A N D R E W TH OM SO N
Berlioz and Byron in the shadow of Napoleon’s
In memoriam Peter W illiams
i . Berlio {.• scenes from the life
and works, ed. Peter Bloom
(Rochester, NY, 2008),
pp. 125-37.
downfall: a new look at Harold en Italie
Harold en Italie op.16, composed
m o n g b e r l i o z ’s s y m p h o n i e s ,
A in 1834, has received considerably less attention from musico­
logists than the Symphonie fantastique or Romeo et Juliette, as if it
were in some way inferior to them and little more than a picturesque suite
of Italian scenes, very loosely based on Lord Byron’s extended poem
Child Harold’s pilgrimage, and largely devoid of any real programmatic
continuity. Moreover, its original conception as a work for viola and or­
chestra, commissioned by the famous violinist Niccolo Paganini albeit
rejected as insufficiently virtuosic and lacking in the qualities of continuous
display, has unfortunately further queered the pitch, emphasising the work’s
hybrid character and undermining its claims to be a symphony per se. Yet
if it lacks the extraordinary orchestral phantasmagoria of its predecessor,
the Fantastique, its musical material is no less distinguished, as in the superb
lyricism of the solo viola’s evocations of the solitary meditations of the
eponymous wanderer amid the beauty of the Abruzzi mountains in central
Italy. In fact, Berlioz displayed here a rare understanding of the special
character and sonority of that so-called ‘cinderella’ instrument worthy
of the Mozart of the Sinfonia concertante and the string quintets. It seems
curious, nevertheless, that to the best of my knowledge no attention has
been paid to a dynamic doom-laden repeated-note idea running throughout
the work, culminating in the aggressive reiterated chords of the explosive
finale, whose profound meaning, as we shall see, is surely revealed by an
attentive reading of Byron’s poem. Indeed, there is considerably more of
Byron’s Childe Harold underlying and shaping this symphony than has been
recognised by musicologists, who have taken at face value the seemingly
tenuous links between the poem and the music. In arguing my case, I am
encouraged by Hugh Macdonald’s bold essay ‘Berlioz’s lost Romeo et
Juliette’, speculating cogently that the Fantastique s musical material had
been salvaged from an earlier hypothetical abandoned symphony on that
very subject, cunningly adapted to its new musical context.'
In my submission, the subtext of Harold en Italie is the downfall and
aftermath of Napoleon Bonaparte, a figure greatly admired by both Byron
and Berlioz, among other elect spirits such as the English Whig politician
Charles James Fox, the radical literary critic William Hazlitt, and the French
author Stendhal (Henri Beyle), who had actually served under ‘the Little
t h e m u s ic a l t im e s Winter 2016 35
}6 Berlio{ and Byron in the shadow o f Napoleon’s downfall: a new look at Harold en Italie

General’ in the commissariat during many of his campaigns, surviving the

doomed 1812 invasion of Russia. In fact, Napoleon’s grand vision was widely
celebrated by liberals and romantics as embodying the supremacy of the
exceptional individual rising above the general level of human mediocrity and
political corruption. In a reflection of his own social disgrace and exile from
Britain after 1816, Byron personally identified himself with Napoleon, seeing
his catastrophic defeat at Waterloo as analogous to the fall of the Roman
Empire:
That page is now before me, and on mine
His country’s ruin added to the mass
O f perished states he mourn’d in their decline
And I in desolation: all that was
O f then destruction is; and now, alas!
Rome —Rome imperial, bows her to the storm,
In the same dust and blackness, and we pass
The skeleton of her Titanic form,
Wrecks of another world, whose ashes still are warm.2

Before attempting to examine Berlioz’s Harold in this light, we must now

look a little more closely at Byron’s Childe Harold, a compulsively sub­
versive poem, and its essential place in the extraordinary posthumous cult
of Napoleon. (The first edition of Byron’s works, translated into French by
Amedee Pichot, appeared in Paris in 1818.) Cantos 1 and 2 (1812) vividly
recount the travels of the pilgrim, a melancholy outcast, through Portugal,
Spain, Greece and Albania; and Canto 3 (1816) through Belgium, the
Rhineland and Switzerland. In the last of these he reflects on nature and his
own states of mind, providing superb poetic descriptions of the Swiss Alps,
subsequently to be transferred to the Italian Abruzzi mountains in Berlioz’s
imaginative musical recreation. But above all this was a Europe transformed
and suffused with gloom after Waterloo; the battlefield and fatal defeat of
Napoleon, now permanently exiled on St Helena in the south Atlantic, is
powerfully evoked:

And Harold stands upon this place of skulls,

The grave of France, the deadly Waterloo!
How in an hour the power which gave annuls
Its gifts, transferring fame as fleeting too!
In ‘pride of place’ here last the eagle flew,
Then tore with bloody talon the rent plain,
Pierced by the shaft of banded nations through;
Ambition’s life and labours all were vain;
He wears the shatter’d links of the world’s broken chain.3

In Canto 4 (1818) Childe Harold’s wanderings cease and he disappears

2. Canto 4 (XLVI). from the remainder of the poem. Thereafter the author’s voice prevails in a
3. Canto 3 (XVIII). lament for Italy’s past imperial and literary glories: the Empire of Rome, the

4- Byron, life and legend
(London, 2002), pp.vii—x,
158,221-22, 253,279,287
& 329.
5. Romanticism and its
discontents (London, 2000),
p.20.
6. The memoirs o f Hector
Berlio{, ed. Ernest Newman
(1932; repr. New York,
1966), pp.185-86.
7. ibid., p.291.
8. Gilbert Martineau, trans.
Frances Partridge: Napoleon s
last journey (London, 1976),
pp. 141-42.
9. Berlioz on music: selected
criticism 1824—1833, ed.
Katherine Kolb (New York,
2015), P-173-
proud Venetian Republic, the Florence of Dante and Petrarch, the Ferrara
of Torquato Tasso. In the words of Byron’s biographer Fiona MacCarthy,
this Canto is ‘a jeremiad for a post-Napoleonic Italy, still beautiful, but now
morally and physically threatened’ by the restoration of the reactionary
Austrian Hapsburgs and the temporal rule of the Papacy.4 It’s no coincidence
that Stendhal’s great novel La chartreuse de Parme (1839), a tale of villainous
court intrigues and adventures in and around this provincial northern Italy
city under Austrian domination, opens in the very midst of the battle of
Waterloo.
Pointing to wider perspectives, the British art historian Anita Brookner
in Romanticism and its discontents envisages Napoleon as ‘the presiding
genius of mature Romanticism. Even the later phase, represented by Musset
and Vigny in literature, by Delacroix in painting, will be steeped in nostalgia
for an heroic way of life ’.5Similarly, Berlioz’s own literary masterpiece, the
Memoires (1870), is full o f intense praise for Napoleon and his departed
era. We learn that, on his way from Rome through Lombardy in 1832, the
composer had sketched out a Symphonie militaire, subsequently abandoned,
entitled Le retour de I ’armee d ’ltalie — based on the young Napoleon’s
spectacularly successful campaigns against the Austrians in 1796—97 and 1800
—comprising two movements, namely ‘Adieux du haut des Alpes aux braves
tombes dans les champs d ’ltalie’ and ‘Entree triomphale des vainquers a
Paris’.6 Significantly, as we shall see, some of its material would be reused
two years later in the finaleof Harold. In 1835 he completed a patriotic cantata,
Le Cinq Mai, a setting o f Beranger’s Ode sur la mort de Napoleon, that for all
its weaknesses achieved a considerable and lasting success. D uring a tour of
Germany in 1843, Berlioz recorded that ‘The memory o f Napoleon is now
almost as dear to the Germans as to the French, which doubtless explains
the profound impression always produced by [Le cinq M a i] in every town
where it was afterwards perform ed’.7 In 1840 the ‘bourgeois’ French King
Louis Philippe, having revived the tradition of grand public ceremonies
and commemorations to bolster his flagging reign (1830—48), ordered
the return o f Napoleon’s body from St Helena to France. D uring the
funeral rites in the Chapel of the Invalides in Paris, M ozart’s Requiem was
performed which, in Berlioz’s injured view, made ‘a pretty poor effect, even
if it is a masterpiece; its proportions are not appropriate to such a ceremony
[worthy of] our sublime Em peror’.8 Berlioz himself had entertained the
Utopian dream o f ‘a composer, a Napoleonic genius, a musical titan [...]
charged with breathing his sublime essence’ into these Requiem settings for
great state occasions.9 Indeed, the reference could only be to himself, his
extraordinary vision having already been fully realised in the 1837 Grande
messe des morts, originally commissioned for the commemoration o f the
1830 July revolution in which the reactionary Bourbon monarch Charles
t h e m u s ic a l t im e s Winter 2016 37
38 Berlioi and Byron in the shadow o f Napoleon’s downfall: a new look at Harold en Italie
10. Brookner: Discontents,
pp.81-82. The author
discusses Delacroix’s
painting Death o f
Sardanapalus (1826):
‘Sardanapalus emerges from
Byron’s play to decree an
orgy of Delacroix’s own
devising, in which naked
women write helplessly
under the disinterested eye
of an inert tyrant’.
X had been ejected from his throne. Indeed, with some imagination on the
part of the authorities, this outstanding work would have also provided the
perfect musical accompaniment to the Imperial interment.
In view of this intense admiration, the question remains: why did Berlioz
abandon his Symphonie militairei Was it due to dissatisfaction, that it possibly
might fail to do justice to Napoleon’s posthumous reputation? Or, more
likely, did he hesitate to complete a major composition — as opposed to a
mere occasional work like the later Symphonie funehre et triomphante (1840),
composed to celebrate the tenth anniversary of July 1830 - which audiences
and critics might well evaluate according to political criteria, rather than on
predominantly musical and artistic grounds? In this connection, one thinks
of the magnificent contemporary, though essentially propagandist, pictorial
representations of the Emperor by such officially approved painters as David,
Gros and Ingres. If I am correct, Berlioz’s solution to this problem was
subtle and complex. Instead he decided to compose a pastoral symphony a la
Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony that overtly evoked his own happy explorations
of the Abruzzi mountains outside Rome during the time when he had been
a discontented Prix de Rome winner — picturesque experiences lovingly
depicted in his Memoires. Moreover, to this programmatic conception the idea
o f Childe Harold’s wanderings provided some element of continuity with the
use of a motto theme, as well as an added dimension of romantic melancholia
and even perhaps a certain self-aggrandisement, a certain identification of the
ambitious composer himself with this figure of fashionable notoriety. And in
the way he altered this text to suit his own requirements, Berlioz resembled his
French contemporary, the painter Eugene Delacroix, who likewise depicted
scenes, both actual and imaginary, from a number of Byron’s plays and
poems.10 In view of the exclusively Italian ambience of his symphony and
the fact that the pilgrim’s wanderings break off before he actually reaches that
southern country, it was necessary to transpose certain chosen episodes of
H arold’s wanderings in Cantos 1—3 from Spain, Albania and northern Europe
to Italy, with a poetic licence in defiance of Byron. (In 1809—11 Byron visited
Portugal, Spain, Malta, Greece and Albania in person. By the time Canto 3
appeared in 1816, he had begun his self-imposed exile in Italy, making his
way there for the first time through Belgium, Germany and Switzerland.)
So, with reference to the actual poem, Berlioz’s first and third movements,
entitled ‘Harold aux montagnes’ and ‘Serenade’, both reflect the Swiss Alps
indirectly; similarly, the second movement, ‘Marche de pelerins’, a brief period
of religious observance in Cadiz, much modified; and the finale, ‘Orgie de
brigands’, the revels of Albanian bandits.
In advancing my thesis o f a Napoleonic subtext to this, it is worth first
drawing attention to Berlioz’s own short and totally inadequate pre-concert
notice for the 1834 premiere of Harold, whose very baldness and self-irony

11. Berlio^ on music, p.99.
12. BBC 2, 28 May 2016.
13. Discontents, p.6. Brookner
provides the following
example: If [Baron]
Gros wishes to express
his misgivings about the
orthodoxy of Napoleon’s
conquests, he does so by
changing the proportions of
his figures, so that the dead
in the foreground of his
Battle o f Eylau reach out as
if to nudge their way into the
living flesh of the spectator.’
arouse suspicion in my mind — as if something is being concealed: ‘And
all through the various scenes we hear the viola solo: Harold the dreamer,
the wanderer — Byron’s hero, characterised by a languorous, wearisome
melody repeated with exasperating sameness. There you have it: th at’s
Harold’ This is certainly not an accurate description of the motto them e’s
varied treatment. (N or are the few vague descriptions in the Memoires of
any assistance here.) Moreover, the work is in the classical four movement
format —unlike the five movement Fantastique and Romeo with its hybrid
structure —and is full of symphonic argument and conflict. And if Berlioz
really did conceive a subterreanian dimension to his symphony, close to the
Napoleonic heart o f Childe Harold, the key to this is surely Beethoven, an
enthusiast for the so-called Saviour o f the French Revolution, made explicit
in his ‘Eroica’ Symphony, until the hero, in an act o f hubris, invested himself
with the mantle of Emperor in 1804. Likewise, in The secret o f Beethovens
Fifth Symphony, John Eliot Gardiner has pointed to quotations from a
Revolutionary hymn and other radical references encoded in the score of
the Fifth.12 The influence of these two epoque-making symphonies —above
all their extended passages o f abrasive reiterated notes and chords —bring
an unsettling undercurrent to the apparently bucolic mood of Harold's first
two movements. These surely evoke the shadow of Napoleon’s downfall,
leading up to the destructive force of the ‘Orgie de brigands’ finale with
its Eroica-style repeated-chord hammerings, whose initial review and
dismissal of the previous themes in the manner o f Beethoven’s Ninth is, as
we shall see, very far from being the mere empty pretentious gesture that
it might appear. My literary interpretation offered here is surely justified
in attempting to elucidate musical invention that otherwise might seem
meaningless or merely eccentric. Indeed, according to Brookner, Stendhal
‘likens the modern, that is to say the Romantic, artist to a soldier. A soldier
not only takes risks with himself; he takes risks with others. It should be
remembered that the Romantic painter [or composer?] has designs on the
spectator. He is out to remove the spectator from his normal or appropriate
perceptual field, and in doing so to infect him with his own personal doubts’.13
We now turn to a closer examination o f Berlioz’s score in the light of these
speculations.
‘Harold aux montagnes. Scenes de melancolie, de
bonheur et de joie’
The first movement in G major commences with a lengthy and most
unconventional introduction. Following a curious, searching fugato in
the strings, characterised by repeated notes, its subject is then detached to
form the accompaniment, in violas, cellos and basses, to H arold’s motto
t h e m u s ic a l t im e s Winter 2016 39
40 Berlw[ and Byron in the shadow o f Napoleon s downfall: a new look at Harold en Italie
joie de vivre, with six bars of repeated low Cs. (6 bars before fig.6). Later,
14. Canto 4 (XLII). I have
taken the liberty of placing
a speech by Byron in the
mouth of Harold.
Ex.i: Berlioz: Harold en Italie, ‘Harold aux montagnes’, 8 bars after fig.55
theme, heard for the first time in the woodwind (fig.i in score) Suddenly
in a sudden contrast of mood, the atmosphere clears and Harold’s motto
theme is repeated by the solo viola in a simple texture of broken chords on
harp (ex.i). Underlying the ensuing continuation of this theme, however,
ominous low Gs are heard on timpani in decreasing note values —triplet
quavers, semiquaver sextuplets and tremolandi - in a series of diminuendi
and crescendi (fig-5). At the start of the sonata-form movement proper, the
solo viola briefly interrupts the romantically expansive first subject, full of
two passages of repeated quavers in the higher register emerge in the central
development and in the recapitulation respectively, in both cases in strident
opposition to the first subject material. In the former, tonally unstable, these
notes rise and fall chromatically - F, Gb, G, F#, F - in octaves on woodwind
and brass against a fragment of this theme played by the strings, rising by
sequence through Bb major, B minor and C major (io bars before fig.io);
in the latter, syncopated octave Ds in the strings are followed by high Gs
in the woodwind against the theme in the dominant D major ( u bars after
fig. 13). It is as if the glorious mountain scenery itself reflects, in a version of
the ‘pathetic fallacy’, Harold’s despairing reactions to the post-Napoleonic
decadence of Italy:
O Italia! O Italia! Thou who hast
The fatal gift of beauty, which became
A funeral dower of present woes and past,
On thy sweet brow is sorrow plough’d by shame,
And annals graved in characters of flame.'4
This culminates in an extraordinary grotesque passage where the
recapitulation of the ‘piping’ second subject, on oboe, clarinet, and bassoon
and horn successively, is combined with the reappearance of Harold’s
motto theme, with its character deformed and made the basis of a highly
eccentric five-part string fugato, structurally balancing the opening fugato.
 Perhaps it’s not too fanciful to see this ironically academic procedure as
symbolising Harold overwhelmed by feelings of angst. Though the motto’s
contour remains basically unaltered, it is now invaded by a swarm of
repeated notes, each of its original notes being now divided into shorter
values: the rising succession of fugal entries is stated in groups of three
quavers in the double basses, four quavers in the cellos, and semiquavers
in the upper strings (ex.2). (It is worth noting a certain resemblance to that
superbly dark and demonic passage in the first movement development
of the Symphome fantastique (fig. 16) where a fragment of the idee fixe in
rising sequences on cellos is accompanied by repeated triplet crochets in
the first violins, and enhanced with a poignant oboe countermelody.) In
Harold thereafter the tempo gradually increases as the second subject is
now intensified by a four-note figure obviously derived from the so-called
‘fate motive’ of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony but with a rising third
(fig.19).

‘Marche de pelerins chantant la priere du soir’

The ensuing Pilgrims’ march, a most fascinating movement of Berlioz’s own
imagination, is in fact very much more than the mere picturesque episode
of Italian rural life in thrall to popular piety that its title might suggest.
Though no such processional episode is to be found anywhere in Byron’s
poem, the basic idea of a religious observance may be found in the Spanish
episode:
All have their fooleries —not alike are thine,
Fair Cadiz, rising o’er the dark blue sea!
Soon as the matin bell proclaimeth nine,

Ex.z: Berlioz: Harold en Italie, ‘Harold aux montagnes’, fig. 14

poco animato

THE MUSICAL TIMES Winter 2016 41

42 Berlio^ and Byron in the shadow o f Napoleon s downfall: a new look at Harold en Italie

Thy saint adorers count the rosary:

Much is the virgi n teased to shrive them free
(Well do I ween the only virgin there)
From crimes as numerous as her beadsmen be [...]15

But whereas the Protestant-raised Byron could only see the hypocrisy
of confessions by serial sinners, Berlioz, though not himself a believer in
theological doctrines, nevertheless respected the artistic and cultural tra­
ditions of the Catholic church and remained fully alive to the ritualistic
and numinous dimensions of religion. The main theme, played by the
strings, reflects the slow movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony,
characterised as it is by a pronounced rhythmic tread. This must have
had a special significance in Berlioz’s conception since it subsequently re­
appears twice in the finale. Yet its positive sense of spiritual confidence
is undermined by the manner in which the end of every measured legato
phrase is cut into by a sharply contrasting three-bar passage of reiterated
semiquavers in the low woodwind and second violins, making a curious
shuddering effect, together with a clashing note C (the flattened submediant)
on horns and harp, evocative of a deep and mournful church bell, it too
sounding alien to the scene (ex.3). The unstable harmonies of these brief
passages, changing with each appearance, contrast violently with the settled
E major tonality of the actual theme; in fact, all these various major, minor,
diminished and augmented chords, built on the rising bass line D(t, E, Ffj,
Gjf, A, have in common the note Q , that of the horn’s unchanging bell­
like ostinato sounding throughout. Could it be that in Berlioz’s imaginative
conception the purity of religion is tainted by the forces of reactionary Papal
corruption? This initial section is offset by the first episode in B major, of an
undisturbed serenity, where Harold’s motto theme appears in augmentation
on the solo viola doubled by clarinet and horn, to which is added a lyrical
countermelody in the strings and woodwind (fig. 23). Moreover, the mobile
‘marching bass’ style of predominantly continuous crochets that underpins
the pilgrims’ procession is still maintained here, as if Harold himself has
been temporarily caught up in its religious formality. After the first return
of the Pilgrims’ theme with its shuddering interruptions, the ‘marching
bass’ continues throughout the second episode in C major, marked Canto
religioso, consisting of a new modal melody on woodwind, answered by
muted strings. Against this the solo viola plays arpeggiando figurations
sul ponticello; whether or not this rare concession to virtuoso display was
intended as a passing tribute to Paganini —in his youth a member of the
court orchestra of Napoleon’s sister Elisa, appointed Grand Duchess of
Tuscany —a marvellous spectral atmosphere is undoubtedly created (7 bars
after fig.27). A few isolated solo arpeggiandi are heard during the last and
15. Canto I (LXXI). shortened return of the Pilgrims’ procession, eventually reduced to its bare
 E x-3: Berlioz: Harolden Italie , ‘M arch de pelerins’, fig.20
16. Act 4, scene 1.
‘marching bass’, now in E minor and accompanied by a curious ostinato
formed from the previous bell-like Cs in the horns alternating with octave Bs
on flute and oboe, both doubled by the harp in an extended decrescendo (11
bars after fig.31). Finally the ‘marching bass’ itself breaks up into fragments
in characteristic Beethovenian style, and the movement ends with six bars
of ppp viola arpeggiandi (32 bars after fig.31). Here Berlioz may well have
had in mind his beloved Shakespeare’s celebrated lines from The tempest:
‘These our actors,/As I foretold you, were all spirits and/A re melted into
air, into thin air’.16
THE MUSICAL TIMES Winter 2016 43
44 Berlio{ and Byron in the shadow o f Napoleon s downfall: a new look at Harold en Italie

‘Serenade d ’un montagnard des Abruzzes a sa maitresse’

This movement in C major has prima facie something of the character of
an interlude before the rigours of the finale. Its musical depiction of the
Abruzzi mountains is a superb reflection of Byron’s evocation of the Swiss
Alps —the French Alps, too, having been an essential part of Berlioz’s own
childhood in Grenoble. Yet if an underlying dimension of doom and menace
is temporarily absent, its conception is certainly not naive. To begin with, a
newpfifferi style dance tune in C major is played on piccolo and first oboe.
(Incidentally, a very similar rustic idea appears in Busoni’s piano Sonatina
‘in diem nativitatis Christi m c m x v ii ’.) The second oboe and clarinets hold
sustained notes while the viola parts mirror the lively dotted rhythmic profile
of the bagpipe tune —it is as if these repeated notes have become, for the
time being, quiescent and devoid of subversive implications. A contrasting
plaintive theme , first stated on cor anglais with a more conventional string
accompaniment, is soon combined with the motto theme in augmentation
on solo viola, doubled by upper strings after its first phrase (fig. 33)- A
short passage of rising octave figuration in the solo viola —again, a slight
concession to technical display — brings a passing moment of agitation
before the return of the initial bagpipe music. The movement culminates in
one of the most exploratory conceptions in the whole of Berlioz’s oeuvre —
the superimposition of Harold’s motto in augmentation high in the flute, the
serenade theme on the solo viola and the dance rhythm in the divided violas.
Moreover, these three ideas are deliberately played out of phase with each
other in complete metric independence —resulting in an amazing expansion
of time-scale opening up a limitless imaginative vista (ex.4). If Berlioz had
received this basic idea from the famous polyrhythmic dance sequence for
triple orchestra in Mozart’s Don Giovannif his vision anticipates the radical
rhythmic explorations of Messiaen, a strong admirer of Berlioz and likewise
a dedicated Alpinist. To my mind it perfectly expresses Byron’s almost
pantheistic evocation of the Swiss Alps, the antithesis of the corruption of
human civilisation:
I live not in myself, but I become
Portion of that around me; and to me
High mountains are a feeling, but the hum
O f human cities torture: I can see
Nothing to loathe in nature, save to be
A link reluctant in a fleshly chain,
Class’d among creatures, when the soul can flee,
And with the sky, the peak, the heaving plain
O f ocean, or the stars, mingle, and not in vain.'8
17. Act 1, scene 5 finale,
second part. I would add that, in this leap into the future, Berlioz is paralleled by his
18. Canto 3 (LXXII). British contemporary, JMW Turner —the painter of War —the exile and the
 E x-4: Berlioz: Harolden Italie, ‘Serenade’, 50 bars after fig.35

Allegretto
Fl.

pp
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rock limpet (1842), depicting Napoleon on St Helena and deemed ‘one of the
artist’s most daringly expressionistic works’ —who supposedly anticipated
the French Impressionists and, in his late abstract canvasses of pure colour,
even the New York avant-garde of the 1940s and 50s.19

‘Orgie de brigands. Souvenirs des scenes precedents’

19. See Kelly Grovier:
‘From the infinite to
the infinitesimal’, in TLS,
to October 2014, p.17.
Italy was historically a country infested with bandits and thus it was
most appropriate prima facie that Berlioz should have decided to use for
his explosive finale the idea of a brigand’s orgy that he had found in the
Albanian episode of Childe Harold.-.

t h e m u s ic a l t im e s Winter 2016 45
46 Berlio{ and Byron in the shadow o f Napoleon’s downfall: a new look at Harold en Italie
20. Canto 2 (LXXI-LXXII).
21. Berlio£ on music, p.5.
22. Essays in musical analysis,
vol.i (London, 1935), p.78.
For ere night’s midmost, stillest hour was past,
The native revels of the troop began;
Each Palikar his sabre from him cast,
And bounding hand in hand, man link’d to man,
Yelling their uncouth dirge, long daunced the kirtled clan [...]
In sooth, it was no vulgar sight to see
Their barbarous, yet not indecent, glee;
And, as the flames along their faces gleam’d,
Their gestures nimble, dark eyes flashing free [,..]20
The anarchistic side of Berlioz’s character was fascinated by brigands
and this was not the first time that he incorporated them into a composition.
Previously he had included a ‘Chanson de brigands’ for chorus and
orchestra in the monodrama Lelio (1830-32), sequel to the Symphonie
fantastique, yet this is, in comparison, a sentimental rollocking burlesque,
worthy of a light operetta, containing erotic and drunken imagery: ‘Today
is a day to be generous/We shall drink to our mistresses/in the skulls of
their lovers!’. Yet, for all this amusing foolery, it formed part of a serious
autobiographical work in which the artist stood out uncompromisingly
for issues of artistic importance. In the words of Katherine Kolb, ‘Thus
a Brigand’s Song voices the desire to escape from the stifling conditions
of everyday life, ushering in a diatribe against defilers of art, above all
arrangers who tamper with great masterpieces’.21 Thus we should surely
regard the ‘Orgie de brigands’ as being on a far higher artistic level than a
mere picturesque episode, and not least for the sheer quality of its musical
invention, worthy of comparison with the romantic paintings of Delacroix,
such as Combat o f the Giaour and the Pasha (1827) on the play by Byron, and
Attila tramples Italy and the arts (1838—47), full of exuberant colour and raw
animal vitality. In my interpretation, this disruptive movement, sweeping
away what has gone before in the symphony, arguably represents the heroic
idealism of Romanticism — that would ultimately bring about Byron’s
death at Missolonghi in 1824, fighting in the Greek war of independence
- as opposed to Harold’s passive despairing pessimism. Most certainly it
doesn’t constitute a lament for the destruction of Italy’s past glories —a
total departure from Byron’s Canto 4. Rather it is more of a re-creation
of the finale of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony with its setting of Schiller’s
‘Ode to joy’. Especially remarkable is Berlioz’s employment of its famous
section - preceded by the dissonant introduction described by Tovey as a
‘chaotic storm’22 —where each of the themes of the previous movements
are reviewed, only to be dismissed in turn by quasi-recitative passages in
the cellos and double-basses. It was a brilliant idea of the French composer
freely to adapt this section to illustrate the sudden disappearance of Harold
and the end of his wanderings at the start of this Canto, where Byron the
author takes over for the remainder of the poem:

23. Canto 4 (CLXIV).
24. See Julian Rushton: The
music o f Berlio{ (Oxford,
2001), pp.34-35, 37, H 1
& 268.1 respectfully beg
to differ from Professor
Rushton’s account of Harold
en Italie, despite the overall
distinction of his study.
But where is he, the Pilgrim o f my song,
The being who upheld it through the past?
Methinks he cometh late and tarries long.
He is no more —these breathings are his last;
His wanderings done, his visions ebbing fast,
And he himself as nothing: - if he was
Aught but a phantasy, and could be class’d
W ith forms which live and suffer - let that pass —
His shadow fades away into D estruction’s mass [...]23
In the introduction to the highly idiosyncratic sonata form finale,
the first subject in G minor, characterised by a ferocious melodic and
rhythmic energy, is the agent by which the chief musical ideas of the earlier
movements are forcefully rejected, representing the elimination of Harold
and his inner, imaginative life, his dreams and disillusionments. Five times is
this dynamic theme interrupted by a series of remote sounding ‘Souvenirs’
(reminiscences) and then immediately resumed, thus achieving each
individual act of destruction. O f these, there first appears the introductory
fugato in G minor on strings from the very opening of the work. Thereafter,
each souvenir is played by the solo viola: the Pilgrims’ March theme in the
unexpected key of F# major (2 bars after fig.36) —as we shall see, there’s a
long-range musical logic at work here; the second cor anglais theme of the
‘Serenade’ in G major; the first subject of the first movement in C major;
and lastly, Harold’s motto theme itself, in G major, fragmented with each
phrase expressively protracted with repeated notes and chromatic semitones
as his shadow fades away. O f these, only the fugato and the motto appear in
their original keys. Thereafter, apart from a later brief interjection, the solo
viola is silent for the remainder of the work.
Forceful reiterated dominant seventh chords announce the double
exposition of the movement’s themes (fig.40.) The destructive first subject
in G minor is succeeded by the striking music salvaged from the abandoned
Le retour de I’armee d ’ltalie which forms the ensuing second subject group
in Bb major.24 I find it impossible to believe that in his re-employment of
this material in ‘Orgie de brigands’ Berlioz could have mentally divested it
of its crucial depiction of his hero Napoleon who, in contrast with the life-
affirming anarchy of the brigands, stood for order and authority. The first
of these themes, in a bold military march style, ends with aggressive and
harmonically daring reiterated chords in a strongly marked dance rhythm
(fig.44). There is a marked resemblance here to the series of dissonant
hammering chords in the first movement development of Beethoven’s
‘Eroica’ Symphony (fig.H) which may well have been intentional on
Berlioz’s part. This leads to the superb monumental climax of the entire
work, transcending what has gone before. An incisive ostinato of alternating
whole-tones (E—D) and repeated broken octave Ds on high first and second
t h e m u sic a l t im e s Winter 2016 47
48 Berlioiam^ Byron in the shadow o f Napoleons downfall: a new look at Harold en Italie

violins respectively offset a powerful obsessive idea in triplet crochets rising

in sequence on trombones, tuba and lower woodwind (ex. 5). To my mind,
it powerfully evokes the awesome spectre of Napoleon looming over the

Ex.5: Berlioz: Harold en Italie, ‘Orgie de brigands’, 1 bar after fig.45

[Allegro frenetico] lourdement a2

 bandits’ revels — well captured by Goya’s The colossus (c. 1812), painted
during the appalling Peninsula War, portraying a gigantic naked figure
towering over a terrified fleeing populace. Yet even this is fated to dissolve
and fade away into an quiet expressive passage of undulating semitones in
the violins similar in mood to the ‘souvenir’ of Harold’s motto theme. The
wild dance rhythm returns in chords of Fff minor (fig.47), announcing the
full exposition repeat, at whose conclusion the triplet idea from the second
theme is treated to a turbulent and concentrated development in sequences,
its bass notes rising by step, reaching a further dance rhythm outburst in C#
minor (13 bars after fig.53). The march music of the second subject group
is now recapitulated in G major, stopping abruptly onpp dissonant tritonal
Cfts in the cellos and basses, descending chromatically in sinister staccato
crochets to Bit (fig.55). At this point Berlioz produces a most effective coup
de theatre, in which the Pilgrims’ March is heard from an offstage string trio
(two violins and cello) ‘dans la coulisse’, to be joined by the solo viola in
rising melodic lines and expressive falling phrases like a benediction (ex.6).
This, the Pilgrims’ final ghostly appearance, so remote and other-worldly
in marked contrast with the force of the main musical material, would
indicate that some new sense of at least partial transfiguration was intended
- indeed, the score does not refer to it here as a mere ‘souvenir’ - although
the shuddering interruptions that are still present, together with more
falling semitones in the orchestral basses, suggest that it is still endangered
by the violence of its surroundings. Above all, its arrival in G major, the
overall tonic key of the symphony, feels all the more of a resolution for

Ex.6: Berlioz: Harolden Italie, ‘Orgie de brigands’, 3 bars after fig.55

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50 Berlio^ and Byron in the shadow o f Napoleon s downfall: a new look at Harold en Italie

Ex.6 continued

having been reached by a series of three rising tonal steps —from its first
appearance in E major in the ‘Marche de pelerins’ and secondly in Fft major
as a ‘souvenir’ in the ‘Orgie de brigands’. It seems that, in the last analysis,
the formal procession of Pilgrims, vulnerable as it is, represents a fixed point
of unshakeable eternal values, beyond Harold’s individual self-doubts and
questionings. Harold en Italie concludes with a brilliant coda based on the
march theme with a new triumphant idea in triplet minims.
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