2 - Berlioz and Early Music

Summary

The subject the editor of this volume has asked me to treat requires narrowing and definition. “Early music” (la musique ancienne) and “Baroque music” (la musique baroque) are expressions that do not mean precisely the same thing for English and French speakers; nor would they have meant to Berlioz what they mean now to us. A reading of Berlioz’s correspondence and readily available criticism—the Mémoires, the three books, the selection published by Gérard Condé, and the first volumes of the Critique musicale—suggests that it would be too limiting to base this brief study primarily upon his reactions to the music of the period from Lully to Rameau, and to ignore the rest of Europe and the names of Palestrina, Bach, Handel, and a host of others as well.

The real problem is to arrive at a terminus ad quem. Gluck and his contemporaries, for our composer, represented the music of the past, even though Gluck himself died only sixteen years before Berlioz’s birth. This may seem strange to us, but one may nonetheless suggest that the French Revolution marked an important point of demarcation for Berlioz, who would presumably have peered out at a vast sort of yesteryear that would extend from that grand political and social event back to the middle ages. In this measureless “past” we must reserve a special chronological division for what Berlioz called “les maîtres de l’ancienne école,” by which he meant the generation of the years 1760–85, marked principally by the mature works of Gluck, Monsigny, and Dalayrac. For this generation Berlioz had high praise, as we may see from the following quotation, from an article concerning some of the old masters of the opéra comique, that appeared in the Journal des débats:

In general I have very little regard for children’s tales in music; but, in the works of the maîtres de l’ancienne école I like the very natural musical sentiments that one cannot fail to find in them, the almost constant respect for expression, the intimate bond between the music and the drama, the proper accentuation of the words, the almost always irreproachable musical prosody, the qualities of the play that are only subtly indicated by the authors yet that are so well understood and so cleverly developed by the composers.