24 April 1846.

Not only had Berlioz won unprecedented laurels and acclaim on this tour: he had also composed the bulk of a large new work, La damnation de Faust. For some years his mind had been turning back to Goethe’s Faust and the settings he had rejected in 1829. A librettist, Almire Gandonnière, supplied some material before his departure from Paris, and Berlioz wrote the rest himself: henceforth he would write all his own major texts. La damnation de Faust was put together in the various cities he stayed in, including Passau, Vienna, Pest, Breslau and Prague. It was completed and orchestrated on his return, although composition was briefly interrupted by the commission of Le chant des chemins de fer for the opening of the Chemin de Fer du Nord at Lille on 14 June 1846, an occasion wittily recounted in Les grotesques de la musique.

The first performance of La damnation de Faust, given on 6 December 1846 at the Opéra-Comique, was a serious reverse, both artistically and financially.

Faust was given twice before a half-empty house. The fashionable Paris audience, the audience which goes to concerts and is supposed to take an interest in music, stayed comfortably at home, as little concerned with my new work as if I had been the obscurest Conservatoire student …. Nothing in my career as an artist wounded me more deeply than this unexpected indifference.

Signs of growing philistinism in Paris had been in evidence for some years, but the irony was all the sharper in contrast to the warmth and understanding shown to him abroad. Berlioz had no choice but to continue to till foreign soil and to extend the chronicle of his wanderings to new lands. Two principal nations offered hope, Russia and England, and it was to Russia that he went first, within two months of the Faust fiasco. Altogether he gave five concerts in St Petersburg and one in Moscow, the former including two complete performances of Roméo et Juliette. He now had La damnation de Faust to enrich his repertory, and the first two parts were heard three times in Russia. On his way home he gave a complete performance of Faust in Berlin at the invitation of the King of Prussia. Once again he was able to report, on his return:

great success, great profit, great performances, etc. etc. … France is becoming more and more philistine towards music, and the more I see of foreign lands the less I love my own. Art, in France, is dead; so I must go where it is still to be found. In England apparently there has been a real revolution in the musical consciousness of the nation in the last ten years. We shall see.

So he left Paris once again, reaching London in early November 1847. He had been engaged by Louis Jullien as conductor of the opening season at Drury Lane, and the works in his charge were Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoorand Linda di Chamounix, Balfe’s The Maid of Honour and Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro. The season opened in December, yet within a month Berlioz was sensing alarm at Jullien’s approaching bankruptcy. Jullien had all the bravado and showmanship of the charlatan, and though the opera season ran its full two months Berlioz was never paid. He pinned his hopes, instead, on a concert of his own music, which won many admirers. At the same juncture revolution broke out in Paris, and Berlioz was perhaps thankful to be away from the barricades. He began to piece together his Mémoires and added a preface that despairs of artistic life in France. His one salaried post, as librarian of the Conservatoire, was threatened, and many of his friends were fleeing the Continent to settle in England, chief of them Charles Hallé. Despite Jullien’s failure Berlioz found the English friendly and hospitable and their appetite for music encouraging. A second major concert on 29 June 1848 in Hanover Square Rooms established his reputation, especially in the eyes of the London press, and he contemplated staying if a suitable position were offered to him. Yet he returned to Paris, perhaps because his feuilletons offered him his sole regular income and because it was after all, as he himself ironically noted, his home.

Berlioz, Hector

5. 1848–63.

Henceforth Berlioz’s tours to foreign cities were almost all to places he had visited before; his years of first conquest were over. In the space of six years his European fame had flowered and he had, too, published most of his major works (Benvenuto Cellini and Faust were exceptions), making possible the further dissemination of his music. Success abroad went a long way to compensating for failure at home, and he continued to make regular visits to England and Germany for 15 years. The new regime in France made the Romantic heyday seem even more remote, and soon Second Empire tastes were to infiltrate all walks of life. But Berlioz achieved a new lofty detachment based on his powerfully ironic sense of humour and on his deep-rooted faith in classical ideals. One may detect a new repose in his music after 1850, linking him with his adored Gluck and isolating him both from Parisian taste and from the new schools of Liszt and Wagner.

It is not necessary to chronicle every foreign tour of this period. The majority gave him deep satisfaction and showed a genuine understanding in his audiences. The most notable events were in Weimar where Liszt’s position at the Duke of Saxe-Weimar’s court allowed him to promote certain works of Berlioz. In March 1852 Liszt revived Benvenuto Cellini, after which Berlioz, with Liszt’s aid, devised a new version, partly to improve the dramaturgy and partly to meet the demands of German taste. Its success in Weimar and other German cities was lasting. In November 1852 Liszt gave a Berlioz Week, with Benvenuto Cellini and Roméo et Juliette and two parts of La damnation de Faust, which was later dedicated to Liszt when published in 1854. In reply Liszt dedicated his own Faust Symphony to Berlioz. Further visits by Berlioz to Weimar in 1855 and 1856 were the occasion of discussions in which the Princess Sayn-Wittgenstein, Liszt’s mistress, urged Berlioz to pursue his dream of a large epic opera based on the Aeneid; it came to fruition in Les Troyens in 1858.

But in London Benvenuto Cellini fared badly when it was performed there, at Covent Garden in June 1853, and was rapidly withdrawn, as it had been in Paris in 1838. This was a single blot on Berlioz’s otherwise happy reception in England in all his five visits. His stay in 1851, as a member of the international jury to examine musical instruments at the Great Exhibition, produced some remarkable impressions in his reports to the Paris press, above all the experience of hearing 6500 children intoning All people that on earth do dwell during the Charity Children’s annual service in St Paul’s Cathedral. Six concerts in Exeter Hall in 1852, in which his own music had relatively little prominence, were ‘an altogether extraordinary success exceeding anything I had had in Russia and Germany’. Two performances of Beethoven’s Choral Symphony, in particular, set the seal on his celebrity as a conductor, and contributed to an invitation from the New Philharmonic Society to conduct their 1855 season. Since Wagner was then conducting the old Philharmonic Society it provided an occasion for the two men to meet and to exchange sympathy and encouragement in fuller measure than at any other time in their careers. Subsequently their radically divergent conceptions of music were to bring an estrangement between them. Other foreign visits that Berlioz recalled with satisfaction were to Hanover, Brunswick and Dresden in 1854, to Brussels in 1855, and his regular engagements for the summer season at Baden-Baden. He first conducted there in 1853 and was engaged every year from 1856 to 1863. Bénazet, manager of the casino, ‘let me have everything I could possibly want for the performance of my works. His munificence in this respect has far surpassed anything ever done for me even by those European sovereigns whom I have most reason to be grateful to’. It was Bénazet who commissioned for the Baden-Baden theatre Berlioz’s last work, Béatrice et Bénédict, first performed in 1862.

At home in Paris Berlioz made another determined attempt to win an audience for his music by the formation of a Société Philharmonique, in clear rivalry to the Société des Concerts du Conservatoire. This new body gave its first concert on 19 February 1850 with Berlioz as conductor. Despite initial success the society was troubled by internal dissent and by an early shortage of funds, and lasted only until May 1851. But in that period Berlioz had conducted a wide range of music and had introduced some of his own works, notably L’adieu des bergers, later to be the central part of L’enfance du Christ. At its first performance Berlioz attributed it to an imaginary 17th-century composer Pierre Ducré, allowing him to delight in the delusion of his audience. The Société Philharmonique also gave his Requiem in the church of St Eustache. The complete L’enfance du Christ was first heard in Paris on 10 December 1854 having grown from L’adieu des bergers and La fuite en Egypte. Many critics observed a more restrained style in the work, but Berlioz insisted that on the contrary only his subject matter had changed and that his primary stylistic aim, accuracy of expressive content, was still unchanged.

Berlioz’s monumental manner was represented by the Te Deum, composed in 1849, although the conception probably goes back three or four years earlier. He found no opportunity to perform this work until April 1855, when it was included in the large-scale events promoted in connection with the Exposition Universelle. By that time he had added to its two choruses a part for large children’s choir, inspired by his experience in St Paul’s Cathedral in 1851. In November 1855 Berlioz conducted three big concerts in the Palais de l’Industrie for the closing events of the Exposition. Throughout the 1840s and most of the 1850s the Société des Concerts, Paris’s longest-established and most regular concert-giving body, continued to ignore Berlioz’s music completely.

His father died in 1848. Berlioz had felt deeply attached to him, the more since the strain in their relationship during Berlioz’s first days in Paris had passed, and he felt the loss keenly. He remained close to both his surviving sisters, Nanci and Adèle, who died in 1850 and 1860 respectively – and their families. He inherited a modest income from his father’s estate, which relieved some of his financial burdens. Harriet Smithson died in 1854 after four years of severe paralysis. Berlioz wrote movingly of her and of the failure of their happiness in the Mémoires; he never forgot the impression she first made on him or the style of dramatic interpretation that coloured his own conception of Shakespeare.

He married Marie Recio seven months later, a natural step after their 12-year association, and though she had not sung in public for some years he still had to suffer the damage done by her spiteful attitude to other musicians, Wagner especially. With her came her Spanish mother who outlived them both and cared generously for Berlioz in his last years. His son Louis, now in the French navy, caused Berlioz many an anxiety after a difficult adolescence, but gradually there developed a strong bond between them. In Louis’ words: ‘The thread of my life is but the extensions of my father’s. When it is cut, both lives will end’. Louis saw action in the Crimean War and in the Baltic. In 1867, when captain of a merchant ship plying between France and Mexico, he died of yellow fever in Havana, one of the severest blows Berlioz ever had to suffer and a direct contribution to his own final decline. In Louis’ love of travel and the sea Berlioz saw a reflection of his own lifelong, idealized passion for distant lands, inextricably interwoven with his dream of a land where art and music enjoyed unfettered cultivation, where the frustrations and miseries of Paris were not to be found. In 1862, in response, Louis came to love and admire his father’s music.

Berlioz’s compositions in the 1840s were haphazard in origin and frequency, partly because of his diversion of energy to travel, conducting, proof correction and journalism. In the following decade these diversions were no less pressing but he now found the mental and spiritual calm to produce a series of masterpieces that shine nobly through the day-to-day battles he was obliged to fight. After the Te Deum of 1849, his main productions were L’enfance du Christ, composed to his own text mostly in 1854. Another work of 1854 is the cantata in honour of the Emperor L'impériale, played at the Exposition Universelle of 1855. Early in 1856 he orchestrated most of Les nuits d’été (Absence had been orchestrated in 1843) for publication in Winterthur, though he never heard more than Absence and Le spectre de la rose in orchestral form. At that point (April 1856) he yielded to his desire to compose a vast epic opera based on the second and fourth books of Virgil’s Aeneid. The idea had been in his mind for five years or so, and had doubtless haunted him since childhood when he wept at his father’s readings of Virgil. His love of Virgil had stayed with him even through the blinding discoveries of Shakespeare and Goethe and came back to him with irresistible force in his maturity. His muse was now in full flight, for long disillusionment with the world seems to have fanned the creative flame even though he knew what difficulties he would face if it were ever written. By abandoning most of his concert tours and much of his journalism he did in fact complete Les Troyens, words and music, in less than two years, with small additions and revisions to be made at intervals over the next five. It is a five-act grand opera in the French classical tradition, on the same approximate scale as Meyerbeer’s operas and many others that enjoyed regular performance in Paris, and composed with the Opéra in mind. Yet Berlioz’s chances of securing a production in which his work would receive attention at all close to its merits were negligible from the first – a fact he was fully aware of.

The following five years were devoted to a series of frustrating attempts to see Les Troyens on the stage. Berlioz’s enemies in the press were quick to exaggerate its length and its demands, and the failure of Benvenuto Cellini was still remembered at the Opéra. He gave numerous readings of the poem to carefully chosen audiences; he vainly sought the patronage of Napoleon III and his ministers. Eventually, in 1860, he accepted an offer to mount it at the Théâtre Lyrique, an independent theatre run by the enterprising impresario Carvalho, while Wagner’s Tannhäuserwas staged with unprecedented extravagance at the Opéra. Its failure in March 1861 was bitterly ironic for Berlioz, and it created an opportunity for Les Troyens to be accepted at the Opéra. This agreement fell through early in 1863 so turning Berlioz back to the Théâtre-Lyrique, where, in order to see any production at all, he was forced to divide his opera into two parts, Acts 1 and 2 becoming La prise de Troie and Acts 3 to 5 Les Troyens à Carthage. The second part was first performed on 4 November 1863, with Mme Charton-Demeur as Dido. It was an unequivocal success, warmly admired by the majority of the press and running to 21 performances. Berlioz was proud and touched, but gradually embittered, then enraged, to see cuts made by Carvalho at subsequent performances (the ‘Chasse royale et orage’, for example, was played on the first night only) and to see the printed vocal scores being mutilated to match the performances ‘like the carcass of a calf on a butcher’s stall’. Of La prise de Troie Berlioz only ever heard one extract sung at Baden-Baden in 1859.

Berlioz, Hector

6. 1863–9.

After 1863 Berlioz discouraged revivals of Les Troyens and none took place for nearly 30 years. The financial fruits were compensation for his artistic despair, for he was enabled at long last to resign his duties as critic of the Journal des débats. He retired from composition and criticism, and allowed his spirit to be overcome by a despair and disillusionment of appalling intensity. He became morbidly conscious of death, especially since the loss of two sisters and two wives, and as more and more of his contemporaries and friends disappeared he haunted the cemeteries. In 1864 he wrote:

I am in my 61st year; past hopes, past illusions, past high thoughts and lofty conceptions. My son is almost always far away from me. I am alone. My contempt for the folly and baseness of mankind, my hatred of its atrocious cruelty, have never been so intense. And I say hourly to Death: ‘When you will’. Why does he delay?

And yet he lived another five years, suffering acutely from a form of intestinal neuralgia that had first appeared some ten years before and had reached severe proportions by 1859. Physical pain was never far away in the last 15 years, accentuated by his spiritual isolation. He depended more and more on a diminishing circle of friends for comfort, especially Stephen Heller, the Damckes, the Massarts and Edouard Alexandre. From time to time he would give readings of Shakespeare; but music he usually avoided. He went to few public concerts or operas, making an exception for Don Giovanni, for Pasdeloup’s concerts where Les francs-juges overture and parts of Les Troyenswere played, and for the Opéra’s revival of Gluck’s Alcestein October 1866. He completed and revised his Mémoires. 1200 copies were printed in 1865 and stored in his office in the Conservatoire. A few close friends received copies; the rest were to be published after his death.

The final pages of the Mémoires reveal the single ray of light that penetrated an otherwise all-pervading gloom. In 1864 he felt an overwhelming impulse to revisit the scenes of his childhood, especially Meylan, near Grenoble, where his adored Estelle had lived as a child. He had made an earlier pilgrimage and even written to her in 1848, but this time, having discovered that she was living in Lyons, he wrote again and paid her a visit. She was now a widow of 67, he 60, yet the memory of their childhood encounter was fully alive in his mind. ‘My soul leapt out towards its idol the moment I saw her, as if she had still been in the splendour of her beauty.’ Berlioz was enraptured to be in her presence, to kiss her hand, and, next day, to receive even a brief and formal letter from her. He sought permission to write to her, and for the rest of his life he did, nearly every month. He visited her the following three summers in Geneva, where she went to live with her son. She accepted his attentions with calmness and incomprehension turning gradually to understanding and sympathy. The full extent of his dependence on this glimpse of his own childhood cannot be measured: not for the first time he had fallen in love with an idealized vision, reality transfigured by imagination.

Berlioz had not wholly given up conducting his own music abroad. In December 1866 he accepted an invitation to conduct La damnation de Faust in Vienna. Hanslick, who had admired Roméo et Juliette in 1846, castigated the music but in general its success was immense. Age, illness and his poor knowledge of German now impaired his conducting skill, but he was lionized by Cornelius and Herbeck and fêted as he had been in 1845. The following February he conducted Harold en Italie and parts of Béatrice et Bénédict in Cologne as the guest of his old friend from 1830, Ferdinand Hiller. The final burst of energy was his acceptance of an invitation to St Petersburg in November 1867, shortly after the death of Louis. Perhaps he thought he would find renewal and escape. Instead the journey and the concerts – six in St Petersburg and two in Moscow – shattered his remaining strength. Not even the instinctively sympathetic response from the emerging school of Russian composers or the overwhelming public applause staved off a sense of impending collapse. He went directly to Nice, scene of happy memories of 1831 and 1844, and Monte Carlo. Twice, walking by the sea, he fell and was picked up dazed and bleeding. He returned to Paris where he had 12 months to live, now little more than a shadow, dragging out what had come to seem a meaningless existence. He died on 8 March 1869, having been cared for by his mother-in-law and visited by his remaining friends, the Damckes, Saint-Saëns and Reyer. He was buried in the Cimetière du Nord, Montmartre, on 11 March 1869.

Berlioz, Hector

7. Character and personality.

Berlioz was widely misunderstood in his own lifetime – and has been since – in spite of the clarity of his ideas and the abundance of his writings. Few composers have explained at such length or with such cogency the nature of their own inspiration, its sources, its aims or its meaning. In Berlioz certain qualities stand out, and chief among them must be cited his consistency and his sincerity. There was no dividing line between his life and his music; the same principles governed both and each was a reflection of the other. Few composers have woven their own personality so tightly into their music, so that all his works reflect something in himself expressed through poetry, literature, religion or drama. Expression is the key. Music was not for him an autonomous art obeying internal rules and exploiting internal relations. It was an integral part of emotional and spiritual life, reflecting the teeming motion of the mind, the explosive diversity of life. Just as Shakespeare had laid bare every facet of human nature in poetry and drama, so Berlioz aspired to chart his own experience in music. Of course, not all his music is autobiographical, but he remained steadfast to an ideal of truthfulness of artistic expression from the first note he wrote to the last.

Sincerity as burning as this meant an unwillingness to compromise. He was not a diplomat, and he often failed to win influential friends by being outspoken at unguarded moments. Cherubini and Fétis, for example, might have been won over to his cause had he been less severe on their work to their faces. Many acquaintances found him embarrassingly forthright in his views. ‘Few were at ease in his company’, wrote Legouvé; and his sister Nanci said as early as 1824 that with him everything was open and spontaneous and that he never made the slightest effort to conceal the vagaries of his mood. He was subject to violent emotional change, from enthusiasm to misery, and these are reflected in his music. The Symphonie fantastiquespecifically depicts the vague des passions of the young artist. Enthusiasm was to be seen in his adoration of Harriet Smithson, Shakespeare, Gluck, Goethe and Virgil; misery in his descriptions of the ‘spleen’ and the ‘mal d’isolement’ that afflicted him throughout his life, increasingly so as his isolation became more real and more intense. His dislikes, for example of inexpressive music, ornamented singing and of commercially minded theatre managers, were as intense as his enthusiasms and as consistently articulated. Sometimes he had to conceal his feelings, when writing public notices of works by respected contemporaries, a cause of bitterness about the critic’s métier that gradually intensified.

Another cause was the failure of the world to live up to his ideals, and not just its failure, its clear determination to dissociate itself from them. He was a passionate idealist, whose conception of what might be achieved in music drew him on even when external discouragement was most intense: in the treatise on orchestration he described an ideal orchestra; in Les soirées de l’orchestre he described an ideal city, Euphonia, where everything is arranged to the service of art and where commerce has no place. He expected his audience to have an imagination as vivid as his own, he made no rigid frontier between the kingdoms of imagination and reality. His lofty conception of the role of art and music presupposed an essentially aristocratic view that music was not for the many; it was a highly sophisticated form of expression (sometimes disarmingly simple in its outward form) that required the highest degree of imagination and intellect for its proper appreciation. He spoke as an artist to men of kindred capacity. The morons, fools, parasites and tune-mongers who made fortunes out of music he bitterly despised.

One quality saved him from morbid self-pity and from the tediousness of rapture: he had the sharpest sense of the ridiculous in human behaviour. His writings win us by their humour as much as by their style and their ideas. His conversation was laced with puns. His humour was largely based on the ironic, on the startling contrast between what is and what might be, but also on the foibles of singers, pianists and audiences. Contrast and diversity were to be cultivated as well as to be laughed at, so that the juxtaposition of passion and mockery in his writing is equally as characteristic as the simultaneous combination of opposites to be found so often in his music.

His intellect embraced the broad movement of ideas that Romanticism swept into currency and can be seen as a powerful expression of them. Yet some tastes passed him by, notably the nostalgia for things medieval so widespread in his time. He had little taste for painting and had, as he confessed, ‘little feeling for conventional beauty’. He knew classical Latin and French literature well and was given to quoting it at all times, especially to adapting quotations slightly to suit his purpose. His favourite authors remained with him through life and provided imaginative worlds for his fantasy.

Berlioz was no philosopher, since life, for all his idealism, was a practical matter whose problems had to be confronted by action not theories. The business of composing and performing music, educating listeners and guiding taste was a daily obligation from which he drew such evidence as he needed to reinforce his views on the proper place of music in culture. His historical sense did not extend to an appreciation of music much earlier than that of Gluck, and most of Bach and Handel left him cold.

Although he falls clearly into the French tradition, from Rameau and Gluck through Gossec, Méhul and Le Sueur, he had no nationalist preconceptions whatever. His distaste for Italian music stemmed purely from its composers’ higher regard for melody and vocalization than for expression. Because Germany, England, Bohemia and Russia applauded his music he was prepared to regard these as musical nations without going so far as to presume that their compositions were inherently superior to those of any other country. He was as happy to work with foreign musicians as with French, though he never fully mastered English and spoke little German. Many of the friends he valued most highly were foreigners, such as Hiller, Heller, Ernst, Davison, Damcke, Hallé and of course Liszt.

Slowly the youthful idealist changed into the aloof, dignified but weary figure of later years. His working life was characterized by tireless energy and the capacity to turn emotional stress into creative form. He was driven by the intensity of his emotional being, with nerves that responded more sharply than those of his fellow men. His life was a continuous search for an unattainable tranquillity, not the tranquillity of idleness or repose but the peace of mind that would allow him to work rather than labour, write music rather than prose, and grapple with his leaping imagination rather than with the petty squabbles of everyday life.

Berlioz, Hector

8. Introduction to the works.

It is fundamental to the understanding of Berlioz’s music to recognize that for him there existed rigid categories of neither form nor medium. Opera, cantata, song and symphony all merge imperceptibly one into another and overlap constantly. The important criterion is the matching of means to expressive ends. Heterogeneous elements are to be found in all his larger works and some, like Lélio or the Huit scènes de Faust, have unity of subject matter and artistic purpose, not unity of musical means. He did not refuse to adopt conventional means in order to be iconoclastic; he felt impelled to give every idea its proper musical setting according to its literary, pictorial or suggestive content, and this led him to construct new forms and to throw musical genres into new relationships.

Apart from two youthful quintets and a sextet, all now lost, Berlioz composed no chamber music. He wrote nothing for the most widely cultivated instrument of his time, the solo piano. He was not a pianist and his only solo keyboard music is a group of three short harmonium pieces commissioned in 1844. His chosen medium was the orchestra, expanding in his time with new speed and momentum. The best of his songs, though all composed with piano accompaniment, were eventually orchestrated. He was not, like Chopin or Schumann, a miniaturist by habit, yet the smallest of his works are little more than albumleaves, while the largest are conceived on a huge scale.

Berlioz, Hector

9. Operas.

Berlioz completed five operas, all different in style and dramatic stance. He contemplated or sketched many more and had at least one operatic project in mind at nearly all points of his working life. Opera was the medium of the predecessors he admired most – Gluck, Spontini, Méhul, Le Sueur, Weber – and was the most assiduously cultivated form of music in Paris during his first years there. Success in opera was also, in Berlioz’s time, the principal yardstick by which a composer was measured and the surest way to financial reward. Dramatic expression is the very pulse of his music, so that operatic elements are to be observed in many of his non-operatic works, especially the symphonies and larger choral works.

Estelle et Némorin, composed in 1823, has not survived. There followed Les francs-juges, composed to a libretto by Humbert Ferrand in 1826. The secret tribunals of the Black Forest in the later Middle Ages provided a background for a sombre story of heroism and virtue in the face of oppression and tyranny. Its colour came from Méhul and more especially Weber, whose Freischütz had been heard in Paris two years before. Six complete numbers and the overture survive, of which the latter is a bold and imaginative piece of orchestral writing, especially since Beethoven was still unknown to him. The first version, probably consisting of 14 numbers, was superseded in 1829 by a longer version, which probably included the Marche des gardes, later to become the ‘Marche au supplice’ in the Symphonie fantastique. But though Berlioz was soon pillaging the score, he made a further attempt to recast it in 1833 into a one-act intermezzo Le cri de guerre de Brisgau. His failure with this reflects the enormous strides his music was taking during these years and his desire to tackle new material. Consider his remark in 1828 that he had two operas in hand for the Opéra-Comique, a third for the Opéra and a fourth planned on the English play Virginius. Projects on Robin Hood and Atala perhaps never even reached libretto stage. In 1833 he considered Much Ado about Nothing for the Opéra-Comique, the theatre for which Benvenuto Cellini was destined when first drafted.

This opera, when finally presented in 1838, was utterly different from Les francs-juges in pace, colour, subject matter and dramaturgy, and was very different too from any other opera to be seen in Paris in that decade, comic or serious. It combined elements of both, perhaps accidentally, because the work, originally intended for the Opéra-Comique, had been upgraded for the Opéra. Yet the mixture of genres was utterly characteristic of Berlioz, with the tone veering from knockabout comedy to serious reflection on the duties and priorities of the artist. One reason for its poor reception was the dazzling brilliance of the music, its orchestral virtuosity and rhythmic élan, shifting in metre and colour with kaleidoscopic suddenness. Neither players, singers nor audience could grasp an opera so teeming with life when the more stolid manner of Meyerbeer was fashionable. The libretto has weaknesses, especially in the character of the Pope (changed to Cardinal on the order of the censor), and is diffuse in the last act; it was these problems that Berlioz attempted to solve in 1852 when he recast the work for Weimar. But at the same time other dramatic inconsistencies were created and some of the vitality of the 1838 version was sacrificed. In his own words, Benvenuto Cellini ‘contains a variety of ideas, an energy and exuberance and a brilliance of colour such as I may perhaps never find again’.

Berlioz made some sketches on Ballanche’s Erigone, an ‘intermède antique’ in the period 1838–40; he also considered a collaboration with Frédéric Soulié, and finally began work on La nonne sanglante by Scribe, a concession to the Opéra’s established tastes. The libretto, based on Lewis’s The Monk, recalls the sombre tones of Les francs-juges and the music survives, likewise, only in fragmentary form, for Berlioz abandoned composition and negotiation with the Opéra in 1847. What music survives is undistinguished, hampered by Scribe’s lumbering metres, though sometimes prophetic of the restrained accents of Les Troyens.

By 1850 Berlioz seems for the first time to have abandoned thoughts of opera. Nonetheless, involuntarily, the dream of a grand opera on Virgil’s Aeneid began then to impose itself. He resisted it, but in 1856, urged by the Princess Sayn-Wittgenstein, decided to yield. He wrote his own libretto, building Acts 1 and 2 around the tragedy of Cassandra in Troy and Acts 3, 4 and 5 around the tragedy of Dido in Carthage, linked in the character of Aeneas and the fateful destiny of the Trojan people. It is a truly epic opera, grand in conception and execution, with equal claim to be Berlioz’s masterpiece as to be one of the towering achievements of 19th-century music. In it all aspects of Berlioz’s art converge: the monumental and the intimate, the symphonic and the operatic, the decorative and the solemn. Its great scenes include the enormous finale of Act 1 where Cassandra’s wails of doom contrast starkly with the Trojans’ fatal faith in the Wooden Horse; the Royal Hunt and Storm, where the coming together of Dido and Aeneas is enacted in an elaborate and symbolic mime; the sublime sequence of quintet, septet and duet in the garden scene that follows; the final departure of Aeneas and Dido’s immolation, and much else. The opera belongs to a long tradition that embraces Rameau, Gluck, Spontini and Meyerbeer, and was anything but revolutionary. Yet the classical poise and sense of tragedy is imbued with a warmth of feeling and passion that only a Romantic composer could attain, ‘Virgil Shakespeareanized’, he called it.

His last opera was an opéra comique, composed almost as relaxation after the travail of Les Troyens. Béatrice et Bénédictwas begun in 1860 and first performed in 1862. Berlioz made his own libretto from Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing, adapting much of the original text for his dialogue. ‘It is a caprice written with a point of a needle’, in his own words, a fair description of the light textures and disarming immediacy of the work. There are moments of sterner feeling, as in Beatrice’s air in Act 2, ensembles of almost Mozartian grace, and a heaven-sent tranquillity in the Duo-Nocturne that concludes the first act. As an interpolation on Shakespeare, Berlioz invented a comic character Somarone, in which the archetypal pedantic Kapellmeister is gently satirized.

Berlioz, Hector

10. Symphonies.

It was Berlioz’s discovery of Beethoven that led him to compose symphonies, yet his treatment of music as an expressive and dramatic art made his symphonies into something other than the pure instrumental music that many Germans saw in Beethoven. They stretch the meaning of the word to new limits. The first, the Symphonie fantastique of 1830, is a five-movement symphony with a slow introduction to the first-movement Allegro, a waltz, a slow movement, a march and a finale, the whole unified by a theme that recurs, transformed, in each movement. But it is, more importantly, an ‘Episode in an Artist’s Life’, set out in detail in the programme, and the recurrent theme is an idée fixe representing the artist’s obsession with the woman he adores. There is no mistaking the artist or the woman as Berlioz and Harriet Smithson, and the programme spells out his dreams and fantasies in dramatic form. The slow introduction, for example, portrays the ‘flux of passion, the unaccountable joys and sorrows he experienced before he saw his beloved’; the Allegro describes ‘the volcanic love that his beloved suddenly inspired in him’. The last two movements represent an opium dream in which he dreams he has murdered his beloved and is led to execution, and in the finale he finds himself at a macabre and turbulent witches’ sabbath. Later (in 1855) the programme was altered to interpret the whole drama as a dream, not just the end. Berlioz devoted much time and attention to the programme, revised it frequently and generally issued it as a pamphlet when the symphony was performed. Its vivid action is matched by music of unprecedented boldness and originality. The orchestration adopts many practices previously associated with opera, such as the use of harps, bells and english horn. Berlioz used the E clarinet for the shrieking presentation of the beloved’s image in the finale, and brought together combinations and distributions (for example the multi-divisi strings) of extreme boldness; four timpani are used simultaneously to represent distant thunder, and the brass is given a distinctive new role. The novelty and defiant youthfulness of the score have never faded, and the musical and thematic invention is inextricably linked with Berlioz’s conception of a new world of colour and dramatic content. At one stroke the symphony as a form became a fully-fledged medium of explicit drama.

Harold en Italie, the symphony that followed in 1834, has a prominent concerto element, with a solo viola impersonating the character of Harold, a responsive and passionate observer of scenes of Italian life. The drama is more episodic and less cogent than in the Symphonie fantastique and the theme that here represents Harold recurs unchanged in each movement. There is a direct link with Beethoven in the last movement (‘Orgie de brigands’), which is introduced by brief reminiscences of the first three movements. There are picturesque echoes of Italy in the ‘Marche des pèlerins’, with its tolling bells and chanting pilgrims, and the serenade of the Abruzzi mountaineer. The symphonic idea is retained with limited acceptance of the principles of sonata form in the first movement and by the balance of the four movements. The music is also enriched by an obsession with rhythmic vitality and rhythmic experiment, looking forward to the impulsive vivacity of Benvenuto Cellini.

Berlioz’s third symphony was Roméo et Juliette (1839), sub-titled ‘symphonie dramatique’. It moves well away from the purely symphonic realm towards that of opera. Yet Berlioz was specifically not writing an opera, and he kept the idea of symphonic construction closely in mind. He was able, consequently, to express the main portions of the drama in instrumental music, while setting the more expository and narrative sections for voices. The three principal instrumental sections – ‘Fête chez Capulet’, ‘Scene d’amour’ and ‘La reine Mab’ – can be seen as first movement, slow movement and scherzo, with elaborate vocal introduction and finale. The introduction sets the scene with warring Montagues and Capulets, and outlines the coming drama in choral recitative, with foretastes of later movements and solo sections for tenor and contralto. The text is by Emile Deschamps, based on Garrick’s version of Shakespeare (which is what Berlioz saw at the Odéon in 1827). The instrumental sections intensify the drama, since instruments have a more powerful capacity for deep expression than voices, as Berlioz explained in his preface. The finale is a complex sequence of movements, scarcely symphonic in the traditional sense, but drawing the listener out from the inner drama to the world of action and resolution. Juliet’s funeral procession, the scene where Romeo comes to the vault, the death of the lovers, Friar Laurence’s explanation and the reconciliation of the two families are enacted in music mostly of operatic cast, especially the final Oath, which can match anything in Guillaume Tell or Les Huguenots for grandeur, and was later echoed in Tannhäuser.

The Grande symphonie funèbre et triomphale (1840) is an occasional piece for a solemn public ceremony, scored for large military band, and was probably put together from earlier drafts. This is definitely so for the second movement ‘Oraison funèbre’, reworked as a trombone solo from a scene in Les francs-juges. The first movement, ‘Marche funèbre’, is one of Berlioz’s most powerful movements, immense in span and dynamic contrast, with an overwhelming sense of melancholy projected on to a public, even popular level. The finale, ‘Apothéose’, is a triumphal march. Of particular interest is the fact that the three movements are in different keys, F minor, G major and B respectively. In 1842 Berlioz added parts for optional string orchestra and later also for chorus, with a patriotic text by Antony Deschamps.

In his Mémoires Berlioz spoke of a symphony he dreamed of writing in the 1850s, though because of difficulties of time, expense and performance he decided not to commit it to paper, a tragic loss perhaps, but an indication too that he had still not lost sight of the symphonic mode. Yet it is easier to see the symphonic impulse expanding vastly into Roméo et Juliette and thence further towards dramatic expression in La damnation de Faust and L’enfance du Christ.

Berlioz, Hector

11. Larger dramatic choral works.

La damnation de Faust was described by Berlioz at the time of composition as an ‘opéra de concert’ but was finally issued as a ‘légende dramatique’ (fig.12). In 1847, when there was a proposal to turn it into an opera, it became clear that Berlioz would have wanted to revise it considerably for the stage. Its effect rests too strongly on the imagination to be directly transferable to the theatre, and the same can be said of Roméo et Juliette and L’enfance du Christ. Transformations of time and place are sometimes dramatically sequential and sometimes kaleidoscopic, since Berlioz used only those parts of Goethe’s Faust that met his needs. Taking the rejected Huit scènes de Faust of 1828–9 and inserting his rousing arrangement of the Rákóczy March at the end of the first part, he expanded the work into a broad conception of Faust as an aspiring, yearning soul, overwhelmed by the immensity of nature, with a heart sensitive to emotion at many levels, yet ultimately damned by his inner weaknesses, which Mephistopheles both represents and exploits. The nature music is particularly striking, in Faust’s welcome of spring at the beginning and the invocation early in the fourth part, where harmony and orchestration display Berlioz’s genius for the unexpected within the span of a huge melodic line. The chorus plays a large part, as penitents, carousers, sylphs, soldiers, students and as the occupants of both Heaven and Hell. The finale of the second part, combining the songs of both soldiers and students, is a tour de force; and the Pandaemonium, at the climax of the precipitous ‘Course à l’abîme’, is an apocalyptic scene worthy of John Martin (a comparison first made of Berlioz’s music by Heine) or even Blake.

L’enfance du Christ (1850–54) shows the same mixture of dramatic action and philosophic reflection as La damnation de Faust, though Berlioz still refrained from calling it an oratorio. It is constructed in three parts, ‘Le songe d’Hérode’, ‘La fuite en Egypte’ and ‘L’arrivée à Saïs’, the second of which was composed first. Like La damnation de Faust, the score contains stage directions to explain (to the imagination) the movement of events. The third part, with the Ishmaelites’ welcome of the holy family, is the most immediately theatrical. In the first part Berlioz’s concern was for the tormented soul of Herod, disturbed in his dreams yet at the mercy of his soothsayers; then, with a clear change of mood, the listener is taken to Mary and Joseph in Bethlehem and the angels’ warning. The second part is seen largely through the eyes of the narrator, with instrumental music in the overture setting the tone and distancing the action. At the end, when the Saviour has found repose, the music draws away from the portrayal of action to a serenely contemplative farewell, ‘O mon âme’, the nearest Berlioz ever came to a devoutly Christian mode of expression.

Perhaps these dramatic choral works would never have existed if Berlioz had won early success and acceptance in opera. Yet they constitute a heterogeneous genre entirely characteristic of his faith in expressive truth as superior to consistency of method. They left their mark, too, on the dramatic style of Les Troyens into which his symphonic, choral and dramatic impulses were then all compulsively channelled.

Berlioz, Hector

12. Other choral works.

Berlioz was not an orthodox Christian, yet he set sacred texts with a strong personal vision that has deep religious roots. The Messe solennelle of 1824 was partially modelled on the masses of Cherubini and Le Sueur, but Berlioz's distinctive tone is already marked, especially in the forceful close of the Kyrie, the closing ‘Domine salvum’, and the powerful ‘Resurrexit’. Although Berlioz turned against the work after its second performance in 1827 and claimed to have destroyed it, it was discovered in an Antwerp church in 1992, revealing that many later works, including the Symphonie fantastique, the Requiem and the Te Deum, borrowed or adapted passages from it. The Requiem (1837) and the Te Deum (1849) form a pair of monumental sacred works that exploit Berlioz’s sense of numinous space on a grand scale. Space and direction are essential elements in both. In the Requiem the large orchestra is supplemented by eight pairs of timpani and four groups of additional brass placed at the four corners of chorus and orchestra. These large forces are used for the ‘Tuba mirum’, where Berlioz’s vision of the Last Judgment is realized with overwhelming vividness and force, and there is no doubt that the music requires a building (such as the church of Les Invalides, for which it was composed) that can do justice to its sonority. This broad ceremonial style was a legacy from the outdoor music of the French Revolution, when immense forces of wind and percussion were assembled for public occasions; yet Berlioz was careful to contrast the great with the small. The ‘Quid sum miser’ and the ‘Quaerens me’ form a strikingly restrained contrast with the outbursts on either side of them. The Offertorium, adapted from the Kyrie of the 1824 Mass, is written in a subdued contrapuntal style, with the chorus intoning two alternating notes over a winding orchestral accompaniment. The Sanctus is a trifle worldly in its sweetness, and the ‘Hostias’ exploits the extraordinary sonority of high flutes and low trombones in combination. The Requiem is expressive without being theatrical, solemn without being sanctimonious. It marks an extreme point in his music, where Shakespearean and literary ideas have no place; all is subsumed in a vision of humanity in collective obeisance to the presence of God.

The feeling for space in the Te Deum is expressed by the contrast of the organ with the orchestra and chorus. The organ should be at a distance from the rest and is not often heard simultaneously with them; the opening chords particularly exploit the directional idea. There are parts for two choruses and an extra body of 600 children’s voices, in a manner similar to the ripieno line in the opening chorus of Bach’s St Matthew Passion. Counterpoint again plays an important part in the formulation of the style. The ‘Dignare’ is constructed on a highly original device of moving the bass line through a succession of pedals, a 3rd apart, and Berlioz’s technique of harmonic variation is much in evidence. The full forces produce moments of great dynamic impact, especially in the ‘Tibi omnes’ at the conclusion of each of three verses, and in the ‘Judex crederis’, described by Berlioz as ‘Babylonian, Ninevitish’, perhaps the most immense movement of his entire output: climax breaks over climax like an unending sea. The last movement is an orchestral march for the presentation of the colours, enacted at St Eustache in 1855, and an additional movement, never used by Berlioz, is a ‘Prélude’ designed for military occasions only. A tenor soloist sings in the ‘Te ergo quaesumus’, a movement retrieved from the Agnus Dei of the 1824 Mass.

There are other choral works in which the same monumental style is applied on a narrower scale, for example the Hymne à la France (1844) and L’impériale (1854) whose titles betray their patriotic origins. The Chant sacré (1829) and the Méditation religieuse (1831), both settings of Thomas Moore, can be coupled as contemplative works, short but broad in style. The Scène héroïque(1825–6) and Le cinq mai (1835) are more narrative, like dramatic cantatas. Sara la baigneuse, to a text by Victor Hugo, especially in its version for three separate choruses and small orchestra, is exquisitely poetic, one of Berlioz’s most delicate and refined compositions. A number of choral works were composed with piano accompaniment, and the best of these are Le ballet des ombres (1828), a remarkably daring evocation of nocturnal spirits, and the Chant guerrier and the Chanson à boire, both in the Irlande collection of 1829, both exploiting expressive contrast as an element of form.

Berlioz, Hector

13. Songs.

Some of Berlioz’s pieces, for example Hélène or Sara la baigneuse, exist in versions for four voices with accompaniment. There are songs for two or for three voices, so that the same phenomenon of a continuum between genres can be observed between choral music and songs. La belle voyageuse is a solo song with piano or orchestra, or a chorus for women’s voices and orchestra; La mort d’Ophélie is a solo song with piano or for women’s chorus with either piano or orchestral accompaniment. Berlioz made adaptations according to need wherever the expressive content of the piece allowed. A number of songs were orchestrated, and some, like Zaïde and Le chasseur danois, came into being in both piano and orchestral versions at the same time.

As a songwriter Berlioz owed much to the tradition of the French romance, with which he was familiar from childhood, and many of his earliest compositions were in this mould. It is interesting to see how La captive, composed in Italy in 1832, was originally a strophic song relying on an exquisitely shaped melody, but was later revised by Berlioz into a through-composed song with orchestral accompaniment, a fully elaborated work in his most expressive style. Even as late as 1850 he was publishing songs like Le matin and Petit oiseau (two settings of the same text) in an unambitious form with simple piano accompaniment. One of his highest achievements in song is the Elégie en prose, the last of the Irlande set of 1829, a fervent outpouring of Romantic feeling. Berlioz wrote of it: ‘I think I have rarely found a melody of such truth and poignancy, steeped in such a surge of sombre harmony’. But this is overshadowed by the Nuits d’été of 1840–41, six settings of poems by Gautier, originally composed for single voice with piano, but orchestrated with some transpositions for different voices in 1856. One should be wary of treating the set as a strict cycle and Berlioz never performed it as such, but it has a wholeness of mood and feeling and a satisfying emotional balance. The outgoing mood of Villanelle and L’île inconnue frame more sombre reflections on disappointed love, the longing of Absence and the icy serenity of Au cimetière. The orchestral versions are executed with supreme skill, with light yet richly coloured textures throughout.

Berlioz, Hector

14. Orchestral music.

Besides the symphonies, Berlioz’s orchestral output included five concert overtures that reflected Beethoven’s and Mendelssohn’s treatment of the overture as an independent form. Waverley (1828) and Rob-Roy (1831) are based on Scott novels without any supposition that they preface an opera. In Waverley the contrast of slow introduction with vigorous Allegro is an illustration of the couplet:

Dreams of love and Lady’s charms
Give place to honour and to arms.

It is one of the few works where Berlioz shows any affinity with the Italian style, but it is also experimental in feeling, especially at the beginning of the coda. Rob-Roy was rejected by the composer as ‘long and diffuse’, which is a fair summary, and two themes were re-used in Harold en Italie. Le roi Lear, composed just before it, displays, in contrast, great concentration of energy; it is not a retelling of the play but a general representation of its mood, with events and characters worked into a logical musical sequence. Its composition was a spontaneous response to first reading the play and has some of the energetic turbulence of the first movement of the Symphonie fantastique. The overture to Benvenuto Cellini established a formal pattern of brief allegro before a slow section returning to the main allegro, and Berlioz used this in all his subsequent overtures, Le carnaval romain, Le corsaire and Béatrice et Bénédict. Le carnaval romain is perhaps Berlioz’s most extrovert and brilliant orchestral work, whose pace and glitter have long established it as a favourite concert showpiece. Le corsaire has a similar swiftness and brilliance, and a beautifully expressive slow section recalled, at fast tempo, in the Allegro. The music spells out the atmosphere and associations of the sea, in particular the Mediterranean, which provided Berlioz’s first experience of wind and rigging in combat.

The Marche funèbre pour la dernière scène d’Hamlet is a neglected work, but one of his finest. There is a part for wordless chorus intoning a lugubrious ‘Ah!’ from time to time, but the burden of a long relentless climax is carried by an orchestral ostinato and a melody of hollow solemnity, the feeling so clearly and so often inspired in Berlioz by his experience of the play. The closing pages, where he used chromatic harmony to fine effect, are as affecting as Dido’s final scene in Les Troyens and seem to have been conceived on an equivalently broad scale.

Another solitary orchestral work is Rêverie et caprice for solo violin with piano or orchestral accompaniment; its restless movement, alternating rapidly between slow and fast tempos, is explained by its origin as a solo air from Benvenuto Cellini, but it is hardly satisfactory as a violin showpiece and has too fragmentary a construction to be convincing as instrumental music.

Berlioz, Hector

15. Other works.

Only with Berlioz’s attitude to the mixing of opposites could a work like Lélio have come into being, for its six musical numbers are, if seen as separate entities, wholly diverse in subject and treatment. Yet the whole is given a sense of order by its literary format and by the vivid links with Berlioz’s personal life in each movement. Originally entitled Le retour à la vie in 1831, it was a pendant to the Symphonie fantastique, a further episode in an artist’s life, showing how he comes to terms with life after an overwhelming traumatic experience, largely through the healing power of music and of creative fantasy. The idée fixe is also used to recall the symphony at crucial points. Most of the music of Lélio had existed before; for example, the ‘Chant de bonheur’ and ‘La harpe éolienne’ are revised from La mort d’Orphée, the Prix de Rome cantata of 1827. The Tempestfantasy was incorporated unchanged. The relevance of each movement is made plain in the monologues between them, summarizing Berlioz’s obsessions with Shakespeare, especially Hamlet, with brigands as a symbol of the free life, with passionate identification of self with others; these give it, quite apart from its unusually heterogeneous musical form, a unique place in the territory occupied by both literature and music.

Berlioz assembled other miscellanies with looser internal associations. There are the nine Moore settings of Irlande and the six Gautier settings of Les nuits d’été. Two Hamletpieces and one Thomas Moore setting were grouped as Tristia for publication in 1850. Other groupings, largely for publisher’s convenience, were Feuillets d’album, Vox populi and Fleurs des landes.

Three of the Lélio pieces were derived from Prix de Rome cantatas, of which Berlioz wrote four. The best of these are the first and third. La mort d’Orphée, of 1827, contains a bold Bacchanale and an affecting ‘Tableau musical’ at the end. The more conventional Herminie, of 1828, won second prize. Cléopâtre, of 1829, is startlingly dramatic with clear adumbrations of Berlioz’s later tragic heroines, Juliet, Cassandra and Dido. The invocation, where she addresses the spirits of the Pharaohs, is magnificent. When re-used in Lélio, Berlioz’s description of it was: ‘Sombre orchestration, broad, sinister harmony, lugubrious melody… a great voice breathing a menacing lament in the mysterious stillness of the night’. The fourth cantata, La mort de Sardanapale, is mostly lost.

Berlioz, Hector

16. Musical style.

Berlioz’s style is one of the most idiosyncratic of the 19th century. It is quickly recognizable and has been as much reviled by his critics as vaunted by his partisans. It is true that its characteristics do not always take immediate effect and that a familiarity with his music is often regarded as essential to its understanding. For a long time the inaccessibility of many of his scores produced a correspondingly hesitant public response, but the higher standing now enjoyed by Berlioz’s music is reinforced and consolidated by its wider circulation. Opinions vary widely over the relative parts played in Berlioz’s style by technique and inspiration. That he was subject to inspiration in truly Romantic fashion has never been denied, but this created the extraordinary belief that he had no technique and composed in a kind of blind fury. The truth is that Berlioz’s music would be worthless with neither inspiration nor technique and that its mastery is due to an abundant provision of both. Both were of an unconventional kind; neither can be overlooked or denigrated for the advantage of the other. Certain elements of Berlioz’s style call for separate discussion.

Berlioz’s claim to be an inspired and natural melodist is irrefutable. Few of his melodies fall into regular phrase lengths, and when they do, as in the second subject of Les francs-juges overture or in the idée fixe of Harold en Italie, they sound uncharacteristic. He found the regular balance of four- and eight-bar phrases uncongenial and spoke naturally in a kind of flexible musical prose, with surprise and contour important elements. His melodies sometimes expand to great length as at the opening of the Symphonie funèbre et triomphale, or fill out a whole musical movement in one long arch, as in Aeneas’s ‘Ah! quand viendra l’instant des suprêmes adieux’, where internal repetition is minimal. The idée fixe of the Symphonie fantastique is well known for its expansive length. Much of Berlioz’s melodic strength is built on small chromatic inflections, especially when an otherwise diatonic melody is slightly coloured by a chromatic note (with an attendant harmonic surprise). He was fond, for example, of falling chromatically from the 5th of the scale (G in the key of C), or falling chromatically downwards towards the 5th, so that using A, often in alternation with A, in C major or C minor is a recurrent fingerprint. The flattened 6th, especially in a major context, introduces a feeling of melancholy or loneliness, and a number of movements end with this almost unresolved hovering over the dominant note. The opening melody of La damnation de Faust offers a fine example of Berlioz’s flattened 6th. There is an occasional modal touch in his melodies, especially in L’enfance du Christ, but he eschewed the folk idiom altogether. The sharpened 4th in the melody of Le roi de Thulé is a deliberately sophisticated attempt to portray Marguerite’s naive nature, not the adoption of a naive style of his own.

Berlioz’s harmony has been greatly abused by those who have sought either a Brahmsian orderliness or a Lisztian spirit of adventure. By the standards of Chopin and Liszt the actual vocabulary of his harmony is restrained and there are few instances of enriched chromatic harmony. Berlioz was for the most part content with the harmonic vocabulary of Gluck and Beethoven, but he differed from most of his contemporaries in seeing harmony as an expressive rather than functional element. Chords do not lead one into another with inexorable cadential progress. They play their part one by one and become altered, when alteration is necessary, by the replacement of any or all of their notes. The element of surprise is intrinsic, for it is frequently the unexpected note of a chord that alters, and despite Berlioz’s avowed dislike of enharmonic change he used it constantly. He similarly disliked accented appoggiaturas for creating new harmony, though many are to be found in his music. Diminished 7ths and kindred secondary 7th chords are much used, but generally without tonal pull. The suggestion that his harmonic thinking was derived from his study of the guitar has too weak a technical basis to be convincing.

A characteristic sonority is the grouping of upper parts as high as possible with the bass line isolated at a distance from them; at such times the strong melodic role of the bass line becomes evident. Much has been said about Berlioz’s ‘false’ basses and his love of root positions, both of which are clear misrepresentations. A root position is sometimes disturbing when it anticipates a cadence on to the same root, but Berlioz preferred a smooth, often stepwise, movement to the striding pattern of a functional bass. The bass line is in free counterpoint with the upper line, with harmonic filling.

The free contrapuntal relationship of parts, especially the upper and lower parts of a texture, is an essential element of Berlioz’s style. His mature style exhibits plainly his distaste for ‘tune with accompaniment’, a mannerism associated by him with Italian opera and only used for special purposes, for example ‘Un bal’ in the Symphonie fantastiqueor Teresa’s cavatina in Benvenuto Cellini. Contrapuntal textures are often an extension of orchestral textures, with layers seen in both contrapuntal and colouristic relationship to one another.

Berlioz regarded strict contrapuntal forms as mechanistic and inexpressive. He parodied the Handel–Cherubini style of fugue in La damnation de Faust and Béatrice et Bénédict. On the other hand fugato occurs repeatedly, generally to fine expressive and formal effect. There are choral fugues in the Messe solennelle, the Requiem and the Te Deum, whose ‘Judex crederis’ exhibits a type of fugue learnt from his teacher Reicha: the entries are successively one semitone higher. ‘Châtiment effroyable’ in Act 1 of Les Troyens has the entries successively one tone lower. Berlioz’s orchestral fugatos range widely, from the turbulent effect of the ‘Ronde du sabbat’ in the Symphonie fantastique and the middle section of Le carnaval romain to the wonderfully atmospheric fugal openings of the first and second parts of La damnation de Faust or the ‘Chasse royale et orage’ in Les Troyens, whose fugal beginning is concealed in delicate harmony. Fugato is used to express strife in Roméo et Juliette and the streets of Jerusalem at night in L’enfance du Christ, and for a host of other purposes elsewhere. Canon and inversion are rare.

One type of contrapuntal treatment appealed greatly to Berlioz and this he called the ‘réunion de deux thèmes’ where two separate themes are heard first separately and then in combination. There are fine examples in the finale of the Symphonie fantastique, where the ‘Ronde du sabbat’ is combined with the Dies irae; in Harold en Italie; in the ‘Fête chez Capulet’ of Roméo et Juliette; in the overture to Benvenuto Cellini; in Act 4 of Les Troyens, and elsewhere. The chorus of soldiers and students in La damnation de Faust is brilliantly effective, for the soldiers sing in B major, in 6/8, and in French, while the students’ song is in D minor, 2/4, and in Latin. At the opening of the carnival in Benvenuto Cellini Berlioz superimposed three separate elements, all distinct in character; this technique is a clear example of his belief in the combination of opposites and the mingling of diverse genres in a single work.

The vitality of Berlioz’s music owes much to the clarity and boldness of his rhythmic articulation. In the mid-1830s, especially in Harold en Italie and Benvenuto Cellini, he exploited experimental rhythms, not just unusual time signatures but also superimpositions of different rhythms. Fieramosca’s air in Benvenuto Cellini is an exercise in shifting time signatures. The ‘Danse cabalistique’ in L’enfance du Christ is in 7/4, the ‘Combat de ceste’ in Les Troyens in 5/8. Berlioz did not succumb to the universal passion for triple metres, which his generation suffered, despite his recurrent fondness for 3/4 for music of tenderness or longing. He felt strongly that rhythm was inadequately studied by both composers and performers. As a conductor, too, he was noted for his rhythmic precision.

Berlioz, Hector

17. Orchestration.

Berlioz’s reputation has long rested on his supreme skill as an orchestrator, sometimes at the expense of his other gifts. Instrumental colour is a fundamental element of his music, for he was no pianist and never thought of sound, as Chopin and Brahms did, through the filter of the piano. But he played no orchestral instrument either (having abandoned the flute) and had to learn this art by studying textbooks, tutors, the instruments themselves, the scores of other composers, and by befriending players. Kastner’s orchestration treatise of 1837 is the main significant predecessor to Berlioz’s own, published in 1844 with a second edition in 1855. For Berlioz it was a sin to neglect the possibilities of orchestral instruments or to use them in unsuitable combinations. He was particularly anxious to use new instruments and took a close interest in Adolphe Sax’s work. Instruments that had previously been used for special purposes he introduced into his normal requirements: the harp, for example, and the english horn are found in most of his scores; he was one of the first to write for the bass clarinet, the valve trumpet and the saxhorn; he made a special arrangement for the newly invented saxophone in 1844 and called for tuned cymbals in Roméo et Juliette; he required a piano, with two players, in the ‘Tempest’ fantasy in Lélio; there is a Turkish crescent in the Grande symphonie funèbre et triomphale and an antique sistrum in Les Troyens.

But it is not the novelty of the instruments themselves that mark out Berlioz’s orchestration so much as his skill in using them. Sometimes one instrument is used for a solo of striking fitness, for example the viola in Harold en Italie or the english horn in Marguerite’s romance in La damnation de Faust. More often it is in combining and contrasting instruments that his judgment is most acute and inventive, especially in his use of wind. He wrote for woodwind in layers more often than in solos, and he liked the sound of wind chattering on repeated notes. Consider the ‘Menuet des follets’ in La damnation de Faust where the banks of woodwind give a splendidly rich effect followed by the darting brilliance of the two piccolos; in contrast there is the sombre colour of Romeo’s arrival at the Capulets’ vault, or of the ‘Choeur d’ombres’ in Lélio. Brass can be solemn or brazen; the ‘Marche au supplice’ in the Symphonie fantastique is a defiantly modern use of brass. Trombones introduce Mephistopheles with three flashing chords or support the gloomy doubts of Narbal in Les Troyens. With a hiss of cymbals, pianissimo, they mark the entry of the Cardinal in Benvenuto Cellini and the blessing of little Astyanax by Priam in Les Troyens.

There are innumerable instances of felicitous orchestral colour in Berlioz’s music, and the delicacy of his use of pianissimo (as in the Queen Mab scherzo) is as memorable as the force of his immense sounds (as in the Requiem or the Te Deum). Yet he could also miscalculate, and there are occasions when the correct balance is extremely difficult to achieve, or when acoustics hinder the proper realization of a novel idea. In the latter category must be placed the trombone and flute chords in the Requiem and the timpani chords in the Symphonie fantastique and the Requiem, effective though they are from the expressive point of view. The influence of his orchestration has been immense, directly upon Liszt, Wagner, the Russians, Strauss and Mahler, but more profoundly by his emancipation of the procedure of orchestration. For Berlioz it was intrinsic to composition, not something applied to finished music. Berlioz also disregarded the 18th-century conception of orchestration as similar to part-writing for voices; in his hands timbre became something that could be used in free combinations as an artist might use his palette, without bowing to the demands of line, and this leads to the rich orchestral resource of Debussy and Ravel.

Berlioz, Hector

18. Other stylistic aspects.

A related element of Berlioz’s style is his care for the spatial distribution of sound. He felt strongly that music should be fitted to the building in which it is heard and he severely castigated the sound of noisy orchestras in small theatres. His scores, especially Roméo et Juliette, are filled with directions for the placing of players and singers. He was fond of offstage music, not only in the operas, but in the symphonies too: the shepherd’s pipe is heard offstage in the Symphonie fantastique, the pilgrim’s march is heard au lointain at the end of Harold en Italie; in L’enfance du Christ the angels are in a neighbouring room whose door is gradually closed. The Requiem is the grandest example of wide orchestral distribution and both the Te Deum and the Symphonie funèbre et triomphale exploit the distinct separation of parts of the orchestra. At the beginning of Act 1 of Benvenuto Cellini and Act 2 of Béatrice et Bénédict a great deal happens offstage, and the first-act finale of Les Troyens is constructed on an elaborate panoply of three offstage groups carefully scored to suggest the approach and passing of the Wooden Horse into the city. The offstage trumpets and drums in Marguerite’s romance in La damnation de Faust simultaneously exploit their separateness in space and their total distinctness in musical language, diversity doubly expressed in both spatial and musical terms.

In matters of form Berlioz never subscribed to rigid procedures and paid only lip service to such inherited patterns as sonata form. Intuition and expression were allowed to dominate expectation and rule. Thematic development is abundant but irregular, tonal balance is felt rather than preordained. Large-scale tonal designs are not easy to discern; indeed there is no reason to expect them. Two movements in Les Troyens, Andromache’s scene in Act 1 and the Sentinels’ scene in Act 5, do not end in the key in which they began, although they are musically self-contained; a similar case is the Symphonie funèbre et triomphale. The dominant does not necessarily play its classical role as antithesis to the tonic, and the notion of a ‘second subject’ in the symphonies is not always applicable. Development for its own sake, as a purely musical procedure, he avoided; he preferred to throw the weight of a movement on to the coda, or sometimes on to a series of codas of cumulative impact, and the sense of climax and closure is always strong. There are few musical forms as satisfying musically or emotionally as the ‘Chasse royale et orage’ (from Les Troyens), yet apart from its return to C major, where it began, its tonal scheme is free and unfettered by pre-set schemes. Modulation in Berlioz’s music is always fluid. Mediant relationships of every kind abound, so do Neapolitan and closer tonal shifts, made possible by his open attitude to the directional sense of harmony.

Two structural techniques should be mentioned. Berlioz contributed much to the then current desire to relate movements to each other by thematic, dramatic and other means. Thematic transformation is clearly seen in the idée fixe of the Symphonie fantastique, and in the treatment of many themes in La damnation de Faust and Les Troyens. To change the significance and colour of a theme by adjusting its pace, pitch, metre or orchestration, was a technique Berlioz applied with great subtlety, as for example in the opening of Act 4 of Les Troyens and the air of Narbal that follows. More personal to Berlioz is the device of harmonic variation, where a theme is presented against a series of different harmonies. The clearest example is the ‘Tibi omnes’ in the Te Deum, where the three strophes have the melody presented in three guises.

Berlioz’s use of programmes must be clearly understood as a natural outcome of his belief in the implicit kinship, identity even, of music and ideas. Since music was not autonomous, it must have equivalences and meanings in the world of action and imagination. In his mind music and literature were inextricably entwined, both expressions of the human soul. Poetry and literature often suggested music, music always suggested life and feeling.

It is thus absurd to speak, as many have, of Berlioz’s ‘reliance’ on programmes, or of his use of them as propaganda. They are not there to serve the music as a means of making it more palatable or more intelligible. They are part of it; they too reflect the movement of the composer’s mind. He did not write the programme of the Symphonie fantastique in order to make it more sensational – that was scarcely needed; he wrote it because he felt it as part of the impulse that brought the music to birth. His programmes have the same status as his vocal texts. Many, of course, are not so explicit; indeed a title often serves as the sole direction, but the title or the image is always there. In some cases, as in the death scene in Roméo et Juliette or the ‘Chasse royale et orage’ in Les Troyens, the action described by the music is continuous and precisely detailed.

A problem is presented by Berlioz’s recurrent habit of self-borrowing, which generally arose from the desire to find better use for music first placed in an unsuitable, unfinished or unsuccessful setting. Generally there is no real conflict between the expressive purpose of one context and another, for it is clear that music of a given type can express many kinds of poetic or pictorial image and that therefore successive images may evoke or require the same music. The same image may likewise relate to more than one musical setting, although this is rarer. Self-borrowing is common because many of his ideas were unrealized, for a variety of reasons, and because he recognized the vitality of pieces that could otherwise be wasted. There is no evidence that when he was borrowing most heavily he was suffering any lack of fecundity, although the Symphonie funèbre came suspiciously close to a fallow period.

Berlioz, Hector

19. The critic.

Berlioz’s views were presented regularly to readers of the Paris press, and his literary output was immense. In addition to the Traité d’instrumentation and the Voyage musical, he published three collections of criticism: Les soirées de l’orchestre (1852), Les grotesques de la musique (1859) and A travers chants (1862). In his feuilletons he wrote of new operas and singers, many of them of staggering unimportance; his opinion on momentous occasions was of crucial interest, for example at the première of Le prophète in 1849. He reviewed most of the concerts of the Société des Concerts; he wrote of new instruments and musical gadgets, of his own impressions of music abroad, and of important musicians visiting France; he wrote biographical notices of Gluck, Beethoven, Spontini, Méhul and himself; he wrote fiction and fantasy, often with a critical purpose; he wrote serialized treatises on orchestration and conducting. There are, in short, few facets of musical practice of the time untouched in his feuilletons.

Inconsistencies and changes of opinion are to be found, as one would expect over 30 years; but in general Berlioz’s opinions are trenchant and clearly expressed. He loathed the easy success of second-rate musicians with no personality and a borrowed style, and he fought endlessly against backstage politics that placed graft above art. His admiration for the greatest masters, especially Gluck and Beethoven, is a leitmotif of almost wearying persistence, and with secondary masters, such as Rossini, Meyerbeer and Halévy, he was carefully discriminating, separating the good from the bad. He greeted Glinka and Bizet with prophetic enthusiasm, yet Wagner ultimately taxed his deep-rooted beliefs beyond the boundaries of acceptance. The Tristan prelude had, for him, ‘no other theme than a sort of chromatic sigh’. It was ‘full of dissonant chords, the harshness of which is intensified by modifications of the real notes of the harmony’; he acknowledged Wagner as a powerful new voice, but one that was speaking a language he no longer understood, and leading the next generation away from the highest reaches of the art.

Berlioz was one of the first to enunciate a critical standpoint that is now a commonplace but was then startlingly new: that music should be enshrined in the form in which it was written and not brought up to date. He attacked Fétis and Habeneck for their ‘corrections’ of Beethoven, and repudiated singers who added ornamentation and ‘improvements’ to the vocal lines of Gluck and Mozart. For Berlioz the composer’s utterance had a sanctity that raised it above the tampering of mere performers. That is not to say that he only accepted whole performances, for his concert programmes were full of extracts, as was the custom of the day, but the principle of respecting a composer’s own directions had his constant support. Castil-Blaze’s travesties of Mozart and Weber appalled him, and it was an ironic twist that exposed him to the criticism of having mutilated Weber’s Der Freischütz when he had set the recitatives to music in order to prevent the Opéra from mutilating it any more. A series of sarcastic directions in the autograph of Les Troyens permits cuts to be made when circumstances render them necessary; a footnote in Roméo et Juliette advises suppression of the more demanding sections when the audience is not sufficiently attuned to the composer’s purpose.

Berlioz’s battles as a critic were not fought just to expound his points of view. They were intimately related to the more serious struggle for recognition as a composer. If his readers could be persuaded to recognize the good and the beautiful in Gluck, Spontini and any modern composer, so they might turn more sympathetically to his own music. But the strategy failed and his journalism was seen more and more as an independent professional activity, executed with extreme flair and wit, but in fact making his stature as a composer all the harder to establish.

Berlioz, Hector

20. Standing and research.

Berlioz belongs to a tradition, yet he is an isolated figure. Since the music on which he based his style is still little known, he has been regarded too simply as a wholly unprecedented phenomenon in French music. From his predecessors he inherited a basic language and certain mannerisms, for example dramatic recitative gestures from Spontini and a taste for plain melody from Gluck. Méhul’s raw vigour is to be seen echoed in Berlioz’s early music, and Le Sueur’s passionate search for new modes of expression, by using lengthy descriptions or unusual instrumental effects, left a clear mark. The grandiose music of the French Revolution, especially such pieces as the Marche lugubre of Gossec, is carried on in Berlioz’s monumental style. He learnt much from Weber and Beethoven and a little, despite himself, from Rossini; his contemporaries on the whole did not influence him greatly. The shape and pulse of his themes and their treatment, his sense of colour and contrast, the urgent flux of passion and the immense expressive variety of his music: these were all new. No other French composer of his time had the imagination or the genius to grasp the Berliozian manner, which was in any case too personal to permit easy imitation. German composers, like Schumann, admired his music but spoke a different language. Mendelssohn admired him as a man, but disliked his music.

Berlioz’s influence was most obviously shown (to the point of imitation) by such minor figures as David and Reyer in France and Cornelius in Germany. The latter’s Barbier von Bagdad is full of homage to Benvenuto Cellini. More important was the fertilization of Liszt’s music, shown especially in the symphonic poems, a debt Liszt was glad to acknowledge. Wagner stands clearly in line, yet though he adapted a number of felicitous inventions from Berlioz and can be shown to have learnt much from him, his fundamental outlook was too different and too all-embracing to be regarded as an offshoot of Berlioz’s Romanticism in particular.

The Russians adopted Berliozian ideas with enthusiasm, especially Balakirev, whose plan for a Manfred symphony, intentionally modelled on Harold en Italie, was taken up by Tchaikovsky. Rimsky-Korsakov’s Antar and many other poematic symphonies show a debt to Berlioz. Strauss showed it, too, in Aus Italien and especially Don Quixote. In France Berlioz’s style is heard occasionally in Saint-Saëns and Massenet. Debussy and Ravel repudiated him on technical grounds, although more sympathetic attitudes have been voiced by Milhaud and Messiaen. In sum, it is a sorry tale of rejection and isolation. Berlioz has inspired many by the sincerity and energy of his music, but in his lifetime the opportunity of absorbing even part of an idiosyncratic style was missed. As an idealist he had much to offer to artists of any milieu, and history has forced one to recognize him for what he was and what he did rather than for where he stood in relation to others. This may ultimately prove a blessing.

Much was written on Berlioz in his lifetime, but the first full-length biographies were written by Jullien and Hippeau in the 1880s. The centenary of 1903 coincided with a wave of Berliozian study that produced the Breitkopf & Härtel collected edition, Adolphe Boschot’s three-volume biography and a wide range of special studies by Prod’homme and Tiersot, who also published three volumes of correspondence. The greatest resurgence of interest was later in the century, assisted particularly by recordings, by Barzun’s two-volume study of 1950, and by the London revival of Les Troyens in 1957. The 1969 centenary created a wider familiarity with the music, especially Les Troyens, which was finally performed, published and recorded in full for the first time. New complete editions of the music, the literary works and the correspondence are all now in progress, so that by the 2003 bicentenary of his birth a full and fair presentation of Berlioz’s life and work may eventually atone for many years of neglect and misunderstanding.

Berlioz, Hector

WORKS

Editions: H. Berlioz: Werke, ed. C. Malherbe and F. Weingarten (Leipzig, 1900–10) [B&H]New Berlioz Edition, general ed. H. Macdonald (Kassel, 1967–) [NBE]Catalogue: Catalogue of the works of Hector Berlioz, ed. D.K. Holoman (Kassel, 1987) [H]

operas



op.	Title	Genre, acts	Libretto	Composed	First performance	Sources	B&H NBE	H	Remarks

	Estelle et Némorin	op	H.-C. Gerono, after Florian	1823				17	lost
	Les francs-juges	drame lyrique, 3	H. Ferrand	1825–6	unperf.	frags., F-Pn*, lib. Pc, ov. (Paris, 1836)	ov., iv; 4	23	rev. 1829; portions adopted for 1833 as Le cri de guerre du Brisgau (1, T. Gounet); 5 complete movts extant
23	Benvenuto Cellini	opéra semi-seria, 2	L. de Wailly, A. Barbier and A. de Vigny	1836–8	Paris, Opéra, 10 Sept 1838	Pc*, excerpts (Paris, 1839), vs (Brunswick, 1856)	ov., v; 1a–d	76	rev. version, in 3 acts, Weimar, 17 Nov 1852
	La nonne sanglante	op, 5	E. Scribe, after M.G. Lewis: The Monk	1841–7	unperf.	frags. Pn*	–; 4	91	inc.
	Les Troyens	op, 5	Berlioz, after Virgil, The Aeneid	1856–8	Les Troyens à Carthage, Paris, Théâtre Lyrique, 4 Nov 1863; complete, Karlsruhe, 6–7 Dec 1890	Pc*, vs (Paris, 1863)	–; 2a–c	133	divided into La prise de Troie and Les Troyens à Carthage(with prol.), 1863
	Béatrice et Bénédict	oc, 2	Berlioz, after Shakespeare: Much Ado about Nothing	1860–62	Baden-Baden, Stadt, 9 Aug 1862	Pc*, vs (Paris, 1863)	xix–xx; 3	138

symphonies



op.	Title and genre	Text	Forces	Composed	Published	Remarks	B&H	NBE	H

14	Symphonie fantastique: épisode de la vie d’un artiste		orch	1830	1845		i	16	48
16	Harold en Italie, symphonie en 4 parties		va, orch	1834	1848		ii	17	68
17	Roméo et Juliette, symphonie dramatique	E. Deschamps, after Shakespeare	A, T, B, STBSTB, orch	1839	1847		iii	18	79
15	Grande symphonie funèbre et triomphale	A. Deschamps	military band, str and SSTTBB ad lib	1840	1843		i	19	80
						Last movt arr. Mez/T, vv, pf, 1848 as L’apothéose	xvi	14

other orchestral



op.	Title and genre	Composed	Published	Remarks	B&H	NBE	H

1	Waverley, grande ouverture	1827–8	1839		iv	20	26
4	Le roi Lear, grande ouverture	1831	1840		iv	20	53
—	Intrata di Rob-Roy Macgregor	1831	1900	perf. 1833, withdrawn	iv	20	54
8	Rêverie et caprice, romance	1841	1841	for vn, orch/pf; arr. from air composed for Benvenuto Cellini	vi	21	88
9	Le carnaval romain, ouverture caractéristique	1844	1844	on material from Benvenuto Cellini	v	20	95
21	Le corsaire, ouverture	1844	1852	orig. title La tour de Nice; 2nd title Le corsaire rouge; rev. before 1852	v	20	101
—	Marche troyenne	1864	1865	arr. from Act 1 of Les Troyens	vi	21	133B

choral works



op.	Title and genre	Text	Forces	Composed	Published	Remarks	B&H	NBE	H

—	Messe solennelle		S, T, B, STTB, orch	1824	1994	withdrawn 1827, rediscovered 1992	-	23	20A
—	Resurrexit		STTB, orch	1824	1902	arr. From Messe solennelle; rev. 1829, as Le jugement dernier; largely absorbed into Benvenuto Cellini, Grande messe des morts and Te Deum	vii	12a	20B
—	La révolution grecque, scène héroïque	Ferrand	B, B, SSSTTBB, orch	1825–6	1903	2 sections rev. for vv, wind band, 1833	x	12a	21A, B
—	La mort d’Orphée, monologue et bacchanale	H.-M. Berton	T, SSSS, orch	1827	1930	Prix de Rome cant.	—	6	25
2	Le ballet des ombres, ronde nocturne	A. Duboys, after J.G. Herder	STTBB, pf	1828	1829	withdrawn by Berlioz	xvi	14	37
1	Huit scènes de Faust	G. de Nerval, after J.W. von Goethe		1828–9	1829	withdrawn by Berlioz; later used in La damnation de Faust	x	5	33
	1 Chants de la fête de Pâques		SSSSTTBB, orch
	2 Paysans sous les tilleuls, danse et chant		STTB, orch
	3 Concert de sylphes		S, S, A, T, Bar, B, orch
	4 Écot de joyeux compagnons, histoire d’un rat		B,TTBB, orch
	5 Chanson de Méphistophélès, histoire d’une puce		T,TTBB, orch
	6 Le roi de Thulé, chanson gothique		S, orch			also for 1v, pf
	7 Romance de Marguerite, choeur de soldats		S, TTBB, orch
	8 Sérénade de Méphistophélès		T, gui
2/3	Chant guerrier	T. Gounet after T. Moore	T, TBB, pf	1829	1830	9 mélodies (Irlande), no.3	xvi	14	41
2/5	Chanson à boire	Gounet, after Moore	T, TTBB, pf	1829	1830	9 mélodies (Irlande), no.5	xvi	14	43
2/6	Chant sacré	Gounet, after Moore	T, SSTTBB, pf/orch	1829	1830	9 mélodies (Irlande), no.6; 2 versions; orchd 1843	xiv, xvi	12a, 14	44
—	La mort de Sardanapale	J.-F. Gail	S, TTBB, orch	1830	—	Prix de Rome cant., mostly lost	—	6	50
18/1	Méditation religieuse	Berlioz, after L. Swanton Belloc’s trans. of Moore	SSTTBB, orch	1831	1852	Tristia, no.1; orig. acc. 7 wind insts [lost]	xiv	12b	56
14bis	Lélio, ou Le retour à la vie, monodrame lyrique	Berlioz (except no.1)		1831–2	1855	orig. title Le retour à la vie, mélologue en six parties; sequel to Symphonie fantastique; rev. 1854	xiii	7	55
	1 Le pêcheur (ballade)	A. Duboys, after Goethe	T, pf			adapted from song of ?1828
	2 Choeur des ombres		STB, orch			adapted from section of Cléopâtre
	3 Chanson de brigands		B, TTBB, orch			adapted from lost Chanson de pirates, 1829
	4 Chant de bonheur		T, orch			adapted from La mort d’Orphée; also arr. T, pf
	5 La harpe éolienne, souvenirs		orch			adapted from La mort d’Orphée
	6 Fantaisie sur la Tempête de Shakespeare		SSATT, orch	1830		perf. 1830 as Ouverture pour la Tempête de Shakespeare			52
—	Quartetto e coro dei maggi		SSTB, orch	1832	1902	possibly rev. of lost Marche religieuse des mages, 1828	vii	12a	59
11	Sara la baigneuse, ballade	V. Hugo	STBB, SA, TTBB, orch	1834	1851	rev. 1850 from lost orig. for TTBB/STTB, orch; also pubd for 2 vv, pf (1850)	xiv	12a	69
13/5	Le chant des Bretons	A. Brizeux	TTBB, pf	1835	c1835	rev. as Fleurs des landes, no.5 (1850); both versions also arr. T, pf; an arr. for vv, orch is doubtful authenticity	xvi	14	71
6	Le cinq mai, chant sur la mort de l’empereur Napoléon	P.J. de Béranger	B, SSTTBB, orch	1835	c1840	refrain composed 1832	xiii	12a	74
5	Grande messe des morts (Requiem)		T, SSTTBB, orch	1837	1838	rev. 1852, 1867	vii	9	75
—	Choeur de 402 voix en langue celtique inconnue	Berlioz	SATB	1843	1969	albumleaf	—	21	93
20/2	Hymne à la France	Barbier	SSATTBB, orch	1844	1850	Vox populi, no.2	xiv	12b	97
2/2	Hélène, ballade	Gounet, after Moore	TTBB, orch	1844	1903	arr. of song orig. for 2vv	xiv	12a	40B
18/3	Marche funèbre pour la dernière scène d’Hamlet		SATB, orch	1844	1852	Tristia, no.3	vi	12b	103
24	La damnation de Faust, légende dramatique	Nerval, A. Gandonnière and Berlioz, after Goethe	Mez, T, Bar, B, SSATTBB, orch	1845–6	1854	incorportating rev. versions of Huit scènes de Faust	xi–xii	8a-b	111
19/3	Le chant des chemins der fer	J. Janin	T, SSTTBB, orch	1846	1850	Feuillets d’album, no.3	xiv	12b	110
20/1	La menace des Francs, marche et choeur		T, T, B, B, SSTTBB, orch	1848 or earlier	1850	Vox populi, no.1	xiv, xvi	12b	117
18/2	La mort d’Ophélie, ballade	E. Legouvé, after Shakespeare	SA, pf/orch	1848	1852	arr. from solo song; Tristia, no.2	xiv, xvi	12b	92B
—	Prière du matin	A. de Lamartine	SS [children], pf	1846 or earlier	1848		xvi	14	112
22	Te Deum		T, STB, STB, S [children], orch	1849	1855		viii	10	118
25	L’enfance du Christ, trilogie sacrée	Berlioz	S, T, T, Bar, B, B, B, SATB, orch	1850–54	1855		ix	11	130
	1 Le songe d’Hérode			1854
	2 La fuite en Egypte			1850	1852
	3 L’arrivée à Saïs			1853–4
2/4	La belle voyageuse, ballade	Gounet, after Moore	SA, orch	1851	—	arr. of solo song	—	13	42D
26	L’impériale, cant.	Lafont	SATB, SATB, orch	1854	1856		xiii	12b	129
	Hymne pour la consécration du nouveau tabernacle	J.H. Vries	SSATTBB, pf/org	1859	1859		xvi	14	135
28	Le temple universel	J.F. Vaudin	TTBB, TTBB, org	1861	1861	rev. TTBB, unacc., 1867	xvi	14	137
—	Veni creator, motet		S, S, A, SSA, org ad lib	?	between 1877 and 1888		vii	14	141
—	Tantum ergo		S, S, A, SSA, org	?	between 1877 and 1888		vii	14	142

solo voice and orchestra



op.	Title and genre	Text	Voice	Composed	Orchestrated	Published	Remarks	B&H	NBE	H

—	Herminie, scène lyrique	P.A. Vieillard	S	1828		1903	Prix de Rome cant.	xv	6	29
—	La mort de Cléopâtre, scène lyrique	Vieillard	S	1829		1903	Prix de Rome cantata	xv	6	36
2/4	La belle voyageuse, légende irlandaise	Gounet, after Moore	Mez	1829	1842	c1844	orig. for Mez, pf	xv	13	42C
12	La captive, orientale	Hugo	Mez/A	1832	1848	c1849	orig. for S, pf, earlier orchestration, 1834, lost; this version exists in 2 keys	xv	13	60E–F
13/4	Le jeune pâtre breton	Brizeux	Mez/T	1833		1839	orig. version, lost, used in Le cri de guerre de Brisgau, 1833; rev. 1835	xv	13	65D
—	Aubade	A. de Musset	S/T	1839	?	1975	arr. for 1v, 2 cornets, 4 hn of song for 1v, 2 hn, 1839	—	13	78
7	Les nuits d’été	T. Gautier					orig. for Mez/T, pf	xv	13	82–7
	1 Villanelle		Mez/T	1840–41	1856	1856
	2 Le spectre de la rose		A	1840	1855 or 1856	1856
	3 Sur les lagunes		Mez/A/Bar	1840–41	1856	1856
	4 Absence		Mez/T	1840	1843	1843
	5 Au cimetière (clair de lune)		T	1840–41	1856	1856
	6 L’ile inconnue		Mez/T	1840–41	1856	1856
	Le chasseur danois	A. De Leuven	B	1845	1845	1903	also for B, pf	xv	13	104B
19/1	Zaïde, boléro	R. de Beauvoir	S	1845	1845	1903	also for S, pf [2 versions]	xv	13	108B

songs



op.	Title and genre	Text	Forces	Composed	Published	Remarks	B&H	NBE	H

—	Le dépit de la bergère, romance	Mme***	1v, pf	?1818–22	?1819		xvii	15	7
—	Pleure, pauvre Colette, romance	M. Bourgerie	(S, S)/(TT), pf	?1818–22	1822		xvi	15	11
—	Canon libre à la quinte	Bourgerie	A, Bar, pf	?1818–22	1822		xvi	15	14
—	Le maure jaloux, romance	Florian	T, pf	?1818–22	1822	also entitled L’arabe jaloux	xvii	15	9
—	Amitié, reprends ton empire, romance et invocation	Florian	S, S, B, pf	?1818–22	1823		xvi	15	10
—	Toi qui l’aimas, verse des pleurs, romance	Duboys	T, pf	?1822–3	1823		xvii	15	16
—	Le montagnard exilé, chant élégiaque	Duboys	S, S, pf/harp	?1822–3	1823		xvi	15	15
1/6	Le roi de Thulé, chanson gothique	Nerval, after Goethe	S, pf	1828	—	used in 8 scènes de Faust and La damnation de Faust	—	15	33B
14bis	Le pêcheur, ballade	Duboys, after Goethe	T, pf	?1828	1833	used in Le retour à la vie (Lélio)	xvii	15	55
2/1	Le coucher du soleil, rêverie	Gounet, after Moore	T, pf	1829	1830	9 mélodies (Irlande), no.1	xvii	15	39
2/2	Hélène, ballade	Gounet, after Moore	(S, S)/(T, B), pf	1829	1830	9 mélodies (Irlande), no.2; later arr. TTBB, orch	xvi	15	40
2/4	La belle voyageuse, ballade	Gounet, after Moore	Mez, pf	1829	1830	9 mélodies (Irlande), no.4; later arr. TTBB, orch [lost], Mez, orch; later arr. SA, orch	xvii	15	42A
2/7	L’origine de la harpe, ballade	Gounet, after Moore	S/T, pf	1829	1830	9 mélodies (Irlande), no.7	xvii	15	45
2/8	Adieu Bessy, romance anglaise et française	Gounet, after Moore	T, pf	1829	1830	9 mélodies (Irlande), no.8; 2 versions	xvii	15	46
2/9	Elégie en prose	Louise Belloc, after Moore	T, pf	1829	1830	9 mélodies (Irlande), no.9	xvii	15	47
14bis	Chant de bonheur	Berlioz	T, pf	1831–2	1833	arr. from Le retour à la vie (Lélio); orig. from La mort d’Orphée	xvii	15	55
12	La captive, orientale	Hugo	Mez, pf	1832	1904	1st version	xvii	15	60A–B
12	La captive, orientale	Hugo	Mez, vc, pf	1832	1832	2nd version	xvii	15	60C
12	La captive, orientale	Hugo	Mez, pf	?1834	1849	transcr. S. Heller from orch. version	xvii	15	65F
13/4	Le jeune pâtre breton	Brizeux	Mez/T, pf	1833	1835	rev. with hn ad lib, 1835; also orchd	xvii	15	65A, C
19/2	Les champs, romance	Béranger	1v, pf	1834 or earlier	1834	rev. in Feuillets d’album (1850)	xvii	15	67
—	Je crois en vous, romance	L. Guérin	Mez, pf	1834 or earlier	1834	used in Benvenuto Cellini	xvii	15	70
13/5	Le chant des bretons	Brizeux	T, pf	1834	c1835	rev. as Fleurs des landes, no.5 (1850); both versions also arr. TTBB, pf	xvii	15	71
—	Chansonette	Wailly	S/T, pf	1835	1974	used for the Choeur de masques in Benvenuto Cellini	—	15	73
—	Aubade	Musset	1v, 2 hn	1839	1975	later rev. acc. 2 cornets, 4 hn	—	15, 13	78
7	Les nuits d’été	Gautier	Mez/T, pf	1840–41	1841		xvii	15	82–7
	1 Villanelle					orchd 1856
	2 Le spectre de la rose					rev., orchd 1855 or 1856
	3 Sur les lagunes, lamento					orchd 1856
	4 Absence					orchd 1843
	5 Au cimetière, clair de lune					rev., orchd 1856
	6 L’ile inconnue					orchd 1856
18/2	La mort d’Ophélie	Legouvé, after Shakespeare	S/T, pf	1842	1848	later arr. SA, orch/pf, pubd as Tristia, no.2	xvii	15	92A
	La belle Isabeau, conte pendant l’orange	A. Dumas	Mez, pf	1843 or earlier	1843	2nd version, Mez, SSTTBB, pf, 1844	xvii	15	94
	Le chasseur danois	Leuven	B, pf	1845	1845	orchd 1845; Feuillets d’album, no.6	xvii	15	104A
19/1	Zaïde, boléro	Beauvoir	S, pf, castanets ad lib	1845	1845	2 versions: orchd 1845	xvii	15	108A
13/3	Le trébuchet	A. Bertin and E. Deschamps	S, S/T, Bar, pf	1846 or earlier	1850	Fleurs des landes, no.3	xvi	15	113
—	Nessun maggior, page d’album	Berlioz, after Dante	S/T, pf	1847	1904		xvii	15	114
13/1	Le matin, romance	A. de Bouclon	Mez/T, pf	1849 or earlier	1850	Fleurs des landes, no.1	xvii	15	124
13/2	Petit oiseau, chanson de paysan	Bouclon	T/Bar/Mez, pf	1849 or earlier	1850	Fleurs des landes, no.2; words the same as for Le matin	xvii	15	125

miscellaneous works



op.	Title and genre	Text	Forces	Composed	Published	Remarks	B&H	NBE	H

—	Fugue	—	4 pts.	1826	1998	Prix de Rome submission	—	6	22
—	Fugue à 3 sujets	—	4 pts.	1829	1902	Prix de Rome submission	vi	6	35
—	Dans l’alcôve sombre	Hugo	?1v, pf	c1832	—	sketch	—	15	62
—	Erigone, intermède antique	after P.-S. Ballanche	solo vv, vv, orch	?1836–41	—	frags. only	—	21	77
8	Rêverie et caprice	—	vn, orch	1841	1841	also for vn, pf, arr. from Benvenuto Cellini	vi	21	88
—	Andante in B	—	2 pts.	1842	—	albumleaf	—	21	93
—	Chasse à la grosse bête	—	ob, bn	1843	—	albumleaf	—	21	93
—	Feuillet d’album	—	pf	1844	—		—	21	96
	Trois morceaux	—	orgue-mélodium	1844	1844		vi	21	98
	1 Sérénade agreste à la Madone sur le thème des pifferari romains
	2 Toccata								99
	3 Hymne pour l’élévation								100
	Le vent gémit, sérénade	F.-J.-P.-A. Méry	1v	1845	—	2 versions	—	15	107
	Valse chantée par le vent dans les cheminées d’un de mes châteaux en Espagne	—	—	1855	—	albumleaf	—	21	131
	Au bord d’une rivière	?	1v, pf	?	1975	sketch	—	15	132
	Salut matinal (en langue kanaque)	Berlioz	1v	?	1954	albumleaf	—	15	140

arrangements



Composer or source	Title	Forces and remarks	Arranged	Published	B&H	NBE	H

Pollet	Fleure du Tage	v, gui	?1817	—	—	22b	5
?	Nocturne	S, S, gui	?1825–30	—	—	22b	31
Various		gui acc. for romances by Lintan, V. Martini, Dalayrac, Pollet, Catrufo, Bédart, Boieldieu, Della Maria, Plantade, Berton, Solié, Nadermann, Lélu, Messonier	?1818–21	1986	—	22b	8
Rouget de Lisle	Hymne des Marseillais
		1 TTB, SSTB, orch	1830	1830	xviii	22b	51A
		2 T, SSTTBB, pf	1848	1848	—	22b	51B
Rouget de Lisle	Chant du neuf Thermidor	T, SSTTBB, orch	1830	1984	—	22b	51bis
F. Huber	Sur les alpes quel délice (le chasseur de chamois)	3 male vv	1833	—	—	22b	64
Weber	Der Freischütz	dialogue composed to recit	1841	1842	—	22b	89
Weber	L’invitation à la valse	orch	1841	1842	xviii	22b	90
L. de Meyer	Marche marocaine	orch	1845	1846		22b	105
[trad.]	Marche de Rákóczi	orch; used in La damnation de Faust	1846	1854	xi	8b	109
Gluck	Orphée	adapted for P. Viardot	1859	1859	—	22a	—
Martini	Plaisir d’amour	Bar, orch	1859	1859	22b	xxii	134
Schubert	Der Erlkönig	T, orch	1860	1860	xviii	22b	136
Gluck	Alceste	adapted for P. Viardot	1861	1861	—	22a	—
Couperin	Invitation à louer Dieu	arr. from Soeur Monique for SSA, pf	—	between 1877 and 1888	xviii	22b	146

lost works



Title and genre	Text	Forces	Composed	Remarks	H

Potpourri concertant sur des thèmes italiens	—	fl, hn, str qt	c1818		1
2 qnts	—	fl, str qt	c1818	1 melody used in ov. to Les francs-juges	2, 3
Estelle et Némorin, songs	J.-P. C. de Florian	1v, pf	1823	1 melody used in Symphonie fantastique	6
Le cheval arabe, cant.	C.-H. Millevoye	1v, orch	1822–3		12
Canon à trois voix			1822–3		13
Estelle et Némorin, op	Gerono, after Florian		1823	probably using the earlier Florian songs	17
Le passage de la mer rouge, Lat. orat	?		1823		18
Beverley ou Le joueur, scena	B.-J. Saurin	B, orch	1824		19
Les francs-juges, op	Ferrand		1826	ov., 5 complete movts survive; the rest was destroyed	23
Fugue	—		1827	Prix de Rome submission	24
Fugue	—		1828	Prix de Rome submission	28
Marche religieuse des mages	—		1828 or earlier	Possibly related to Quartetto e coro dei maggi of 1832	27
Variations on Mozart’s Là ci darem la mano	—	gui	1828 or earlier	pubd by Aulagnier	30
O salutaris		3 solo vv, org/pf	1828–9	probably the same as lost oratorio written for Choron	32
Chanson de pirates	Hugo	?1v, orch	1829	rev. as Chanson de brigands in Lélio	34
Fugue	—		1830	Prix de Rome submission	49
Choeur d’anges pour les fêtes de Noël	?		1831		58
Choeur de toutes les voix	Berlioz		1831		57
Romance de Marie Tudor	Hugo	T, ?orch	1833	perf. 22 Dec 1833	66
Fête musicale funèbre à la mémoire des hommes illustres de la France	?	?vv, orch	1835	2 movts of 7 completed; these probably incorporated the Ressurexit and Le dernier jour du monde (planned 1831–2) and were used in, probably, Le cinq mai, Benvenuto Cellini, the Grande messe des morts and the Grande symphonie funèbre et triomphale	72
Plains-chants de l’église grecque		16vv	1843	commissined by the Russian imperial chapel	—
[Hymne]	—	6 Sax insts	1844	probably arr. of Chant sacré	44C
[Marche d’Isly]	—	orch	1845	arr. of Léopold de Meyer’s Marche d’Isly	108
Ouverture des ciseleurs	—	orch	1846	listed as unpubd in Labitte catalogue, 1846; probably based on Benvenuto Cellini; perhaps never written

Berlioz, Hector

WRITINGS

see Holoman, 1987, for more detailed bibliographical information

Grand traité d’instrumentation et d’orchestration modernes, op.10 (Paris, 1843, 2/1855/R; Eng. trans., 1856, rev. 2/1882 by J. Bennett)

Voyage musical en Allemagne et en Italie (Paris, 1844/R)

Les soirées de l’orchestre (Paris, 1852/R, 5/1895; Eng. trans., 1956/R); ed. L. Guichard (Paris, 1968)

Le chef d’orchestre: théorie de son art (Paris, 1856; Eng. trans., 1917/R)

Les grotesques de la musique (Paris, 1859/R); ed. L. Guichard (Paris, 1969)

A travers chants (Paris, 1862/R; ed. and Eng. trans., E. Csicsery-Rónay, 1994); ed. L. Guichard (Paris, 1971)

Mémoires (Paris, 1870/R; ed. and Eng. trans. by D. Cairns, 1969, 2/1970); ed. P. Citron (Paris, 1969, 2/1991)

Les musiciens et la musique, ed. A. Hallays (Paris, 1903/R)

ed. G. Condé: Cauchemars et passions (Paris, 1981)

ed. H.R. Cohen and Y. Gérard: Critique musicale, i: 1823–1834 (Paris, 1996)

Articles in Le corsaire (1823–5), Le correspondant (1829–30), Berliner allgemeine musikalische Zeitung (1829), Revue européenne (1832), Europe littéraire (1833), Le rénovateur (1833–5), Gazette (later Revue et gazette) musicale (1834–61), Journal des débats (1834–63), Journal des artistes (1834), Monde dramatique (1835), Italie pittoresque (Paris, 1836), Chronique de Paris (1837–8), L’éclair (Brussels, 1842), L’émancipation (1843), L’artiste (1844), Monde illustré (1858–9); see Holoman 1987

Berlioz, Hector

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A Correspondence. B Bibliogrpahies and lists of works. C Contemporary memoirs. D Life and works. E Specialist publications. F Biographical studies. G General critical studies. H Specialized critical studies. I Individual works: (i) Messe solennelle (ii) Symphonie fantastique (iii) Harold en Italie (iv) Roméo et Juliette (v) Benvenuto Cellini (vi) La damnation de Faust (vii) Les Troyens (viii) Others

a: correspondence

b: bibliographies and lists of works

c: contemporary memoirs

d: life and works

e: specialist publications

f: biographical studies

g: general critical studies

h: specialized critical studies

i: individual works

Berlioz, Hector: Bibliography

a: correspondence

D. Bernard, ed.: Correspondance inédite (Paris, 1879, 3/1896; Eng. trans., 1882 as Life and Letters of Berlioz, i)

V. Wilder, ed.: ‘Vingt lettres inédites … adressées à M. Adolphe Samuel’, Le ménestrel (8, 15, 22, 29 June; 6, 13 July 1879)

‘Lettres inédites de Hector Berlioz’,Nouvelle revue, iv (1880), 801; also pubd separately as Lettres intimes (Paris, 1882; Eng. trans., 1882 as Life and Letters of Berlioz, ii)

O. Fouque: Les révolutionnaires de la musique (Paris, 1882)

La Mara [M. Lipsius], ed.: Briefe hervorragender Zeitgenossen an Franz Liszt (Leipzig, 1895–1904)

La Mara [M. Lipsius], ed.: Briefe von Hector Berlioz an die Fürstin Carolyne Sayn-Wittgenstein (Leipzig, 1903)

J. Tiersot: ‘Lettres inédites de Berlioz’, RHCM, iii (1903), 426–30

‘Une page d'amour romantique: lettres à Mme Estelle F.’, Revue politique et litéraire (Revue bleue) (4, 11, 18, 25 April 1903)

J. Tiersot, ed.: Hector Berlioz: Les années romantiques: 1819–1842 (Paris, 1904)

J.-G. Prod’homme: ‘Nouvelles lettres d’Hector Berlioz’, RMI, xii (1905), 339–82

J.-G. Prod’homme: ‘Les lettres de Berlioz à Auguste Morel’, Guide musical, lviii (1912), 605–710

J.-G. Prod’homme: ‘Lettres inédites de Hector Berlioz’, RMI, xx (1913), 277–90

J. Tiersot, ed.: Hector Berlioz, le musicien errant: 1842–1852 (Paris, 1919)

H. Girard: Emile Deschamps dilettante (Paris, 1921/R)

J. Tiersot: ‘Lettres de Berlioz sur Les Troyens’, Revue de Paris, xxi/4 (1921), 449–73, 749–70; xxi/5 (1921), 146–71

‘Lettres inédites de Berlioz à Edouard Monnais’, ReM, iv/4–6 (1922–3), 206–17

‘Lettres de Berlioz à sa famille’,Bulletin de l’Académie delphinale (29 Feb 1924)

S. Dupuis: ‘Quelques lettres inédites de Berlioz’, Bulletin de la classe des beaux - arts de l’Académie royale de Belgique, i–ii (1927), 10–17

M. Fehr: ‘Achtzehn Briefe von Hector Berlioz an den Winterthurer Verleger J. Rieter-Biedermann’,Schweizerisches Jb für Musikwissenschaft, ii (1927), 90–106

J. Tiersot, ed.: ‘Lettres de musiciens écrites en français: du XVe au XXe siècle’, RMI, xxxvi (1929), 1–25, 408–29; xxxvii (1930), 1–20, 185–203, 329–49, 529–50; also pubd separately, ii (Turin, 1936)

G. Clarence: ‘Lettres inédites de Berlioz’, ReM, nos.100–05 (1930), 400–16

S. Ginsburg: ‘Correspondance russe inédite de Berlioz’, ReM, nos.100–05 (1930), 417–24

J. Tiersot, ed.: Hector Berlioz: au milieu du chemin, 1852–1855 (Paris, 1930)

‘Lettres inédites de Berlioz’, ReM (1935), nos.152–6, 164–8

M. Pincherle, ed.: Musiciens peints par eux-mêmes (Paris, 1939)

J. Barzun, ed.: Nouvelles lettres de Berlioz (New York, 1954)

R. Sietz, ed.: Aus Ferdinand Hillers Briefwechsel, i (Cologne, 1958)

P. Valléry-Radot: ‘Une lettre inédite de Berlioz’, Fureteur médical, xxiii (1964), 35–8

Pisma zarubyezhnïkh muzïkantov iz russkikh arkhivov (Leningrad, 1967)

R. Weeda: ‘Vier brieven van Hector Berlioz’, Mens en melodie, xxiv (1969), 177–9

‘Sixty-One Letters by Berlioz’, Adam, xxxiv (1969), 48–87

P. Citron, ed.: Hector Berlioz: Correspondance générale, i: 1803–1832(Paris, 1972); ii: 1832–1842 (Paris, 1975); iii: 1842–1850 (Paris, 1978); iv: 1850–1855(Paris, 1983); v: 1855–1859 (Paris, 1989); vi:1859–1863 (Paris, 1995)

M. Marx-Weber: ‘Hector Berlioz: unbekannte Briefe an Peter Cornelius’, Mf, xxvi (1973), 235–40

R.P. Locke: ‘New Letters of Berlioz’, 19CM, i (1977–8), 71–84

P.A. Bloom: ‘Berlioz and Officialdom: Unpublished Correspondence’, 19CM, iv (1980–81), 134–46

P.A. Bloom: ‘Berlioz to Ferrand: Eight billets intimes’, MQ, lxxix (1995), 552–79

H. Macdonald, ed.: Selected Letters of Berlioz (London, 1995)

P.A. Bloom: ‘Berlioz à Ricordi: dix lettres inédites’, RdM, lxxxii (1996), 155–67

Berlioz, Hector: Bibliography

b: bibliographies and lists of works

J.-G. Prod’homme: ‘Bibliographie Berliozienne’, SIMG, v (1903–4), 622–59

T. Müller-Reuter: Lexikon der deutschen Konzertliteratur (Leipzig, 1909/R)

J. Kapp: Berlioz: eine Biographie (Berlin, 1917, 4–7/1922) [incl. list of writings]

C. Hopkinson: A Bibliography of the Musical and Literary Works of Hector Berlioz 1803–1869 (Edinburgh, 1951, rev. 2/1980 by R. Macnutt)

J.-G. Prod’homme: ‘Bibliographie berliozienne’, ReM, no.233 (1956), 97–147

B. Jacobson: ‘A Berlioz Discography’, High Fidelity/Musical America, xix (1969), 56–60

J.B. Ahouse: The Centenary Years: a Bibliography of Articles in the Periodical Literature, 1967–71 (El Paso, TX, 1974)

D.K. Holoman: Catalogue of the Works of Hector Berlioz (Kassel, 1987)

M.G.H. Wright: A Berlioz Bibliography (Farnborough, 1987)

J. Langford: Hector Berlioz: a Guide to Research (New York, 1989)

Berlioz, Hector: Bibliography

c: contemporary memoirs

W.R. Griepenkerl: Ritter Berlioz in Braunschweig (Brunswick, 1843)

J. d’Ortigue: La musique à l’église (Paris, 1861)

L. Escudier: Mes souvenirs (Paris, 1863), 222–57

E. Reyer: Notes de musique (Paris, 1875)

A. Etex: Les souvenirs d’un artiste (Paris, 1877)

J.-B. Weckerlin: Musiciana (Paris, 1877), 319–36

G.A. Osborne: ‘Berlioz’, PMA, v (1878–9), 60–75

F. Hiller: Künstlerleben (Cologne, 1880), 63–143

A. Barbier: Souvenirs personnels et silhouettes contemporaines (Paris, 1883/R), 230–33

E. Legouvé: Soixante ans de souvenirs (Paris, 1886–7; Eng. trans., 1893)

L. Bourgault-Ducoudray: ‘Berlioz: souvenirs intimes’, Le conseiller des dames et des demoiselles, xxxix (1886), 276ff

M. Maretzek: Revelations of an Opera Manager in 19th-Century America: Sharps and Flats (New York, 1890/R)

C. Gounod: Mémoires d’un artiste (Paris, 1896; Eng. trans., 1896/R)

C.E. and M. Hallé eds.: Life and Letters of Sir Charles Hallé (London, 1896), abridged 1972 by M. Kennedy as The Autobiography of Charles Hallé

F. Hueffer: Half a Century of Music in England, 1837–1887 (London, 2/1889), 151–234

V.V. Stasov: ‘List, Shuman i Berlioz v Rossii’, Severnïy vestnik (1889), no.7, pt i, pp.115–57, no.8, pt.i, pp.73–110; Eng. trans., 1968, in Selected Essays on Music

E. Reyer: ‘Hector Berlioz: Biographical Notes and Personal Reminiscences’, The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine, xlvii (1893–4), 305–10

C. Saint-Saëns: Portraits et souvenirs (Paris, 1900, 3/1909), 3–14

E. Reyer: ‘Berlioz: souvenirs intimes’, Monde musical, xv (1903), 335

C. Saint-Saëns: ‘Souvenirs’, Monde musical, xv (1903), 335

‘Anecdotes sur Berlioz’, RHCM, iii (1903), 422ff

J.-G. Prod’homme: ‘Hector Berlioz jugé par Adolphe Adam’, ZIMG, vi (1904–5), 475–81

P. Cornelius: ‘Hector Berlioz in Weimar’, Die Musik, iv/2 (1905–6), 159–68

A. Schloesser: ‘Personal Recollections of Franz Liszt and Hector Berlioz’, RAM Club Magazine (1911)

H. Davison, ed. : Music during the Victorian Era, from Mendelssohn to Wagner: being the Memoirs of J.W. Davison (London, 1912)

G.B. Shaw: ‘A Reminiscence of Hector Berlioz’, Berlioz Society Bulletin, no.81 (1973), 4–12; no.82 (1974), 9–14

Berlioz, Hector: Bibliography

d: life and works

F. Clément: Les musiciens célèbres depuis le seizième siècle jusqu’à nos jours (Paris, 1868, 4/1887), 514–21

A. Jullien: Hector Berlioz: la vie et le combat: les oeuvres (Paris, 1882)

J. Bennett: Hector Berlioz (London, 1883)

A. Jullien: Hector Berlioz: sa vie et ses oeuvres (Paris, 1888)

E. Hippeau: Berlioz et son temps (Paris, 1890)

W.H. Hadow: Studies in Modern Music, i (London, 1893, many later edns incl. 1926/R), 71–146

L. Pohl: Hector Berlioz’ Leben und Werke (Leipzig, 1900)

A. Hahn and others: Hector Berlioz: sein Leben und seine Werke (Leipzig, 1901)

R. Louis: Hector Berlioz (Leipzig, 1904)

R. Rolland: ‘Berlioz’, Revue de Paris, xi (1904), 65, 331; repr. in Musiciens d’aujourd’hui (Paris, 1908, many later edns; Eng. trans., 1915/R)

J.-G. Prod’homme: Hector Berlioz (1803–1869): sa vie et ses oeuvres (Paris, 1905, 3/1927)

J. Tiersot: Hector Berlioz et la société de son temps (Paris, 1904)

J. Tiersot: ‘Berlioziana’, Le ménestrel (1904–6) [series of articles]

A. Boschot: Histoire d'un romantique (Paris, 1906–13, 2/1946–50) [later pubd as Hector Berlioz: une vie romantique, édition définitive (Paris, 1951/R, 2/1965)]

A. Coquard: Berlioz (Paris, 1909)

P.-L. Robert: Etude sur Hector Berlioz (Rouen, 1914)

J. Kapp: Berlioz: eine Biographie (Berlin, 1917, 4–7/1922)

P.-M. Masson: Berlioz (Paris, 1923)

L. Constantin: Berlioz (Paris, 1934)

W.J. Turner: Berlioz, the Man and his Work (London, 1934/R)

J.H. Elliot: Berlioz (London, 1938, 4/1967)

E. Lockspeiser: Berlioz (London, 1939)

G. de Pourtalès: Berlioz et l’Europe romantique (Paris, 1939, rev. 2/1948)

A. Boschot: Portraits de musiciens, i (Paris, 1946)

J. Daniskas: Hector Berlioz (Stockholm, 1947; Eng. trans., 1949)

F. Knuttel: Hector Berlioz (The Hague, 1948)

J. Barzun: Berlioz and the Romantic Century (Boston, 1950; rev., abridged 2/1956/R as Berlioz and his Century, rev. 3/1969 under orig. title)

T. Tiénot: Hector Berlioz: esquisse biographique (Paris, 1951)

H. Barraud: Hector Berlioz (Paris, 1955, 2/1966)

A.A. Khokhlovkina: Berlioz (Moscow, 1960)

C. Ballif: Berlioz (Paris, 1968) [Berlioz and the Romantic Imagination (London, 1969) [Arts Council Exhibition Catalogue]

S. Demarquez: Hector Berlioz: l’homme et son oeuvre (Paris, 1969)

H. Macdonald: Berlioz (London, 1982, 2/1991)

D. Cairns: Berlioz 1803–1832: the Making of an Artist (London, 1989)

D.K. Holoman: Berlioz (Cambridge, MA, 1989)

D. Cairns: Berlioz, ii: Servitude and Greatness: 1832–1869 (London, 1999) [vol. ii of Cairns, D1989]

Berlioz, Hector: Bibliography

e: specialist publications

Neue Musik-Zeitung (3 Dec 1903) [Berlioz issue]

RHCM, iii (1903), 403–46 [Berlioz issue]

RMG, no.49 (1903) [Berlioz issue]

Berlioz Society Bulletin, no.1– (1952–)

Revue musicale, no.233 (1956) [Berlioz issue]

Association nationale Hector Berlioz: Bulletin de liaison, i–1964–)

Romantisme, no.12 (1976) [Berlioz issue]

RdM, lxiii (1977) [Berlioz issue]

Silex, xvii (1980) [articles by M. Antoine, C. Ballif, S. Baudo, P. Boulez, A. Bourmeyster, M. Clavaud, G. Condé, G. Constance, B. Didier, G. Duval-Wirth, J.-F. Héron, D. Lémery, P. Reliquet, G. Rennaud, J.-V. Richard]

Revue musicale de Suisse romande, xxxvii/1 (1984) [Berlioz issue]

Cahiers Berlioz, i– (1991–)

P.A. Bloom, ed.: Berlioz Studies (Cambridge,1992) [incl. articles by J. Barzun, P.A. Bloom, D. Cairns, J.-M. Fauquet, I. Kemp, D.B. Levy, H. Macdonald, K. Reeve, J. Rushton]

Berlioz, Hector: Bibliography

f: biographical studies

E. de Mirecourt: Berlioz (Paris, 1856, 3/1856)

O. Fouque: Les révolutionnaires de la musique (Paris, 1882)

E. Hippeau: Berlioz intime (Paris, 1883, 2/1889)

J. Tiersot: ‘Un pèlerinage au pays de Berlioz’, Le ménestrel (1884–5)

M. Brenet: Deux pages de la vie de Berlioz (Paris, 1889)

E. Closson: ‘Hector Berlioz à Bruxelles’, Guide musical, xlix (1903), 33–9

H. de Curzon: ‘Les débuts de Berlioz dans la critique’, Guide musical, xlix (1903), 28–31

F. Grenier: ‘Cherubini et Berlioz’, Guide musical, xlix (1903), 4–8

E. Istel: ‘Berlioz und Cornelius’, Die Musik, iii/1 (1903–4), 366–72

M. Kufferath: ‘Wagner et Berlioz’, Guide musical, xlix (1903), 24–7

R. Sand: ‘Berlioz et ses contemporains’, Guide musical, xlix (1903), 23–4

M. Brenet: ‘L’amitié de Berlioz et de Liszt’, Guide musical, l (1904), 595–687

C. Maclean: ‘Berlioz and England’, SIMG, v (1903–4), 314–28

C. Malherbe: ‘Une autobiographie de Berlioz’, RMI, xiii (1906), 506–21 Le livre d’or du centenaire d’Hector Berlioz (Paris, 1907)

R. Blondel: ‘La jeunesse médicale de Berlioz’, Chronique médicale (1 April 1908)

J.-G. Prod’homme: ‘Berlioz anecdotique’, Musica, vii(1908), 44 only

J. Tiersot: ‘Berlioziana: Berlioz à l’Institut’, Le ménestrel (1910)

J. Tiersot: ‘Berlioziana: Berlioz, bibliothécaire du Conservatoire’, Le ménestrel (1910)

J. Tiersot: ‘Berlioziana: Berlioz, directeur de concerts symphoniques’, Le ménestrel (1909–10) [series of articles]

E. Dupuy: ‘Alfred de Vigny et Hector Berlioz’, Revue des deux mondes, 6th period, ii (1911), 837–65

O. Feis: Hector Berlioz, eine pathographische Studie, Grenzfragen des Nerven- und Seelenlebens (Wiesbaden, 1911), 81

J.-G. Prod’homme: ‘Une aventure d’amour de Berlioz’, ZIMG, xiii (1911–12), 137–45

J.-G. Prod’homme: ‘Hector Berlioz, bibliothécaire du Conservatoire’,Guide musical, lix (1913), 783, 803

J. Tiersot: ‘Hector Berlioz and Richard Wagner’, MQ, iii (1917), 453–92

H. Labaste: ‘Alfred de Vigny, collaborateur d’Hector Berlioz’, Revue universitaire, xxix (1920), 369–74

A. Boschot: Chez les musiciens du XVIIIe siècle à nos jours, i (Paris, 1922)

D. Lazarus: ‘Un maître de Berlioz: Anton Reicha’, ReM, iii/6–8 (1921–2), 255–61

J.-G. Prod’homme: ‘Wagner, Berlioz and Monsieur Scribe: Two Collaborations that Miscarried’, MQ, xii (1926), 359–75

E. Rey: La vie amoureuse de Berlioz (Paris, 1929)

K. Emingerova: ‘Hector Berlioz à Prague’, Revue française de Prague (1933), 167–86

A. Boschot: ‘Berlioz et l’Institut’, Monde français, xv (1949), 220

A.W. Ganz: Berlioz in London (London, 1950/R)

H. Kühner: Hector Berlioz: Charakter und Schöpfertum (Olten, 1952)

G. Court: ‘Hector Berlioz and Alfred de Vigny’, ML, xxxvii (1956), 118–27

L. Lack: ‘Berlioz à Londres’, ReM, no. 233 (1956), 87–90

M. Wright: ‘Humbert Ferrand’, Berlioz Society Bulletin, no.22 (1957), 5–6; no.23 (1957), 3–4

D. Cairns: ‘The Pinch of Snuff’, Berlioz Society Bulletin, no.40, (1962), 3–7; no.41, (1963), 3–10

M. Wright: ‘Berlioz’s Physiognomy’, Berlioz Society Bulletin, no.43 (1963), 3

G. Svyet: ‘Gektor Berlioz i Rossiya’, Russkaya mïsl' (2 March 1967)

V. Donnet: ‘Hector Berlioz et la médecine’, Lettres et médecins, i (1969), 3–21

V. Donnet and C. Moureaux: ‘Le baccalauréat-ès-sciences d’Hector Berlioz’, Marseille médical, iii (1969), 1–7

J. Gavot: ‘Berlioz à Nice’, Cahiers de l’alpe, xlvi (1969), 122–4

L. Guichard: ‘Berlioz et Stendhal’, Cahiers de l’alpe, xlvi (1969), 114–18

M. Hofmann: ‘Hector Berlioz en Russie’, Journal Musical Français musica-disques, no.179 (1969), 28–30

J.W. Klein: ‘Berlioz’s Personality’, ML, l (1969), 15–24

F. Lesure: ‘Le testament d’Hector Berlioz’, RdM, lv (1969), 219–23

E. Schenk: ‘Berlioz in Wien’, ÖMz, xxiv (1969), 217–23

A. Vander Linden: ‘En marge du centième anniversaire de la mort d’Hector Berlioz (8 mars 1869)’, Bulletin de la classe des beaux-arts de l'Académie royale de Belgique, li (1969), 36–75

R. Weeda: ‘Hector Berlioz’ bezoecken aan Belgiee’, Mens en melodie, xxiv (1969), 374–5

F. de la Sablière: ‘Quel père fut Hector Berlioz?’, Revue de Paris, lxxvii/2 (1970), 94–103

C. Comboroure: ‘Harriet Smithson, 1828–37’, Berlioz Society Bulletin, no.86 (1975), 15–18

P.A. Bloom and D.K. Holoman: ‘Berlioz's Music for L'Europe littéraire’, MR, xxxix (1978), 100–09

P.A. Bloom: ‘La mission de Berlioz en Allemagne: un document inédit’, RdeM, lxvi (1980), 70–85

P.A. Bloom: ‘Berlioz à l'Institut Revisited’, AcM, liii (1981), 171–99

P. Raby: Fair Ophelia: a Life of Harriet Smithson (Cambridge, 1982)

R. Clarson-Leach: Berlioz: his Life and Times (Tunbridge Wells, 1983)

E.F. Jensen: ‘Berlioz and Gérard de Nerval’, Soundings, xi (1983–84), 46–51

P.A. Bloom: ‘Berlioz in the Year of the Symphonie fantastique’, JMR, ix (1989), 67–88

G. Payzant: Eduard Hanslick and Ritter Berlioz in Prague (Calgary, 1991)

P. Bloom: ‘Episodes in the Livelihood of an Artist: Berlioz's Contacts and Contracts with Publishers’, JMR, xv (1995), 219

Berlioz, Hector: Bibliography

g: general critical studies

G. de Massougnes: Berlioz: son oeuvre (Paris, 1870, 2/1919)

F. Niecks: ‘Hector Berlioz and his Critics’, MT, xxi (1880), 272–4, 326–9

G. Noufflard: Berlioz et le mouvement de l’art contemporain (Florence, 1883, 2/1885)

R. Pohl: Hektor Berlioz: Studien und Erinnerungen (Leipzig, 1884/R)

C. Saint-Saëns: Harmonie et mélodie (Paris, 1885, 9/1923), 249–55

A. Jullien: Musiciens d’aujourd’hui (Paris, 1892–4)

G. de Massougnes: ‘Berlioz et les artistes d’aujourd’hui’, Monde musical, xv (1903), 339–45

E. Schuré: ‘Le génie de Berlioz’, Guide musical, xlix (1903), 1–3

T.S. Wotton: ‘Hector Berlioz’, PMA, xxx (1903–4), 15–36

T.S. Wotton: ‘Stray Notes on Berlioz’, ZIMG, v (1904), 395–9

J. Tiersot: ‘Berlioziana’, Le ménestrel (1904–5) [series of articles]

E. Newman: Musical Studies (London, 1905, 3/1914) Le livre d’or du centenaire d’Hector Berlioz (Paris, 1907)

A. Bruneau: ‘L’influence de Berlioz sur la musique contemporaine’, Musica, vii (1908), 36 only

A. Jullien: Musiciens d’hier et d’aujourd’hui (Paris, 1910), 105–57

F. Weingartner: Akkorde: gesammelte Aufsätze (Leipzig, 1912/R)

M. Emmanuel: ‘Berlioz’, Le correspondant, cclxxviii (1920), 237–61

J. Kapp: Das Dreigestirn: Berlioz, Liszt, Wagner (Berlin, 1920)

A.W. Locke: Music and the Romantic Movement in France (London, 1920/R)

C. Koechlin: ‘Le cas Berlioz’, ReM, iii/3–5 (1921–2), 118–34

Berlioz: being the Report of a Discussion held on December 17, 1928 (London, 1929)

J. Tiersot: La musique aux temps romantiques (Paris, 1930/R)

T.S. Wotton: Hector Berlioz (London, 1935/R)

W. Mellers: ‘A Prophetic Romantic’, Scrutiny, vii (1938–9), 119–28

F. Farga: Der späte Ruhm: Hector Berlioz und seine Zeit (Zürich, 1939, rev. 2/1952 as Hector Berlioz: der Roman seines Lebens)

E.H.W. Meyerstein: ‘An Approach to Berlioz’, MR, ix (1948), 97–101

L. Guichard: La musique et les lettres au temps du romantisme (Paris, 1955)

H. Raynor: ‘Berlioz and his Legend’, MT, xcvi (1955), 414–17

J.A. Westrup: ‘Berlioz and Common Sense’, MT, ci (1960), 755–6

D. Cairns: ‘Berlioz and Criticism: Some Surviving Dodos’, MT, civ (1963), 548–51

D. Cairns: ‘Berlioz: a Centenary Retrospect’, MT, cx (1969), 249–51

J. Barzun: ‘Berlioz a Hundred Years After’, MQ, lvi (1970), 1–13

M. Guiomar: Le masque et le fantasme (Paris, 1970)

E.T. Cone: ‘Inside the Saint’s Head: the Music of Berlioz’, Musical Newsletter, i/3 (1971), 3–13; i/4 (1971), 16–21; ii/1 (1972), 19–22

A.E.F. Dickinson: The Music of Berlioz (London, 1972)

P. Heyworth, ed.: E. Newman: Berlioz: Romantic and Classic (London, 1972)

B. Primmer: The Berlioz Style (London, 1973)

R. Bockholdt: Berlioz-Studien (Tutzing, 1979)

M. Clavaud: Hector Berlioz: visages d'un masque (Lyons, 1980)

J. Rushton: The Musical Language of Berlioz (Cambridge, 1983)

T. Schacher: Idee und Erscheinungsformen des Dramatischen bei Hector Berlioz (Hamburg, 1987)

J.-P. Bartoli: L'oeuvre symphonique de Berlioz: forme et principes de développement (diss., U. of Paris, Sorbonne, 1991)

A. Ramaut: Hector Berlioz: compositeur romantique français (Arles, 1993)

Berlioz, Hector: Bibliography

h: specialized critical studies

J. d’Ortigue: Le balcon de l’Opéra (Paris, 1833), 295–324

J. Mainzer: Chronique musicale de Paris (Paris, 1838)

P. Scudo: Critique et littérature musicales, i (Paris, 1850, 3/1856), 14–74

E. Hanslick: Aus dem Concert-saal (Vienna, 1870/R, 2/1896)

A. Jullien: Goethe et la musique (Paris, 1880), 126–43

A. Ernst: ‘Wagner corrigé par Berlioz’, Le ménestrel (1883–4)

A. Ernst: L’oeuvre dramatique de H. Berlioz (Paris, 1884)

A. Jullien: Musiciens d’aujourd’hui, 2nd ser. (Paris, 1894), 94–112

M. Brenet: ‘Berlioz inédit: Les francs-juges, La nonne sanglante’, Guide musical, xlii (1896), 61–7, 81–5

F. Weingartner: Die Symphonie nach Beethoven (Leipzig, 1898, 4/1926/R; Eng. trans., 1906)

A. Boutarel: ‘Berlioz und seine “Architecturale Musik”’, Die Musik, iii/1 (1903–4), 323–31

P. Flat: ‘Le romantisme de Berlioz’, Guide musical, xlix (1903), 3–4

M. Puttmann: ‘Hector Berlioz als Gesangkomponist’, NZM, xcix (1903), 645–7

F. Weingartner: ‘Le manque d’invention chez Berlioz’, Guide musical, xlix (1903), 21–3

T.S. Wotton: ‘Einige Missverständnisse betreffs Berlioz’, Die Musik, iii/1 (1903–4), 358–65

G. Pioch: ‘Berlioz littérateur’, Musica, vii (1908), 45 only

J. Tiersot: ‘Berlioz symphoniste’, Musica, vii (1908), 41–2

A. Boschot: ‘La musique religieuse de Berlioz’, Le correspondant, ccxxxvii (1909), 1172–94

P. J. Bone: The Guitar and Mandolin: Biographies of Celebrated Players and Composers (London, 1914, 2/1954/R)

E. Newman: ‘Rouget de L'Isle, “La Marseillaise”, and Berlioz’, MT, lvi (1915), 461–3

T.S. Wotton: ‘The Scores of Berlioz and Some Modern Editing’, MT, lvi (1915), 651–6

J. Tiersot: ‘Hector Berlioz and Richard Wagner’, MQ, iii (1917), 453–92

G. Abraham: ‘The Influence of Berlioz on Richard Wagner’, ML, v (1924), 239–46

W.W. Roberts: ‘Berlioz the Critic’, ML, vii (1926), 63–72, 133–42

F. Bonavia: ‘Berlioz’, MMR, lix (1929), 231–5

C. Lambert: ‘The Isolation of Berlioz: Academic Criticism’, Daily Telegraph (27 April 1929)

T.S. Wotton: ‘Berlioz as Melodist’, MT, lxx (1929), 808–12

T.S. Wotton: Berlioz: Four Works (London, 1929)

F. Baser: ‘Hector Berlioz und die germanische Seele’, Die Musik, xxvi (1933–4), 259–63

E. Lockspeiser: ‘Berlioz and the French Romantics’, ML, xv (1934), 26–31

J. Tiersot: ‘Schumann et Berlioz’, ReM, no.161 (1935), 89–102

D. Tovey: Essays in Musical Analysis, iv: Illustrative Musik (London, 1936/R, 2/1981) [on Harold en Italie, Le roi Lear and the ‘Scène d’amour’ in Roméo et Juliette]

T.S. Wotton: ‘Infernal Language: a Berlioz Hoax’, MT, lxxviii (1937), 209–10

H. Bartenstein: Hector Berlioz’ Instrumentationskunst und ihre geschichtliche Grundlagen (Strasbourg, 1939, 2/1974)

T.S. Wotton: ‘An Unknown Score of Berlioz’, MR, iv (1943), 224–8

R. Dumesnil: La musique romantique française (Paris, 1944)

M. Sahlberg: Berlioz et les russes (diss., U. of Paris, 1944)

J.-G. Prod’homme: ‘Berlioz, Musset and Thomas de Quincey’, MQ, xxxii (1946), 98–106

C. Cudworth: ‘Berlioz and Wiertz: a Comparison and a Contrast’, RBM, vi (1952), 275–82

F. Noske: La mélodie française de Berlioz à Duparc (Amsterdam, 1954; Eng. trans., rev. R. Benton and F. Noske, 1970/R)

R.W.S. Mendl: ‘Berlioz and Shakespeare’, The Chesterian, xxix (1954–5), 95–107; xxx (1955–6), 1–11

J. Barzun: Energies of Art (New York, 1956/R), 281–301

A. Copland: ‘Berlioz Today’, Saturday Review (27 Aug 1960)

P. Friedheim: ‘Radical Harmonic Procedures in Berlioz’, MR, xxi (1960), 282–96

J.W. Klein: ‘Berlioz as a Musical Dramatist’, The Chesterian, xxxv (1960–61), 35–43

C. Wallis: ‘Berlioz and the Lyric Stage’, MT, ci (1960), 358–9

A.W.G. Court: Hector Berlioz: the Rôle of Literature in his Life and Work (diss., U. of London, 1961)

R. Collet: ‘Berlioz and Shakespeare’, New Statesman (20 Dec 1963)

F.V. Grunfeld: ‘The Colossal Nightingale’, Reporter, xxix (1963), 52–5

G. Warrack: ‘Hector, Thou Sleep’st’, MT, civ (1963), 896–7

E.C. Bass: Thematic Procedures in the Symphonies of Berlioz (diss., U. of North Carolina, 1964)

A.E.F. Dickinson: ‘Berlioz’s Rome Prize Works’, MR, xxv (1964), 163–85

A.S. Garlington: ‘Lesueur, “Ossian” and Berlioz’, JAMS, xvii (1964), 206–8

P. Hartnoll, ed.: Shakespeare in Music (London, 1964)

J. Warrack: ‘Berlioz and the “Theatre of the Mind”’, The Listener, (5 Nov 1964)

R. Hyatt: ‘The Earliest Compositions of Berlioz’, Berlioz Society Bulletin, no.51, (1965), 1–5, no.52 (1965), 2–9

J. Rushton: ‘Berlioz’s Roots in 18th-century French Opera’, Berlioz Society Bulletin no.50 (1965), 3–10

H.J. Macdonald: ‘Berlioz’s Self-Borrowings’, PRMA, xcii (1965–6), 27–44

D. Cairns: ‘Berlioz's Epic Opera’, The Listener, (1966)

D. Cairns: ‘Hector Berlioz (1803–69)’, The Symphony, ed. R. Simpson, i (London, 1966, 2/1972), 201–31

A.E.F. Dickinson: ‘Berlioz’s “Bleeding Nun”’, MT, cvii (1966), 584–8

K. Lucas: Hector Berlioz and the Dramatic Symphony (diss., U. of Melbourne, 1966)

E.C. Bass: ‘Thematic Unification of Scenes in Multi-Movement Works of Berlioz’, MR, xxviii (1967), 45–51

E. Gräbner: Berlioz and French Operatic Tradition (diss., U. of York, 1967)

L. Guichard: ‘Berlioz et Heine’, Revue de littérature comparée, xli (1967), 5–23

P.H. Tanner: Timpani and Percussion Writing in the Works of Hector Berlioz (diss., Catholic U. of America, 1967)

R. Hyatt: ‘Le cheval arabe, Beverley, and Estelle’, Berlioz Society Bulletin, no.60 (1968), 6–13

R.F. Weirauch: The Orchestrational Style of Hector Berlioz (diss., U. of Cincinnati, 1968)

J.-M. Bailbé: Le roman et la musique en France sous la monarchie de juillet (Paris, 1969)

J. Barzun: ‘Berlioz in 1969: a Fantasia for Friends Overseas’, Adam, xxxiv (1969), 33–4

L. Guichard: ‘Berlioz et Stendhal’, Cahiers de l’alpe, xlvi (1969), 114–18

H.J. Macdonald: Berlioz Orchestral Music (London, 1969)

H.J. Macdonald: ‘Berlioz’s Orchestration: Human or Divine?’, MT, cx (1969), 255–8

H.J. Macdonald: ‘The Colossal Nightingale’, Music and Musicians, xvii/11 (1968–9), 24–5

H.J. Macdonald: ‘Two Peculiarities of Berlioz’s Notation’, ML, l (1969), 25–36

H. Pleasants: ‘Berlioz as Critic’, Stereo Review, xxiii/4 (1969), 89–93

J.F. Stuart: The Dramatic World of Hector Berlioz (diss., U. of Rochester, 1969)

N. Temperley: ‘Berlioz and the Slur’, ML, l (1969), 388–92

P. Vaillant: ‘Berlioz à la bibliothèque de Grenoble’, Cahiers de l’alpe, xlvi (1969), 133–6

M. Wright: ‘Berlioz and Anglo-American Criticism’, Adam, xxxiv (1969), 93–101

R. Covell: ‘Berlioz, Russia and the Twentieth Century’, Studies in Music, iv (1970), 40–51

J. Day: ‘Goetz von Berlichingen and Les francs-juges’, Berlioz Society Bulletin, no.66 (1970), 6–10

H.J. Macdonald: ‘The Labitte Catalogue: Some Unexplored Evidence’, Berlioz Society Bulletin, no.69 (1970), 5–7

D. Charlton: ‘A Berlioz Footnote’, ML, lii (1971), 157–8

S. Ironfield: L’art et l’artiste dans les écrits de Berlioz (diss., U. of Liverpool, 1971)

H.J. Macdonald: ‘The Labitte Catalogue: More Evidence’, Berlioz Society Bulletin, no.70 (1971), 7–8

B. Primmer: ‘Berlioz and Harmonic Intensification’, Berlioz Society Bulletin, no.72 (1971), 3–6

C.B. Wilson: Berlioz’s Use of Brass Instruments (diss., Case Western Reserve U., Cleveland,1971)

E. Gräbner: ‘Some Aspects of Rhythm in Berlioz’, Soundings, ii (1971–2), 18–27

J.-M. Bailbé: Berlioz: artiste et écrivain dans les ‘Mémoires’ (Paris, 1972)

P.J. Dallman: Influences and Use of the Guitar in the Music of Berlioz (diss., U. of Maryland, 1972)

H.R. Cohen: Berlioz and the Opera (1829-1849) (diss., New York U., 1973)

L. Goldberg: A Hundred Years of Berlioz’s Les Troyens (diss., U. of Rochester, 1973)

D. McCaldin: ‘Berlioz and the Organ’, Organ Yearbook, iv (1973), 3–17

R.S. Silverman: ‘Synthesis in the Music of Hector Berlioz’, MR, xxxiv (1973), 346–52

J. Rushton: ‘Berlioz’s “Huit scènes de Faust”: New Source Material’,MT, cxv (1974), 471–3

P.A. Bloom: ‘Orpheus’ Lyre Resurrected: a tableau musical by Berlioz’, MQ, lxi (1975), 189–211

D.K. Holoman: The Creative Process in the Autograph Musical Documents of Hector Berlioz, c1818–1840 (Ann Arbor, 1975)

D.K. Holoman: ‘The Present State of Berlioz Research’, AcM, xlvii (1975), 31–67

D.K. Holoman: ‘Reconstructing a Berlioz Sketch’, JAMS, xxviii (1975), 125–30

R.F. Weirauch: ‘The Neo-Renaissance Berlioz’, MR, xxxvi (1975), 245–52

D. Cairns: ‘Spontini’s Influence on Berlioz’, From Parnassus: Essays in Honor of Jacques Barzun, ed. D.B. Weiner and W.R. Keylor (New York, 1976), 25–41

J.R. Elliott jr: ‘The Shakespeare Berlioz Saw’, ML, lvii (1976), 292–308

P. Friedheim: ‘Berlioz and Rhythm’, MR, xxxvii (1976), 5–44

D.K. Holoman: ‘Berlioz au Conservatoire: notes biographiques’, RdM, lxii (1976), 289–92

P.A. Bloom: ‘Berlioz and the Critic: La damnation de Fétis’, Studies in Musicology in Honor of Otto E. Albrecht, ed. J.W. Hill (Kassel, 1980), 240–65

J. Rushton: ‘Berlioz through the Looking-Glass’, Soundings, vi (1977), 51–66

J. Haar: ‘Berlioz and the “First Opera”’, 19CM, iii (1979–80), 32–41

M. Henke and M. Stegemann: ‘Hector Berlioz: neue Aspekte zum Jugendwerk’, NZfM, cxli (1980), 241–3

D.K. Holoman: ‘The Berlioz Sketchbook Recovered’, 19CM, vii (1983–4), 282–317

M. Biondi: ‘L'armonia di Berlioz: aspetti tecnici e stilistici’, NRMI, xviii (1984), 406–19

K. Murphy: ‘Attribution of some Unsigned Articles of Berlioz in the Revue et Gazette Musicale de Paris (1834–1837)’, Musicology Australia, viii (1985), 39–49

K. Murphy: Hector Berlioz and the Development of French Music Criticism (Ann Arbor, 1988)

K.H. Kohrs: ‘Berlioz' coup rude de tam-tam: autobiographische Konstruktion als Kunstenwurf’, Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistergeschichte, lxiii (1989), 120

K.H. Kohrs: ‘Emphase und Sturz: Elevationsmotive bei Hector Berlioz’, Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistergeschichte, lxvi (1992), 697

J. Barzun: ‘Berlioz and Shaw: an Affinity’, Unpublished Shaw ed. D.H. Laurence and M. Peters (Philadelphia, 1996), 67

J.-P. Bartoli: ‘La “Technique de la cigale”: la construction périodique et motivique des thèmes de Berlioz’, Musurgia, iv/2 (1997), 59

N. Del Mar: Conducting Berlioz (Oxford, 1997)

Berlioz, Hector: Bibliography

i: individual works

(i) Messe solennelle

H. Macdonald: ‘Berlioz's Messe solennelle’, 19CM, xvi (1992–3), 267–85

H. Macdonald: ‘Die Wiederentdeckung der “Messe solennelle” von Hector Berlioz’, Musik und Kirche, lxiii (1993), 140–43

(ii) Symphonie fantastique

R. Schumann: ‘Aus dem Leben eines künstlers: Phantastische Symphonie in 5 Abtheilungen von Hector Berlioz’, NZM, iii (1835), 1–51

G. Noufflard: La Symphonie fantastique de Hector Berlioz: essai sur l'expression de la musique instrumentale (Florence, 1880)

P. Magnette: Les grandes étapes dans l'oeuvre de Hector Berlioz, i: La symphonie fantastique (1829–32) (Liège, 1908)

D. Cairns: ‘Berlioz, the Cornet and the Symphonie fantastique’, Berlioz Society Bulletin, no.47 (1964), 2–6

E.T. Cone: Berlioz: Fantastic Symphony (New York, 1971)

N. Temperley: ‘The Symphonie fantastique and its Program’, MQ, lvii (1971), 593–608

W. Dömling: ‘Die Symphonie fantastique und Berlioz' Auffasung von Programmusik’, Mf, xxviii (1975), 260–83

C. Berger: Phantastik als Konstruktion: Hector Berlioz' ‘Symphonie fantastique’(Kassel, 1983)

J.-P. Bartoli: ‘Forme narrative et principes du développement musical dans la Symphonie fantastique de Berlioz’, Musurgia, ii (1995), 25ff

(iii) Harold en Italie

F. Liszt: ‘Berlioz und seine Haroldsymphonie’, NZM, xliii (1855), 25–97

A. Montaux: ‘Berlioz: son génie, sa technique, son caractère; à propos d'un manuscrit autographe d'Harold en Italie’, Le ménestrel (1890)

G. Court: ‘Berlioz and Byron and Harold in Italy’, MR, xvii (1956), 229–36

M.E. Bonds: ‘Sinfonia anti-eroica: Berlioz's Harold en Italie and the Anxiety of Beethoven's Influence’, JM, x (1992), 417–63

J. Langford: ‘The Byronic Berlioz: Harold en Italie and Beyond’, JMR, xvi (1997), 199–221

(iv) Roméo et Juliette

D. Cairns: ‘Berlioz in Verona’, Music and Musicians, xii/8 (1963–4), 15–17

J. Rushton: Berlioz: Roméo et Juliette (Cambridge, 1994)

(v) Benvenuto Cellini

H. von Bülow: ‘Hector Berlioz: Benvenuto Cellini’, NZM, xlvii (1852); repr. in Ausgewählte Schriften, i (Leipzig, 1911), 190

J.-G. Prod'homme: ‘Les deux Benvenuto Cellini de Berlioz’, SIMG, xiv (1912–13), 449–60

A. Hammond: ‘Benvenuto Cellini’, Opera, viii (1957), 205–9

H. Macdonald: ‘The Original “Benvenuto Cellini”’, MT, cvii (1966), 1042–5

L'avant-scène opéra, no.142 (1991) [Benvenuto Cellini issue; articles by F. Piatier, H. Macdonald, J.-M. Brèque, C. Capacci, J.-M. Fauquet, D. van Moere, A. Vanzo, E. Giuliani]

P.A. Bloom, ed.: Hector Berlioz: Benvenuto Cellini, Dossiers de Presse Parisienne (n.p., 1995)

(vi) La damnation de Faust

L. Kreutzer: ‘Le Faust d'Hector Berlioz’, Revue et gazette musicale de Paris, xxi (1854), 389; xxii (1855), 10, 27, 41, 91, 97

J.-G. Prod'homme: Le cycle Berlioz, i: La damnation de Faust (Paris, 1896)

E. Colonne: ‘La damnation de Faust’, Musica, vii (1908), 37 only

A. Boschot: Le Faust de Berlioz (Paris, 1910, 3/1945)

K. Isoz: ‘Le manuscrit original du “Rákóczy” de Berlioz’, Revue des études hongroise, ii (1924), 5–17

J. Tiersot: La damnation de Faust de Berlioz (Paris, 1924)

E. Haraszti: ‘1846–1946: un centenaire romantique: Berlioz et la marche hongroise’, ReM (1946), suppl.

J. Rushton: ‘The Genesis of Berlioz's “La damnation de Faust”’,ML, lvi (1975), 129–46

(vii) Les Troyens

E. Destranges: Les Troyens de Berlioz: étude analytique (Paris, 1897)

A. Jullien: ‘Les Troyens’, Musica, vii (1908), 43 only

G. Servières: ‘Pièces inédites relatives aux Troyens’, ReM, v/7–8 (1923–4), 147–51

E. Newman: ‘Les Troyens’, Opera Nights (London, 1943), 283–324

J.W. Klein: ‘Les Troyens’, MMR, lxxxvii (1957), 83–91

G.S. Fraenkel: ‘Berlioz, the Princess and “Les Troyens”’, ML, xliv (1963), 249–56

D. Cairns: ‘Berlioz and Virgil’, PRMA, xcv (1969), 97–110

H. Kühn: ‘Antike massen: zu einigen Motiven in Les Troyens von Hector Berlioz’, Opernstudien: Anna Amalie Abert zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. K. Hortschansky (Tutzing, 1975), 141–52

J. Rushton: ‘The Overture to Les Troyens’, MA, iv (1986), 119–44

I. Kemp: Hector Berlioz: Les Troyens (Cambridge, 1988)

L'avant-scène opéra, nos.128–9 (1990) [Les Troyens issue; articles by H. Macdonald, D. Cairns, J.-M. Brèque, G. Condé, J.-F. Labie, J.-M. Fauquet, C. Wasselin]

A. Ramaut: ‘Le livret des Troyens de Berlioz: le compromis d'une réécriture’, Le livret malgré lui (Paris, 1992), 94–105

F. Heidlberger: Hector Berlioz: Les Troyens à Carthage, Dossiers de Presse Parisienne (n.p., 1995)

(viii) Others

J.-G. Prod'homme: Le cycle Berlioz, ii: L'enfance du Christ (Paris, 1898)

R. Sternfeld: ‘Ist der Lélio von Berlioz aufführbar?’, Die Musik, iii/1 (1903–4), 373–5

J. Tiersot: ‘Les huit scènes de Faust’, Le ménestrel (1910)

T.S. Wotton: ‘A Berlioz Caprice and its Programme’, MT, lxix (1927), 704–6

G.T. Sandford: The Overtures of Hector Berlioz: a Study in Musical Style (diss., U. of Southern California, 1964)

A.E.F. Dickinson: ‘Berlioz's “Bleeding Nun”’, MT, cvii (1966), 584–8

J. Warrack: ‘Berlioz's Mélodies’, MT, cx (1969), 252–4

C. Hopkinson: ‘Berlioz and the Marseillaise’, ML, li (1970), 435–9

J. Rushton: ‘Berlioz's “Huit scènes de Faust”: New Source Material’, MT, cxv (1974), 471–3

E.T. Cone: ‘Berlioz's Divine Comedy: The Grande messe des morts’, 19CM, iv (1980), 3–16

O. Visentini: ‘I recitativi di Berlioz per il Freischütz di Weber’, RIM, xxviii (1993), 299–359