Foreword: Talking about Berlioz

Summary

C’est un génie. Il a trop de génie. Il fait des fautes. Qu’importe!

—Richard Strauss, talking about Berlioz to Romain Rolland

This book presents papers, as revised for publication, from a gathering at Smith College, in Northampton, Massachusetts, that was the first of five international conferences planned in the late 1990s by the Paris-based Comité International Hector Berlioz to usher in the bicentenary of the composer’s birth. As I write, a second conference, in Bayreuth, has already taken place; a third, in London, is imminent; a fourth and fifth, in La Côte-Saint-André and in Paris, are not far off. The approach to 2003 will also see a crescendo of concerts and exhibitions, including one of grand proportion at the très grande Bibliothèque Nationale de France, and a ceremonial tribute—Berlioz would dub it pyramidal or babylonien—that will remove the composer’s remains from the tranquility of the Cimetière Montmartre to the imposing dignity of the Panthéon: Aux grands hommes, la patrie reconnaissante.

That panthéonisation—the word cannot be pronounced without an incredulous smile—was the subject of some formal discourse and rather more talk at the Smith College Colloquium (colloquium oblige!). Berlioz’s entombment in the Panthéon, alongside such figures as Voltaire and Rousseau, Victor Hugo and Émile Zola, Jean Jaurès and Jean Moulin, raises questions of enormous import for those engaged in the musical politics of this year and yesteryear: Are Berlioz’s political views—in particular his rejection of republicanism à la 1848 and his embrace of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte’s 1851 coup d’état—relevant to the honor one would bestow upon him now? Louis Napoléon associated his first election with the will of god: “Vox populi, vox dei” read the inscription on a banner that was unfurled when he entered the Opéra shortly after a plebiscite made him President of the Republic on 10 December 1848. Less than a year later Berlioz published two “popular” choruses, La Menace des Francs and Hymne à la France, under that same Latin expression, Vox populi. Was this a sign of his belief in universal suffrage? Or was it a cynical attempt to ingratiate himself with the man who would soon convert from four-year executive to emperor for life?