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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 June 2013
This article reassesses Berlioz's complex relationship to the French romance. Berlioz is often regarded as a musical revolutionary who made his mark writing massive, path-breaking symphonies – a far cry from the popular songs that became a staple of the bourgeois woman's salon. Yet he wrote romances throughout his life. How are we to understand these songs in the context of his overall output? What did the genre mean to him? How do his romances relate to the larger works on which his reputation rests? I explore these questions in relation to the romances he composed or revised between 1842 and 1850, a period often regarded as a fallow one for Berlioz but one that nonetheless saw a surge of songwriting activity. Drawing upon recent theories about the autobiographical construction of Berlioz's music, and considering when these songs were written or revised, to whom they were dedicated, what images were associated with them and how their texts relate to the events of Berlioz's biography, I argue that their conventionality belies a deeply personal resonance and a musical ingenuity uncommon to the romance genre. As a whole, these songs show Berlioz returning to an intimate and direct style during an especially introspective and nostalgic period of his life. Even more, they suggest that his urge toward self-reflection was not confined to the programmatic and the large-scale, and that his miniatures and monuments have more in common than one might think.
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the annual meeting of the American Musicological Society in Los Angeles, in 2006. Research on this project was supported by a Faculty Research Fellowship from the Oregon Humanities Center. I am grateful to Francesca Brittan, the late Anne Dhu McLucas, and the two anonymous readers for providing comments on an earlier draft.
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6 Peter Bloom reminds us that Schubert's Lieder were published in France most often as ‘mélodies’, but Mendelssohn's Lieder ohne Worte became ‘romances sans paroles’ (‘In the Shadows of Les Nuits d’été’, 81).
7 A case in point is Berlioz's collection Neuf Mélodies (later published as Irlande), whose title indicates not so much the musical genre of the songs – they in fact fall squarely in the romance tradition – as the source of the poetry Berlioz set (in French translation): Thomas Moore's Irish Melodies.
8 ‘Les Champs’ appeared in 1834 in the fashion magazine La Romance, ‘La Belle Isabeau’ and ‘Le Chasseur danois’ were published in Le Monde musical's holiday album (January 1843 and 1844, respectively) and ‘La Mort d'Ophélie’ was published in the Album de chant de la Gazette musicale in January 1848.
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15 The opera to which Berlioz devoted his energies was La Nonne sanglante, with a libretto by Eugène Scribe. The two worked on the project sporadically between 1841 and 1846 but eventually had to set it aside because of poor relations and a lack of true commitment on either side.
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35 From lines 13 and 14 of Book I of Tristia. See Tristia, trans. Arthur Leslie Wheeler (Loeb Classical Library, 151) (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1959), 2.
36 Ovid was exiled by emperor Augustus, at the age of 50, to Tomos, where he wrote Tristia. David Charlton, in NBE12b, explicitly draws the connection between Ovid's condition and Berlioz's: ‘[Tristia's] relevance to Berlioz was threefold: meditation on personal sorrow; conception away from home (the revolution of 1848 kept the composer in London until around 14 July, and he despaired of any future in Paris); and artistic similarity of purpose’ (xi).
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43 The album includes songs by Berlioz, Félicien David, Eckert, Gouin, Halévy, Kastner, Meyerbeer, Panofka and Vivier. Blanchard made it clear in his announcement preceding the album's publication that these songs were intended to provide contrast with many of the ‘short-breathed’ and ‘restrained’ romances of the day (Revue et Gazette musicale [26 December 1847], 424). Many, like ‘Ophélie’, do reach beyond the ‘pure’ romance (romance pur sang), with more active and colourful accompaniments and expressive harmonies, but Berlioz's song most deftly brings together the charm and grace of the romance with a real feeling of pathos and a spirit of musical invention.
44 Heather Hadlock emphasizes this point. In Berlioz's hands, Ophelia's death ‘results not in silence, but in the amplification of her song.’ See ‘Berlioz, Ophelia, and Feminist Hermeneutics’, in Berlioz: Past, Present, Future, 129. Hadlock further relates the song's vocalise to Harriet's unintelligible speech in her 1827 Hamlet performance, arguing that the song ‘encodes … the memory of hearing and seeing Smithson’ (127).
45 Strophic variation was by no means uncommon to the romance genre; Meyerbeer, for example, used this technique often in his songs. Yet of all the songs in the Gazette album only ‘Ophélie’ is in varied strophic form; all the others are simple strophic.
46 The song was never published. It exists only on an albumleaf dated 12 November, eight days after Berlioz had arrived in London. The music is so brief on this albumleaf (a mere 13 bars) that it seems more a sketch of a song than a full-fledged song itself – though there is no reason to believe Berlioz intended to do anything more with it. See NBE15, xviii.
47 ‘Nessun maggior dolore/Che ricordarsi del tempo felice/Ne la miseria’, from Dante Alighieri, Inferno, canto V, lines 121–3. See The Divine Comedy, trans. Charles S. Singleton, Bollingen Series, 80, 2nd ed., 6 vols. (Princeton, 1997), volume 1: Inferno, 55.
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50 The other songs of Les Nuits d’été were orchestrated in 1856 and published with the orchestral version of ‘Absence’ in the same year. A separate edition of the orchestrated Absence was issued in 1844. (See NBE13, xi–xiii.)
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59 Frank Heidlberger has suggested to me that Berlioz may well have associated ‘Le Matin’ with his mother – despite the fact that the song describes the death of a father – because he returned to the house of his mother's father. Berlioz's mother died in 1838, but unlike with his father, he makes no mention of her death in his Memoirs.
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65 Berlioz, Memoirs, postscript, 519. See also CG4, 465, for similar sentiments.