Berlioz

Berlioz on Music
Miniature portrait of Berlioz by Pierre-Paul de Pommayrac, oil on ivory, ca. 1839.

Musée Hector Berlioz, La Côte-Saint-André, by permission.
Berlioz on Music
Selected Criticism 1824–1837
z
Edited by
KATHERINE KOLB
Translated by
SAMUEL N. ROSENBERG
1
3
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Berlioz, Hector, 1803–1869.
[Prose works. Selections. English]
Berlioz on music : selected criticism, 1824–1837 / edited by Katherine Kolb ; translated by
Samuel N. Rosenberg.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978–0–19–939195–0 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Musical criticism—France—19th century.
I. Kolb, Katherine, editor. II. Rosenberg, Samuel N., translator. III. Title.
ML410.B5A5 2014
780.9—dc23
2014023062
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
Contents
Editor’s Preface xv
About the Companion Website xix
Editor’s Introduction 1
1. Musical Polemic: On “Dilettanti” 27

Le Corsaire, January 11, 1824
Definition of “dilettante”; Italian vs. French opera;
Rossini vs. Gluck
2. Musical Polemic: On Armide and Gluck 30

Le Corsaire, December 19, 1825
Criticism as understanding vs. carping; misprints and
borrowings in Gluck; defense of Gluck; attack on
Castil-Blaze (M. XXX)
3. The Arts: Observations on Classical Music and Romantic Music 34

Le Correspondant, October 22, 1830
Romantic manifesto for music: definition of music;
Classical scholasticism vs. Romantic liberty; Gluck as
first Romantic; instrumental expressiveness; Weber and
Beethoven
4. Concert Society of the Conservatoire: First Concert 41

Revue européenne, April 1833
Beethoven and the Egyptian pyramids; Weber’s
Freischütz; Beethoven’s “Pastoral” Symphony
vi Contents
5. Music Review: Concerts 47

Le Rénovateur, December 15, 1833
Liszt, Chopin, and Ferdinand Hiller; launching of the
Symphonie fantastique
6. Music Review 52
Le Rénovateur, January 12, 1834
Measures of progress in audience education; Mozart’s
Don Giovanni ill-served at the Théâtre-Italien; Beethoven
quartets well performed and well received
7. Music Review 56
Le Rénovateur, February 23, 1834
Balls at the Opéra; Opéra-Comique woes and solutions;
Beethoven by the Müller Quartet; Chopin; Mozart’s Don
Giovanni at the Opéra-Italien vs. Don Juan at the Opéra;
Handel festival in London
8. Music Review: Concerts 61

Le Rénovateur, April 27, 1834
Women performers; violinist Hauman’s communicative
emotion; Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and Shakespeare’s
Othello; Cherubini aria sung by Ponchard; rarity of great
singers
9. Gluck (Part I) 66
Gazette musicale de Paris, June 1, 1834
Biographical sketch; critique admirative of monologue
from Il Telemaco
(Part II in companion website )
10. Music Review: Beethoven and the Dilettanti of Bordeaux 73

Le Rénovateur, June 8, 1834
Turkish music; Beethoven’s “Eroica” booed in Bordeaux;
musical conditions in the provinces; oasis of progress in
Lyon
11. Music Review: Henri Reber Quartets 77

Le Rénovateur, July 20, 1834
Contents vii
Jealousy vs. solidarity among artists; trials of young

composers; ironies about Conservatoire training; Liszt
performs in Reber’s piano trio
12. Music Review: Funeral Service for Choron (I) 81

Le Rénovateur, August 11, 1834
Choron, voice teacher and propagator of sacred music
of the past; funeral service at the Invalides: Mozart
Requiem, Jommelli, and Palestrina
13. Music Review: Funeral Service for Choron (II) 85

Gazette musicale de Paris, September 7, 1834
Decline of religious music in France; destruction of
ancien régime choir schools; church ban on women
singers; inadequate “Tuba mirum” of Mozart’s Requiem;
visions of grandiose musical possibilities
14. Rossini’s William Tell (Part I) 90

Gazette musicale de Paris, October 12, 1834
Rossini’s new manner; Overture—detailed analysis
(Parts II, III, and IV in companion website )
15. Boieldieu 94
Le Rénovateur, October 14, 1834
Funeral music for Boieldieu; survey of requiems;
Cherubini
16. Notice to Readers Idle Enough to Read My Articles 98

Le Rénovateur, November 2-3, 1834
Satirical announcement of Berlioz’s upcoming concert,
conducted by Girard; amusing summary of Harold in
Italy
17. Gluck’s Iphigenia in Tauris (Part I) 101

Gazette musicale de Paris, November 9, 1834
Early enthusiasm for Gluck; life-changing first experience
of Gluck’s masterpiece at the Opéra
(Parts II, III, and IV in companion website )
viii Contents
18. Music Review: À elle, Letters for Piano by Chrétien Urhan 105
Le Rénovateur, November 16, 1834
Music as poetry and as expression; conditions for
appreciating such music; analysis of Urhan’s evocative
pieces
19. Gabussi’s Ernani at the Théâtre-Italien 109

Disappointing adaptation of Hugo’s epoch-making play;
assessment of Théâtre-Italien orchestra
20. Music Review: Opéra: William Tell; Opéra-Comique: Zémire et

Azor (Reprise); Concerts 112
Falling standards at the Opéra; success of Grétry’s work;
concert initiative at the Opéra-Comique; “little” Paris
concerts vs. grand Handel festival in Vienna
21. Conservatoire Orchestra: First Concert [Eighth Season] 117

Journal des débats, January 25, 1835
Music in Paris before the founding of the Conservatoire
Orchestra; circumstances of that founding; piece-by-
piece analysis of a typically varied concert including
Schubert’s “The Nun”; ridiculous “Amen” fugue in
Beethoven’s Missa solemnis vs. fugal perfection in
Mozart’s overture to The Magic Flute
22. Critical Review: “Le Moine,” Text by Émilien Pacini, Music by

G. Meyerbeer 125
Gazette musicale de Paris, February 8, 1835
Struggle between sensuality and piety in Meyerbeer’s
song; well-deserved success
23. Third Concert at the Conservatoire: Symphonies by Haydn and

Beethoven 127
Journal des débats, February 20, 1835
Haydn symphonies vs. choral works; progress in music;
digression on Gluck; Beethoven’s Eighth Symphony
Contents ix
24. Music Review: Royal Academy of Music: First Performance of La

Juive, Opera in Five Acts by MM. Scribe and Halévy 133
Le Rénovateur, March 1, 1835
Critics on libretto vs. music; plot summary; scenic excess;
visual vs. vocal in opera; triumph for Mlle. Falcon
25. Music Review: Concert by the Pupils of Choron at the Hôtel de

Ville 140
Le Rénovateur, March 17, 1835
Poor showing by remnants of Choron’s school; difficulties of
performing Palestrina; Choron as composer; duo by Clari; scene from
Le Juif errant by Monpou; Beethoven’s “Kreutzer” Sonata performed by
Baillot and Hiller
26. Concert Society of the Conservatoire: Fourth Concert 145

Journal des débats, March 22, 1835
Quest for great music in Paris by an enthusiast from
the provinces; scene from Weber’s Euryanthe; man's
tirade against arrangers; Beethoven: Prisoners’ Chorus
from Fidelio, quartet movement by full string section,
“Pastoral” Symphony as glimpse of a higher world
27. Sixth Conservatoire Concert 154

Journal des débats, April 18, 1835
Analysis of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony; extraordinary
audience responses, notably to the Finale; Napoleonic
hauntings
28. Concert by Franz Liszt: Hôtel de Ville (Salle Saint-Jean) 161

Symphony by Hiller; “Ballade du pêcheur” from Berlioz’s
Mélologue (Lélio); new work by Liszt based on themes
from Lélio; trivial vs. poetic arrangements; Girard’s
transcription for orchestra of Beethoven’s “Moonlight”
Sonata (first movement); his interpretation of Pilgrim’s
March from Berlioz’s Harold in Italy
x Contents
29. M. Cherubini’s Requiem at the Invalides and M. Lesueur’s Te

Deum at Notre Dame 168
Journal des débats, August 9, 1835
Ceremony for the victims of an assassination attempt
on Louis-Philippe; aptness of Cherubini Requiem for
occasions of violent death; critique of Mozart’s Requiem,
partly composed by Süssmayer; overlap between religious
and dramatic music; attribution to Mozart of funeral
march by Devigne; performing forces gauged in relation
to performance space; music on a grand scale; the way of
the future
30. On the Score of Hérold’s Zampa 176

Journal des débats, September 27, 1835
Open-air, ancient grandeur vs. artifice of modern theaters
in Italy; Hérold’s work vs. Mozart’s and Molière’s;
“Parisian music” vs. moments of quality in the score
31. Music Review 183

Le Rénovateur, October 5, 1835
Satire on review writing: Vigny greets Berlioz as man of
letters; Berlioz greets Vigny as musician; review topics
considered and dismissed, e.g., Bellini’s I Puritani at the
Théâtre-Italien, Cherubini’s Treatise on Counterpoint—
or a volume of poetry by Chaudesaigues
32. Mozart’s Don Juan 188

Journal des débats, November 15, 1835
Success of Mozart’s masterpiece at the Opéra owing to
positive influence of Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots and
Rossini’s William Tell; great Commendatore Scene
given its due; catechism on judicious use of orchestral
resources; great interpreters of Don Giovanni (Garcia,
Nourrit, Tamburini) and Donna Anna (Falcon); higher
musical standards under new Opéra administration
33. Religious Music: M. Lesueur: Rachel, Noëmi, Ruth et Booz,

Oratorios; M. Urhan: Auditions 195
Journal des débats, November 21, 1835
Contents xi
Three phases of artists’ lives: imitation, independence,

solitude; Lesueur as exception—wholly individual
style; unusually expressive role of harmony; novelties of
instrumentation and vocal writing; his oratorios; Urhan’s
imitation of an Aeolian harp
34. Opéra-Comique—Concerts: Virtuosos and Composers 203

Journal des débats, January 17, 1836
The Opéra-Comique as a French musical institution;
concerts added (Styrian singers; Hauman); difficulties
of virtuoso career; even greater obstacles for composers;
example of Gluck, Spontini, Meyerbeer; Mozart
disdained by the Opéra
35. First Conservatoire Concert of the Season 212

Journal des débats, February 24, 1836
Exorbitant poor tax threatens even the Conservatoire
Orchestra; review of failed concert initiatives in Paris;
story of a hapless foreign concertgiver; sensational
appearance of Thalberg; scene from Mozart’s Idomeneo
eclipses Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony
36. Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots: Acts 4 and 5 219

Revue et gazette musicale de Paris, March 20, 1836
Analysis of the climax of Meyerbeer’s masterpiece
(Earlier acts: see companion website )
37. Concerts at the Conservatoire: The Magic Flute and Les Mystères
d’Isis; Mozart’s Corrector 224
Journal des débats, May 1, 1836
Burlesque scene of audience misbehavior, mirrored by the
players on an off day; history of Mozart’s Magic Flute in
France; anathema on its arranger, left unnamed
38. Liszt 231

Revue et gazette musicale de Paris, June 12, 1836
“New” Liszt, just returned from Geneva, in concert at
Érard’s; has attained the summit of artistry through
self-mastery; represents highest of several artistic stages
xii Contents
or types; solves “Hammerklavier” riddle of the Sphinx; is

pianist of the future
39. Antoine Reicha 236

Journal des débats, July 3, 1836
Recent deaths of Choron, Boieldieu, and Bellini; sudden
death of Reicha, a dedicated teacher and composer
indifferent to success; youthful acquaintance with
Beethoven; studies with Haydn; contrast between
Reicha, exponent of music as mathematics, and Choron,
of music as expression and soul; many successful students
40. Musical Entertainments: Le Siège de Corinthe at the Opéra; M. Ole

Bull; M. Labarre and His Harp School; Music of Public Festivals;
Paris Artists and Music Lovers Celebrating the Victory at Fleurus
in 1794; Amateur Fund-raiser for the Wounded in 1830; Huge
Chorus in Galerie Colbert 244
Journal des débats, July 23, 1836
Rossini’s lightweight success; Ole Bull’s promising talent;
Labarre’s powers as harpist; potential of his harp school
for mass music; power of music to ennoble the crowd;
examples from 1794 and Berlioz’s own experience in 1830
with the Marseillaise
41. The Progress of Musical Education in France: M. Joseph Mainzer

and M. Aubéry du Boulley 252
Journal des débats, September 18, 1836
Destruction of choir schools and of Choron’s Institution
for Religious Music; abolition of the Chapelle royale;
lack of musical sensibility in the clergy; orchestral music
in the provinces suffers from musicians’ disdain for
rehearsing, vs. thirty rehearsals for Beethoven’s “Choral”
Symphony at Conservatoire; promising initiatives for
military music in France under M. Beer, clarinetist; for
a philharmonic society in Normandy under Aubéry
du Boulley; for a workers’ chorus in Paris under Joseph
Mainzer
Contents xiii
42. Polytechnical Society: Awards Ceremony 260

Revue et gazette musicale de Paris, December 4, 1836
Touching awards ceremony for workers’ school; classes
in music and choral singing added to regular classes;
civilizing power of music lauded in awards speech;
four hundred workers sang a vocal fugue by Mainzer,
organizer of choir and concert
43. Opéra: William Tell; Debut of Duprez 263

Farewell to tenor Adolphe Nourrit; background and
talents of Duprez; astonishment of his high notes “from
the chest”; his talent as actor and dramatic singer
44. Royal Academy of Music: Premiere of La Chatte métamorphosée en

femme, Ballet in Three Acts by MM. Charles Duveyrier and Corali,
Music by M. Montfort 270
Revue et gazette musicale de Paris, October 22, 1837
Satiric discussion of pantomime, impossible for Berlioz
to comprehend; simulated audience conversation over
ballet-pantomime in question; Fanny Elssler dazzles,
silencing conversation and objections
Biographical Notes 275

Abbreviations and Short Bibliography 285
Index 289
Editor’s Preface
Jacques Barzun, dean of Berlioz studies in our time, called for a good
English-language anthology of Berlioz’s criticism in the first edition (1950) of
his monumental Berlioz and the Romantic Century, the foundation of mod-
ern Berlioz scholarship. Again in 1969, in the new edition published on the
centenary of Berlioz’s death, Barzun put out the call. Yet as late as 2003, the
bicentennial of Berlioz’s birth, no such volume had appeared. My own work
on Berlioz’s writings and my bilingual background, both of which led to a
long and treasured friendship with Barzun, would have made me a natural
candidate for producing it. I did once try my hand at translating three amus-
ing articles by Berlioz that I had discovered under the pseudonym “Un vieil-
lard stupide qui n’a presque plus de dents” (A stupid old man who is missing
most of his teeth)—an allusion to the notorious vieillard stupide (stupid old
man) phrase in Hernani, Victor Hugo’s play, misheard by a Classicist on the
alert for linguistic enormities as vieil as de pique (old ace of spades) during
the Battle of Hernani, the banner fight for the Romantics in the Classical
bastion of the Théâtre-Français in 1830. But I never undertook the anthology.
It came about, almost by chance, on the initiative of Samuel N. Rosenberg,
an eminent medievalist and translator who was seeking a translation proj-
ect in modern French. Intrigued by Berlioz, he contacted me via our mutual
Berliozian friend John B. Ahouse, and after consulting with David Cairns
and Peter Bloom, we determined to fulfill the “urgent” need identified by
Barzun so many years ago. Although Barzun did not live to see this book in
print, he followed its early stages with keen interest. The last letter I received
from him—which he wrote in longhand at age 103—consisted of a numbered
list of imperatives and caveats that I was to bear in mind. Knowing his stan-
dards, I can only hope that the volume as it has turned out corresponds in
some measure to his idea of “a good anthology.”
xvi Editor’s Preface
In the larger sense, this anthology embodies the history of Berlioz studies
since 1950. It would not exist in the form that it does without the modern
tools of Berlioz research created by stalwart scholars whom I am proud to
call friends. The bibliography lists the main ones, notably in Berlioz biog-
raphy: David Cairns’s compelling two-volume masterpiece, which furthers
and enhances Barzun’s achievement; D. Kern Holoman’s Berlioz, unsur-
passed in its treatment of manuscripts, editions, and performance histories;
Hugh Macdonald’s well-edited selection of Berlioz’s letters and one-volume
life-and-works in the Master Musicians series, outcroppings of the great
twenty-six-volume New Berlioz Edition produced under his editorship
between 1967 and 2004; and Peter Bloom’s elegant, incisive short biography
in the Cambridge series, which even after so many weighty predecessors man-
ages to contribute a wealth of insights and discoveries. I am beholden to all
these scholars but especially to Bloom, my Berliozian consultant of first and
last resort, who responded with goodwill to numerous requests for advice. He
also subjected the first and final drafts of the introduction to his excruciat-
ingly minute scrutiny, his help always doubled according to the Latin maxim
Bis dat qui cito dat: “One who gives quickly gives twice.”
What also made this volume possible is the existence of a comprehen-
sive, chronological, annotated edition of Berlioz’s criticism in French, seven
of whose ten projected volumes are complete at this writing. That edition
was conceived in the 1970s by H. Robert Cohen, whose 1973 dissertation on
Berlioz’s opera criticism incorporated translations of a number of important
opera reviews from Berlioz’s tenure as critic at the Journal des débats. The
splendid edition of the Critique musicale that began appearing in 1996 puts
the articles within easy reach and partly explains the impulse, at long last,
to produce this selection. When I first began working on Berlioz’s criticism,
before quick-copy machines, electronic texts, or Internet, I was obliged to
read the articles on microfilm or photocopies, unless I happened to be in a
library possessing the originals. When Rosenberg and I started to plan this
volume in 2010, we had the Critique musicale at our fingertips. It is a spe-
cial pleasure to acknowledge the support given, in the course of this proj-
ect, by that edition’s current editors, Anne Bongrain and Marie-Hélène
Coudroy-Saghaï, whom I consulted several times and who even went to the
trouble of pursuing one elusive identification at the Archives Nationales for
inclusion in the notes.
I am grateful to many well-known scholars in nineteenth-century French
studies for their encouragement and assistance in helping this volume come
to life. Among them are H. Robert Cohen, who gave the project his blessing;
Editor’s Preface xvii
Katharine Ellis and Mark Everist, whose expertise led them to found the
Francophone Music Criticism network; the receptive, insightful group of
scholars at one meeting of that network, to whom we presented our project;
Kerry Murphy, whose book on Berlioz’s criticism covers the same time span
as this one and should be consulted for further reading; the great collector
and manuscript expert Richard Macnutt, another founder of modern Berlioz
studies, who helped with the choice of frontispiece, besides giving gracious
permission for the use of portraits on the cover and the website; Antoine
Troncy of the Musée Berlioz, who came to my aid for pictures and permis-
sions; and Gunther Braam, author of the New Berlioz Edition volume of
portraits and world authority on Berlioz iconography, who answered many
questions and kindly supplied from his own collection portraits for the book's
companion website. That website, a first experience for both collaborators of
this volume, has made it possible to keep the paper book within reasonable
bounds, yet to complete some overlong articles and add a few others. We hope
thereby to have made the book more useful for students and scholars while
keeping it enjoyable for general readers.
The translations are the work of Rosenberg; the selection of articles, intro-
ductions, footnotes, and editorial apparatus are mine. We have shared sugges-
tions and reflections on each other’s drafts but have respected that division
of labor. For accuracy in historical and musical matters, and any remaining
inaccuracies, I bear the responsibility.
We acknowledge with gratitude the helpful comments of the readers of
our original proposal at Oxford University Press, especially the one who
later also read the entire manuscript. We give thanks to Jeffrey S. Ankrom, a
constant presence throughout this project. I am especially grateful to my sis-
ter Jocelyne Kolb, a professor of German at Smith College, who found time
to give the introduction the benefit of her keen sense of tone and nuance.
Finally, I pay tribute here to Jocelyne’s and my extraordinary mother, Dorothy
Dietrich Kolb, who spent her last six months with me while this project was
underway, and who showered on my efforts the total, unquestioning confi-
dence that was her greatest gift to her three children.
About the Companion Website
www.oup.com/us/berliozonmusic
Oxford has created a website to accompany Berlioz on Music: Selected
Criticism 1824–1837. Material that could not be included in this book is pro-
vided there, including some extra pieces and the remainder of several long
articles published in installments. The reader is encouraged to consult this
resource as the references come up in the text. Examples available online are
indicated in the text with Oxford’s symbol .
Berlioz on Music
Editor’s Introduction
Revolution in Paris
The world today knows Berlioz as a composer. His contemporaries knew him
equally well as a critic. For the three core decades of his career, from 1833 to
1863, he earned his living by his pen, commenting with authority and wit
on musical happenings in Paris and, from the 1840s, much of Europe. That
was when, frustrated with musical conditions at home, he began a new life
as composer-conductor abroad, taking his music to Germany and Austria,
eastern Europe, Russia, and England. Caricatures of the day show him, quill
or baton in hand (sometimes both together), peering out from an exagger-
ated shock of hair meant to convey his famously fiery temperament. The
portrait heading this volume reflects, rather, the sensitivity and clear-sighted
wisdom also forged in his character, as his Memoirs lyrically recount, by a
sheltered small-town upbringing in the shadow of the Alps during an age of
epic social and political upheaval. Born at the tail end of the Revolutionary
period, in 1803—a year later, he might have been named Joseph, after the
empress, rather than Hector, after the Classical hero favored under the First
Republic—Berlioz grew up to echoes of Napoleonic glory, reaching adoles-
cence in the wake of Waterloo and adulthood under an increasingly oppres-
sive Restoration monarchy. Like many of his fellow artists, he was among the
insurgents on the Paris streets when the regime of the elderly Charles X crum-
bled virtually overnight in the Revolution of July 1830. He almost missed the
excitement. It erupted while he was under quarantine at the French Academy,
competing for the Prix de Rome, intended to launch composers’ careers with
a stay in Italy—never mind that music in Italy was then at a low ebb while
music and culture in Paris were in such ferment that to be anywhere else, for
2 Be r l ioz on M usic
Berlioz and countless others, was to be exiled from the center of everything
of importance happening in the arts.
Well might Paris be taken for the center of everything important in 1830.
The decade surrounding it (the span covered by this anthology) uncannily
recapitulates and brings to a head the previous half century’s journey from
old regime to new, Classical to Romantic, preindustrial to premodern—the
commerce-dominated society memorably depicted in the novels of Balzac.
In 1830 less than half the population of France could read. But literacy was
spreading rapidly, multiplying the readership of journals and newspapers;
when the Guizot law of 1836 decreed free elementary public school educa-
tion for all (Berlioz argued for musical education as well: see #41), the tide
turned irrevocably. Although political change itself was modest, given that
the new constitution still granted the vote only to men of property, and
although Berlioz was to live under two further regimes (the short-lived
Second Republic after the Revolution of 1848, and the Second Empire under
Napoleon III), caricatures of the citizen-king, Louis-Philippe, sporting a ple-
beian umbrella for a scepter augured a world-changing shift in political and
social custom, and in the conditions under which artists would henceforth
need to make a living.
To gauge the shift in artistic custom, consider two related phenomena
that frame the decade in question: the extinction of the operatic castrato
on the one hand, and the birth of the heroic tenor on the other. In 1826
the castrato Velluti held the stage for one last London season (not so long
before, in 1812, Crescentini was still enchanting audiences at Napoleon’s
court theater). Tenor operas—featuring tenor rather than soprano heroes—
had been gradually edging out the Baroque model since the 1770s, as we
know from the later operas of Mozart. But the type of tenor incarnated in
the legendary Caruso, or in a Pavarotti or a Domingo or a Jonas Kaufmann,
first emerged as a model in April 1837 when Gilbert Duprez made his début
at the Paris Opéra in Rossini’s William Tell, astounding the audience with
high notes produced not in the customary head voice but “from the chest”
(#43). While high-voiced heroes (played by cross-dressing women) contin-
ued to perform at the Théâtre-Italien alongside tenors at the Opéra, the
contest implicitly ended when Rossini, in 1829, produced both tenor and
baritone heroes (Arnold and Tell) for William Tell in the genre that came
to be known as French grand opera. Bellini was thus behind the times with
I Capuleti e i Montecchi in 1832 when he assigned the part of Romeo to a
woman. Berlioz heard the new opera while passing through Florence dur-
ing his fifteen-month stay in Italy as prizewinner of the Academy’s contest
and rose indignantly to Romeo’s defense: were his consuming passions, he

expostulated, likely to be found in eunuchs?
Like all of artistic Paris, Berlioz had thrilled to Romeo and Juliet in the fall
of 1827 during a run of Shakespeare plays by a British troupe that, language
barriers notwithstanding, opened French eyes to a world of drama beyond
the Neoclassical strictures governing their theater since the seventeenth cen-
tury. Other transformative events of the decade surrounding 1830 included
the revelation of Beethoven, as yet virtually unknown to the French, by the
first great modern symphony orchestra, led by a standing, baton-wielding
conductor (in fact Habeneck, the founding conductor, still led with his violin
bow after the Baroque fashion; Berlioz, with his orchestras, would always use
a baton); the creation of the first successful French music journals; the emer-
gence of music criticism as an occupation for music professionals rather than
a sideline for writers who happened to like music; the recognition of a canon
in music equivalent to that of the art in the Louvre; and a surge in status for
instrumental music, professional musicians, and music itself, all ranked low
in Classical hierarchies. These changes took place in counterpoint with the
belated flowering of Romanticism in France, fed by currents from Germany
and Britain where Romantic revolts had occurred decades earlier while the
French were busy rebelling in the streets. In the long history of French cul-
ture, few periods can rival the richness of the late 1820s to the late 1830s, when
Victor Hugo, Stendhal, Balzac, George Sand, Lamartine, Vigny, Mérimée,
Musset, Gautier, Nerval, and Dumas were producing a heady mix of experi-
mental drama, lyric poetry, and novels. They were matched in music and art
by Berlioz and Delacroix, whom Gautier later saluted as forming, with Hugo,
the high trinity of French Romanticism.
Whatever its import in politics, 1830 brought revolutionary events in the
arts. Revolt had been brewing under artistic cover throughout the 1820s, as
preface-manifestoes by Hugo declared with mounting bravado independence
from stifling academic conventions. In 1827 the preface to his sprawling,
unperformable drama Cromwell marked a turning point, coincident with
what Berlioz called the “thunderbolt” revelation of Shakespeare. (Berlioz’s
simultaneous thunderbolt passion for the troupe’s leading lady, Harriet
Smithson, would forever inflect both his work and his life.) Between Classics
and Romantics the battle lines were drawn from then on, but it took until
February 1830 for the Romantics to conquer the official bastion of Classical
theater, the Comédie-Française. Berlioz was among the supporters in that
theater lustily defending Hugo’s rule-breaking play Hernani against hoots
and catcalls from the Classics, in a famous “battle” (see #18) that anticipated
by six months the events commemorated in Delacroix’s equally provocative

Liberty Leading the People. If it is not so obvious today just what in Hernani
so upset contemporary ears, in Berlioz’s signature work of the same year
the iconoclasm remains palpable: his Symphonie fantastique, performed in
December as the ministers of the fallen monarchy were about to go on trial
for their lives, closed out a tumultuous year. Six weeks before its premiere,
Berlioz published a kind of Hugolian preface-manifesto on the notions of
Classical and Romantic in music (#3). Which art, he asked, was the most
Romantic? Music, came the reply. What kind of music? Instrumental. Few
notions, for the French, could have been more radical.
The period covered by this volume takes Berlioz from student to master,
from outlier to recognized leader in the musical world as both composer and
critic. Examples from his three principal spheres of action—religious music,
symphony, and opera—can bring home the dramatic nature of that transition.
At the time he writes his letter to the editor in January 1824 (#1), he is still
nominally a medical student at his family’s insistence, their unyielding oppo-
sition to his chosen career offering a good example of middle-class disdain
for the profession. Steeped in music and studying privately with his future
teacher at the Conservatoire, Jean-François Lesueur, he is about to compose
his Messe solennelle, a mass so teeming with ideas that a single one of them,
Lesueur exclaimed after its first performance, would suffice for an entire work
of his. (Berlioz himself redistributed many ideas from the Messe solennelle of
1824 in later works of his own, as was discovered when the four-hundred-page
manuscript turned up in 1991.) In the person of Lesueur, as later with other
composers encountered at the Conservatoire such as Cherubini and Reicha
(#29 and #39), Berlioz had found a mentor linking him directly with music
under the ancien régime, the Revolution, and the Empire. Trained in a church
school (maîtrise), as was the norm before the Conservatoire was founded
in 1795, and given to writing Enlightenment-style tracts on music history
and aesthetics, Lesueur had composed for the great popular festivals of the
Revolution and attained glory as opera composer and chapel master under
Napoleon. During the Restoration he served (with Cherubini) as chapel mas-
ter for the king, producing oratorios, masses, and motets for the Chapelle
royale in the Tuileries. After the services, Berlioz recalled, he and his teacher
would engage in long conversations about music, lived history, and their com-
mon admiration for Napoleon. Lesueur died in October 1837, two months shy
of the premiere of Berlioz’s Requiem, a work that fulfilled with unimagined
power the ideal shared by both composers of monumental music as a means
of ennobling the people. Written under government commission, performed
at the Invalides to commemorate a general killed in Algeria, acclaimed by

audience and critics, the Requiem officially trumpeted Berlioz’s achievement
of public stature. Read his reviews of requiems by Cherubini and Mozart for
insight on the choices and ideals underlying his own (#29 and #33).
Meanwhile the training imparted by the Conservatoire largely skirted
instrumental music, deemed inconsequential, so that when Beethoven
appeared, much of that training suddenly felt obsolete. Never expected to
compose symphonies, Berlioz underwent an evolution in this domain even
more drastic than in religious music: by the mid-thirties he had become, for
Paganini and Liszt, “Beethoven’s only possible heir.” By the end of the decade
he had produced a second symphony, Harold in Italy, with solo viola (1834)
(#16); a third, considered by many his masterpiece, Roméo et Juliette, with
soloists and chorus (1839); and the now least-known Funeral and Triumphal
Symphony (1840), again commissioned by the government and conceived,
like the Requiem, in the Revolutionary spirit of music for the nation. This
last was the symphony that most impressed Wagner, who heard them all with
astonishment between 1839 and 1842. But it was the first that sealed Berlioz’s
reputation, thrusting him squarely into the center of Parisian musical and
intellectual life.
The key event was not the symphony’s first performance in December
1830—actual premieres tend to be ragged affairs, as the reviews often attest—
but its second, in December 1832, on Berlioz’s return to Paris after his stay
in Italy. This second concert was a triumph, drawing a glittering assembly
of the Parisian elite to the Conservatoire to hear the two-part Episode in the
Life of an Artist, of which the symphony formed part I. Part II consisted of a
monodrama, The Return to Life, eventually retitled Lélio, which had the pro-
tagonist hold forth—like Berlioz as critic—on issues of artistic importance
related to interspersed pieces of music. 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.
The subject of that outburst points to another important shift reflected in our
decade: the transition from a performer-based art, in which musicians were
either composers themselves, or expected to embellish a composer’s sketchy
canvas, toward an art of masterpieces fully set down for performers to inter-
pret with unswerving fidelity—at least in theory and at least for Berlioz, a
pioneer in such matters. Those matters were of topical concern not only for
music: in The Hunchback of Notre-Dame and elsewhere, Hugo had recently
launched a campaign to preserve medieval monuments. Berlioz’s diatribe thus
caused a stir, not least because of a personal twist by the actor playing the
Artist who, in the passage denouncing liberties taken with masterworks in

the name of Classical “good taste,” gave the key phrase—beaucoup de goût—
the distinctive intonations of François-Joseph Fétis, an eminent musicologist,
creator of the first French scholarly music journal (La Revue musicale) and
sometime corrector, as Berlioz happened to know, of “oddities” in Beethoven’s
symphonies. Artistic Paris was a small town: the audience caught the allusion
and Fétis took the insult full in the face. Until then he had numbered among
Berlioz’s slightly alarmed yet well-intentioned supporters. No more. In 1835 he
published a critique of the Symphonie fantastique so scathing that Schumann,
observing how no less a musician than Liszt had paid homage to the work
by transcribing it for piano, responded with a long, admiring critical analysis,
making history for Berlioz and for the craft of music criticism. Berlioz, mean-
while, had made an enemy by speaking his mind, something he was so much
prone to do that from then on he needed his critical pen, among other things,
for self-defense. (Fétis’s support was rekindled in 1854 by Berlioz’s oratorio
L’Enfance du Christ, which also entranced the young Brahms.)
Among the luminaries at that brilliant concert of 1832 was the actress
Harriet Smithson, who to her surprise found herself taken by the audience
for the heroine of Berlioz’s drama—which, indeed, she partly was. A nar-
rative program that Berlioz drafted to accompany his symphony told of an
introspective artist-composer, a “new Faust,” who falls in love with a god-
desslike woman glimpsed from afar. In Lélio the artist-hero calls out for “the
Juliet, the Ophelia my heart yearns for”—the very roles for which Smithson
was famous. Berlioz had in fact composed Lélio under the influence of a dif-
ferent woman, the young pianist Camille Moke, who had cured him of his
obsession with Smithson by passing on false rumors that the actress was hav-
ing an affair with her manager. Stories of feminine betrayal were so much
part and parcel of contemporary fiction—in November 1829 Vigny’s transla-
tion of Shakespeare’s Othello served as one of the lead-ins for Hernani at the
Comédie-Française—that Berlioz was ripe for persuasion, not to mention
Camille’s charms: by the time he left for Rome, the two were in love and
engaged to be married. The program of the symphony bears a distinct trace
of Othello. In the third movement, the Artist suspects his beloved’s infidelity;
an opium-induced nightmare that he has killed her leads to the fourth move-
ment, where he is famously marched to the scaffold. (A nightmare in hell in
the fifth movement accounts for the symphony’s “fantastic” label, a nod to
E. T. A. Hoffmann’s newly translated Tales of the Fantastic; its sacrilegious
coupling of a devils’ dance with the medieval sequence Dies irae was, rather,
a nod to Faust.)
In Lélio, the concluding Fantasy on The Tempest for orchestra and cho-
rus paid tribute to Camille by bringing the piano (her instrument) into
the orchestra (his)—a musical first. Initially Berlioz had also associated the
“return to life” in Lélio, where (as in Faust II) the hero awakens from the
nightmares closing part I, with Camille’s healing ministrations. Had she not
given in to maternal pressure while he was in faraway Rome and married the
wealthy piano manufacturer Pleyel, thereby acquiring the name of Marie
Pleyel under which she became famous, the work would have been hers, not
Harriet’s. At the December 1832 concert, at all events, Berlioz finally won his
Harriet. Within a day they had met; within a year, not without tribulation,
they were married.
Such biographical details have their relevance in reading Berlioz’s criti-
cism, if only because Berlioz’s staggering productivity as both critic and
composer in his early married years seems to fulfill the prediction he once
made to a friend that, should he ever win Smithson, his creative energies
would know no bounds. Equally to the point was a new, pressing need for
money: Smithson brought heavy debts into the marriage from a failed the-
atrical enterprise in Paris. As for the episode with Camille, it resonates in
Berlioz’s views of instrumental music, which are decidedly split. Berlioz was as
suspicious of pure virtuosity, Camille’s pianistic territory, as he was worship-
ful of Beethoven’s symphonies. Even with Beethoven he favored the grander
symphonies, those that went the furthest beyond what he considered the
purely decorative manner of Haydn and Mozart. In other words, he extended
to instrumental music the condemnation of virtuosity for its own sake associ-
ated most famously with Gluck’s operatic reform of the 1770s. Camille casts
an especially disquieting shadow on an offshoot of Berlioz’s criticism that
played a key part in his campaign for fidelity to the composer’s intentions: the
genre of the musical short story, also inherited from Hoffmann. In two of his
stories Berlioz imagines a virtuoso singer unfaithful both to Art and to the
hero. In his criticism, as in Lélio, Berlioz may likewise be found represent-
ing music as a woman dangerously subject to prostitution. Although none
of Berlioz’s short stories figures in this anthology (look for them in Evenings
with the Orchestra), his talent for spinning out a tale and inventing lively dia-
logue is everywhere in evidence.
All three members of Gautier’s Romantic trinity possessed double talents.
Hugo’s powerful imagination sought another outlet in drawing; Delacroix
wrote a masterly Journal. But of the three only Berlioz found himself having
to earn a living through his second talent, because his type of art did not pay.
Symphonies, he quickly learned, cost more than they brought in. Religious
music had no sponsor, Louis-Philippe having abolished the Chapelle royale

in 1830. (When Napoleon III reinstated it—as the Imperial Chapel—the
post of chapel master went not to Berlioz but to the popular Auber, who
did not need the generous salary.) Berlioz often points out that a composer’s
work, unlike that of novelists or painters, is not finished with the writing;
it then begins the long road to performance. For works involving numer-
ous performers, this involves huge organizational efforts and heavy costs for
the copying of parts, the hiring of players for rehearsals and concerts, and
the steep tax (10–25 percent) on the gross receipts, a leitmotivic complaint
of Berlioz’s criticism (#5 and #35). Of the three major domains of serious
music—light music was another matter—only opera paid well. The Opéra,
officially called the Académie royale de musique, paid royalties; for French
and foreign composers alike, it was thus the royal road to fame and fortune.
It was the way Berlioz and his teachers had always assumed he would make
his living. And so it might have been. A mix of circumstances coupled with
the startling originality of his idiom conspired to prevent what for Gounod,
Bizet, Massenet, and a host of composers now forgotten happened as a matter
of course.
Such as they were, Berlioz’s ties to the Opéra remain crucial for under-
standing his criticism, which is fundamentally bound up with opera. His
development in the operatic domain, during our transformational decade, was
at least as significant as in religious and instrumental music. As a student in
the 1820s he lived in the opera house and the opera pit (sitting in the pit dur-
ing performances, he learned firsthand about the instruments), not only at the
Opéra but at all the musical theaters of the capital. At every turn he sought out
operatic possibilities of his own, his first problem being to secure a libretto (see
#5): not until 1845, traveling out of reach of his librettist for The Damnation
of Faust, did he begin to take over his own libretto writing, as he later did
from the start with Les Troyens and Béatrice et Bénédict. In the years 1826–
28 he completed Les Francs-Juges on a libretto written by his closest friend,
Humbert Ferrand. But that opera went nowhere—nor did its libretto, the req-
uisite foot in the door to any French opera company. Indeed, Berlioz’s only
piece of public writing between his three early letters to the editor in 1823–25
and his paid criticism beginning in 1829 was a letter of May 18, 1828, to several
journals defending his initiative in giving a concert entirely of his own works.
Having knocked at all doors for four years without having a libretto accepted,
he wrote, how else was he to draw the attention of theater directors to his
work? Les Francs-Juges has survived only in fragments; its overture remains,
having become during his lifetime his most performed work.
Less than ten years later, as this selection of articles ends, Berlioz has
to all appearances arrived: he is under contract at the Opéra for Benvenuto
Cellini, on a libretto derived from the Florentine sculptor’s recently trans-
lated Memoirs. Largely composed in 1836, Cellini reached the stage in the fall
of 1838, where it had mixed results. A scintillating work of unprecedented
technical challenges, it was not performed often enough to become properly
known (it is still not established in the repertoire). Paganini attended a per-
formance and declared afterward that if he were the director of the Opéra, he
would commission four more operas from Berlioz and pay him in advance.
The director had other ideas: since 1830, money making had become the the-
ater’s chief imperative, and only sure-fire successes (or works backed by the
composer’s own money, like Meyerbeer’s) were receiving support. It did not
help that the tenor Duprez, cast as Cellini, returned the favor of Berlioz’s
glowing reviews by withdrawing from the production after three perfor-
mances. After one full performance with another tenor and several partial
performances, Berlioz withdrew the work.
The demise of Cellini by no means discouraged Berlioz from further
operatic ventures. Even ancillary work in that domain paid handsomely, as
he learned in 1841 when he oversaw a production of Weber’s Freischütz at the
Opéra and received generous royalties for his efforts (he orchestrated Weber’s
Invitation to the Waltz for the ballet and composed music for the spoken
dialogue, in conformity with government mandates on the separation of
genres: mixed works including speech, like Freischütz, were the province of
the Opéra-Comique and thus forbidden at the Opéra). In the 1840s he initi-
ated two operatic projects with the enormously influential librettist Eugène
Scribe, though neither came to fruition. Much later he oversaw productions
at the Opéra of Gluck’s Orphée and Alceste. With Les Troyens in 1863 he
finally abandoned the Opéra, which had accepted the work but kept delaying
production; he turned to a lesser theater, where a mere twenty-one perfor-
mances of the Carthage acts alone enabled him to give up criticism entirely.
It must be added at once that by this time he had also given up com-
posing. His near-simultaneous retirement from both spheres of production
suggests an answer to a question we might be tempted to speculate on: had
those other four operas imagined by Paganini materialized, would Berlioz
have continued to write criticism? All indications are that he would. For
Berlioz, composition and criticism went hand in hand, and it was more than
a question of money. It was partly, as we saw, a matter of self-protection. In
making his way as composer, he needed his critical shield; that his criticism
kept engendering more enemies made it, at the least, a self-perpetuating
necessity. But it was also a matter of impulse and talent. A born writer,
Berlioz thrived on speaking out “to defend the beautiful and attack the
opposite,” as he put it in his Memoirs. That generous impulse implied the
freedom to write at will on topics of his choosing—as he did in the years
1829–33 and in his three unsolicited letters to the editor of 1823–25 (the
second and third included in this volume). It was after his marriage in
October 1833, essentially beginning in 1834, that criticism turned into the
burden he so often bemoaned. From then until his circumstances improved
in the late 1850s, he wrote under the pressure of financial necessity on the
one hand and of publisher assignments and deadlines on the other. As a
composer-critic, he suffered the special torture of having to review count-
less trivial works of others when he chafed to produce significant works of
his own. That he managed to turn such chores into treasures of trenchant
judgment, imaginative insight, and captivating prose—it will captivate, we
hope, even in translation—does not render any less credible his lamenta-
tions (see #31, and c hapters 21 and 47 of his Memoirs) over the necessity of
doing them in the first place. Had his career in opera flourished, he would
have published fewer articles, and without complaint.
Two incidents from his life illustrate from opposite angles Berlioz’s impos-
sible situation as a composer of large-scale works in a time of small-minded
attitudes toward art. One is wrenching: it concerns a fifth symphony that he
was inspired to write in the early 1850s but that he suppressed, fearing that the
expenses of producing it would jeopardize the costly nursing care required by
his now invalid wife. The other incident is happy, though so weirdly excep-
tional as to prove the rule. At a concert Berlioz conducted in the aftermath of
Cellini, Paganini heard for the first time Harold in Italy, a work composed at
his behest five years earlier. In a grand Romantic gesture, the violinist knelt
afterward at the composer’s feet and declared him the supreme musical genius
of the age; then, joining practicality to theatrics, he sent Berlioz a check so
generous that it freed him from debt and enabled him to compose his Roméo
et Juliette symphony in complete serenity. That he continued to produce his
regular articles during this reprieve—without complaint—further suggests
that it was the circumstances rather than the writing itself that made for frus-
tration with the task.
One effect of Paganini’s gift was to postpone Berlioz’s first concert tour
abroad, long contemplated and now becoming a necessity. Harriet’s oppo-
sition was another cause of delay, besides a sign of strain in the marriage,
which suffered from the imbalance between frenetic activity on his side
and frustrated inactivity on hers (she was unable to perform in French, and
special parts were rare). But departure was inevitable. Berlioz needed to per-
form his works without ruining himself in the process. For that he looked
to old-style courts and sovereigns who could appreciate and subsidize him,
sometimes generously, as when he turned to Russia to recoup his losses from
the Damnation of Faust in Paris in 1846. Yet even while traveling, he relied
on his writings for steady income. He also learned to boost that income by
reprinting some of his writings in volume form. Initially, it was the idea of a
volume that generated a fresh series of articles: the sixteen installments titled
“On Instrumentation” that he produced between November 1841 and July
1842, a few months before his first tour in Germany, became his Treatise on
Orchestration. To classify the elements of this classic manual for composers
as a branch of his criticism might seem to be stretching a point. If so, this is
a good place to observe how readably—how poetically, even—Berlioz could
describe the special qualities of the flute, the clarinet, the oboe, or the trom-
bone. Although there are differences in the level of technicality he used in
different publications—a specialized journal permitted more specialized ter-
minology—he knew, like any good writer, how to make good reading out of
virtually any topic he turned to.
The time span chosen for this anthology deliberately predates the col-
lected volumes Berlioz produced himself, for the simple reason that those
volumes, all available in English, amply represent the later parts of the cor-
pus. Implicitly, these include the phantom Voyage musical of 1844, his first
work of collected criticism in the ordinary sense of the word (i.e., apart from
the orchestration treatise), which he consigned to oblivion by redistribut-
ing all its parts in his later volumes—where they may now be found. Next
to take shape were the Memoirs, begun in London in 1848 and largely com-
pleted by 1854; the volume was printed in 1865 but put on sale only in 1870,
a year after his death. (It was in his Memoirs that Berlioz incorporated the
travel writings from Voyage musical.) His last three volumes form a kind of
trilogy. Evenings with the Orchestra (Les Soirées de l’orchestre, 1852) is struc-
tured around the short stories; The Musical Madhouse (Les Grotesques de la
musique, 1858) extracts some of his funniest satires and spoofs from longer
reviews and articles, along with a few serious pieces; The Art of Music and
Other Essays (À travers chants, 1862), produced partly in response to Wagner
and his acolytes (just as his early criticism had ignited against the fanatics of
Rossini), amounts to an artistic testament. For a sense of Berlioz’s aesthetic
principles, of his passionate likes and dislikes, of his inventive genius as a
writer, of music in Paris in the decades concerned, a reader can do no better
than turn to the volumes he imaginatively crafted himself.
Yet those volumes give little idea of the day-to-day practice of music jour-
nalism in Paris. Berlioz organized them thematically, cutting and pasting to
fit his polemical and literary intent. (Two volumes of his collected criticism
published after his death, by André Hallays and Gérard Condé respectively,
proceed in similar fashion; Condé’s especially is a delightful but idiosyncratic
patchwork.) The result is greater polish, but at the expense of context and
of the sense of immediacy that comes with seeing the articles as they first
appeared. In The Art of Music, for example, Berlioz’s analyses of Beethoven’s
nine symphonies are neatly gathered together in their numbered order and
given pride of place at the start. Originally, however, Berlioz began that series
with pedagogical intent in January 1838, just weeks after Balzac’s novel César
Birotteau came out bearing an innocent allusion, in a poetic evocation of the
Fifth Symphony strategically placed at midpoint, to Beethoven’s corpus of
“eight symphonies.” It is easy to imagine Berlioz, an avid reader of Balzac’s
novels as each appeared, jumping at the error. Not that Balzac, a recent con-
vert writing only a decade after Beethoven’s death, could be faulted. The sym-
phonies were not yet referred to by number (our Fifth was the Symphony
in C minor); the Ninth had been performed only twice so far in Paris, and
was called the “Choral” Symphony, or Symphonie avec chœurs. Who other
than a professional was to know exactly how many symphonies there were?
By that date, Berlioz had already analyzed them all, several more than once,
but only as they happened to come up in concert. Now he purposefully reuses
his previous analyses and sets them in the proper order—and the canon of the
numbered nine starts to crystallize before our eyes.
From that perspective, the cutoff date of 1837 settled on for this volume
represents a symbolic moment, just before Berlioz begins to complain that
he has nothing more to say about Beethoven’s symphonies, and just before he
reframes his analyses as a series treating the corpus as a whole. In The Art of
Music as in our usual reference works today, the symphonies appear outside
their performing context, outside time and space, as though their canonical
status had been self-evident from the start. The historical reality is far more
haphazard. Several of the Beethoven analyses are presented here (includ-
ing two versions each of pieces on the Fifth and the “Pastoral” Symphony,
Berlioz’s canon-within-the-canon), despite their availability in The Art of
Music, precisely to show how those analyses originated and what sort of
programs the symphonies were performed in. Those programs may come as
a surprise. True, the Conservatoire orchestra had been founded expressly
to perform Beethoven, taking advantage of an ideal moment when both
Opéra and Conservatoire could supply a legion of virtuoso instrumentalists.
Under the visionary leadership of Habeneck the symphonies received their

first world-class renditions, beginning in March 1828, after endless rehears-
als and arduous efforts to make sense out of what seemed at first unplay-
able riddles (see #4). But the programs by no means featured Beethoven
alone. On a typical Sunday afternoon at the Menus-Plaisirs hall where the
Conservatoire orchestra performed, in one of the seven or eight concerts
that constituted its spring season, the master of masters brushed shoulders
not only with other symphonists, past or contemporary, but also with oper-
atic and choral numbers, vocal solos or ensembles, and solo displays by some
of those orchestra virtuosos, whose individual egos needed to be stroked.
Berlioz makes no objection to the mixed nature of these sessions. The kind
of homogenized programs customary in classical concerts today would have
struck him as impossibly tame, and possibly too short: in those days before
electronics, a concert was expected to fill as much time as an opera. But he
does object to the promiscuous company Beethoven is forced to keep when
a popular prima donna, or a student protégé of an influential teacher, or
one of the instrumental virtuosos displaying a composition of his own mars
the tone he would have liked to find in the event as a whole. Since he made
similar concessions in his own concerts, his protests essentially lament pre-
vailing customs and audience limitations. They also worked to educate the
audience, whose progress in musical taste he variously signals in the course
of the 1830s.
This anthology is the first, then, to give a chronological selection of
Berlioz’s articles in their entirety. As such, it can give a sense of the chrono-
logically ordered complete annotated edition of the criticism, decades in
the making, still underway in France, seven of ten projected volumes being
complete at this writing. In both editions, individual pieces come to light
in a rougher state than their author might have wished. In this anthology,
Berlioz’s editorial example has occasionally prevailed: the pedestrian review
of an opera has been cut from an amusing self-advertisement for a concert,
and a pedestrian operatic plot summary has been left out of another; long
quotations in one piece, and some passages in a couple of others, have been
replaced by summaries; the companion website has been left to complete
articles made up of multiple installments. Otherwise the pieces stand as first
published, with their imperfections and their spontaneity intact. Keeping
them in chronological order makes it possible to read them against the back-
drop of events, musical and other, unfolding in Paris, the wider world, and
Berlioz’s life. The upshot is a panorama of one of the richest periods in French
musical and cultural history.
It needs to be mentioned, among these remarks on the time frame of our

selection, that with Berlioz early does not mean immature. Even his first
utterances in the press speak with impressive authority. The only thing that
might betray his youthful age of twenty in the opening piece of this volume
is the extreme form of his partisanship, a failing that seems to have been
shared, to be sure, by the middle-aged men he attacks. Eventually the virulent
anti-Rossinian stance of his youth gave way to more measured views, as we see
from his respectful analysis of William Tell in 1834 (#14). Like every music
lover of his day, Berlioz was susceptible to the delights of Rossini’s music,
especially the comic operas. In the tragic operas he never quite forgave the
frequent disregard of the principle, learned from his idol Gluck, of musical
and dramatic fitness, for him the very foundation of dramatic music.
It hardly needs restating that the period encompassed here follows
Berlioz’s path from his sure-footed but sporadic early outbursts to his posi-
tion as leading music critic of the French capital. What needs emphasizing is
the quality of his criticism even during his freelance years of 1829–34 (minus
the hiatus of his Italian sojourn), the years preceding his arrival at the Journal
des débats. By the time the Débats chose to hire him, he had proved his mettle
in vivid pieces whose distinctive voice obviously caught the attention of the
owner-editor, Louis Bertin. At the same time, his new post at the Débats
spurred him to new levels of craftsmanship and creative energy, as samples
from the first three years will attest (the very first ones, he confided to Ferrand,
caused a sensation among artists in Paris). From the moment he began writ-
ing, Berlioz lost no time addressing the issues that mattered to him. As a
result, the criticism from this first segment of his career speaks in large mea-
sure for the rest of it. By 1837 he has already introduced his major arguments,
his signature passions, his irascible dislikes—in sum, most of the main topics
and themes of his criticism (one exception: a recurring fantasy about an ideal
music theater first surfaces in January 1841, when Wagner was in Paris and
took note). Shifts of orientation in later years reflect a change not of doctrine
but of tactics in the face of new challenges. Whereas in the early years, for
example, he battles scholastic uses of the fugue, especially full-voiced, rapid
fugues on “Amen” that he finds contrary to the essence of the prayer (see #20,
#29, and #33), in later years he repeatedly underlines the importance of coun-
terpoint to those who might be tempted to follow Wagner’s example in ban-
ning it (as Berlioz thought) from the Gesamtkunstwerk.
Readers of this volume may rest assured, then, that they will have absorbed
the essence of Berlioz’s musical creed. They will have done so, moreover,
without the effort required by a Wagnerian treatise. Berlioz is at his most
Wagnerian, that is to say his most straightforwardly didactic, in certain early

pieces such as the manifesto “Observations on Classical Music and Romantic
Music” (#3) or “Reflections on Religious Music” . Otherwise the very ease
and entertainment of reading him call for a caveat. His mode of instruction
through wit and humor, irony and indirection resembles Voltaire’s, and it can
take an attentive reader to recognize serious messages under their deceptively
light appearance.
Two examples may serve to illustrate the pitfalls not only of reading
Berlioz but also of translating him. Take, first, the title of his most weighty
volume of criticism, À travers chants, given in English in the Csicery-Rónay
translation as The Art of Music and Other Essays. “The Art of Music” actu-
ally corresponds to the sedate title of the volume’s panoramic opening essay
(“Musique”). À travers chants, the volume’s French title, is anything but
sedate. It says literally “across songs,” a meaningless phrase that to a French
speaker conveys no more on first hearing than the expression it puns with,
the identical-sounding à travers champs, “across country.” On noticing the
word chants (songs) substituted for champs (fields), the French reader will
intuit something like “through fields of song” and be amused. Berlioz adored
puns, but there is more to this one than amusement. Since the word “routine”
derives from “route,” Berlioz frequently borrowed the image of the highway
or main road (la grande route) to describe the hated routine of professors and
pundits. So while he rails against old-school professors who refuse to stray
from la vieille grande route, “the old, well-trodden highway,” he pictures him-
self taking the side roads or, more daring still, leaving the beaten path entirely
and setting off across the fields. The trivial-sounding title pun, hopelessly
untranslatable, thus captures a fundamental message about liberty in art, the
core of Berlioz’s lifelong musical philosophy.
Consider now a second example from the analysis of William Tell, where
at one point Berlioz interrupts his commentary to exclaim, in half-feigned
powerlessness, that words fail him and that he can merely “cry out like the
crowd: Beautiful! Superb! Admirable! Heart-rending!” ( Part II in com-
panion website) As Jacques Barzun cautioned many years ago in his founda-
tional Berlioz and the Romantic Century, parsing this very passage, the alert
reader must pay attention to the giveaway phrase “like the crowd.” A practiced
reader of Berlioz knows that he never stands on the side of the crowd (“the
people” are another matter). And when, a moment later, he writes “Superb!
I must catch my breath,” the tacked-on “I must catch my breath” goes just a
trifle overboard and must likewise give pause. Barzun’s cautions are worth
repeating because these responses are occasionally still quoted as evidence of
Berlioz’s total, about-faced embrace of Rossini. William Tell gave him much
to admire, but Berlioz’s admiration was not unbounded. We will see shortly
how things worked when he was trying to express praise with every means at
his command. First, though, a little more background on the journals and
papers for which he wrote.
Revolution in the French Musical Press

The press in which Berlioz plied his critical trade was itself in transition dur-
ing the years surrounding 1830. Already fighting for greater freedom under
the repressive Charles X, it exploded after the July Revolution, which was
in fact sparked by journalists’ protests at an ordinance suspending freedom
of the press. New journals and newspapers sprang up; older ones ventured
into new territories, including music. Having been in the vanguard of politi-
cal change before the Revolution, the arts took the lead in its aftermath: in
1831 the title of a new journal, L’Artiste, consecrated not the mere artisan
denoted earlier by the word “artist,” but a genius and leader of men or, as
soon elaborated by Hugo and Vigny, a philosopher-guide who serves as moral
and spiritual compass for the rest of us. In his Episode in the Life of an Artist,
Berlioz thus caught the spirit of the times exactly, though he himself had
been placing artists on pedestals since adolescence. He never contributed to
L’Artiste, but in the early 1830s he published in other artistic periodicals such
as L’Europe littéraire, the Revue européenne and the Revue musicale—which
reprinted from the Revue européenne his ironic “Letter of an Enthusiast on
the Present State of Music in Italy,” obviously before Berlioz had burned his
bridges with its editor, Fétis. Already in 1829 he had contributed six reviews
as foreign correspondent for a German music journal, the Berliner allgeme-
ine musikalische Zeitung—five on current operatic productions, one on the
newly formed Conservatoire orchestra.
One of the reasons artistic periodicals were so numerous is that they were
spared the heavy security deposit required of political papers, a deposit for-
feited if something unacceptable appeared about the government. In politi-
cal newspapers, where Berlioz had some experience even before landing at
the Journal des débats, the assignment was to produce the daily feature on
literature, art, music, or dance known as the feuilleton. The Journal des débats
was in fact the originator of the feuilleton, which occupied the bottom of
the front page in a kind of nose-thumbing dialogue with the serious matters
above. As a rule, a paper’s political bias had little effect on its artistic content,
although Berlioz’s first piece for Le Correspondant, a Catholic conservative
newspaper to which he contributed a number of articles in 1829 and 1830,

was a logical match: “Reflections on Religious Music” , an essay on the
nature and potential of religious music. (Berlioz’s atheism interfered not at
all with his devotion to religious music, to him a branch of dramatic music;
he was atheist in the French sense of the word, meaning not-Catholic and
freethinking like his father. Schooled by Chateaubriand, Berlioz’s generation
remained highly susceptible to the poetic aspects of Catholicism.) Beginning
in 1833 he contributed to Le Rénovateur, another conservative paper, until
it merged in 1836 with the Bourbon royalist La Quotidienne; his articles for
this paper hold special interest because there, as Berlioz told Ferrand, he felt
greater freedom than in the others to speak his mind.
What, then, of Berlioz’s independence—or not—as a critic? Politics,
as just mentioned, played little or no part in the matter. Assignments did
occur, and at the Débats there were limits to his given domain—limits worth
putting up with, since work there paid better than all Berlioz’s other assign-
ments put together. At first Jules Janin, the most popular literary critic of the
day, retained his privilege over the three subsidized “lyric theaters” (Opéra,
Opéra-Comique, and Théâtre-Italien). Berlioz was hired initially to review
concerts, notably at the Conservatoire. He might also venture into ceremo-
nies involving religious music; workers’ concerts that seemed to offer a prom-
ising new choral resource (#41); miscellaneous concerts by famous, visiting,
or debuting artists; or the large domain of song, one of his predilections
also as composer. And he could address general concerns relative to music,
such as musical education. In 1837 Janin relinquished the Opéra-Comique
and the Opéra (retaining the ballet)—just in time for Berlioz to review
Duprez’s début at the Opéra (#43)—while leaving the Théâtre-Italien to a
third critic, Delécluze. Curiously, there is evidence that the initial ban on
Berlioz’s reviewing opera at the Débats was partly self-imposed. In a letter
to Ferrand of April 15, 1835, Berlioz mentions that Bertin had offered him a
chance to review Donizetti’s I Puritani and Halévy’s La Juive; he refused, he
says, fearing that any negative criticism on his part would be taken as a sign
of jealousy. Later that year he does review Hérold’s Zampa in the Débats, no
doubt because Hérold had died in 1833 (see #30). Late in 1836 he also reviews
Les Huguenots on the basis of its newly published score. By 1837 he has clearly
gathered up his courage to tackle works at France’s leading opera company in
the limelight provided by his influential post.
What most cramped his style as critic, he tells us in the Memoirs, was his
delicate position as a practicing composer. In pronouncing on current pro-
ductions he risked offending the managers, singers, players, and others whose
cooperation he relied on to produce his own music. If he felt somewhat freer

in Le Rénovateur, it was evidently because he felt less exposed than at the
prominent Débats, widely disseminated not only in France but throughout
Europe. In his Memoirs—published, remember, only after his death—he
speaks candidly about the necessity he felt of holding back at least part of
what he thought, and about the constant pressures put on him to support
the theaters and to promote their favored composers and performers. Readers
of his criticism soon discover, nonetheless, what he also readily admits: so
unshakable are his convictions, so visceral his likes and dislikes, that his true
opinion tends, as he puts it, to seep through the lines. When it was a matter of
praising a work he admired by a composer he personally disliked (Cherubini
is a good example), he never hesitated. He was as incapable of not praising
a great work by his greatest enemy, he wrote, as of praising a poor one by
his dearest friend. In the latter case he naturally tried his best, but the truth
inevitably leaked out—at least to those paying attention.
One tactic Berlioz used to avoid giving offense was simply to digress, set-
ting off on tangents having little or no bearing on the topic under review. In
reviewing operas, he could take advantage of the customary plot summary
that prefaced the treatment of the music and that, if necessary, could take
up most of the space. Practiced in a variety of ways, these diversionary tactics
proved so valuable that Berlioz eventually assigned them a name, under amus-
ing circumstances: in a cost-saving measure, the management of the Opéra
once decided to stop granting critics their usual free tickets. In retaliation,
they banded together to produce what Berlioz dubbed feuilletons de silence,
or “silent reviews,” which spoke of anything and everything but the operas in
question. Though not as systematic as in its later use (e.g., in Evenings with
the Orchestra), the feuilleton de silence tactic is already well in evidence in the
decade represented here. See, for example, the long paean on Gluck in the
review of a lackluster concert in which Gluck had no part (#23).
When writing of Gluck or others he revered, Berlioz practiced another
technique to which he later assigned a name: criticism of admiration, or cri-
tique admirative. Such criticism served to channel a critical equivalent of the
religious fervor he called for on the part of performers. In general it could
be said that his criticism moves between the opposite poles of the feuilleton
de silence and critique admirative, between the urge to condemn vehemently
what he finds beneath contempt and the effort to express the highest praise
humanly possible. The latter effort can end, paradoxically, in literal silence,
since supreme beauty stretches the power of words to convey (the relevant lit-
erary device is praeteritio or preterition, which manages to express something
by calling it inexpressible). There was obviously room for much that affected
him as neither especially good nor especially bad. For that he used a kind of
lukewarm praise, the trade conventions of which he can sometimes be found
satirizing.
What is to be said, then, of his satire? The word identifies an essential
mode of his criticism, but its types vary. Here again the span of years covered
in the present volume shows an evolution. At the height of the mid-1820s con-
troversy over Rossini, whom Stendhal heralded as Europe’s new Napoleon,
the young Berlioz rose to the attack in Le Corsaire, which presented itself as a
“journal of literature, the arts, manners, and fashion.” The satirical tone and
light banter of his critiques retain a flavor of ancien régime frivolity, like the
journal itself; indeed, the conduct of those Rossinian skirmishes harks back
to similar “quarrels” that had engrossed French operagoers in the previous
century, like the famous Querelle des Bouffons. In Berlioz’s critical arsenal,
satire of the witty, Voltairean kind remains a permanent, even a preferred
tool. But under the thunderbolt changes of the years around 1830, the sat-
ire darkened. Where satire was concerned, Berlioz and his contemporaries
would have thought at once of the vehement Iambes by Auguste Barbier,
written just after the July Revolution in homage to the more famous Iambes
of André Chénier, produced in prison during the Revolutionary Terror of
1793. (“Iambes” were a form of Greek hexameter used to disrupt French
Classical alexandrine verse, as Hugo’s enjambments and other liberties also
served to do.) Berlioz admired Barbier, who became a good friend and the
main librettist for Benvenuto Cellini. And Berlioz cultivated his own forms
of violent satire, even if—contrary to common perception—he unleashed
them as rarely as he did the full brass and percussion of his orchestra. Both
are reserved for moments of supreme disaster or convulsion, such as the
Judgment Day in the Requiem, or Berlioz’s own Jehovahlike judgment on the
better-left-anonymous hack who dared lay a rearranging hand on Mozart’s
Magic Flute (#37).
The platform that best permitted Berlioz to show the full breadth of his
critical powers was not the Débats but a music journal not yet founded when
he began contributing to Le Rénovateur in the summer of 1833. In January
1834, just in time to help with the financial strains brought on for Berlioz by
his marriage, the German expatriate and music publisher Maurice (Moritz)
Schlesinger—also Berlioz’s publisher at the time—founded La Gazette musi-
cale de Paris. In content, import, and impact the new journal deliberately
set out to rival the Revue musicale, published since 1827 by Berlioz’s nemesis,
Fétis. But whereas Fétis produced his journal virtually single-handed and
wrote under the banner of Mozart, the new journal could count on a phalanx
of writers and musicians ready to do battle on behalf of Beethoven and newer
“poetic music” such as Berlioz’s or Chopin’s or Halévy’s (the last mentioned
also a “house composer” published by the press). Berlioz was active as critic
and associate editor from the start, producing two multipart series on Gluck,
the review of William Tell, two short stories, and other miscellaneous pieces
in the first year alone. His contributions reached a peak in 1837, a year during
which he also served as editor. By that time the Gazette had absorbed its rival
(in 1835) to become La Revue et gazette musicale de Paris without, at first,
inheriting any significant influence from Fétis. Later, its original mission
accomplished, the journal came to adopt principles very much in the con-
servative spirit of its one-time rival. For Berlioz in the 1830s it was a godsend.
He used it to publish all manner of reviews, analyses, composer biographies,
and stories, as well as the original elements of his orchestration treatise. It
provided him with his most congenial platform, valuable as much for its sup-
portive group of contributors as for its progressive-minded, often musically
literate readership. He continued to write for it until 1858.
In some ways the Gazette musicale was the counterpart of Schumann’s
Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, founded in the same year and similarly fueled
by the energies of zealots for progressive music in the lineage of Beethoven.
Schumann called his troops Davidsbündler—Davidites, or partisans of the
band of David—and summoned them to fight the Goliath of popular music
coming mostly from France. It is worth remembering that France in the nine-
teenth century resembled the United States in the twentieth as a Goliath
of commerce and industry, whose invasive popular music provoked consid-
erable ambivalence in the rest of the world. In opposing the light French
music so attractive to his countrymen, Schumann sounded the same drum
as Schlesinger’s cohorts in Paris: no one could have been more caustic than
Berlioz toward what he saw as the taste-perverting influence of both the French
and Italian popular music of the day. On other matters the French journal dif-
fered from Schumann’s in content and tactics, simply because music history
in France had taken a different course from that in Germany, and because
the campaign in Paris on behalf of high culture had farther to go. One case
in point is the outlook on Bach, whose St. Matthew Passion as revealed by
Mendelssohn in 1829 had the thunderbolt effect, in Germany, of Habeneck’s
Beethoven in 1828; in France, deification of Bach came decades later. Another
is the perspective on Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. Whereas for Hoffmann
and Schumann the three formed a trinity bound in a natural continuum, for
Berlioz the first two were old-regime, frivolous note jugglers, on the whole
(they “became poets,” he conceded, when composing to words), who were

overturned by the revolutionary Beethoven. Schumann wrote no analyses of
Beethoven (others in Germany had already done so). But in his analyses of
other music, such as the Symphonie fantastique, he addressed a common set of
problems with Berlioz. It is to those problems that we now turn.
Music Criticism as Revolutionary Practice

As Berlioz’s association in 1829 with the Berliner allgemeine musikalische
Zeitung will have suggested, German music journals became established a
full generation ahead of the French, implying a head start for the new practice
of music criticism as well. What was essentially new about the practice, obvi-
ous though it may seem, was the attempt to write about music itself. From the
Classical standpoint, based on the venerable doctrine of imitation, instru-
mental music was unworthy of serious attention because it did not imitate; it
held no function—other than to accompany dance, or table talk, or the hunt,
or battle charges—beyond a pleasant tickling of the ear. “Sonata, what do you
want of me?” (i.e., “What are you trying to say?”) queried Fontenelle irritably,
in a quip taken up by Rousseau and others. Only through association with
words could music imitate, that is, express emotion, and thereby attain some
semblance of value. Painting, more obviously capable of imitation, ranked
beneath literature but well above music. At the Conservatoire Berlioz was
taught that instrumental music was a minor form of the art that Haydn, in
any case, had taken as far as it could go. Verbal programs sometimes came to
the aid of instrumental music, but Classical verbal programs tended either
drastically to overreach their claims or to propose relatively trivial objects of
imitation, such as natural sounds. In opera, the orchestra’s part was to set the
background, often with imitative scenes from nature, while the voices held
forth dramatically on the stage.
Beethoven’s symphonies proved incontrovertibly that music alone could
equal the power of any opera or spoken drama—indeed, that it could sur-
pass them, upsetting Classical dogma entirely. Such a novel idea had already
become an article of faith among the early German Romantics by the end of
the eighteenth century; but it was an essay by Hoffmann that most famously
transmitted the idea to the rest of Europe. Another man of multiple talents,
Hoffmann the story writer was also a composer and critic, whose essay “On
Instrumental Music” first appeared in the Leipziger allgemeine musikalische
Zeitung in 1810. The essay begins by dismissing the idea that music should imi-
tate, mocking rising sunsets and paltry battle symphonies—of which a recent
one by the French composer Louis Jadin no doubt irritated him especially,
given his fierce resentment of the Napoleonic invasion of Prussia. By con-
trast, he extolled the instrumental music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven
as embodying music in its essence. While the Classics reproved music for its
frustrating “vagueness,” Hoffmann glorified that quality as the very source
of music’s power—a power capable of transporting listeners beyond words,
beyond everyday reality into a sublime “Orphic world.” As example, he
evoked Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.
Hoffmann’s essay became known in France at the same time his stories
came into vogue around 1830; Fétis published parts of it in his Revue musicale
on the day before the first performance of Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique.
His timing was no accident: when by way of friendly publicity he had pub-
lished the symphony’s program the week before, he had added a warning à la
Hoffmann to the effect that programs diminished an art whose very nature,
properly understood, repudiated abstractions or imitations. For a man whom
Berlioz would pillory two years later—most unfairly—as an old fogey, this
was to express advanced ideas. Yet in Berlioz’s case it was also to misconstrue
them. As it happens, Berlioz had already voiced the same Hoffmannesque
principles several weeks earlier in his manifesto on Classic and Romantic in
music, where he lauds the instrumental music of Beethoven and Weber as all
the more powerful for its “vague,” twilight powers of expressiveness. Clearly,
he identified not with Jadin and his like but with Beethoven. On several
occasions (as in footnotes to his program) he took the trouble to explain the
difference (see #18). In January 1837 a long essay, “On Imitation in Music”
(translated in Edward Cone’s Norton pocket edition of the symphony),
gave his fullest defense against the charges of trivial imitation launched at
him by Fétis and others. The details need not concern us; the upshot is that
Berlioz considered himself to have done in his first symphony precisely what
Beethoven had done in his Fifth. Both were symphonic dramas, in his view,
concerned not with external characters, as in the theater, but with the emo-
tions and inner turmoil of the composer himself. To read Berlioz’s description
of his own first movement together with that of Beethoven’s first movement
is to see plainly that spiritual affinity (see #27).
Whatever we may think of Berlioz’s reading of Beethoven, there is a close
kinship in the way that Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and Berlioz’s Symphonie
fantastique each made history as its composer’s central, signature work. There
is also a kinship in the way both works promoted the idea of a symphony as a
production of major importance to be taken as a whole—one and indivisible.
Before Beethoven, it was common practice for symphonies to be performed
piecemeal, or with movements in random order at the whim of the per-

formers. Remnants of that practice may be found in early programs at the
Conservatoire: the slow movement of the Seventh Symphony was a favorite
choice for separate performance; in its first two performances, the Ninth was
given with two movements at the start of the program, two at the end, in
different configurations. Countering such practices, Beethoven’s Fifth incor-
porated musical elements that worked to make its unity ironclad. Some were
subtle (thematic, harmonic, structural) but others obvious: the Scherzo lead-
ing without interruption to the Finale in a dramatic transition that Berlioz
was to describe memorably in his analysis; a part of the Scherzo showing up
again in the Finale; the Finale itself crowning the work as a kind of operatic
apotheosis that would inspire other grand finales forever after.
Berlioz took Beethoven’s model of symphonic unity and made it so bla-
tant as to startle even the dullest of listeners to attention. The most important
function of his program was no more than that: to make people give his music
the same undivided attention as to a spoken drama. He also used the program
to justify his most obvious unifying device, the first-movement motif that
partly recurs in each of the subsequent movements, otherwise known (bor-
rowing from contemporary psychology) as an idée fixe. Conceivably, he could
have made his theme recur without bothering to explain. Beethoven would
have served as a partial precedent, as would operas in the early part of the
century, where proto-leitmotifs were used a good half century before Wagner.
But it seems likely that Berlioz hit on the ideas of his idée fixe and his Artist
scenario simultaneously. In adopting both he crucially reoriented his original
plan, which had been to write a Faust symphony—an instrumental counter-
part to his vocal Eight Scenes from Faust of 1828. His inspiration, sometime
in the early months of 1830, to present those distinct scenes as chapters of
“his” story proved decisive, not only in marking the work as an unmistakable
whole, but in giving it beacon status for composers throughout the century
and beyond.
Today most people take it for granted that art gives us projections of an
artist’s self (though New Critics and formalists worked hard to teach us oth-
erwise). But when the Romantics explored that idea—following Rousseau—
at the end of the eighteenth century, it was unprecedented. The French
writer Chateaubriand, regarded by artists of the generation of 1830 as their
direct spiritual ancestor, did his part to establish it in 1802 with a popular
short novel, René (part of a larger work presenting Christianity—more pre-
cisely, Catholicism—to a post-Revolutionary, post-Enlightenment world as
worth reviving for its beauty), whose hero embodied the new idea of art as
confession. René transparently spoke for its author of the same name, or at
least for those parts of his psyche that were brooding, introspective, suffering,
world-weary—the characteristic moods of the Romantic hero. In his pro-
gram, Berlioz made explicit allusion to René’s trademark vague des passions,
a phrase coined by Chateaubriand to sum up the emotions just listed, while
conveniently displaying the single word, “vague,” most commonly associated
with instrumental music. Partly it was the up-to-date allusions in his program
that made Berlioz’s symphony so modern in 1830—besides Chateaubriand,
the text also refers to Hugo, Goethe, De Quincey (who triggered the idea
of opium-induced nightmares), and of course Hoffmann. The symphony
thus presented itself as the equivalent of a Romantic confessional novel, or
of dramas such as Hamlet and Faust understood as self-projections of their
authors, or of lyric poetry, newly risen like instrumental music in the artistic
hierarchy and similarly considered an outpouring of authorial self. Classical
art had nothing to do with self-expression. No Classical composer had ever
done with a program anything remotely like what Berlioz did with his, and
no music had ever sounded or behaved like the Symphonie fantastique.
Hoffmann was not much concerned with Beethoven’s Fifth as a story
of self, but he was obsessed with its integrity as a unified whole. The over-
riding aim of his essay was to defend Beethoven’s music from contemporary
charges of disorderly conduct—of throwing out his ideas helter-skelter in the
wild abandon of untamed genius. “But what if it were you, oh men of deep
understanding and insight,” Hoffmann asked ironically, “whose eyes were
too shortsighted to see the deep inner coherence in Beethoven’s works?” The
question points to an entirely new role for music criticism. For the first time
a critic is seen not as a detached judge or recorder of contemporary musical
events, but as a defender and guide for music too demanding to be under-
stood without help. In order to fill the role of guide and to defend Beethoven
against charges of disunity, Hoffmann found himself compelled to go into
considerable technical detail. Writing for the Leipzig music journal where
he published the first version of his essay, he could count on readers knowl-
edgeable about music, so he added a long second part where he provided a
close technical analysis of the symphony, driving home its multiple thematic
and harmonic unifying features. Berlioz could not have known this part
of Hoffmann’s analysis, which was never translated into French; at most
he might have learned of it through his German-speaking friends, who are
unlikely to have provided a full translation. What he knew was the lyrical,
rearranged first part of Hoffmann’s piece incorporated in his Kreisleriana,
from where it made its way into various French translations.
Schumann’s long analysis of the Symphonie fantastique follows Hoffmann’s

dual model. Indeed Schumann went so far in his early practice as to assign
names to his contrasting styles, both musical and critical—one lyrical and
introverted (Eusebius), another rational, extroverted, and fiery (Florestan).
Absent the fieriness, the latter mode harks back to Hoffmann’s technical
manner and looks ahead to analyses by music theorists of the future. Berlioz
too exhibits a variety of styles in his criticism, as we have had occasion to
observe in distinguishing the lyrical evocations of his critique admirative
from the light or heavy satire of his critical attacks. Yet that division has
little to do with the two-pronged approach of Hoffmann and Schumann,
which responds directly to the challenge of evoking music in words. Berlioz
never produced a full-blown technical analysis in the manner of his German
fellow critics (his orchestration treatise might serve as the closest equiva-
lent: there we find lyrical, descriptive elements—those initially published in
the Revue et gazette musicale—followed by technical sections for profession-
als). Nor would he have wanted to, even if he had been fully acquainted with
Hoffmann’s and Schumann’s precedent. Berlioz and his generation in France
were suspicious of technical analysis, which they associated with the fossil-
ized practices of theorists and professors. Noting that musicians such as Fétis
and Castil-Blaze, not to mention his teachers at the Conservatoire, remained
immune to much of Beethoven’s music, Berlioz saw that responsive listening
required more than technical expertise. In his earliest piece on Beethoven,
apropos of the op. 131 string quartet, which had mesmerized Berlioz and a
few others but caused most of the audience to flee, he speculates that it takes a
listener versed in suffering to understand, one capable of identifying with the
composer’s expressions of intense emotion. Novelists were better at such acts
of empathy than many expert musicians. So at the very moment when the
champions of professional music criticism had largely won their cause, such
writers as Balzac, Sand, and Janin, amateurs to varying degrees in their musi-
cal knowledge, nevertheless came to the fore at the Gazette musicale, where
their poetic eloquence helped fight the good fight for “poetic music.”
Berlioz could easily have produced technical analyses. His writings bear
traces of such, especially in the years 1834–36. Yet even when addressing musi-
cally educated readers, his technicalities remain few compared to Hoffmann’s
and Schumann’s. The very word “analysis,” coming from Berlioz’s pen, must
be understood in a sense different from its ordinary use as a branch of theory.
Opera reviews supply a hint: each began, as we saw, with a plot summary,
called analyse de la pièce—literally, “analysis of the play.” In Berlioz’s analyses
of Beethoven’s symphonies or other works, there subsists an element of that
narrative background from opera. Berlioz tells us the story of the music, as it
were, leading us to follow along and take in what the composer is telling, as
though in a plot summary.
Above all, a Berliozian analysis is not a technical dissection. It might
rather be called a narrative description, even if that phrase would count as an
oxymoron in reference to a Balzac novel, where the objective narrative or sto-
ryline stands out against a descriptive background provided by the authorial
voice. In fact, distinctions between narrative and authorial voice do obtain in
Berlioz’s criticism, as in Balzac, and to speak of his narrative descriptions is
not to discount those distinctions. At least three separate voices emerge, each
representing a different solution to the problem of evoking music in words: a
lyrical “I” registering impressionistic, individual responses to musical stimuli,
even to the point of daydreaming (like Schumann’s Eusebius); an alert, feisty
“you” (like Schumann’s Florestan) summoning readers, on the contrary, to lis-
ten intently to the story or message being told; finally, a purportedly detached
third person, the voice of critics as we ordinarily think of them, meting out
judgments from on high about the music and its composer. We read Berlioz
to hear all those voices. We also read him to learn about musical conditions in
his time; about composers now famous but then just becoming known, such
as Schubert, Chopin, and Liszt; and about composers, performers, persons
and practices long since forgotten. We read him to detect the biases he brings
as a composer to the music of others, and thereby to learn more about his own
musical practice. And we read him because he pulls us irresistibly into his
world and makes us want to read on.
1
Musical Polemic
On “Dilettanti”
Satire of audience behavior, a constant of Berlioz’s criticism, begins early: we

find it already in this piece, his second known venture into print. The general
topic is an ongoing French-style “Quarrel” pitting Gluck, the operatic reformer of
the 1770s, against the upstart Rossini, who is about to arrive in Paris to take the
helm at the Théâtre-Italien. Contrary to Stendhal, a defender of Rossini from
the start, the young Berlioz passionately identifies with Gluck and admires his
grand expressive style, still in vogue at the Opéra. In mocking Théâtre-Italien
dilettantes, he contrasts Italian bel canto, which sought in a libretto mere pre-
texts for vocal embellishment, with French-language opera in the Gluckian
tradition, which demanded fidelity to the text, and whose supreme interpreter
was the dramatic soprano Caroline Branchu. Make no mistake: the “ highly tal-
ented, influential musician” Berlioz pretends to quote is none other than him-
self, though his views were unquestionably shared by the likes of Lesueur, Reicha,
and Cherubini.
z January 11, 1824

Le Corsaire
Monsieur Le Corsaire
Sir:
Your Musical Polemics having slowed down for the moment, allow me to take
the opportunity to mention a discussion I recently heard, on which I would
welcome your opinion. Who and what, it was asked, are “dilettanti”?1 From a
highly talented, influential musician I heard the following explanation.
“They are men of taste,” he said, “who attend only the Théâtre-Italien,
never read scores—you can easily guess why—and pass peremptory judg-
ment on the merits of everything: works, singers, orchestras. They are of
such delicate sensitivity that they can barely breathe when they hear that
‘heart-rending’ moment in Rossini’s La Gazza ladra when the servant is led
to her death.2 Yet performances of Gluck at the Opéra—Iphigénie en Aulide
or Iphigénie en Tauride—or of Salieri’s Les Danaïdes leave them utterly
unmoved.”3 I asked why.
“The truth is, you see, the singing at the Opéra is third-rate. Over there,
they think it’s enough to be dramatic, even sublime, and do nothing but ren-
der the composer’s intention. What could be more ridiculous than Madame
Branchu singing Clytemnestra?4 Why, she doesn’t add a single note to her
part, especially in the aria ‘Jupiter, lance ta foudre,’ which is, after all, so easy
to embellish! A run of a dozen notes on the first line, for example, would
give an admirable picture of lightning flashes across the sky. On the second,
‘Que sous tes coups écrasés les Grecs soient réduits en poudre,’ a martelle-
ment would do very nicely for the crushing of the Greeks; and the final line,
‘Dans leurs vaisseaux embrasés,’ would sound far better with a trilled chro-
matic scale to match the flames swirling up from the blazing vessels.5 That,
sir, is the style that your ‘dilettanti’ invariably demand of singers; and as long
1. The word “dilettante” was current in French since 1740 in its original Italian sense of “one
who delights in,” i.e., a music lover. Berlioz uses the word in its modern sense of ignorant
amateur; the word “amateur,” by contrast, he elsewhere dignifies as denoting a serious music
lover. Lexical issues are a mere pretext for polemics.
2. Rossini’s two-act opera The Thieving Magpie (1817) was first given at the Théâtre-Italien on
September 18, 1821. The “heart-rending” moment when the servant girl, unjustly accused of
theft, is led to her death is in Act II, sc. 15, No. 16. Following a chorus of lamentation, “Infelice
aventurata,” she sings her affecting “Deh tu reggi in tal momento.”
3. Gluck’s three-act Iphigenia in Aulis was created at the Opéra in 1774; Iphigenia in Tauris,
his last Paris opera, dates from 1779. On the latter, and Berlioz’s early discovery of Gluck, see
#17. Antonio Salieri’s Les Danaïdes is the gruesome story of the murder by the daughters of
Danaus, on his orders, of their bridegrooms, and of the daughters’ murder, in turn, by the one
bridegroom who is spared. First performed at the Opéra in 1784, Salieri’s work was revived at
the Opéra shortly before Berlioz’s arrival in Paris in 1822.
4. Clytemnestre is the heroine of Iphigenia in Aulis. Berlioz could have heard Branchu sing
the part in April, May, and December 1822 and in April and August 1823.
5. Berlioz quotes from Clytemnestre’s aria in Act III, sc. 6 (“Jupiter, lance ta foudre”). The
lines he refers to may be rendered, in order: “Jupiter, let your lightning bolts fly,” “May your
blows crush the Greeks into dust,” and “Burning up in their ships.”
1. “Dilettanti,” Rossini vs. Gluck 29
as Madame Branchu is content to make her listeners merely tremble and

weep, as long as she persists in not singing Hypermnestre the same way she
does ‘Quel calme à mes esprits rappelle’ from Les Mystères d’Isis or the aria
‘Que j’aime à voir ces hommages flatteurs’ from Iphigénie en Aulide, they will
maintain that she is just screaming.6
“As for Dérivis, don’t even mention him! He is their obsession. Particularly
as Oreste in Iphigénie en Aulide, they find him frightful, just terrible. Can you
imagine Bordogni thrashing about like him as Ottavio in Don Giovanni? 7
A ‘dilettante’ couldn’t risk saying anything favorable about the Opéra orches-
tra. It is good form to complain of its ear-splitting noise, without bothering
to ask whether it’s the players or the composer who should be blamed for let-
ting the accompaniment overpower the voices.8 The ‘dilettante’ would take
care not to acknowledge the orchestra’s beautiful work in La Mort d’Abel or
Oedipe9 or—shall I go on?—simply because it is the orchestra of the Opéra. In
a word, a ‘dilettante’ is a man of breeding known for his constant talk about
music and his lack of common sense, especially when he talks about music.”
That, sir, is the judgment I heard. We are now eager to hear yours. It will
perhaps be different from the one I have just relayed, but I am counting on
your impartiality to publish my letter in one of your forthcoming issues.
Very truly, etc.

H. B. . . .
6. Berlioz is arguing that the high dramatic role of Hypermnestre, the daughter who, in
Les Danaïdes, disobeys her father’s orders and spares her husband, requires a different sort
of delivery from the gentle pieces he mentions, the first from Les Mystères d’Isis (Act III, sc.
2), the 1801 arrangement by Lachnith of Mozart’s Magic Flute (see #37), and the second from
Gluck’s Iphigenia in Aulis (Act I, sc. 5, Clytemnestra’s aria).
7. The Italian-born tenor Marco Bordogni (1789–1856) had an influential career at the
Théâtre-Italien and the Conservatoire. Berlioz implies a difference between the roles of
Oreste in Gluck and of Ottavio in Mozart as well as between two performance styles.
8. Berlioz is admitting that even his admired composers need to learn a thing or two about
instrumentation. Already at this stage, his awareness of this facet of the art stands out.
9. Operas by Rodolphe Kreutzer (1810) and Antonio Sacchini (1787), respectively, that
Berlioz often mentions with admiration.
2
Musical Polemic
On Ar mide and Gluck
In an apt preface to his critical career, Berlioz offers here a brief description of
the music critic’s task. Equipped with literary talent and musical expertise, he
declares,the critic should analyze works in light of their guiding principles, rather
than carp about minor matters in dilettante fashion, as in a recent journalistic
skirmish apropos of Gluck's Armide. Young though he is, Berlioz already exhib-
its the skills he calls for, and with an assurance beyond his years, he turns them
brazenly against the Parisian critical establishment, in particular the eminent
Castil-Blaze, who signed as “XXX,” and whose post at the Journal des débats
Berlioz would inherit ten years later. In fairness, it might be noted that Berlioz
would one day criticize Wagner for the same fault he pronounces irrelevant here
when found in Gluck's music, namely the echo of a popular tune.
z December 19, 1825

Le Corsaire
To the Editor
Sir:
If Gluck came back from the dead and could witness the childish exchanges
that the reprise of one of his masterpieces has recently sparked in the literary
press, he would shake his head in pity.1 “What!” he would probably say, “can
1. Berlioz refers to a recent journalistic skirmish in L’Opinion on the occasion of a perfor-

mance of Armide at the Opéra on December 7. The arguments concerned resemblances
between certain of Gluck’s melodies and popular French tunes, a misprint in the score, and
2. Armide and Gluck 31
they find nothing to discuss in Armide beyond engraving errors or would-be

snippets of popular tunes? . . . Is there no man with a bit of literary talent
who knows enough about dramatic music to analyze my work, convey some
notion of the spirit behind it, and reveal the flashes of genius that escape a
public blinded by the prejudices of the moment?”
I certainly don’t have all the qualifications needed to fulfill this task, but
though I may lack sufficient knowledge of literature, I know enough about
music to venture a contribution or two to the ongoing polemic. I know all of
Gluck by heart; I have even memorized most of the orchestral parts; I have
copied out several of his scores for practice.2 In short, I think I know Gluck
as thoroughly as possible.
As a result, it seems clear to me that the dispute between a certain French
dilettante and the reviewer for L’Opinion includes both errors and truths, and
many misunderstandings. “Ah!” the two will cry, “here’s a new thought: we’re
both wrong, and this amateur is all for treating us like the Litigants in La
Fontaine!”3
Don’t be upset, gentlemen. To begin with, I am no amateur, but an artist,
a composer. As such, I can speak about my art with the assurance conferred
by extensive musical study, close knowledge of the great masters, and deep
reflection. And so:
Monsieur Ph. C.4 is right that there is a harmonic error in the place he
cites; it is probably an engraver’s slip, since the same passage recurs correctly
eleven consecutive times in different keys.
The dilettante is right that another passage, unmentioned by Monsieur
Ph. C., contains a row of six parallel fifths between the flutes and violins,
which Gluck certainly composed deliberately and veiled with stunning skill.
Monsieur Ph. C. is wrong to say that the fifths he cites are ear-splitting
and that any child would recognize them. In fact, many people with at least as
much experience as a little girl who plays Clementi have never been disturbed
a case of six parallel fifths in a row. Berlioz is pleased to prove that Gluck’s “error” with those
parallel fifths was intentional.
2. In Mem., chap. 5, p. 23, Berlioz tells how he copied out entire scores of Gluck’s operas at the
Conservatoire library, even before he had given up his medical studies.
3. The reference is to La Fontaine’s fable “The Oyster and the Plaintiffs” (“L’Huître et les
plaideurs,” Book 9, no. 9), in which a dispute over an oyster is resolved by a judge who eats the
oyster, dividing the shell between the plaintiffs.
4. Philarète Chasles (1798–1873), literary critic (for L’Opinion at this time, obviously) and
professor, eventually at the Collège de France.
by those fifths; and there is every reason to suppose that, were the effect as
awful as claimed, Monsieur Valentino, certainly one of the finest conductors in
Europe,5 would have corrected the flawed passage.
The dilettante is wrong that the phrase “Quand on peut mépriser les charmes
de l’amour”6 bears no relation to the tune “Toto Carabo.”7
But Ph. C. is far more seriously mistaken to have pointed out such a connec-
tion, for it was the declamation in Armide that recalled the children’s refrain,
and it is just as laughable to link those two pieces as it is to claim—as some peo-
ple have done—that the Hunters’ Chorus in Robin des bois resembles the folk
song about Malbrough just because the third part of the Chorus is remarkably
close to the opening of that medieval air. 8 There is a passage in the famous aria
from Figaro “Mon cœur soupire!” that is just like the popular tune “Vive Henri
Quatre!”9
Surely, Gluck never imagined that his work would be subjected to ridicule on
such grounds, any more than did Weber or Mozart.
The outburst at the end of the dilettante’s article is, for me, a bit much. But
who could resist a surge of indignation upon reading some of those reviews of
Armide, especially the one by Monsieur XXX in the Journal des débats?10 What’s
this? The finale of the first act “produces no effect”? The cry “Notre général vous
rappelle” “brings forth no emotion”?11 The arias of Renaud and Armide are
5. He had just conducted Berlioz’s Messe solennelle (1824) the previous summer, to the com-
poser’s great satisfaction.
6. Renaud’s aria in Act II, sc. 1, “When one can scorn the charms of love.” These words actu-
ally come toward the end of the aria, which begins: “Le repos me fait violence” (“Rest does
violence to me”).
7. These nonsense words occur in the refrain of the popular song “Compère Guilleri,” begin-
ning “Il était un p’tit homme.”
8. Robin des bois (Robin Hood) was the title of the French arrangement by Castil-Blaze of
Weber’s Freischütz (1824); the Hunters’ Chorus occurs in Act III, sc. 6, No. 16. The popular
song Berlioz refers to is “Malbrough s’en va-t’en guerre,” in which the name of a French noble-
man is often confused with that of the eighteenth-century British General Marlborough
(Berlioz actually spells it Malbourough).
9. “Mon cœur soupire” (“My heart sighs”) from Mozart’s Figaro, the famous “Voi che sapete,”
is Cherubino’s aria from Act II, sc. 3, No. 2. The popular sixteenth-century tune Berlioz men-
tions (“Long live Henry IV!”) served under the Restoration as a kind of national hymn, on
words celebrating “Louis” rather than “Henri.”
10. December 10, 1825. In his two-volume De l’opéra (1820), Castil-Blaze calls for profes-
sional qualifications for music critics, much as Berlioz does here.
11. What Berlioz calls a “fearsome war cry” (“Our commander summons you”) occurs in Act
V, sc. 3. Elsewhere (GM, June 8, 1834—see the companion website ), Berlioz pronounces
it a stroke of genius on the part of the composer, who added it to Quinault’s libretto himself,
though part of its effectiveness, Berlioz admits, came from features added by French arrangers.
2. Armide and Gluck 33
“undeveloped and always seem cut short”? The whole work is composed in “a
false system of declamation that we (!)” have happily left behind?
Ah, poor devils! What’s wrong with you? There is no blood in your veins
if you’re not stirred by the fearsome war cry that summons Renaud, calling
the lover back to glory! . . . But who is this “we”? Who, Monsieur XXX,
has left Gluck’s system behind? Who, Monsieur XXX, finds the first half
of the music of Armide laughable? Who, Monsieur XXX, finds the libretto
worthless, the principal role antimusical, the stage decorations cheap, the bal-
lets stale? Why, it’s Monsieur XXX! But who, one may ask, is this inexorable
critic, this righter of wrongs, this universal fault-finder? Surely some great
composer, some lyric poet, or at least a member of the Academy . . . Well, no;
better than all that, it is Monsieur Castil-Blaze.
H. B.
It looks ahead to the laconic cries of “Italie!” that pry Aeneas away from Dido’s arms and back
to his mission in Berlioz’s own opera Les Troyens.
3
The Arts
Observations on Classical Music
and Romantic Music
The following manifesto for musical Romanticism could also be taken as a pref-
ace to Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique, which after many delays was finally
nearing performance. “No disrespect to Mahler or Shostakovich,” writes Michael
Steinberg of the revolutionary work, “ but this is the most remarkable First
Symphony ever written.1 What made it remarkable was, among other things, its
date, only three years after Beethoven’s death, and its defiance of Conservatoire
teachings dismissive of the genre. For Berlioz as for Victor Hugo, Romanticism
meant above all freedom from rules (later he recanted the label, noting that the
great Classical composers, too, ignored the rules when it suited them). Like Hugo
in his poetic manifestoes, or like Rousseau and Montesquieu in the previous cen-
tury, Berlioz returns to basic principles in calling for liberty in music, “the most
essentially free of all the arts.” Why the freest? Because of its independence from
words. Music, “servant of the word” for the Classics, has overthrown its master.
z October 22, 1830

Le Correspondant
1. The Symphony: A Listener’s Guide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 60.
3. Classical and Romantic Music 35
If such a distinction obtains in literature, all the more must it obtain in music,
the most essentially free of all the arts, yet the longest fettered by prejudice
and arbitrary rules.2
Before proceeding any further, I need to explain what I understand by
music and enumerate its means of action.3 Music is the art of using sounds to
move persons who are sensitive, intelligent, educated, and endowed with imagi-
nation. It speaks to them alone, which is why it is not made for everyone.4
Only by presuming it capable of attaining so lofty a goal can music be con-
sidered an art; viewed in any other way, it is only noise acting with variable
strength on the human nervous system. Indeed, rolling thunder, cannon fire,
the sounds of bells or drums, birdsong, the murmur of the wind or water or
woods move us in various ways, but not musically.5 All such sensations consti-
tute music no more than a rainbow constitutes painting.
Feeling for music probably first arose from rhythm; at least, that is the form
in which it emerged among uncivilized nations and our own ignorant masses.
It is the power of rhythm that spurs thousands of men to charge ahead in the
face of death. It is rhythm that makes the beat of the tam-tam, monotonous
though it is, entrance its black listeners.6 It is rhythm, again, that gives such
power to certain popular songs whose only merit is their strong, simple beat.
Feeling for melody comes directly after rhythm among both primitive and
civilized peoples. But what is truly remarkable is that, in the bushman as in
the peasant, melodic feeling is sometimes accompanied by a very acute sense
of expression, which, in contrast, occurs only seldom among city dwellers.
2. Berlioz echoes the famous opening of Rousseau’s Social Contract: “Man is born free, yet is
everywhere in chains.”
3. Berlioz will list four basic elements: rhythm, melody, expression, and harmony. In a later
piece (RGM, September 10, 1837), ultimately used as the first chapter of Art of Music, he adds
five other elements to the list.
4. The allusion is to a recent book by Fétis on music for the layman or tout le monde, “every-
one” (La musique mise à la portée de tout le monde, 1830). Berlioz’s definition of music is a
far cry from the traditional one by Rousseau in his Dictionnaire de musique (1758): “Art of
combining sounds in a manner pleasing to the ear,” which Fétis alters to “the art of moving
listeners by the combination of sounds.”
5. It is curious to find Berlioz including bells and drums in this list; he famously calls for a
great bell in his symphony. In his Treatise on Orchestration he will define as musical instru-
ment any sound-making device used as such by a composer. Imitation—e.g., of bird calls,
as in Beethoven’s “Pastoral” Symphony—is a separate matter but falls for Berlioz under the
same general rule: it must be used musically.
6. Berlioz uses the word nègres, “Negroes.” Despite a demonstrable openness of mind with
regard to race, Berlioz shows an ignorance of African drum music on a par with his designa-
tion of its native listeners as primitive.
Swiss airs almost all bear a stamp of artless and tender simplicity perfectly
in keeping with the folkways of the Helvetian shepherds. Many Scottish airs,
on the contrary, are infused with a kind of savage pride and virile energy. The
MacGregor clan anthem “We Are Scots,” among others, is admirable;7 there
is no need to hear the words of this mountain song to recognize the highland
native reveling in his strength and freedom.
The Neapolitan tarantellas, with their rapid movement and syllabic verse,
give rise to the sort of grinning hilarity that is at one and the same time human
and simian, and that the local urchins love to display. Certain Spanish airs sung
by paupers as they go begging for alms have such a groveling whine about them
that someone I know can’t hear them without feeling a profound disgust along
with a raging itch all over his body.8
City dwellers have no songs specifically tied to their routines or to their vari-
ous occupations—far from it. Indeed their sense of expression is so weak, in all
fairness, as to be deemed nonexistent. Here is one proof in a thousand. Imagine
an audience in the provinces or even a capital city attending an opera. If the
singer emits a sound that is off-key or merely suspect, the public will spontane-
ously show its discomfort and disapproval. The music itself, however, might be a
complete misconstruction—might run completely counter to the dramatic situ-
ation or to the nature of the characters and their emotions—might be a waltz
instead of a funeral march or a contredanse instead of an aria full of rage. As
long as it has a graceful melody and rapid rhythm, no one will be troubled. It will
all be thought charming; some listeners may even be enraptured; the composer
will be fêted; and whole populations will deify as the greatest of artists the crafty
businessman who laughs behind their backs.9
Few people have a naturally developed sense of harmony. True, we some-
times encounter in Italy, in Germany, in southern France bands of workers
whose choral singing is not too bad, but it is limited to an extremely narrow
range of chords, sometimes used very inappropriately.10 Many of these singers,
7. A reference to “Scots, wha hǽ wi Wallace bled” (“Scots who have with Wallace bled”),
the unofficial national anthem of Scotland ever since Robert Burns penned the words to an
ancient tune, one that Berlioz would use in his overture Rob Roy.
8. This “certain person” is of course Berlioz himself. One thinks of the whining music he
assigns the innkeeper going over the bill in Benvenuto Cellini.
9. These details all point to the immensely celebrated Rossini—that is, to Berlioz’s view of
his character and of the dramatic incongruities in his tragic operas.
10. Berlioz avoids saying the chords are incorrect but implies that harmony requires train-
ing. As composer, he shows great harmonic daring compared with his teachers, yet he puzzles
especially in Germany, have received some sort of musical instruction, so that

it is often easy to mistake for an innate sense of harmony what is merely the
product of memory and imitation.
Once rhythm, melody, expressiveness, and harmony were seen to be the
principal means by which music functions, it is easy to understand that musi-
cians would note the most advantageous ways of putting them to use and,
reflecting on those observations, would draft a code of rules to guide them
in practicing their art. But when music was in its infancy, instances were few,
so that observations were necessarily limited as well. No one at that time sus-
pected that a musical effect could radically shift in character depending on its
manner of presentation. Not allowing for the possibility of conflicting obser-
vations, the early musicians did not hesitate to write in their treatises “This is
bad; that is good.”
As instruments improved from day to day,11 and as singers became increas-
ingly numerous and proficient, chance itself contributed to the appearance
of musical forms prohibited by the schools. Since the effect of many of these
forms is all the more powerful for being less commonly used, some younger
artists eagerly seized upon them, while their elders, vexed to see their doc-
trines questioned and perhaps even more to see the emergence of composi-
tions more colorful than their own, denounced innovation as a crime and
redoubled their strict observance of the old rules.
At that point, it was no longer tolerable to evaluate a score that one had
merely heard; a score had to be read to determine whether it was well written.
Then, depending on its greater or lesser departure from the accepted norms,
it was assigned a higher or lower grade irrespective of the effect it might pro-
duce. The process went still further: not only was it absolutely necessary to
follow the schoolbook rules down to their last detail; it was also forbidden
to aim for effects not mentioned in the rules and consequently not even in
conflict with them.
Certain Classical authorities had such abiding faith in their musical reli-
gion that they could not imagine anyone might think of not respecting it.12
over certain extreme dissonances in Beethoven and later expresses dismay at the profusion of
diminished seventh chords in Wagner.
11. In his essay of 1837 (see n. 3), Berlioz lists instrumentation among the elements of music.
The important role of instrumentation in his music made his scores difficult to render on the
piano, putting him at a disadvantage in the Academy’s Prix de Rome competition, where the
cantatas were performed with piano accompaniment.
12. Berlioz echoes views of current teachers at the Conservatoire, notably Berton and the for-
midable Cherubini. In Mem., chapter 13, Berlioz writes that Cherubini “carried his obeisance
When they were called upon to judge a work composed outside the rules,
then, even if the composer’s knowledge of his art, talent, and genius were a
thousand times greater than their timid creativity could ever allow, they, in
all their innocence, ascribed his alleged mistakes to ignorance.
Spontini, for example, was a poor fellow who was not totally without talent,
but who, in the eyes of true connoisseurs did not enjoy much esteem.13 Weber was
a madman with a barbarous, disordered style, whose music could be duplicated
by overturning an inkwell on music paper. Beethoven was a sort of maniac with
occasional flashes of genius. La Vestale and Cortez were a fine mess,14 Freischütz
an absurdity, and the C Minor Symphony thumping debauchery.
It is no doubt to their thorough knowledge of the mistakes of these poor
musicians that we are to attribute the success of our illustrious Classical
authorities in avoiding such errors in their own works.
The Romantic composers, in contrast, gather their forces under the slogan
“Creation is free.” They deny themselves nothing; everything belonging to
the realm of music is theirs to use. This statement by Victor Hugo provides
their motto: “Art has no truck with handcuffs or boundaries or muzzles. It
tells the man of genius, ‘Go!’—and leaves him free to roam in the great gar-
den of poetry where there is no forbidden fruit.”15
The first to break the schoolmasters’ chains and free himself of the even
heavier yoke of routine was Gluck.16 He innovated in almost every respect.
I do not believe that his direct goal was to broaden the reach of music; he
was simply following the irresistible drive of his dramatic genius. Endowed
with an extraordinary sense of expression and a rare knowledge of the human
to the Law to the point of suppressing his own musical judgment—as when he says in his
Treatise on Counterpoint, ‘This harmonic setting seems to me preferable to that one, but the
old masters thought otherwise and we must defer to them.’ ” See also #39 on Reicha, charged
with cultivating music “for the eye” rather than the ear.
13. Berlioz quotes Berton to this effect in a letter of November 29, 1827, to Humbert Ferrand.
14. Operas by Spontini of 1807 and 1809, sponsored respectively by Josephine and Napoleon
and among the works Berlioz most fervently admired.
15. Preface of January 1829 to Victor Hugo’s volume Les Orientales. Hugo writes simply: “It
[Art] tells you: Go!” Berlioz replaces “you” with “the man of genius.” He read the volume
enthusiastically when it first appeared and later set to music two of its poems, “Sara la
baigneuse” and “La Captive.”
16. Late in life Berlioz declares: “I am a Classicist.—Romantic? I’ve no idea what that
means.—By Classical art, I mean an art that is young, vigorous and sincere, thoughtful, pas-
sionate, enamored of beautiful forms, perfectly free. Gluck and Beethoven are Classicists;
they never refrained from saying what they wanted, as they wanted, in defiance of certain
rules” (CG, 8:653–54, undated, correspondent unidentified).
heart, he worked exclusively to voice its passions in a language true, pro-

found, and vigorous,17 directing all his musical resources toward that single
end. When the rules did not conflict with his inspiration, he followed them;
when they proved a deterrent, he shrugged them off. His harmony alone
remained limited; he acknowledged only a quite small number of chords and
often used them in an unchanging way. On the other hand, he introduced a
great number of new rhythms, which were then adopted by Mozart. Several
of them have made their way into modern compositions, to the point where
present-day composers find them unavoidable. That powerful genius still
casts a despotic spell over all types of expressive music. He was the first to
turn music into a veritable poetry. And had he not sacrificed everything to his
system, had he made room for greater variety, Gluck could well be regarded as
the Shakespeare of music.18
Among those he influenced most we must include Mozart (in his oper-
atic music),19 Salieri, his pupil Vogel (the composer of the divine score of
Démophon), and Méhul. Spontini is generally thought of as belonging to his
school; however, he bears no relation to Gluck beyond a shared truthfulness
of expression. Spontini’s impassioned loves, heroic pomp, martial pride, vocal
and instrumental lavishness, orchestral frenzies, recitatives with indefinable
melodies, mistakes in diction and prosody (only in the choruses), profusion of
grand effects—none of these come from the German composer. The author
of Alceste found satisfaction in a simple expression of the emotions—his stat-
ues are unclothed. The author of La Vestale insists on drapery, royal purple,
and garlands of flowers. Gluck’s genius likes to wander up to the gates of Hell,
onto rocky outcrops and arid beaches; Spontini’s dwells in palaces and great
temples, demanding marble and gold.20
One particular type of music wholly unknown to the Classics, a genre
brought to France in the past few years through the compositions of Weber
17. Berlioz uses the word “passions” in its Classical sense of “emotions” or “feelings.”
18. Since the revelatory performances by the Kemble troupe in September 1827, Shakespeare
has become the ultimate reference. Reluctantly, Berlioz admits that his idol, Gluck, is not
quite equal to a title that Beethoven unquestionably merits.
19. Berlioz consistently regarded Mozart’s operas as the truest expression of his genius.
20. On Berlioz’s contrast between Gluck and Spontini there hangs a tale—his “Suicide from
Enthusiasm” (1834), the story of a provincial musician who, as a fanatic of Gluck, is first suspi-
cious of Spontini, then so enamored of La Vestale that he commits suicide after the supreme
bliss of hearing it performed in Paris (Evenings, 134–51).
and Beethoven, is very closely tied to Romanticism. We shall call the genre
instrumental expressiveness.
The instrumental music of the early composers seems not to have any
purpose beyond pleasing the ear or engaging the mind. In the same way, the
instrumental cantilenas of the modern Italians produce a sort of voluptuous
sensation in which heart and imagination play no part. Throughout the com-
positions of Beethoven and Weber, on the other hand, we find evidence of
a poetic turn of mind. It is music on its own, with no verbal help to make
the meaning clear; its language thus becomes extremely vague and precisely
thereby acquires yet greater potency for listeners endowed with imagina-
tion. Like objects glimpsed in semidarkness, its scenes expand and its shapes
become blurred and vaporous. The composer, no longer constrained by the
limited range of the human voice, can give his melodies much greater flexibil-
ity and variety. He can write the most unusual, even the most bizarre, phrases
without fearing that their execution will be impossible—the risk he always
runs when writing for voices. Whence the extraordinary effects, the strange
sensations, the inexpressible emotions produced by Weber’s and Beethoven’s
symphonies, quartets, overtures, and sonatas. This bears no resemblance to
our experience in the theater. There we are in the presence of humanity, with
all its passions. Here a new world opens before us; we are lifted into a higher
sphere of ideas. We feel growing within us the sublime life dreamt of by the
poets, and along with Thomas Moore, we cry: “Oh, divine music! Language,
weak and powerless, retreats before your magic. Why would feeling ever
speak, when you alone can voice its very soul?”21
H. B.
21. Berlioz ends by quoting Moore’s poem “On Music” from a translation by Mme.
Swanton-Belloc (Mélodies irlandaises, no. 37 [Paris, 1823]). Moore’s original reads: “Music,
oh, how faint, how weak, / Language fades before thy spell! / Why should Feeling ever speak,
/ When thou canst breathe her soul so well?” For Berlioz’s own Mélodies irlandaises (Irish
Melodies), op. 2, he chose nine poems, not including this one, as adapted by his friend Thomas
Gounet from the Swanton-Belloc translation.
4
Concert Society of the Conservatoire

First Concert
This piece, the first signed with Berlioz’s full name, begins with a paean to the
great Conservatoire orchestra (Société des concerts du Conservatoire) founded
by Habeneck. To Berlioz, an orchestra is like a well-disciplined army, and the
Conservatoire’s orchestra's arduous early efforts to master a Beethoven sym-
phony—Berlioz could appreciate those struggles from having attended many
of the rehearsals—elicit a comparison between the musicians’ ultimate illumi-
nation and the first sighting by Napoleon's soldiers of the Egyptian pyramids.
Beethoven himself, meanwhile, is hailed as the Shakespeare of music. A Weber
aria and Beethoven’s “Pastoral” Symphony appear in the full flush of Berlioz’s
early enthusiasm, rubbing elbows at the concert with a varied program of works
less sublime.
z April 1833
Revue européenne
What a fine institution! What a noble monument, raised to preserve Art

and protect its existence from all the mercantile foulness that threatens to
destroy it! It is a rare gathering of artists endowed with feeling and under-
standing, with passion and awe, in obedience to the guiding spirit whose
faithful interpreters they are, not usurping his place in the sun but rather
putting his work into even greater relief, weaving their talents and efforts and
separate selves into a single strand, and serving as pedestals to a great statue.
Nothing discourages them. Often the works of the great man whom they
have adopted bristle with disheartening difficulties. Often, on first reading

the vast compositions by the musical Shakespeare, an understanding of the
deeper sense eludes them; their eyes and fingers are too busy for inspiration
to take hold. But the master has implanted such trust in the soul of the per-
formers that they blame themselves if they remain unmoved by the new score.
They redouble their efforts, rehearsing twice, three times, ten times if neces-
sary, till at last chaos clears; the cloud vanishes; the poetic idea emerges with
brilliant clarity. An electric enthusiasm spontaneously courses through the
players; emotion is born; and cries of admiration ring from every music stand,
along with the resounding hail of bows striking the wood of the violins.1 It is
like Napoleon’s army in the middle of the Egyptian desert cheering when the
pyramids suddenly come into view.
Where in Europe could one find the equivalent of such an orchestra? To
those who have traveled through Germany or heard the London Philharmonic
Society I leave the task of comparing and judging. I myself, who have as yet
seen only Italy, will not attempt a comparison.2
The program for Sunday, March 17, comprised the following works: the
“Pastoral” Symphony, the big scene from Freischütz (Agatha’s monologue),
a wind quintet by Reicha, the overture to The Brigand’s Bride, a Credo by
Cherubini, and the overture to Weber’s Ruler of the Spirits. The following
discussion will take them up in reverse order, and for good reason.3
The overture to The Ruler of the Spirits was unknown in Paris; it includes
some lovely effects and flashes of energy that Weber used again later in
Oberon. But it was an unpleasant surprise to find, too, a number of worn-out
cadences and a march whose harmony was banal and pedantic. The work is
no doubt to be attributed to the composer’s early youth, although it strikes
me even so as a thousand times superior to what we hear every day in the
theaters, dressed up as an “overture.”
The Cherubini was applauded at length. The “Incarnatus” in the Credo
is admirable for its expressivity and color. Regrettably, the same cannot
1. Interesting detail: string players today tend to tap their music stands, not their instru-
ments, with the wood of the bow in lieu of clapping.
2. In Italy, Berlioz had encountered little to impress him by way of instrumental resources.
He would have learned about the history of the London Philharmonic and the state of music
in Germany in RM (May and August 1829). For now, the Paris orchestra had no rivals.
3. The two works by Weber on the program are Freischütz, Act II, sc. 8, “Wie nahte mir der
Schlummer” and “Der Beherrscher der Geister” (“Ruler of the Spirits”), Op. 27, the revised
overture from his early opera Rübezahl.
4. Conservatoire: Beethoven, Weber 43
be said of the “Resurrexit,” which struck me as lacking in nobility and

originality.4—F. Ries, who wrote The Brigand’s Bride, is one of Beethoven’s
most distinguished pupils; in Germany, he enjoys a solid reputation as both
pianist and composer.5 Before Sunday’s concert, his overture had been grossly
disparaged—a premature judgment that struck me as unjust in many ways.
The orchestration is perfect, the harmony vigorous, the rhythm full of drive.
Various strident and incisive effects reveal the work’s dramatic inspiration.
But I believe it makes excessive use of violent modulations and ideas: I heard
many brigands but hardly a suggestion of the bride! Scarcely had a poor little
melodic phrase appeared, when it was almost immediately stifled by the mad
shouts of the savage band.
—O Reicha quintet! What do you want of me?6 . . . Of the work, alas, the
less said, the better. . . . Let’s move on.
Here now is Agatha, the German maiden, with her blond tresses, her vir-
ginal heart and soul, her shy, veiled love. She is alone in her modest chamber
open to the light of the moon, alone like Marguerite awaiting Faust and, like
her, anxious and in tears, yet confident of the protection of the Mother of
God, and, like her, too, clasping her hands in prayer in an effort to pry out of
Hell the man who told her, “I love you.”
Oh! it is all so poetically rendered by Weber’s music! What virginity in
that prayer, what soft and melancholy light is shed across the orchestra, what
confidence, what artless abandon in the melody, what harmonies! Then,
when Agatha, spotting her lover in the distance, cries out, “There he is!,”
what an explosion of passion, joy, rapture, enthusiasm, boundless love! But
this outburst, quickly contained by an angelic modesty, softens into a pas-
sionate murmur that seems to escape from the maiden’s lips despite her best
efforts to contain it. Sublime, triply sublime—the recitative, the prayer, the
allegro, the melody, the orchestra, everything! Good God, what beauty! It is
the northern ideal of love, just as the soliloquy in the second act of La Vestale
expresses the ideal of ardent southern love: both of them beyond our grasp
and inimitable. Each of the composers, Spontini and Weber, having just writ-
ten such a page, could raise his head and, hand on heart, tell himself, with the
assurance of genius, “I am a great poet.”
4. The two pieces by Cherubini are from his early Messe solennelle.
5. Ferdinand Ries (1784–1838), Beethoven’s secretary, copyist, and biographer, was the com-
poser of the three-act opera La Fiancée du brigand (Die Räuberbraut), the overture to which
was on the program.
6. Parody of Fontenelle’s famous quip, “Sonate, que me veux-tu?” On Reicha, see #39.
Mlle. Dorus was entrusted with the role of the German girl, but we
heard a young Frenchwoman instead.7 I’ll make no comment on her perfor-
mance: she wouldn’t understand. I will, however, point out to M. Habeneck
that the tempo of the prayer was too fast. To rush this section robs it of much
of the pious and tender quality that constitutes its principal charm. I wouldn’t
dare express this opinion if Benedict, a pupil of Weber who had himself long
conducted Freischütz in Vienna, in line with the traditions he had learned
directly from the composer, had not let us hear this Andante a good twenty
times performed at a much slower tempo.8
Let us now turn to Beethoven. It is as if Michelangelo had decided to
borrow the palette of Poussin and created a great, admirable landscape. The
composer of the “Eroica” Symphony, of Fidelio, now wishes to depict the calm
life of the countryside, the gentle ways of the shepherds . . . Oh, let’s make
no mistake about it; these are not the pink-green beribboned shepherds of
M. de Florian—not at all! This is nature itself. Beethoven entitles the first
movement “Gentle feelings inspired by the sight of a cheerful landscape.” The
shepherds begin to move through the fields with their easy gait, their pipes
heard first in the distance, then up close. Sparkling phrases caress you like
a deliciously scented breeze. Flights—no, flocks of birds go twittering and
chirping overhead, and from time to time the atmosphere seems filled with
vapors: great clouds block out the sun. Then suddenly they dissipate and drop
whole torrents of dazzling light straight down onto the fields and woods.
That is what I imagined upon hearing this movement, and I think that,
despite the imprecision of instrumental language, many listeners have expe-
rienced the same impression. Further along comes a “Scene by the brook.”
Contemplation . . . The composer no doubt created this admirable Adagio
lying in the grass, facing skyward, ear to the wind, fascinated by thousands of
soft shimmerings of sound and light, eyes and ears both open to the sparkling
wavelets of the brook breaking in a hush against the small white stones spar-
kling along the shore. Ravishing.
At this point, the poet throws us into the midst of a “Joyous gather-
ing of peasants.” There’s dancing, there’s laughter—moderate, at first. The
7. Despite the negative comment here, Dorus-Gras was to become one of the leading singers
of the day, and Berlioz would be pleased with her performance in the role of Teresa in his
Benvenuto Cellini at the Opéra six years later.
8. Jules (Sir Julius) Bénédict (1804–1885), composer of German origin whose career unfolded
in Paris, Naples, and London. A student of Weber and Hummel, he transmitted his knowl-
edge of Freischütz to Berlioz.
4. Conservatoire: Beethoven, Weber 45
musette plays a jolly refrain accompanied by a bassoon that can’t emit

more than two notes. Beethoven probably wanted in this way to character-
ize some good old German peasant straddling a beer barrel, armed with a
broken-down old instrument from which he can barely coax the two main
sounds of the fundamental bass: dominant and tonic. Each time the oboe
takes up the musette tune, jovial and naïve like a girl in her Sunday best,
the old bassoon comes along with his two notes. When there is a modu-
lation of the melodic phrase, the bassoon goes mute and patiently waits
until the recurrence of the original key allows it to repeat its imperturb-
able F–C–F. This effect, wonderfully grotesque, went almost completely
unnoticed by the audience. Then the dance grows animated and becomes
wild and noisy. The rhythm changes; a crude two-beat tune announces the
arrival of mountain dwellers with their heavy clogs. The first section, in
triple rhythm, starts up again, livelier than ever. Everything gets caught up
and carried away—the women’s hair goes flying about their shoulders; the
mountaineers have brought in their noisy, wine-stoked carousing; hands
clap; there’s shouting, running, dashing to and fro; it’s sheer frenzy . . .
when distant thunder suddenly casts alarm into the ranks of the revelers
and puts them to flight.
Storm. I despair of being able to give you an idea of this prodigious move-
ment; you need to hear it in order to realize what degree of truth musical
imitation can reach at the hands of a man like Beethoven. Listen, just listen
to those rain-laden blasts of wind, those muffled rumblings in the basses, the
high-pitched whistling of the piccolos foretelling a dreadful storm about to
break. The tempest draws near; it swells. A long chromatic run, initiated in
the highest registers of the orchestra, descends to the lowest depths, grasps
the bass viols and pulls them along, trembles its way back up, like a whirl-
wind overthrowing everything in its way. Then the trombones burst forth;
the thunder of the timpani redoubles in violence. No more is this rain and
wind; it is a frightful cataclysm, a universal flood, the end of the world. It
leaves your head spinning. For my part, every time I hear this storm, the
emotion it creates in me is so intense that I can’t really tell whether it is
pleasure or pain.
The symphony closes with “Feelings of joy and gratitude after the storm.”
Everything then becomes cheerful again; the shepherds reappear and hail
one another on the mountainside; the sky is clear; the waters gradually
recede; there is a rebirth of calm and with it come bucolic airs whose sweet
music brings repose to the soul shaken and disturbed by the sublime horrors
depicted a little while before.
The performance was equal to the composition: ensemble work, vigor,

general intelligence, grace and expressivity, stunning energy: nothing was
lacking. What an admirable orchestra!
Hector Berlioz
5
Music Review
Concerts
Despite the title, this is neither a concert review nor even a preview, since it was
designed to appear on the day of the concert. Rather, it is a pretext for Berlioz
to salute good friends—Franz Liszt, Frédéric Chopin, and Ferdinand Hiller—
and to unburden himself after a disastrous attempt to perform his Symphonie
fantastique during a benefit concert for his new wife, the heavily indebted actress
Harriet Smithson.1 Riveting glimpses of Liszt and Chopin in the early days
of their fame, along with details of their performance practice, precede a long
lament about the trials facing a composer in France—especially a composer of
instrumental music, or what Berlioz calls “music for its own sake, jealously inde-
pendent music . . . music that you hear for itself, just music!” Not that operatic
and church music, the more traditional forms of musical success in France, lack
their share of pitfalls, which Berlioz rapidly evokes, notably the gauntlet-road
to the Opéra via a “poem” and a “wordsmith.” Those preliminaries complete,
Berlioz comes to the heart of the piece: the tale of his tribulations in bringing to
life the Symphonie fantastique three years earlier, the first version of the account
he will give in his Memoirs.
z December 15, 1833

Le Rénovateur
1. On November 25 an overlong program resulted in the impossibility of performing Berlioz’s

symphony, since its turn came after midnight and many of the musicians abandoned ship.
Today, Sunday, at two o’clock sharp, Ferdinand Hiller, known both for his
fine talent as a pianist and for compositions full of originality, will present a
concert in the great hall of the Conservatoire; his new symphony will be con-
ducted by Monsieur Habeneck. Joining him on this occasion will be several
young artists, most notably Franz Liszt and Frédéric Chopin. The enthusiasm
aroused by Liszt a few weeks ago at the Théâtre-Italien has not yet died down.
Wherever there is talk of music, Liszt is mentioned as a phenomenon of bril-
liance, daring, and inspiration. His attacks are so dazzling, his endings so
fearsomely forceful and precise, his ornamentation so delicate and new and
different that it is sometimes truly impossible to applaud him: he is petrify-
ing. Chopin’s talent is completely different. In order to fully appreciate his
playing, you have to hear him up close, in a drawing room rather than a the-
ater, and you have to dismiss every preconceived idea: it would not apply to
him any more than to his music. As a performer, as a composer, as an artist, he
is one of a kind, without the slightest similarity to any other musician I know.
His melodies, heavily influenced by Polish forms, suggest something guile-
lessly wild that is both charming and captivating in its very strangeness. In
his Études you hear harmonic combinations of startling profundity. He has
invented a sort of chromatic embroidery that recurs in several of his composi-
tions, with effects too provocative and bizarre to be described. Unfortunately,
Chopin himself is the only one who can play his music and give it the novel
flair, the sense of the unpredictable, that is one of its great charms. His play-
ing is shot through with a thousand subtle ripples that cannot be notated and
that he alone understands.
There are incredible details in his mazurkas. He knows, moreover, how to
make them doubly interesting by playing them with such extreme softness—
pianissimo, the hammers barely brushing the strings—that you are tempted
to go up the instrument and cup your ear as if you were at a concert of sylphs
and will-o’-the-wisps. Chopin is Nodier’s Trilby,2 a very sprite among pianists.
Hiller, though gifted with a great, fine talent at the piano, has chosen
to focus on composition. As a composer, though, he faces a trying career in
France. The ordinary music-loving public has no idea of the myriad difficul-
ties and obstacles that confront at every turn the unfortunate artist eager to
be heard. As if the material impediments to performance were not enough,
they are magnified by all that malice or sheer indifference can produce in the
2. Trilby, ou Le Lutin d’Argail was a short novel by Charles Nodier (1822), the title character
of which is a captivatingly inventive sprite.
5. Liszt, Chopin, Hiller 49
way of cruel discouragement. And so a composer must be armed, first and

foremost, with a robust faith in his mission and a veritable worship of his art.
If he wants to write for the operatic stage, he needs what theater directors
call a “poem.” Once he has his “poem”—wretched, flat, average, passable, or
even good (and there have been some good ones)—he has to have it officially
read. To obtain a reading, there is no end of steps to climb, requests to make,
people to see—trials that would test the patience of a saint. If the libretto is
bad, it is rejected. If it is passable, it is still rejected. If it is good, the author is
advised to ally himself with a well-known wordsmith, who then stamps his
name on it, changes two or three rhymes, and gets it onstage.3 It often hap-
pens, though, that the libretto writer refuses to go along with such a transac-
tion, in which case the good “poem” is rejected outright and the disappointed
composer is reduced to . . . biding his time or changing course or going into
light entertainment . . . or blowing out his brains.
If, instead of the stage, he is inclined to compose for the church, he can
only with great effort be allowed to spend 1200 or 1500 francs to have his
music performed.4
What is left is music for the concert hall: symphonies, overtures, concer-
tos, oratorios, dramatic fragments—that is, music for its own sake, jealously
independent music, acting without the support or, rather, the burden, of
words, action, dance, theater and stage sets—music that you hear for itself, just
music!5 Well, if you care to know how many slights and slurs you have to face
before being granted a public hearing for a work of some magnitude, I can tell
you what tribulations I went through to have my first symphony performed.
Even so, I should advise the reader that before my first concert I had
already made a point of becoming acquainted with almost all the performers
in Paris. To succeed at that, I managed to find myself a spot in the orchestra
stalls every evening for six whole months, first at the Odéon, then at Feydeau,
then at the Opéra, then at the Théâtre-Italien, then, for a few weeks each at
the Vaudeville, the Gymnase, and the Porte-Saint-Martin.6 This opened for
me an opportunity enjoyed by few composers: the chance to form a colossal
3. The most influential “wordsmith” of the day was Eugène Scribe. Berlioz intimates here
why he waited so long to take over the writing of his own librettos: not only was tradition
against it, but a well-known librettist was a powerful intermediary with the Paris theaters.
4. Berlioz was obliged to borrow money to have his Messe solennelle of 1824 performed.
5. A mini-manifesto on instrumental music as the equal of opera.
6. These represent the main Paris venues for musical theater. Feydeau is the Opéra-Comique,
although the building by that name (built in 1791, occupied by the Opéra-Comique after
orchestra with a choice of players from the capital’s various theaters. I now
knew the name, the character, the occupation, the sort of talent of each one
in particular, and I could consequently overcome hurdles that many other
composers would find insurmountable. When the Symphonie fantastique was
completed (forgive me for referring to my own work) and I saw that paper
heap of scribbles and scrawls, those twenty-six-line scores, that multitude of
wind instruments, those violin parts with their divisions and subdivisions, all
that complicated mass of musical means employed, discouragement gripped
my heart. Several weeks went by with no hope that I could ever hear an
acceptable performance of what I had written so rapidly. Finally, one day, in
a sudden rage, I cried out: “It must be heard, and it shall be, even at the cost
of my life!”
Immediately I began to copy the parts. Despite two months of steady
work, all I could bring forth were the wind and viola parts. I was at that
point obliged to have my copyist take on the violins and basses—which
cost me almost 600 francs. There I was, then, with two months of drudgery
and 600 francs in expenses, merely to have the separate parts. Once every-
thing was duly collated and properly arranged, it was time to assemble the
players and stage the concert. The conductor at the Théâtre des Nouveautés
arranged to give me the use of fifty musicians from his establishment;7
I added a troupe of sixty auxiliaries. When the time came to rehearse, we
saw that one thing was still missing: room for the orchestra. The stage was
too small; our measurements were inaccurate. After a few hours of uselessly
piling up violins, trombones, double basses, creating a veritable Berezina,8
the concert was indefinitely postponed, and all I gained from my efforts
was ridicule. Everyone had his word to say about the titles of the move-
ments or the bits of phrases they had noticed on opening their parts or the
1801) was destroyed in 1829; in 1833, at the time of this article, the Opéra-Comique occu-
pied the Théâtre des Nouveautés on the place de la Bourse (Berlioz often refers to the
Opéra-Comique as Théâtre de la Bourse, i.e., Theater of the Stock Exchange). The last three
are among the popular so-called boulevard theaters. During the late 1820s the Odéon brought
in foreign productions of Shakespeare, Weber, and Mozart that greatly influenced the French
Romantic generation. Berlioz’s story shows that each venue had its own orchestra, and that he
drew on them all to form a pickup orchestra for his concerts.
7. Fifty was an impressive number of musicians for a theater of this kind. The Théâtre des
Nouveautés was a separate establishment at this point; the Opéra-Comique began using the
building in 1832.
8. The reference is to the crossing of the Berezina river (in today’s Belarus) by Napoleon’s
troops, retreating from the debacle in Russia. Though the crossing succeeded in military
terms, the cost in casualties was horrific.
5. Liszt, Chopin, Hiller 51
wild pretentiousness of the subject, and so on and on. I no longer dared

show myself in public.
Eight months later a new, better-organized attempt was made. I myself
assembled an orchestra, paying three-fourths of the participants myself.
I reserved the concert hall at the Conservatoire and announced for the sec-
ond time the debut of my hapless symphony. The musicians were so wary of
the difficulties in the work, so wary of the work itself, that I almost let it
go under once again after a few wretched rehearsals at which some players
declared that their efforts were pointless and that it was madness to continue.
I managed, however, to bolster the spirits of the would-be defectors. A dress
rehearsal, conducted by M. Habeneck, had some success in bringing an end
to the chaos. The protesters took heart; the players began to understand the
music and come alive; the lines of the symphony took shape more and more
clearly, and the work was born.
But who would believe the torments I had to endure before reaching that
point? When a full-orchestra rehearsal had finally got underway, when, after
a half hour’s work, clear and precise ideas were beginning to emerge and my
heart was pounding with joy, I realized all of a sudden that the first horn was
no longer in his place. “What’s happened to the first horn?” I asked anxiously.
“He had a lesson he couldn’t miss. Had to leave.” Ten minutes later, two
trombones and the ophicleide disappeared: their service in the Royal Guard
called them away! Then half a dozen violinists deserted their seats to go
attend Baillot’s violin class: they had not received the master’s permission to
cut! A few double basses went out for lunch at the restaurant next door. What
I suffered, seeing the music stands abandoned little by little, is unimaginable.
I had the impression of being gradually stripped of all my limbs. To crown
the experience, once the concert had been given at last, after I had spent eight
months to launch my ship, eight months of being worried to death night and
day, and had finally succeeded, once the poor tax and the Opéra tax (which
was still in effect at that time) had been paid,9 as well as the cost of the hall,
the accessories, the copyist, the printer, and the musicians, my net profit, the
result of rather substantial box-office receipts, was a loss of only 400 francs.
9. On the crushing effect of the poor tax on concertgivers, see #35.

6
Music Review
With heavy doses of irony, Berlioz uses Mozart’s Don Giovanni and Beethoven’s
late quartets to measure progress in the public’s musical education. Don Giovanni
is a mismatch at the Théâtre-Italien, he charges, despite some improved audience
behavior: neither listeners nor performers are equal to a work so far outside their
usual sphere. With Beethoven, progress is most tangible among performers, the
composer’s front-line audience, as we see from an incident involving the violist
Urhan, who plays his part from memory in a Beethoven quartet.
z January 12, 1834

Le Rénovateur
The musical education of the public is gradually making headway. Progress

is, in fact, evident enough for Artists to be delighted and purveyors of art
to be alarmed.1 One of the most striking symptoms I have seen appeared at
the last performance of Don Giovanni at the Théâtre-Italien. It’s not that the
opera buffs in the low-cost seats failed to have Tamburini repeat his cavatina,
which would have shown that admirable singer how displeased they were
with his incredible lapse in taste.2 Oh, no! The audience at the Salle Favart is
1. “Purveyors of art” renders Berlioz’s disdainful expression, industrialistes de l’art, which

implies that Art has become a money-making speculation, a business.
2. The recent performance was on January 2, 1834. In Rén., January 5, Berlioz writes of
Tamburini: “In the aria ‘Fin ch’han dal vino’ (Act I, sc. 15) he attacks the first note in falsetto,
which produces a sort of cry similar to the one emitted by dancers from the Auvergne or the
Savoie when dancing the bourrée. Did Don Juan—the witty, elegant, fashionable Don—ever
sing in such a way? Last year, Tamburini performed this piece admirably; what came over him
to add this wretched ornament?”
6. Mozart, Beethoven 53
far too experienced and sophisticated to misbehave like that. Tamburini may
sing “Fin ch’han’ dal vino” however he likes; he can do it in head voice from
beginning to end if that’s what sounds right to him, and the sheep who line
up at every performance will still bleat out “Encore!” like the good sheep they
are. At the premiere, they even wanted to hear the Mask trio a second time,
despite the fact that the two women had just sung the whole thing madden-
ingly out of tune.3 It is true that the second time the discordant voices were a
bit less discordant. If the point was to coax them into a better performance of
that magnificent trio, the applauders should have called for a third try. Then
perhaps it would all have come out right.
The progress that I noticed in the musical education of the public showed
up only in the first two tiers of boxes. Simple: light dawns first at the summit.
A few years ago, the statue of the Commendatore could not make it onto
the stage unhampered by the noise of usherettes pushing back seats and clap-
ping doors shut with stylish insolence. Good form demanded that no one
trouble to stay for the “plainchant” in the final scene; the dilettantes would
have thought their reputation compromised if they listened to all that “dron-
ing” at the end.4 Well, today you can see a notable change. Out of ten boxes,
at least six remain occupied, and when spectators exit from the others, they
do so with a measure of decorum that shows they are no longer sure they need
to make it obvious that they’re leaving.
Oh, Mozart! What an honor for you! Your most admirable conception,
the most terrible, most profound and original product of your genius—I
mean the Commendatore—is beginning to get a hearing. Within ten years,
I’m sure, the entire audience will deign to listen to your sublime drama to the
very end. Doesn’t this unhoped-for honor thrill you in your grave, fill you
with joy and pride? What glory, indeed, what happiness for an artist who,
after the bliss of a great creation, can say to himself, with hand on heart, “Yes,
I feel—no doubt whatever—that I am a great Poet. . . .” What pride there is
in being able to add, “People will listen to me; my work will find an audi-
ence along with all those bravura arias and romances, galops and vaudeville
refrains!” After all, this is no mere figment of vanity, and history is there to
prove it. Shakespeare, in his day, cut deeply into the bear fighting that was
flourishing in England; memoirs of the period attest to it. Let us hope, then,
3. The Mask Trio of Donna Anna, Donna Elvira, and Don Ottavio is in Act I, sc. 19.
4. The “droning” refers to the dramatic recitative in Don Giovanni’s death scene, the “final
scene” at the time, as the closing Sextet was customarily omitted.
that in a few years people will still be excited by all the great and beauti-
ful trills of the prime donne, but at the same time fair enough to grant poor
geniuses like Mozart the sole true compensation for their labors, the sole
crown they have ever sought: the favor of being listened to when they com-
pose a “plainchant” like the Commendatore’s. It may even come to pass—but
surely at some far-off date—that opera directors will finally understand that
such “dronings” should be assigned to the most remarkable voices and tal-
ents, and not be made to overwhelm the already weak abilities of third-rate
singers, as is the practice today.5
Another sign of the slow, but real, revolution occurring in the behavior of
the musical world in Paris is the interest people are starting to show in more
rarefied compositions, such as Beethoven’s quartets. The afternoon concerts
of the brothers Tilmant, like the evenings organized by M. Schlesinger, have
been attracting not just the fashionable young men normally spotted only in
the balcony of the Théâtre-Italien or the Opéra, but also lovely young women
who, two years ago, would have fled the mere announcement of a Beethoven
quartet.6 Such events are enough to reassure the players, whose distrust of the
public, all too well justified by past experience, would offer little to hope for
in the future. In truth, nothing is as wholly beautiful as the performance of
these miraculous quartets, the final flares of the brightest genius that art can
claim.7
M. Tilmant the elder combines impeccable taste and the rarest sensibil-
ity with an uncommon technical facility that allows him to face the greatest
of difficulties with complete confidence. The first violin part of Beethoven’s
last quartets is routinely studded with bizarre features, unexpected modula-
tions, broken phrases and the like, which at first glance make the writing look
like Sanskrit. When you add to the basic technical difficulties the challenge
of giving each phrase, even each note, its proper color and intended expres-
sion, you see that an artist capable of skating past those dangers belongs in
5. This Finale will be the glory of the production at the Opéra that opens on March 10, 1834.
See Berlioz’s retrospective discussion in JD, November 15, 1835 (#32).
6. Berlioz was lukewarm about the quality of the performances—and positively insulting
about the ugliness of the women present—at Schlesinger’s Friday concerts in 1829 (letter to
his sister Nanci, December 28, CG 1:293); the praise of the cellist at recent sessions, and the
presence of “lovely young women,” imply double progress.
7. Berlioz is evidently thinking of Beethoven’s late quartets, notably the op. 131 in C-sharp
minor, which he first heard performed by the Baillot quartet in March 1829 (CG 1:244). In
his Beethoven articles for the BAMZ, he gives a gripping evocation of this performance, from
which most of the audience fled (CM 1:56–57).
6. Mozart, Beethoven 55
the highest sphere of the musical hierarchy. Alexandre Tilmant, the brother
of the first violinist, plays the bass part so well that he will soon enjoy the
same reputation with the public that he has long had among his fellow musi-
cians: an able cellist, a bit cold, but more than equal to the task and scrupu-
lously accurate. (At Schlesinger’s evening concerts, that part is in the hands
of young Franchomme, whom I have already mentioned several times; his
delightful talent is daily acquiring greater polish and delicacy.) The second
violin is a sort of intimate in the instrumental drama, playing a somewhat
obscure role that yet requires tact, assurance, and constant self-restraint; it is
very hard to carry off. M. Cuvillon, one of Habeneck’s best pupils, manages
the task perfectly, never turning his part, more demanding than most people
think, into mere accompaniment. As for the viola part, the name Urhan says
it all! Everyone recognizes this admirable talent. His unique turn of mind,
his fervent piety, his modest demeanor have made him almost as well-known
as his beautiful viola playing, his viola d’amore solos, and his mystical com-
positions. He doesn’t admire Beethoven; he adores him. When he utters that
sacred name, it is with the reverence of Newton pronouncing the name of
God. This story will suffice to characterize him: At a gathering where music
was being played, the viola part of a Beethoven quartet was found to be miss-
ing, and it was impossible to locate another copy. The host was nonplussed.
Urhan, informed of his trouble, took him aside and said simply, “Put some
other score on my stand, and I’ll pretend to read it. The music won’t go
unheard: I know it by heart.” True enough, Urhan, sure of his memory, played
the part from beginning to end just as if the music had been before his eyes.
With such interpreters, you can readily see that the Poet-Composer’s
intention will be faithfully conveyed. And such is the nature of Beethoven’s
music that if we say certain performers rise to its poetic heights, we are offer-
ing them the greatest possible praise. Thus we listen to Beethoven; ladies
begin to smile at him; and backed by five or six romances and a good Vaccai
duet, his quartets come across very successfully. Oh! we are clearly becoming
an artistic people!
HECTOR BERLIOZ
7
Music Review
A survey of musical events in Paris and even London, where Berlioz casts an
envious eye at a great Handel festival ordered by the king, noting that a music
festival—the word and happening still novel in French—celebrates music itself.
Chopin’s playing and that of the Müller brothers’ string quartet elicit raves.
Framing the review are doings at the Opéra, including popular balls unwor-
thy of the venue but more dignified than most, and Mozart’s Don Juan, just
going into rehearsal—in French translation as required by this theater—and
prompting speculative comparisons with Don Giovanni at the Théâtre-Italien.
Meanwhile the Opéra-Comique, the third subsidized Paris music theater, has
fallen on hard times. The solution? Not the recall of a once-favorite singer past
his prime, Berlioz chides, but good music such as Weber’s Freischütz.
z February 23, 1834

Le Rénovateur
The balls at the Opéra are over. Monsieur Mira no doubt feels satisfied in
all respects, his initiative having been crowned with success of every sort.1 It
was, in fact, too well implemented not to succeed. Instead of the turbulent
horde that such events attract at other theaters, instead of boorish dances
peppered with even more boorish shouts and cries, the Opéra drew a large
but well-mannered crowd with its graceful, picturesque dances, striking
choreographic creations, and fine orchestra (to which people unfortunately
1. Jean-Joseph Brunet, known as Mira (1766–1851), managed props at the Opéra and also
organized the Opéra balls.
7. Mozart, Chopin 57
paid little attention). It was a thorough triumph of luxury and fashionable

good taste.2 The receipts must have been enormous, to judge by the numbers
thronging in on the first two or three evenings, numbers inevitably much
greater in the final week. What is true of human beings is true of theaters as
well: some succeed in everything. Good fortune today seems to have settled
on the Opéra, which can accept any challenge, attempt anything, and do it
with the greatest likelihood of success. Except, to be sure, when it’s an effort
to pass off as an admirable work of genius something that is often no more
than a product of plodding drudgery.
At the poor Théâtre de l’Opéra-Comique, on the contrary, they rack their
brains in vain; nothing they try succeeds. Even a work full of musical inter-
est, in which stimulating ideas, incisive and original, stand out beautifully
against an often brilliant orchestration—I refer to Gomis’s Le Revenant3—
was unable to overcome the doldrums. Now Martin has been called in to
save the till.4 Would that he could! But despite the satisfaction—the very
beatitude—that a number of respectable burghers appear to feel upon once
more seeing their long-admired Frontin,5 I have to say frankly that his voice,
once so pure, now emits only weak, colorless sounds devoid of vibrancy and
life. Producing them seems to tire the singer almost as much as certain listen-
ers, and when he tried, in Le Charme de la voix,6 to conclude a phrase on a
low note that used to bring wild applause from the entire house, a neighbor
of mine cried out to the bassoonist in the orchestra: “Have pity, good God!
Play him his E-flat!”
Not by such means can the Opéra-Comique be reinvigorated. It will take
good young actors—a good young orchestra—large choruses musically tal-
ented and young—young compositions new and different and bold; it will
take operas instead of comedy shows—overtures instead of fairground thump-
ing. That is what it will take for this theater to ensure its standing in the musi-
cal world, assuming that music is what it wants to make its principal concern.
2. Berlioz uses the English word in his text, with ironic intent.
3. Joseph-Melchior Gomis (1791–1835), a Spanish composer who fled Ferdinand VII’s abso-
lute monarchy in 1823, eventually settling in Paris in 1830. Berlioz admired not only Le
Revenant (1833), but also his Diable à Séville (1831), especially the Monks’ Chorus.
4. Nicholas-Jean-Blaise Martin (1768–1837), a high baritone (or low tenor), had specialized
in comic roles before retiring in 1823.
5. The valet in Les Visitandines, 2-act opéra-comique by Devienne (1792).
6. One-act opéra-comique written by Berton for the Opéra-Comique (1811). Its title, “The
Voice’s Charm,” is ironic in view of the singer’s insufficiencies.
For that, however, it needs money: it needs a subsidy. It needs the government
to show a clear interest in the future of music and make it possible for this
Theater of the Stock Exchange to rise to second place,7 immediately after the
Opéra, by abandoning its routine immobility and at last taking the road it
should all along have been following: the road of progress. It is hard to under-
stand why the Opéra-Comique should be the only theater in Paris to have
resisted the general movement of the times. The Vaudeville and Variétés the-
aters have both followed musical developments. They have had big hits with
duos, trios, ensemble pieces, and choral finales introduced into their shows.
Even the Ambigu, in the recent Festin de Balthazar, sought to fill out the lav-
ish staging with large choruses.8 If the admirers of the Opéra-Comique think
that all that’s needed for its salvation is to regain its level of success before the
present decline—if they believe that such means would win back the audi-
ences that used to come for Elleviou or Martin or Gavaudan9—they are mis-
taken. The ranks of the old regulars are getting thinner day by day, while the
new generation, eager for new excitement, runs off to the Conservatoire, to
the Opéra, to quartet recitals—wherever, in short, it sees a glimmer of dis-
coveries within the new world that the pioneers of musical civilization have
brought to light. Germany has a number of theaters like the one we would
like to see established in Paris; it is thanks to them that Weber’s masterpiece
gained its popularity. Well, as long as the Opéra-Comique remains incapable
of a decent staging of Freischütz, it will fail to be what it should be today. It
will fail, indeed, to justify its very existence.
M. Schlesinger’s recital series continues to offer much to attract lov-
ers of Beethoven.10 Last Sunday’s program was especially remarkable for
the extraordinary impression made by the Müller brothers. This was the
instrumental foursome’s first appearance as a group in Paris. It was unity in
quadrinity—the ideal quartet! If a composer could find the words to express
7. Literal translation of the name of the building used at this time, located near the Stock
Exchange. Berlioz implies a corruptive influence.
8. The three theaters just mentioned are among the most popular of the so-called boulevard
theaters. Le Festin du roi Balthazar (King Belshazzar’s Feast) was the title of a sacred drama
by Francis and Robillard, with choral music by Charles-Joseph Paris.
9. Jean Elleviou (1769–1842), light French tenor who held the major tenor roles at the
Opéra-Comique from 1801 to 1813, when he retired. In 1812 he was much offended by the
honors showered by Napoleon on the castrato Crescentini. Jean-Baptiste-Sauveur Gavaudan
(1772–1840), another popular tenor from the Opéra-Comique in the early nineteenth cen-
tury, began his career at the Théâtre-Italien in the late eighteenth century, as did Elleviou.
10. See #6, especially n. 7.
7. Mozart, Chopin 59
such incredible perfection and tried to require it for the performance of his
music, anyone unacquainted with the Müllers would be quite right to label
him mad. For unity and exactitude, they are mathematical precision itself, but
when it comes to nuances of expression, to changes of tempo—in a word, to
whatever is pure musical feeling—they are simply astonishing. They respond
instinctively to one another, perhaps without even realizing it; the four of
them vibrate in harmony like the sympathetic strings of a low note on a fine
piano. It is true that their situation as brothers constantly together, living
together, working together, sharing their thoughts, submitting to a common
natural instinct developed by an equal measure of study, is the prime source
and, no doubt, the explanation of the phenomenon we observe. This family
of artists has a great reputation in Germany. Equally great successes undoubt-
edly await them in France.
That same evening, Chopin presented a magnificent piano concerto,11
sparkling with verve, with graceful spirit and piquant whimsy, delicate
phrases and ravishing arabesques—all performed with the great talent for
which he is known. I would speak at length about Chopin and his music,
were I not afraid of being rebuked for partiality toward a friend. But when
I speak enthusiastically about artists who are friends of mine, my praise
should not be attributed to the influence of personal feelings. On the con-
trary, my friendship stems from admiration inspired by their talents.
An immense musical congress is scheduled to take place in London
in a few months. King William IV has mandated a festival commemorat-
ing Handel, and the preparations suggest a rare magnificence. All of Great
Britain’s skilled performers, together with players from the Continent free to
participate at the time, will constitute a force of six or seven hundred musi-
cians under the direction of Sir George Smart.12
The English, whom we tend to scoff at in this regard, are actually more
open to the arts than we are. England frequently spends large sums on solem-
nities like the one now in preparation. The most recent took place a few
years ago in York; it was brilliant. Whenever impressively massed voices and
instruments have appeared in Paris, the occasion has been some political cer-
emony or other—never love of music itself. Do we have anything to match
11. The reference is no doubt to a piano reduction of one of Chopin’s two concertos for piano.
12. Sir George Thomas Smart (1776–1867), organist at the British Chapel Royal, where in
1838 he would also be appointed composer. A specialist in the Handel tradition of great cho-
ral productions, he had known Beethoven and been a friend of Weber’s.
the Shakespeare Jubilees? Has anything similar been done for Molière?
Napoleon once said that, had Corneille lived during his reign, he would have
made him a prince. Today the author of Cinna and Horace could not even
become a deputy.
The Opéra is very busy with rehearsals for Mozart’s Don Juan. The stag-
ing and sets are reported to be wonderful. As for the performance, there is
no reason to fear that it will be unworthy of the composer. Nourrit will sing
the Don with his usual impetuous vigor, making the character very much his
own. The role of Ottavio is a fearsome challenge, it’s true, because of the aria
“Il mio tesoro” and the great shadow of Rubini. The same is true of Zerlina,
a role that demands great sweetness and lightness not only in the voice, but
also in the person, of the singer. As for the other two women, Donna Anna
and Donna Elvira, they have no great competition to fear. With the Opéra’s
massive chorus and powerful orchestra, the final scene will be stunning.13
Today, Sunday, the Conservatoire is presenting Beethoven’s “Pastoral”
Symphony. Tuesday and Thursday the rehearsals of Don Juan begin. A week
of pure pleasure! I could get used to this!
HECTOR BERLIOZ
13. The premiere of Don Juan at the Opéra would be on March 10, 1834. See n. 3 of #20, and
#32.
8
Music Review: Concerts

Beethoven, Cherubini, Hauman, Ponchard
The performance reviews that begin this piece bring an unsettling reminder of
the way women performers in Berlioz’s day were often treated: audiences—and
critics—had trouble getting past their looks. Central place goes to Berlioz’s first
extended review of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, whose first movement is strik-
ingly presented as a musical translation of Shakespeare's Othello, from which
Berlioz quotes in English. His entire review bears a strong literary cast, as he
strains to convey emotions beyond the reach of ordinary words. If he gives luke-
warm praise to the performers mentioned at the start, he pays glowing tribute
to the singer Ponchard at the end, who in a work by Cherubini did the impos-
sible, performing after Beethoven without breaking the spell. Balzac, attending
a Conservatoire concert for the first time, was among those responding to the
Fifth with the fervor Berlioz describes, and was forever marked by the occasion.
z April 27, 1834

Le Rénovateur
Last week we had a torrent of concerts now happily reaching its end. We
heard M. Ghys, a Belgian violinist, whose “imminent departure” for London
was announced on all the billboards; M. Panseron, whose graceful romances
are becoming ever more popular; Mme. Filipowicz, who seems to have sac-
rificed to her talent that instinctive sense of coquettishness women seem
never to lose, so sure is she, when she lifts her bow, of putting a stop to all the
chuckles and whispers prompted by the odd appearance of that enormous
pair of glasses on her face and the little cushion to protect her chin from
the violin. A young Italian lady, Mlle. Mayer, sacrifices even more than the
Polish violinist to her artistic appearances, for the sounds of her floooot-t-t-t
and the Donizetti cavatinas that constitute her basic repertoire do nothing to
dampen the merriment inevitably triggered by the sight of a dumpy woman
pulling faces to enliven, as best she can, the silliest of instruments.1
While Bériot travels around Italy with Mme. Malibran, Hauman is busy
stealing away the other’s numerous admirers—which is not to suggest that
there is the slightest resemblance in form or style between the two rival violin-
ists; I don’t even know how they might properly be compared.2 But the public
has taken notice of the rapid development of Hauman’s talent, the original-
ity of his style, the deep feeling behind it, the boldness of his approach, and
its applause hastens the ripening of those felicitous abilities. He plays with a
searing expressivity that no amount of practicing can give; only the soul can
produce the sounds that move the soul. If the artist’s heart does not beat,
neither will the listener’s:
To make me weep, you need to weep yourself.3
And Hauman’s violin weeps admirably.

But let us turn now to the Conservatoire’s latest concert. The Symphony in
C minor, perhaps Beethoven’s greatest work, had been reserved for this final
program of the season. If anything could heighten our regret at seeing our
musical Louvre close so early, it would surely be the extraordinary impression
produced by this incomparable work. The first movement depicts the unset-
tled emotions of a great soul fallen prey to despair. It is not the concentrated,
calm despair that looks like resignation, nor the despair of Romeo at the news
of Juliet’s death, but rather the terrible fury of Othello hearing Iago spew the
1. An accomplished flute player in his youth (like Cellini, the hero of his opera), Berlioz
often mocked the instrument for the trills and frills of its popular repertoire. When used
expressively by Gluck or other composers it draws his highest praise. Of the four musicians
mentioned so far—Joseph Ghys, Élise Filipowicz, Lorenzina Mayer, and Auguste Panseron
(1795–1859)—only the last, a voice teacher, music theorist, and composer best known for his
romances, has retained any attention from music historians.
2. Charles-Auguste de Bériot (1802–1870) was one of the great violin talents and pedagogues
of the century, whose reputation his Belgian countryman Théodore Haumannn (1808–1878)
never seriously rivaled, despite a respectable career performing and composing for his instru-
ment. Bériot had recently married the great singer Malibran.
3. “Pour me tirer des pleurs, il faut que vous pleuriez.” Boileau, Art poétique, part III, line
142. Berlioz frequently quotes this line, though often to deny its message (see #38 on Liszt).
8. Concerts: Beethoven, Cherubini 63
venomous calumnies that convince him of Desdemona’s crime. It is now a

frenetic delirium that bursts into frightening cries; now a bottomless dejec-
tion that can express nothing but regret and self-pity; now a torrent of execra-
tions, a rage that tumbles into convulsions or unconsciousness. Beethoven
may not have thought of it when composing this sublime movement, but one
could hardly find a more exact musical translation of Shakespeare’s famous
scene:4
Ha! ha! false to me? to me?
in which wretched Othello, passing in turns from anger to tenderness:
. . . O now, forever,
Farewell the tranquil mind! farewell content!
Farewell the plumed troop, and the big wars,
That make ambition virtue . . .
Farewell! Othello’s occupation’s gone,
from sadness to fury:
Villain! be sure thou prove my love a whore;

Be sure of it: give me an ocular proof,
lashing out at Iago and then, in a broken voice, calling him back with a
friendly word:
Nay, stay: thou shouldst be honest,
shows us, in all its nakedness, the most frightening and unplumbed depths
of the human heart. To say which of these two poets is the greater strikes me
as absolutely impossible. Only their means are different; the outcome is the
same.
At the first five or six performances of Beethoven’s masterpiece, the audi-
ence responded rather coolly to the cries of the wild-haired composer; they
didn’t yet understand. This last experience marks a notable move forward
in their education: emotion was at its height, and the standing crowd even
4. Othello, Act III, sc. 2.

begged, though in vain, for an encore. At the finale, though, a dispassionate

observer would have seen a curious spectacle. Just when, leaving the sinister
harmony of the Scherzo for the brilliant march that follows, the orchestra
seems suddenly to pass from the Brocken to the peristyle of a sun temple,5
shouts and hushes, plaudits and convulsive fits of laughter, held back for a
few seconds, suddenly shook the hall with such intensity that the powerful
orchestra, drowned out by this burst of enthusiasm, disappeared completely.
Only after a few moments of feverish agitation did the nervous spasm rack-
ing the entire audience subside, allowing the instruments to be heard again.6
So electrifying a commotion put the rest of the program at considerable
risk. But such is the power of expressive music and all true feeling that the aria
from Les Abencérages came close to reviving the same excitement.7 This frag-
ment of a great work by Cherubini is in the grandest dramatic style; it belongs
to the school of Gluck in all its tragic depth, with his eloquent orchestra and
disdain for meaningless ornamentation. Ponchard, despite a failing voice,
was sublime. It is extremely rare to witness an aria detached from the operatic
stage produce such emotion. With truth in every phrase, with the warmth
and sensitivity he conveyed, the singer made us forget that we were at a con-
cert. From the very first line:
Suspendez à ces murs mes armes, ma bannière,8
he gripped his audience and never let go; all we could see in him was his char-
acter, the dying Abencerrage. Scarcely had the final chord been struck when
the orchestra and choruses joined the audience in endless bravos for both the
beauty of the work and the immense talent of the singer. Yes, it has to be said
again and again, as often as possible, because he does not always receive his
due: Ponchard is one of Europe’s greatest artists. Others are endowed with a
more youthful voice or a more impressive build, but none does greater justice
5. Brocken is the name of the mountain (also known as Blocksberg) on which Goethe placed
the famous witches’ Sabbath (Walpurgisnacht) of his Faust I.
6. For more on audience reception of Beethoven’s Fifth, see #27.
7. Cherubini’s opera, Les Abencérages, based on a story of Moorish Granada by Berlioz’s
beloved Florian, was composed for the imperial court in 1811; it is considered a precursor of
French grand opera. The aria performed by Ponchard, sometimes featured separately even
today, refers to a sacred banner lost by the hero through treachery but restored in the last act,
happy endings being still the norm at this time.
8. “Hang my weapons and my banner on these walls.”
8. Concerts: Beethoven, Cherubini 65
to the composer’s intent or more clearly expresses his ideas through intelli-
gent phrasing, pure diction, and flawless pronunciation, never marring them
with ill-placed and almost always vulgar or banal ornamentation.
A few weeks ago at the Opéra-Comique, shortly before so-called repairs
forced its closure, a simple romance by Della Maria,9 sung by Ponchard with
the exquisite taste for which he is known and those rare expressive nuances
that he can draw from the depths of his heart, made me feel a pleasure more
genuine, more delicate, in short, more artistic than many more weighty com-
positions that demand little more of the performer than skill and a certain
gift for effects. Great composers are very rare; great singers are perhaps even
more so. Ponchard, with his intelligent understanding of drama, his sensibil-
ity, his natural musicality no less than his fully developed talent, is in the
front rank of great singers.
HECTOR BERLIOZ
9. Pierre-Antoine-Dominique Della Maria (1769–1800), early French composer of

opéras-comiques.
9
Gluck (Part I)
In providing this biography as one of his first major contributions to the

Gazette musicale, Berlioz signaled his allegiances: worship of Beethoven, the
main god of the new journal, did not diminish his fidelity to Gluck, whom
he venerated all his life as his spiritual father. Note the lyrical description of
an aria from one of Gluck’s early Italian-language operas and the admiring
mention, anti-Italian bias notwithstanding, of the Italian diva Mme. Pasta.
Based on faulty sources, this piece should be read not for historical specifics on
Gluck but for Berlioz’s image of him as a man of immense talent on the one
hand and of strong character on the other, a man who knew how to make per-
formers and opera directors conform to his artistic vision. Genius, for Berlioz,
is clearly a combination of both.
z June 1, 1834
Gazette musicale de Paris
It is never without a surge of enthusiasm that this name enters my mind.

Like the names of Shakespeare, Beethoven, Goethe, Michelangelo, Gluck’s
is a banner whose still-bright colors awaken a whole world of ideas. I was
quite young when I first entered the magnificent temple of which Gluck
was architect and high priest and god. Since crossing the threshold, I have
explored its every corner—and if I err in my understanding of this great
composer of tragic drama, it will not be for want of deep and serious study
of his works.
9. Gluck Biography 67
Gluck—the knight Christophe—was born in 1714 in Weidenwangen

in the Upper Palatinate, where his father was hunting master for Prince
Lobkowitz, according to the account in Dlabacz’s Statistique de Bohême.1 Little
is known of his early years. My research has revealed nothing particularly infor-
mative about his tastes or inclinations as a youth or the direction that his par-
ents had in mind for him. Did they wish, from the start, to urge him toward
a career in music? Probably so, if we consider that, barely seventeen years old
and already a fine cellist, he went to Italy to seek lessons in composition from
the well-known Sammartini. Unlike Beethoven, Weber, and Mozart, Gluck
seems not to have reached the full maturity of his faculties until about the age of
forty. For Milan, Rome, Venice, Turin, and London, he wrote numerous Italian
operas, most of which we know only by name. Though already moving away
from the well-trodden path followed by dozens of Italian maestri, the composer
he was one day to become was not yet in evidence. The Poet was not yet born.
A performance of La Caduta dei giganti at London’s Italian theater led Handel
to form his lifelong opinion that Gluck was a thoroughly mediocre composer.2
Gluck’s own reflections, however, had already brought him some sense
of the triviality of the works he had been casually dropping along his way,
with no more than two weeks’ labor devoted to any of them. Some rare,
profoundly expressive pieces surface here and there in his few surviving
Italian operas. They form admirable sketches, turned to good use later on
in his grand tableaux. One alone, Asteria’s monologue in Telemaco, did not
so serve, consigned as it was to the same neglect that buried the rest of the
score.3 I learned of it by chance. Leafing through Gluck’s Italian manuscripts
at the Conservatoire library, I was struck by a recitative whose setting had a
truthfulness and a poignancy that distinguished it remarkably from its pre-
decessors. I followed it up to the entrance of the aria. What rapture, at the
1. Mention of this early Czech account (1815) serves to remind us that Gluck was Czech by
birth. For details of his life based on modern research, see Patricia Howard, Gluck and the
Birth of Modern Opera (1963), and the entry on Gluck in The New Grove Dictionary of Music
and Musicians by Bruce Alan Brown and Julian Rushton.
2. Berlioz inserts his own footnote here: There was in fact no sympathy between Handel and
Gluck and we may well believe that The Fall of the Giants was not exactly a remarkable score.
Had it been so, however, the opinion of the man who composed the Messiah would present no sur-
prise when you realize that Haydn never recognized Beethoven’s genius, that Beethoven granted
Weber only some talent, and that the man whom Beethoven judged the most meritorious of
contemporary composers considered the C minor Symphony a work of wanton excess. [This was
Cherubini, whom Berlioz preferred not to identify.—Ed.]
3. Two-act opera by Gluck, first performed in Vienna on January 30, 1765. Asteria’s mono-
logue is in Act I, sc. 4.
discovery of that miraculous elegy where the orchestral harmonies and melo-
dies vie with the voice to depict the most overwhelming pain that can break
the heart of a woman, young and beautiful—the pain of rejection by the man
whose very life she has saved!
recitative: A fatal day it was for me when I found him lying on the shore,
pale and marked by death (pien di morte).4 Terrified, I clasped him to my
breast, and my sighs breathed new life into his fading soul.
aria: Ah, I see it still—how with his weak and icy hand, he gripped my
helping hand—how he looked about with sightless glances and slowly
moved his eyes still covered with the veils of death, then opened them
to the light . . . and pierced my heart. O day! . . . O gentle glance! . . . O
memory! . . . O love!5
I have never found, even in the extraordinary works that Gluck composed
later, anything more simply, nobly beautiful than this plaint of a victim ren-
dering a resigned farewell, without bitterness, to a past full of poignant mem-
ories. Voice and accompaniment are so admirably melded that it is impossible
to tell which produces the result. The instrumentation is minimal, limited to
the strings alone. But what expressive features in every part! Under the line
“Quando appannati e tardi pria girò gli occhi intorno,”6 the violins spin out
a long phrase in which the violas soon join. The three parts blend, intersect,
rise, and gently fall. The blood begins to flow, and life gradually spreads from
limb to limb: He first glanced about: “pria girò gli occhi intorno.” Here the
melodic line, gradually rising, reaches an explosive crescendo on the words
“E poi gli aperse al giorno.” 7 A hint of reproach comes through in the words
“E mi trafisse il cor.” After a silence, Asteria continues on a higher note: “O
giorno!” After another, longer silence, the melody rises further: “O dolci
sguardi!” Third silence. And the voice, stretching painfully upward to the
highest note, sings, “O rimambranza!” Then, suddenly falling like the stifled
4. Berlioz inserts these Italian words into his French translation.

5. Under “Recitative,” Berlioz translates a segment of the recitative, made up of mm. 13–19;
under “Aria” he continues to translate the measured, orchestrated passage from mm. 21–41.
6. “When, with dim, slow eyes, he first glanced about.” Berlioz embarks on a descriptive
analysis of mm. 30–41.
7. From here until the end of the paragraph, Berlioz quotes one by one the broken phrases
given earlier under “Aria”: “then opened them to the light,” etc.
sigh of a breaking heart, she murmurs, “O amor!” Nothing follows. Not a single
note of ritornello. The orchestra is silent. . . . What, in fact, could follow that
wouldn’t be superfluous?
In Italy one day, I introduced this searing piece to a musician of considerable
distinction. He thought it insignificant and attempted to prove it so with a host
of peremptory arguments. I instantly hated this man; I doubt I can ever forgive
him. . . .8 Pasta—ravishing as Paisiello’s Nina!9 She alone should sing the grievous
melody that Gluck tore from his very heart. Among all the warblers that Italy
has sent out into the world, let us hope none will venture to practice her trills on
this remarkable piece or bedeck it with the flourishes of her laryngeal rhetoric. If
such there be, I send the blasphemer my sincerest curses.
But I see that I have let myself be drawn into too long a digression on the
misfortunes of Asteria and on my personal impressions. Back, then, to my
biographical sketch.
In Vienna Gluck made the acquaintance of Calzabigi, a Florentine liter-
ary figure who had been imagining the same sort of reform in opera libretti
that Gluck desired to introduce into operatic music. The two soon came to an
understanding, and Calzabigi wrote Italian texts for Orfeo, Alceste, and Elena
e Paride.10 Alceste was the first work in which Gluck boldly put his new system
into practice. Here are his own terms explaining his program and its intended
goal. [Berlioz quotes here in its entirety the preface to Alceste, Gluck’s signature
statement on his reform.11 In summary: Gluck aims to avoid the singer-centered
8. Berlioz’s Memoirs relate such an incident apropos of Mendelssohn in Rome, who mistook
this piece for the product of some minor Italian composer (Travels in Germany I, Fourth
Letter). But the “hatred” was momentary; Berlioz continued to like and admire Mendelssohn,
though the latter did not reciprocate the sentiment regarding Berlioz’s music.
9. Berlioz’s praise of Pasta—in Paisello’s Nina, not Dalayrac’s, his usual favorite—is note-
worthy given the disdain he usually professes for Italian opera. For interpreters of the caliber
of Pasta and Rubini, he clearly made exceptions. Paisello’s Nina (1789) is the score shown in
Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun’s lovely portrait of him. Nicolas Dalayrac (1753–1809), French com-
poser, chiefly of opéras-comiques; Berlioz was charmed, in an arrangement for ballet he heard
in Paris, by the English horn player’s rendition of a melody from Dalayrac’s Nina (1786) that
he had heard at his first communion, and Dalayrac is the first composer mentioned in Mem.
(chapter 1, p. 6; chapter 5, p. 23).
10. Orfeo (1762), Alceste (1768), Elena e Paride (sometimes called Paride ed Elena, 1770), all
written for Vienna’s Burgtheater in collaboration with Ranieri de Calzabigi (1714-95).
11. In 1861 and 1866 Berlioz was to oversee two productions at the Opéra of Alceste, an opera
he also wrote about on numerous occasions. In Art of Music, pp. 88–135, a long piece on ver-
sions of Alceste going back to Euripides includes an analysis of Gluck’s opera and a reprint of
the preface (p. 101), followed by a critique of its principles (pp. 101–4), which Berlioz partly
disagrees with.
abuses of contemporary Italian opera; to reduce music to its essential function of

reinforcing the poetic message, adding to poetry what color brings to a line draw-
ing; to let dialogue flow naturally, without undue interruptions and repetitions;
to make the overture suggestive of the opera’s argument; to create a smooth tran-
sition from recitative to aria; and above all, to achieve clarity and simplicity,
without regard to novelty for its own sake. In the end, he says, there is no rule he
is not ready to sacrifice for the sake of a better effect.]
As the following quotation makes clear, Gluck and Calzabigi were not the
only worthy men struck by the need to reform musical drama. Metastasio,
writing to Father Mattei on the staging of one of his own lyric works, com-
plains [that singers have become tightrope walkers interested only in showing
off rather than musicians capable of arousing emotion; he yearns for a man of
superior talent and musical mastery who, ignoring his rivals, will reconceive the
art of stirring the emotions and rid music of its current boredom].12
Gluck was the man Metastasio yearned for.13 Nature had richly endowed
him with the qualities indispensable for an innovator: quick judgment, over-
arching vision, admirable sense, keen sensibility, an inflexible will, faith in
his mission as a man of genius—he had it all. What an explosive impact when
this genius, matured to manhood, rose at last to his full height! There has
been too much talk of the ridiculous war between Gluckists and Piccinnists
for us to bring it up again. La Harpe and Marmontel championing the
Italian, while Father Arnaud and a few writers defended Gluck, hurled
insults back and forth on issues that none of them truly understood.14 The
composer of Armide himself did not find it beneath him to take up the pen
in his own defense.15 I am unfortunately compelled to admit that Gluck’s
defender was as bitter and partisan as La Harpe was witty and moderate. At
any event, and without denying the composer of Dido some eminent quali-
ties, it can’t be denied that Piccinni is dead and gone, while his rival is alive.
12. Berlioz cites “Martini, Histoire de la musique” as source for his quotation (Giovanni
Battista Martini, 1706–84, music theorist and historian). According to CM 1:249n, the para-
graph was cobbled together from various sources in the Notes of Abbé Arnaud (Œuvres com-
plètes, Paris: Collin, 1808, 2:394–96).
13. Having just cited Martini as the source for his quotation from Metastasio, Berlioz mis-
takenly writes “the man Martini wished for.”
14. Marmontel was the author of the libretto of Piccini’s Didon, created in 1783. He and La
Harpe were both critics at the Mercure de France. Father Arnaud, a fervent partisan of Gluck,
initiated the “quarrel,” which at its height pitted two versions of Iphigénie en Tauride (on dif-
ferent libretti) by the two composers.
15. Gluck responded to La Harpe in the Journal de Paris (October 12, 1777).
Gluck is performed throughout Germany, especially in Berlin. Spontini, who

with good reason regards Gluck as his father, continues to mount Alceste and
Iphigenia in Tauris there with a lavishness and care that we cannot claim to
have seen in Paris for quite some time.16 Besides, Gluck is still alive in his
disciples. Isn’t that the right term for composers who have adopted some
variant of his system? The group includes Vogel (who actually was his pupil
and to whom we owe the immortal overture to Demophon), Salieri, Méhul,
Spontini, Weber, even Beethoven, whose discipleship shows up in many a
passage of Fidelio, his sole work for the stage. Gluck had the heartbreaking
experience of being unable to see his initial foray into grand opera performed
onstage. None of the Italian theaters was prepared to perform Alceste when
it appeared. Indefatigable and headstrong as Gluck was, another effort could
not be long in coming. And so, Orfeo appeared, with such success that the city
of Bologna grew to almost a million owing to the flood of outsiders attracted
by its performances.17 Gluck had sent the score to Paris for publication;
Philidor, entrusted with it, pillaged the work unscrupulously. I had a chance
to see his boldness at first hand. Poring over the books on display along the
Quai d’Orsay, I came across an old score for Le Maréchal-ferrant under the
name of Philidor,18 in which I found the entire first-act romance of Orphée
(“Objet de mon amour”) with no change other than a poor ritornello a few
measures long added after the vocal part, and a transposition from C to A.
Hélène et Paris,19 a graceful work but, to my mind, somewhat cold, quickly
followed the Singer of Thrace. I am ignorant of the fate of this work, barely
known in France, where it was, I think, performed at the Théâtre-Italien. Only
its two predecessors, Orphée and Alceste, have had the honor of being trans-
lated. The composer himself apparently deemed it unworthy of preservation
16. Still, they had not been performed in Berlin since 1825 (Alceste) and 1829 (Iphigénie en
Tauride).
17. Berlioz is apparently conflating two different episodes: in 1763, Gluck gave a performance
of Il Trionfo de Clelia in Bologna for the opening of a new theater, which attracted great
crowds; Orfeo was not performed in Bologna until 1771, when it was a success, though not of
the kind Berlioz describes.
18. The Farrier. Actually, it was a different work of Philidor’s that contained bits of Orfeo, or
perhaps two works, as suggested in the New Grove entry on Gluck, section 4, where Bruce
Alan Brown offers a kinder supposition about the coincidence: “The music so impressed itself
upon Philidor, whom Favart had asked to proofread the score, that, probably unconsciously,
he plagiarized certain passages in Le Sorcier and Ernelinde.”
19. This time Berlioz uses a French title for the work, but it was never translated into French;
at the Théâtre-Italien, it would have been sung in Italian.
in its entirety, since he incorporated several pieces of it in his French scores.

The charming little dance chorus in Alceste, “Parez vos fronts de fleurs nou-
velles,” is the same as “Non sdegnare o bella Venere”;20 the great chorus “Vieni
al mar” became the finale of the final act of Iphigenia in Tauris;21 and the
aria with chorus “Va coll’amata” provides the basis of the chorus in Armide,22
“Suis l’amour, puisque tu le veux.”23
Although Gluck and Handel had very little in common, they did share a
contempt for social proprieties when love for music was at issue. During the
performance of one of Gluck’s operas in Vienna, a fire broke out backstage
toward the end of the first ballet. Performers and spectators attempted to
escape; there was pandemonium. The fire was promptly extinguished, how-
ever, and the second act was called for. Wanting to give the audience some
time to calm down sufficiently to give its full attention to his music, Gluck
insisted that the ballet be started anew. The dancers, in their fright, had fled
to their dressing rooms, and the director refused to obey the composer’s
wishes. Thereupon Gluck, in a fury, stood up on his seat in the presence of the
court—a shocking move at that time—and thundered to the director: “You
will have the ballet begin again, or I swear the opera will not go on!” Gluck
had his way. The ballet was repeated, and, with calm restored during the
dance, the opera came to a very successful conclusion.
To be continued in an upcoming issue24
20. Respectively: “Adorn your foreheads with fresh flowers” (Alceste, Act II, sc. 3, chorus
with dance) and “Disdain me not, o beautiful Venus” (Elena e Paride, Act I, sc. 1).
21. “Come to the sea” (Elena e Paride, Act V, sc. 5, final chorus) becomes “Les dieux long-
temps en courroux” (“The long-wrathful gods”) in Iphigénie en Tauride (Act IV, sc. 6).
22. “Go with your beloved” (Elena e Paride, Act V, sc. 3).
23. “Follow love, since you wish to” (Armide, Act III, sc. 4).
24. For the remainder, see the companion website .
10
Music Review
Beethoven and the Dilettanti
of Bordeaux
Reports of Beethoven’s "Eroica" being booed in Bordeaux prompt this piece,

which begins by imagining, in the comic spirit of Molière, a bedlam of a Turkish
concert that resembles, ironically, certain caricatures in the press of Berlioz’s own
music. Mockery of Turkish music and of Berlioz’s bespeaks ignorance, to be sure,
but also an ingrained devotion to distinct forms of beauty: again and again,
Berlioz lucidly recognizes, as here, that no such thing as absolute beauty exists.
Thus, painful though he finds it to admit, Beethoven’s admirers still number
only a few. They are at least a vibrant and vocal few, and Berlioz uses this piece
to further trumpet his creed. With Beethoven as his yardstick, he detects hope-
ful signs of progress in another town of France, Lyon, where the pianist Mme.
Montgolfier propagates the Great and the Beautiful as Berlioz understands
them—namely, as an apostle of Beethoven.
z June 8, 1834
Le Rénovateur
The Turks love music. Occasionally they take pleasure in rather strange con-
certs, odd enough, I imagine, to breathe new life into the world-weary senses
of our dilettanti. Instead of the “noble ennui” that is their usual plight,1 this
1. Though it is difficult to specify a reference, the irony is self-evident, ennui being the tradi-
tional privilege of the upper classes. Even while reporting on the provinces, Berlioz cannot resist
a dig at Theâtre-Italien dilettantes, who tended to represent actual remnants of the aristocracy.
music would plunge them into the ecstatic, irrepressible laughter that Homer
reports as one of the privileges of Olympus, reserved for the Immortals
alone. If a Muslim wants to refresh himself in the fragrant softness of har-
mony and thus drive away the dark and sooty vapors that opium and tobacco
have deposited in his brain,2 he gathers an orchestra in the courtyard of his
house. The players, equipped with kettledrums and such small wind instru-
ments as our shepherds’ fifes, stand in a circle and let musical inspiration take
over, striking or blowing each after his fashion, one in one rhythm, one in
another, in the noblest spirit of independence. The reputation of these eastern
orchestras being in direct proportion to the distance covered by their sound,
it follows that the musicians, spurred on by praiseworthy competition, spare
neither their lungs nor the leather of their drums; and as the rich Ottoman
listens, he signals his satisfaction from time to time with puffs of tobacco
smoke. Praise God, our Bordelais are saved! All we need now is to send to
Smyrna or Constantinople for musicians who can charm the leisure hours of
our indigo merchants.
Now just imagine some luckless conductor with the bright idea of pre-
senting Beethoven’s “Eroica” to these gentlemen. Do they boo? Of course!
What’s surprising about that? You don’t go to a concert to hear some sym-
phony with no singing, or some funeral dirge, when you can hear the over-
ture to La Caravane du Caire!3 Besides, there are half a dozen young men
who, alleging that this fellow Beethoven is Europe’s greatest composer (not
possible, of course, since he’s never managed to get himself performed at the
Opéra-Comique), keep trying to put a stop to private conversations and call
the talkers lowbrows.
On the shores of the Garonne,

when you go to a show,
you laugh and you chatter;
you’re just there for the fun . . .4
2. Berlioz parodies Molière, who made fun of the doctors’ jargon of his day (Monsieur de
Pourceaugnac, Act I, sc. 8 and 11).
3. Opéra-ballet by Grétry.
4. “Aux bords de la Garonne, l’on rit, l’on jase et l’on raisonne, et l’on s’amuse un moment. . .”
Slightly altered refrain from an aria by the character Frontin in Devienne’s Les Visitandines
(Act II, sc. 8): “On rit, on jase, on raisonne / On n’aime qu’un moment.”
10. Beethoven in Bordeaux 75
Oh, Falstaff is right: what is glory?5 Consider for a moment the full reach of
that word. A few hundred of us hotheads have turned Beethoven into a god
in Paris. In Germany there are some thousand others who cannot utter his
name without a reverential bow. We weep and laugh and pull our hair and cry
out like savages when we hear his melancholy adagios, the biting buffooneries
of his scherzos, the gigantic, Napoleonic pomposity of his marches. We can
readily imagine the whole civilized world echoing his name, every one of us
with heart throbbing in admiration, ready to bow down before the blinding
power of the genius we worship. We leave the concerts of his music aglow
with lofty phrases on the universal power of the Beautiful; and still under the
sway of this musical giant, we swear that such potent thought is irresistible,
bound to sweep away and conquer and overwhelm everything it touches, as
easily as flaming lava melts or burns everything in its path. Oh, perfect, isn’t
it?
Well, now—go to Bordeaux and you will find the “Eroica” booed by peo-
ple for whom Beethoven is no more than the name of a deaf old codger who
wrote incomprehensible music that no one can hum. At the same time you’ll
hear how much they love the composer of Le Rossignol and that “charming”
opera Les Prétendus, which isn’t new but is far better than all that Beethoven
stuff.6
But, good God! you don’t have to go so far for an experience like that. At
the Odéon I recently heard The Marriage of Figaro endlessly booed by those
worthy concertgoers from the rue de la Harpe who like to practice bird calls
on their flooooot-t-ts.7 Le Bourgeois gentilhomme met the same respectful
reception the next day; Molière got his share of glory just like Mozart! Don
Giovanni—that immortal opera, as they say in Paris as in London, in Vienna
and Berlin, in Munich and Dresden—has never been received by the Italians
with anything but sacrilegious, insolent rejections of its divinity; its glory
fades in crossing the Alps. Cherubini would be ill-advised to try mounting
5. Falstaff’s tirade (Henry IV, Part 1, Act V, sc. 1) actually concerns “honor”—or honneur, in
the Letourneur translation standard at the time. Berlioz either misremembers or purposely
trades honneur for gloire, “glory” being more relevant to art and to the Gallic tradition. In
some instances we have rendered gloire as “fame.”
6. The syntax implies that both works were written by the same composer and were inter-
changeable, a grammatical slip that may not have been inadvertent. In fact, the former is by
Lebrun, the latter by Lemoyne. Berlioz mocked the former much more frequently.
7. According to CM 1:113–14n, the reference is to a series of weekly amateur concerts in
which, for a fee, anyone can participate: parts and instruments are furnished. The series is
announced in RM (February 29, 1829, p. 114).
Médée or Les Deux Journées in Milan or Naples.8 His glory, too, would be
unpersuasive to his compatriots. A music dealer in Rome once asked me who
Weber was: “Frenchman? German? He’s not known here.” Just recently the
audience at the Opéra’s reprise of La Vestale needed the “brilliant” ballet La
Révolte au sérail to rescue it from the “boredom caused by the opera”—that,
at least, is how one newspaper reported the event.9 Spontini’s fame is begin-
ning to dim—sad but true.
Still, the setbacks suffered by men of genius have a positive side. If one fact
can truly ensure their fame, it is the esteem of those serious, high-minded
souls for whom Art and Poetry are great and beautiful things, sources of
deepest fulfillment rather than pointless off-day fun for the crowd. Such souls
exist—not many, but more than twenty years ago. At that time, the French
provinces, musically speaking, were in the dark ages.10 Actually, they still are,
but here and there, at least, individual talents shine through as promising
points of light. In Lyon, for example, Mme. Montgolfier, a pianist inspired
by more than just earning a living, has brought together the city’s true art-
ists and enlightened music lovers. Not only does she understand Beethoven
and the great masters, but she knows how to make others understand them.
Aided in her mission by a man of zeal and talent, Monsieur Baumann, she has
become the apostle of the Great and the Beautiful. M. Baumann and Mme.
Montgolfier are destined to open Lyon to the revolution now reshaping Art
throughout Europe.11
HECTOR BERLIOZ
8. Médée (1797) and Les Deux Journées (1800), operas in three acts by Cherubini written for
the Théâtre Feydeau.
9. The ballet La Révolte au sérail was by Taglioni (choreography) and Labarre (music).
10. Berlioz speaks partly from his own experience growing up near Grenoble.
11. Berlioz refers to a private chamber music series founded by the French pianist Jenny
Montgolfier, a friend of Liszt, from whom Berlioz may know these details of her talents. Louis
Baumann (1789–1861), violinist, student of Baillot, was concertmaster at the Grand-Théâtre
in Lyon.
11
Music Review
Henri Reber Quartets
Berlioz prided himself on impartiality toward colleagues and rivals, and begins
here with a riff on that theme. A case in point is his warmth toward Reber, part
of a broader artistic solidarity in the concert under review: Liszt has donated his
services as performer; Chopin has lavished praise. Reber was to enjoy success both
as a composer and as a professor at the Conservatoire, where his rocky start as a
student mirrors Berlioz’s experience with that stodgy institution. Berlioz takes
the opportunity to satirize illogicalities such as the preliminary fugue contest for
the Prix de Rome competition, which was intended to determine dramatic tal-
ent, or the policy of sending prize-winning composers to Rome, though Roman
music at the time lagged far behind that of Paris. In analyzing Reber’s composi-
tions, Berlioz loses no chance to salute his independence from academic rules, a
basic tenet of his own creed.
z July 20, 1834

Le Rénovateur
If there is one true joy for an artist, it is when he happens upon a new man
endowed with all the qualities of the creative elite: strength of conviction
and will, of perseverance and determination, of faith in himself and in his
future. The fellow feeling that such a man arouses is potent enough to turn
his rivals into admiring champions and friends, when a more ordinary talent
would inspire only a disdainful smile at the sound of his name. I assume that
most true artists, loving their art for its own sake, are utterly above the base
stupidity of envy. If a man of distinction responded to a discovery of genuine

merit with animosity instead of warmth and delight, he would be a monstrous
anomaly. Still, such instances have been seen. A famous composer who, be it
noted, was always at his best in the depiction of jealousy apparently shed tears
of rage every time some new work came along to rival his own compositions.1
It is also true that envy and mediocrity do not always go hand in hand. There
are, indeed, many people, as unknown in life as they will be in death—deserv-
edly unknown though they imagine themselves sublime geniuses—who guard
against jealousy precisely because they recognize that vice as a sign of inferiority,
or because they view themselves as so highly placed that they can afford to look
down benevolently at other men’s labors.
Some practitioners, certainly not artists, remain fully aware of their short-
comings, yet hate, detest, and tear apart anything that is not themselves.
Self-esteem plays no part in their hatred; they attack eagles and ducks alike. No;
money and money alone drives them, as Auguste Barbier so forcefully says:
Money, fatal money, men’s last and final god,

Pulls them by the hair and beats them with its rod,
Pushes them into vice—and all for filthy gold;
They’ d kick their very father, even dead and cold.2
It is commerce corrupting art: a hydra constantly branching out to stifle art,

its very source of life—which it would actually do if not for the occasionally
successful efforts to uproot it, at least in part, made by generous-spirited art-
ists such as the one I now turn to.
M. Henri Reber, born, I believe, in Colmar,3 studied a while at the
Conservatoire and then tried to enter the annual competition in musical
composition at the Institute. His attempt was predictably unsuccessful; if
1. The reference is to Méhul, a jealous rival of Lesueur and composer of “jealousy duets” in
both Euphrosine (1790) and Ariodant (1799).
2. Auguste Barbier, Iambes, “Melpomène,” part IV, lines 13–16, sums up what is also a recur-
ring theme of Balzac’s novels.
L’argent, l’argent fatal, dernier dieu des humains,

Les prend par les cheveux, les secoue à deux mains,
Les pousse dans le mal et pour un vil salaire,
Leur mettrait les deux pieds sur le corps de leur père.
3. Actually Reber was born in Mulhouse, south of Colmar, both towns being in the Alsace
region of France.
11. Reber Quartets 79
I am not mistaken, M. Reber was not even admitted to the competition, hav-
ing failed the preliminary examination on the fugue. By the special logic of
the Institute, it apparently followed that he was incapable of writing a proper
lyric scene. . . . “You want a fish? Here’s what you do: take a bear. . . .” Tristapatte
is well thought of at the Institute, not only for his logic but also his educa-
tional system.4 “Train a bear? Simple! First, you take a bear . . . a young one . . .
but if he’s old, that’s all right, too. You feed him some instruction, and if he’s
done well for a few years, you call him trained. That’s it.”
To train a composer you start with a fellow who has some talent. But if
he doesn’t have any, that’s all right, too. You send him off to study music in
Rome, where there is no music, and if there are a few sparks of the sacred
fire in him and he has taken advantage of the instruction that you have not
given him, he may come home as a man of distinguished talent. M. Reber
never had the advantage of being one of the chosen few, but it’s obvious that
he profited handsomely from the instruction that he never received. There
is nothing more alien to school forms—or, rather, formulas—than the per-
sonal style of his compositions. His melodies have a youthful, naive contour
whose features bear not the slightest resemblance to those produced with
the turn of a kaleidoscope. His harmonic doctrine is sheer anarchy and over-
turns every dogma.
M. Reber, in this regard, shows no concern whatever for the rules of
the ancients5—to such an extent that if, during his examinations at the
Conservatoire, he had dared submit a piece like those he has just published,
his impertinence would have sufficed to hasten the advantage of receiving no
instruction. He sometimes uses rhythm with much finesse and originality.
His very instrumentation, so limited by the more or less similar instruments
available, as in his string quartets, has nonetheless allowed him to display a
multitude of striking effects and fitting contrasts. Let me cite in particular
the opening of the Adagio in Reber’s second quartet.6 The theme, full of mel-
ancholy and a certain graceful Gothic spirit reminiscent of medieval fabliaux,
4. Tristapatte (“sad paw”) is a character from a popular one-act musical comedy

( folie-vaudeville) by Scribe and Xavier (1820), L’Ours et le pacha (The Bear and the Pasha); he
is a simple fellow who is disguised as a bear to entertain a pasha mourning his favorite bear.
5. Berlioz puns on the word “prescription” (ordonnance), referring to a line of Molière’s
(Monsieur de Pourceaugnac, Act I, sc. 5) about doctors who wouldn’t alter the “rules of the
ancients” by one iota, even if their patients should die from it.
6. Reber’s Second String Quartet, op. 5, titled “Vergiß mein nicht” (Forget me not), is in two
movements, Andante poco adagio and Allegretto.
is sung by the first violin and sustained—or rather, underlined—by a pizzi-

cato accompaniment in the second violin of two notes per bar. At the end of
the phrase the viola and cello enter arco, with sustained chords imitating an
organ. The impression is admirable and wholly unexpected. Another effect
struck me in the last movement of the same quartet, a magnificent depiction
of a soul first torn by despair, then soothed by religious resignation. The effect
springs from one instrument playing tremolo triplets while the other three
remain on quarter notes alone.
In the piano trio that followed the quartet, a phrase remarkable for its
stark simplicity brought murmurs of pleasure and amazement from the audi-
ence, a response inspired by the admirable art with which this deeply quiet
melody is accompanied, and by the innovative modulations that it comprises.7
Liszt was at the piano. For the fiery pianist, the scant number of notes in the
piece was a distinct challenge, but he met it with intelligence and taste, add-
ing not one note to the composer’s Spartan score. Liszt’s well-deserved reward
was the chance to reveal an unknown side of his talent, which was greatly
appreciated. MM. Seghers the elder, Cuvillon, Urhan, and Franchomme per-
formed their parts in the quartet and the trio with a skill that must surely
have gratified the composer.8 Such a performance is a quite rare event. It is
true that these gentlemen, despite their individual talents—or rather because
they are men of talent—had spent several days in careful rehearsal.9 For his
first public appearance, M. Reber could not have chosen more faithful inter-
preters. The applause that filled M. Duport’s salon proved to the composer
that he had won the understanding and allegiance of his distinguished audi-
ence. It was true justice for this new musical genius unexpectedly emerging
fully formed,10 and many people left the recital echoing the exclamation
by Monsieur Chopin, a good judge in such matters: “No question—it was
superb! There is no other word for it!”
HECTOR BERLIOZ
7. Reber’s Second Trio for piano, violin, and cello, op. 12 (1825). Berlioz seems to be referring
to its second movement, marked “Doucement.”
8. François Seghers (1801–1881), admired violinist and conductor, founding member of the
Conservatoire Orchestra.
9. Berlioz often inveighs against the practice still current among musicians—except at the
Conservatoire—of performing at sight, often as a matter of pride. Eighteenth-century reper-
toire fared better under such treatment than post-middle-period Beethoven.
10. Allusion to the goddess Athena, born fully formed from the head of Zeus.
12
Music Review
Funer al Service for Choron (I)
A composer notable for the strong elegiac strain in his music, Berlioz the writer
pays here an eloquent literary tribute to a French pioneer of music history and
early-music performance, mourning both his death and the resulting absence of
early-music performance in Paris. Those familiar with Berlioz’s often disparag-
ing remarks about Palestrina, Handel, or even Bach may be surprised. For one
thing, Choron’s arrangement of Palestrina for large choir made the music far
more palatable to Berlioz than what he had heard in Rome from a dozen or so
castrati at the Sistine Chapel. For another, there are polemical overtones to his
defense of the “virile” music of the past in the face of current frivolities, such as the
catalog of personal aversions he details in closing. Three years before his Requiem,
he manifests his deep commitment to the cause of sacred music, and in general to
a canon of musical works powerful enough to withstand the passage of time.
z August 11, 1834

Le Rénovateur
The art of music has just suffered a cruel loss: Choron is dead. Will the school
he founded and directed with tireless zeal survive his passing?1 Alas, I fear not.
1. What Berlioz calls Choron’s school had been limping along ever since its subsidy was dras-
tically reduced by the new government in 1830. Even before 1830 there were various incarna-
tions of the school, which Choron established in its original form in 1812. The Institution
royale de musique religieuse de France, which Berlioz knew and whose concerts had such an
What undeniable service, however, this nursery of vocal talent has provided!
This is where all the good choral singers in Paris were trained. Many of our
young singer-actors, who today are viewed as pupils of the Conservatoire on
the rue Bergère because they were admitted there before making their debut
at the Opéra, had already done preparatory work in Choron’s classes. Their
studies bore fruit—redounding, I should add, to the credit of other teachers
who needed do no more than sign their names on the prize-award program,
where by rights Choron’s name belonged. Sic vos non vobis.2 Such unfairness
is only too frequent, unfortunately. Duprez—that wonderful tenor who for
three years now has been making a fortune for Tuscan theaters as well as
himself with a talent great enough to overcome the national prejudices of
the Italians and draw the wild applause they grant only to voices of the first
rank—Duprez, I say, owes to no one but Choron the excellent musical educa-
tion that he received.3
Moreover, the matinee performances at the Institution for Religious
Music, which brought together all of Paris’s enlightened music lovers and
conscientious artists, gave us the opportunity to study the masterpieces of
Handel as well as the finest compositions of the old Italian school. Where
can we hear them now? Nowhere—which is most distressing. Those vir-
ile harmonies, so different from the pale, colorless, disjointed music that
daily arouses the ire and pity of the friends of Art, would no doubt have
ultimately had a beneficial influence on the public. In shaping public taste,
such compositions, furthermore, would have proven that the caprices of
fashion are powerless against the works of genius, when genius is so tem-
pered as not to yield before the base demands of tired frivolity. If Choron’s
school is closed, then Handel, Bach, Leo, Palestrina, Carissimi, Marcello,
Porpora, Scarlatti, Allegri, and Jommelli will again be as alien to us as the
philosophers of China.4 All that bygone art, still barely known, will disap-
pear once more.
impact, was founded in 1825 at 69 rue de Vaugirard. Berlioz came to know Choron well, writ-
ing for him a three-voice Salutaris with organ accompaniment (now lost) in 1828–29, part of
a commissioned oratorio (CG 1:220). It is thus partly the loss of his own associated prospects
that Berlioz laments in the passing of Choron and his school.
2. “This you do, though not for yourselves,” a Virgilian quotation referring among others to
honeybees, and used to denounce those who profit from others’ work.
3. One of Berlioz’s first tributes to Duprez. Berlioz had heard and admired him in Italy and
was now campaigning to bring him back to Paris.
4. Except for Bach and Handel, all the names refer to composers of the Italian Baroque.
12. Funeral of Choron 83
The theaters too may well feel the effect. Choron was not only an intel-
lectual; he was also a man of action. As the director of a school for singing,
he was not content simply to announce in the newspapers that he would be
holding auditions for new pupils on this or that particular day. When he
needed new voices, he went in search of them himself, traveling through
France and Germany on foot, questioning barbers (usually great talkers),
inquiring into the musical resources of the area, drinking in taverns with
workers and peasants for a chance to hear them sing, and never getting
back to Paris without his quota of basses and tenors. Let us hope that the
minister will understand what an enormous gap the closing of the school
for religious music would leave in music education and will preserve this
veritable branch of the Conservatoire.5 Let us hope, too, that the new direc-
tor will not veer away from the difficult but successful course laid out by
M. Choron.6 In truth, if his institution were ever to become one more cava-
tina factory or shop for musical cream puffs, like so many others, better by
far that it be demolished!
Two days ago, Choron’s many pupils and an orchestra of 130 musicians
gathered at the Invalides to perform a requiem mass, conducted by M. Girard.
The audience was immense. Both sides of the monumental church were full
and the balconies, overflowing. Men, women, clergy, military—they were
all drawn to the solemn event by a simple announcement, and they came in
eager droves. This fact is worth noting, for it shows that music is now becom-
ing almost a need for our Paris public. Unfortunately, it’s a caninelike hun-
ger: it devours everything with no discrimination—oratorios by Jommelli
or Mozart performed by 250 artists, or vile quadrilles and tasteless overtures
played by street bands.
The performers, stationed at the highest point in the church, were unable
to produce the full effect that such a mass of voices and instruments would
5. Adolphe Thiers (1797–1877) was Minister of Home Affairs (de l’Intérieur) from April to
November 1834 and (based on a surviving letter) seems to be the one responsible in this mat-
ter. Thanks to Anne Bongrain and Marie-Hélène Coudroy-Saghaï for their special sleuthing
in this matter, rendered complex by changes in ministerial assignments. In April 1834 the
domain of the arts (Beaux-Arts), previously under Commerce, went to Home Affairs, while
religion went to the Ministry of Justice.
6. CM 1:358 quotes Le Chérubin (November 27, 1834) on Choron’s appointed successor,
M. de Bligny, who was charged with “gathering up the remains of Choron’s school, hiring
eight professors, and opening a Special School for Music starting on December 1st at 93 rue
de Sèvres.” Its future was extremely uncertain; in March 1835 Berlioz expresses surprise on
learning that it was giving a concert, which proved disappointing (#25).
have had if they had been placed in tiers, on risers.7 The sound was lost in
certain spots, and many people complained at the end that they had had
difficulty hearing. Listeners in the balconies, on the other hand, report hav-
ing been mightily impressed. I was seated quite close to the orchestra and
found the effect generally very satisfying, occasionally full of grandeur and
majesty. A few passages of the Mozart Requiem needed more rehearsal. The
Jommelli fragment was well rendered; its fine style is simple, expressive, and
broad. I can say as much of the Palestrina motet, unaccompanied but sung
beautifully, without the slightest slip in intonation, by 140 voices. These
lovely harmonies, pure and calm as the sky that witnessed their birth, seemed
deeply moving to the audience—which I well understand: it was all ravish-
ingly beautiful.
My God, what a splendid thing is music! Why has Providence imposed
such cruel counterweights to the enjoyment of this sublime art? Open-air
orchestras, for example; Don Giovanni rewritten as quadrilles; one-act comic
operas; baleful farces; trill-filled cavatinas, and in general the various products
of present-day Italian commerce; sopranos who embroider their melodies;
orchestras with twelve violins; double-bass players who simplify their parts;
flute duets; vocal fugues on the word “Amen”; mass-produced romances;
dance numbers for Mademoiselle Taglioni with ophicleides, snare drums,
and bass drum8—and other abominations that decency forbids me to name.
HECTOR BERLIOZ
7. Berlioz was a pioneer in the science of orchestral acoustics; among other things, he
advocated the use of tiered risers for the best projection of sound. Lack of resounding sur-
faces accounts for the generally poor effect of outdoor music. A street performance of “The
Marseillaise” described in Mem. (chapter 29) was an exception, because enclosed arcades near
the rue Vivienne provided the necessary reflectors. See #40.
8. The ethereal dance of Taglioni deserved a corresponding accompaniment; the heavy artil-
lery were to be reserved, Berlioz implies, for moments of grandeur and high drama.
13
Music Review
Funeral Service for Choron (II)
Berlioz reserves for the Gazette musicale, the newly founded weekly for musi-
cal progressives, his fullest expression of dismay at the “ barbarous” abolition
of institutions for sacred music by the revolutionaries of 1789 and 1830, and
at the smashing, during the July Revolution, of musical instruments in the
Chapelle royale. Members of the clergy bore some responsibility, we learn,
for the dearth of religious music, guilty as they were of forbidding the use of
professional women singers in church and of sheer lack of interest. Composers
themselves come under fire: Berlioz expresses disdain for Mozart’s setting
of the “Tuba mirum” in his Requiem—a disdain tempered, as we find else-
where, by admiration for the work as a whole (#29). In 1837, Berlioz’s own
Requiem will help move religious music beyond the current crisis; and begin-
ning in the 1840s, the emergence of new, independent initiatives will help
make the nineteenth century, in the end, the richest in the history of French
sacred music. Yet the new developments will not all be to Berlioz’s liking: as
a proponent of expressive music in all domains, he remains cool toward the
movement to reinstate plainchant in the churches, and toward “purity” of
style in general.
z September 7, 1834
Sacred music is a rare thing today. This beautiful branch of the art is with-
ering rapidly and will soon no doubt disappear completely. Its decline
dates from the abolition of choir schools.1 These institutions, serving primar-
ily to enhance worship, were hardly less precious for music itself, as shown by
the numerous distinguished composers and singers who were trained in them.
At that time, religious works had a purpose. Composers who felt drawn to that
noble and majestic genre, admirers of the sublime poetry of our holy books,
could write a mass or oratorio without the risk of having it remain sterile, born
to utter obscurity, never to be performed.
Today, let’s suppose a composer writes a new mass. What can he do with
it? Nothing, absolutely nothing. Is there a single church in Paris where he
might find the chorus and the orchestra he needs? Not one. Among the
wealthy priests who officiate at the various parishes in the capital, is there
one interested enough in music to subsidize musicians brought in from else-
where to make possible a worthy performance of the unknown score? Not
likely. Supposing such a man of generosity were to come forward, would he
dare take a stand against an archbishop who prohibits professional women
musicians from singing in church? His good intentions would be brought to
a quick halt. The human voice is already limited enough without restricting
its range even further by barring sopranos from the chorus. What an absur-
dity to rule out women’s voices! Yet we are subjected daily in our churches
to shrill, out-of-tune voices struggling to sing their stupid hymns in unison.
The archbishop finds nothing wrong with that. Instruct these same women;
teach these amateurs music; civilize them; then try to bring them together as
a proper, trained choir in the very same place where earlier they were splitting
our eardrums. The archbishop will have none of it!
Let me go further. A composer willing to underwrite personally the per-
formance of a mass written for men’s voices alone, or including boy sopra-
nos, might still be thwarted. He would have to obtain the permission of the
priest, who would refer the matter to the archbishop, who would deny his
authorization. The writer of this article speaks from experience.2 The priest
at Saint-Roch, a great music lover, is said to have done his best to introduce
music into his church. So far his efforts have led to nothing more than a band
1. The French term was maîtrise: these schools were attached to churches and cathedrals,
for which they provided the music. Berlioz’s teacher Lesueur was trained at one of them. The
anticlerical ideology of the French Revolution led to their abolition.
2. In fact Berlioz did arrange, by paying out of pocket (thanks to a friend’s loan), for a perfor-
mance of his Messe solennelle at the Church of Saint-Roch on July 10, 1825.
13. Choron and Religious Music 87
of ten or fifteen wind instruments. Such means are completely useless for the
performance of a mass, however spare. And yet, the music at Saint-Roch has
been gaining something of a reputation. People speak of it as a remarkable
thing that we owe to the pastor. Fifteen winds! And not the smallest choir
able to offer a decent performance of a four-part motet! Such is the barbaric
state of church music in France, thanks to the abolition of choir schools.
That decree left only the Chapelle royale and Choron’s school.
Every Sunday in the chapel we could hear compositions by MM. Lesueur
and Cherubini, performed by a small but excellent orchestra with a substan-
tial choir that did not exclude women.
“Kings can make allowances.”3 The recent revolution put a stop to all
that: no more music in the Tuileries, no more sacred songs. The victors in July
put the decree into effect by smashing the instruments in the chapel. Since
then, there has reigned the most lawful silence.
The institution of religious music in the rue de Vaugirard, where six years
ago we’d go to admire the great works of Handel, Marcello, and Palestrina,
was cruelly affected by the same blow that crushed the Chapelle royale.
Still, it remained in existence thanks to the selfless, incredible energy of its
founder. Choron has just died . . . and with him his school. There! The work
of destruction is now complete; in all of France, there is not a single school for
the propagation—or even the simple preservation—of sacred music. Barbary,
you have wiped the slate clean . . .
The public, however, seems ready to welcome efforts to prevent the radical
disappearance of an art that, in all periods and among all civilized peoples,
has been the finest ornament of temples and religious ceremonies. The crowds
that recently packed the approaches to the Invalides to hear Mozart, Jommelli,
and Palestrina performed by Choron’s pupils gave an eager, energetic demon-
stration in favor of that welcome. A few newspaper announcements had been
enough to draw almost nine thousand persons to this outlying church for the
sake of the music alone. The attraction was not a political meeting or the pres-
ence of important people or ceremonial pomp or any sort of spectacle. People
came not to see or be seen, but only to hear—a remarkable fact that needs to
be emphasized, for it points to considerable progress in the musical education
of the Paris public.
3. “Il est avec les rois des accommodements.” Berlioz, substituting “kings” for “heaven,”
parodies the rogue priest in Molière who attempts to seduce his host’s wife: “Heaven forbids
certain pleasures,” admits Tartuffe, “but it can make allowances.” “Le ciel défend, de vrai, cer-
tains contentements, / Mais on trouve avec lui des accommodements” (Tartuffe, Act IV, sc. 5).
The huge audience, expecting mass at ten o’clock, had to wait until eleven,
a delay due to the absence of a very important part of the orchestra, the brass
players, without whom the conductor, M. Girard, did not want to begin. He
was nevertheless forced to do so, for the late players did not appear; only one
trombone and one trumpet could be found. The chorus, in contrast, was there
in full force, and among its 140 voices you could spot about 50 young women.
The chaplain of the Invalides,4 less rigid than most of his colleagues, was will-
ing to ignore this infraction of the ecclesiastical rules. Although the music
for the funeral service had been organized somewhat hastily, with rehears-
als insufficient and incomplete, Mozart’s Requiem was so well known to the
musicians, Jommelli’s so broad and simple in style, and everyone so good-
willed that the overall execution was quite satisfactory. The unaccompanied
“Agnus,” a contrafact of Palestrina’s motet Alla riva, was rendered with rare
perfection; the chorus was never once off-key. Sung by a great mass of voices,
a thousand or twelve hundred for example, this piece would produce an over-
powering effect. Since the composer uses almost no rhythm or melody, such
an effect would convey the true power of harmony, when chords are chosen
and set in this way.
Mozart’s “Lacrymosa” and “Confutatis” were similarly well rendered
by both voices and orchestra. The “Tuba mirum,” as usually happens, pro-
duced no effect whatever. Despite the profound veneration everyone feels for
Mozart, despite the beauty of the melodic phrase that opens this movement,
it is impossible not to find it unpleasant and disappointing. The poetry is
sublime and fills you with a holy fright; your imagination grows and leaps
forward to the vast throng that the “terrifying trumpet” of the heavenly
host has just “snatched from the sleep of death” and thrust “trembling at
the feet of the sovereign Judge.”5 You naturally search in the composer’s set-
ting of these terrible words for thoughts and images not merely analogous
but even more powerful, especially when the composer is Mozart. Yet you
have to admit that this movement of the celebrated composition presents
almost nothing outstanding. The composer chose a single trombone to ren-
der the effect of the archangel’s formidable summons. Why only one, when
thirty or even three hundred would not be too many? Might it be because
the text says “tuba” and not “tubae”? It is not possible to attribute to Mozart
so strange and silly a blunder. Why, immediately after the summons and the
4. Claude Ancelin (1783–1856), who assumed his functions at the Invalides in 1833.
5. Berlioz is quoting freely from the text of the “Tuba mirum.”
13. Choron and Religious Music 89
corresponding vocal phrase, this unexpected calm throughout the move-

ment and the even more unexpected accompaniment by the bassoons in the
middle range? Yes, indeed—bassoons! Yes, the singer is busy spinning out
notes, when what we seek is a depiction of the final convulsions of the expir-
ing universe. It is Virgil’s picture: “There rise the bellowing of men and the
blaring of trumpets.”6 It is inconceivable that Mozart would make such a mis-
take—even impossible. We prefer to believe that he only outlined this part
of the Requiem and left the rest to a man who did not understand its spirit.7
Several persons complained as they left that they had had trouble hear-
ing; they blamed it on the sparseness of the orchestra. The point is that every
time the number of musicians fails to correspond exactly to the air mass that
is supposed to vibrate, only listeners seated very close to the orchestra can be
moved; all others will experience only feeble sensations and fail to grasp the
whole or the details. That was the case at Choron’s service. Three hundred
performers are too few to carry the harmonies, however broad, through a
space as vast as that of the Invalides church. It would take six hundred at the
very least. Besides, no one thought to place the voices and instruments on ris-
ers, an indispensable precaution on such an occasion.
Unfortunately, such things cost a great amount of money, and Choron’s
poor pupils, despite the free participation of the large number of instrumen-
talists who had joined them, had to bear an expense of 1800 francs themselves,
which the voluntary contributions at the door did not completely cover.
H. BERLIOZ
6. “Exoritur clamorque virum clangorque tubarum”: Virgil, Aeneid, 2:313.

7. Mozart’s Requiem was in fact completed by Süssmayer. See #29, where Berlioz discusses
the issue of authorship, repeating almost verbatim his critique of the “Tuba mirum” but in
the context of an enthusiastic evocation of most of the work, leaving a much more balanced
impression.
14
Rossini’s William Tell (Part I)
When Rossini’s William Tell was first performed at the Opéra in 1829 and hailed
as a great new turn in the composer’s manner, Berlioz was dismissive. In this
piece, he not only concurs in that judgment but acclaims the opera as a master-
piece—a flawed masterpiece, to be sure, but worthy of one of his first ventures in
critique admirative, a type of analytical study he usually reserved for great mas-
ters of the past. Here, in the first of four installments on the opera,1 Berlioz ana-
lyzes the famous overture, a major undertaking in the field of instrumental music
that responds to the revelation of Beethoven the year before. Despite relapses into
artifice and the ever-present shadow of Beethoven, Berlioz finds more to admire
than he may have expected. The amount of technical detail in this early analysis
is unusual; Berlioz may be testing out his readership in the new journal.
z October 12, 1834

Tired of hearing his operas endlessly criticized for violating the norms of dra-
matic expression and still more tired, perhaps, of his fanatics’ blind admira-
tion, Rossini found a simple means of silencing the opposition and shaking
off his partisans: he composed a work that was seriously conceived, pondered
at leisure, and executed from beginning to end according to the time-honored
principles of reason and taste. He wrote William Tell. This fine opera should
1. The others appeared in the issues of October 19 and 26 and November 2 (GM was pub-
lished once a week). Those installments may be found on the companion website .
14. William Tell Overture 91
be regarded as an application of the composer’s new theories, and as the

awakening of greater, more noble faculties than had been possible with the
sensualist public that he had earlier had in view. Such are the assumptions
that, beyond any hint of partisanship, will guide our examination of Rossini’s
latest score.
To judge only from the acclaim it has earned, the ovations it has
aroused, and the converts it has won, William Tell has clearly enjoyed great
success—a spontaneous success with some, a more reasoned and analyti-
cal appreciation with others. Still missing, however, is the sort of success
most keenly sought by theater administrators and, indeed, composers as
well: popular, financial success. The dilettanti are hostile to William Tell,
deeming it cold and boring.2 The causes of such broadly divergent opinions
will emerge, I hope, from the study of this important work that I now invite
the reader to share with me. Let us follow the composer step by step along
his new path—where he would have made faster and surer progress if not
for a few backward glances forced on him by deeply rooted habits. These
rare examples once again confirm the adage “The arts require a firm stand;
half measures are worthless.”
Overture
For the first time, Rossini decided to compose his overture in the dramatic
manner accepted by everyone in Europe, save the Italians. In adopting this
instrumental style completely new to him, he enlarged the form and turned
the ordinary two-movement piece into a veritable symphony in four distinct
parts.
The first movement depicts the stillness of deep solitude, the solemn quiet
of nature when the elements—and human passions—are at rest. It is a poetic
start. The animated scenes that follow provide a lovely contrast in expressive-
ness and even in orchestration, for this opening section is scored for only five
solo cellos accompanied by the rest of the cello section and the double basses.
The following movement, “The Storm,” brings the full orchestra into play.
Here Rossini might have done well to abandon the foursquare rhythms, the
evenly balanced phrases, and periodically repeated cadences that he elsewhere
uses very successfully. “A beautiful disorder is often a product of art,” said a
2. Earlier in the year Rossini had been subject to attacks reported in RM (April 13). Fétis
came to the composer’s defense with a long, admiring biography (RM, June 29 and July 6 and
13, 1834). Berlioz is following up, as it were, on Fétis’s initiative.
writer whose classical reserve can hardly be questioned.3 Beethoven proved

as much with the prodigious cataclysm of his “Pastoral” Symphony and thus
reached his goal, whereas Rossini did no more than catch a glimpse of his.
Several harmonic effects are remarkable and ingeniously brought to the fore;
the minor ninth chord, among others, gives rise to some truly exceptional
effects. In the opera’s storm music, it is disappointing to encounter once
again that sprinkling of woodwind notes which music lovers call raindrops,
a device that the composer already used for the little shower in The Barber
of Seville and in another of his works.4 On the other hand, he succeeds in
making the bass drum—without cymbals—produce picturesque sounds that
readily evoke the rumble of distant thunder through the mountain hollows.
The storm’s inevitable decrescendo is handled with rare skill.
In short, the result is not stunning or overwhelming—unlike Beethoven’s
storm, a musical depiction perhaps matchless for all time. Nor does it have
the admirably somber and forlorn sound of the introduction to Iphigenia in
Tauris.5 It is beautiful, though, and full of majesty. Unfortunately the note-
smith is always in evidence, so that all along we remain aware of his strate-
gies, even the most unusual ones. Beethoven, in contrast, knew how to keep
himself out of sight; we hear not an orchestra, not music, but the tumultu-
ous voice of the heavens’ downpour mixed with the earthly roar of rushing
streams and claps of thunder, cracking branches of uprooted trees, gusts of
murderous wind, the howls of frightened people, and the bellowing of live-
stock. It’s all consternation and alarm—and the illusion is total. The emotion
that Rossini generates in the same setting is far from achieving such intensity.
But let’s go on.
The storm is followed by a pastoral scene of great freshness. The English
horn plays a delightful melody in the style of a Swiss pasture call, a ranz des
vaches, while the flute does a wonderful, bright frolic over that quiet tune.
I note in passing that the triangle, with little spaced-out pianissimo dings, is
very much in its place: it is the bell of the herds peacefully feeding while their
herders entertain one another with spirited songs. Ah! someone will no doubt
object to my attributing a dramatic effect to this use of the triangle. Are, then,
all the other instruments—the violins, violas, cellos, clarinets—also meant to
3. Boileau, Art poétique, part II, line 72.

4. There are in fact storms in both The Barber of Seville and Cinderella (La Cenerentola).
5. Gluck’s opera opens with a storm; Berlioz describes it extensively in one of his first letters
home from Paris after seeing it performed for the first time: he is completely taken in by the
illusion, both from the scenic effects and from the music (CG 1:36).
14. William Tell Overture 93
represent something? No! They are musical instruments, the very bedrock of
music, whereas the triangle is merely a piece of iron of indistinct pitch, whose
use in a soft, quiet piece has to be clearly justified; otherwise it can only be a
laughable oddity.6
As the English horn plays the final notes of the pastoral melody, the trum-
pets enter with a rapid, incisive fanfare in B, the major third of the key of G
established in the preceding section. Within two measures, the B turns into
the dominant of E major, thus setting, simply yet unexpectedly, the tonality
of the following allegro.
This final part of the overture is treated with a brio and verve that always
excite the audience, but it is entirely based on what is today an overused
rhythm. Then, too, the theme is almost identical to that of the overture
to Fernand Cortez.7 The staccato flourish of the first violins, flitting from
C-sharp minor to G-sharp minor, is a particularly successful passage wit-
tily tossed into the martial instrumentation. In addition, it offers a way back
to the main theme, now taken up again with irresistible fervor. A masterly
move! This exuberant allegro comes to a very energetic conclusion.
All in all, despite the lack of originality in theme and rhythm, despite an
occasionally excessive, annoying use of the bass drum and its somewhat vul-
gar underscoring of all stressed beats, as in double-time marches or in country
dances, we have to admit that the work is overall an undeniably superior com-
position, perhaps more vital and engaging than anything in Rossini’s previ-
ous works.
(To be continued in the following issue)
6. The insistence on justifying or “motivating” an unusual choice of musical means is a rem-

nant of Classical preconceptions about music’s need for conceptual meaning, although the
notion of (purely) musical instruments implicitly discounts such needs.
7. Berlioz is evidently referring to similarities between the famous allegro vivace theme of
Rossini’s overture (known to Americans of a certain age as the “Lone Ranger” theme) and the
opening of the two main themes in the overture to Spontini’s opera.
15
Boieldieu
In Berlioz’s Memoirs, we meet Boieldieu as one of the Conservatoire professors

who stood in the way of progress. This courtly old-school Frenchman liked his
music “soothing,” when Berlioz wanted music to set him on fire. As a young stu-
dent, he had in fact delighted in Boieldieu’s lively operas; here he evokes the com-
poser’s sad decline and death with genuine nostalgia and fellow feeling. Most of
the review nonetheless concerns the music for the funeral and the arrangements
for its performance: the need for permission to allow women to sing in church;
the acoustical problems caused by the presence of heavy draperies and the lack of
risers for the orchestra. Berlioz dwells especially on Cherubini's Requiem, which
he describes with contagious excitement. He also criticizes the rowdy behavior
of some of the audience, implicitly evoking two opposing faces of “the people”: the
crowd ennobled through group performance, and the rowdy mob that, given
haunting memories of the Terror of 1793, must be kept well under control.
z October 14, 1834

Le Rénovateur
The Opéra-Comique, cruelly struck a year and a half ago by the death of
Hérold, has received no less harsh a blow with the loss of Boieldieu.1 “He had
stopped composing quite some time ago,” some will say; “his state of health
prevented him from writing.” So for us the death of Boieldieu dates from the
time when his weakening faculties severed him, as it were, from the world
1. Hérold died on January 19, 1833, Boieldieu on October 8, 1834.

15. Boieldieu 95
of music. Not just yesterday could the theater that owes him its fame and
fortune regard itself as orphaned of his genius. When his illness reached the
point where sustained work became a danger, the graceful cantilenas came
to an end, along with his sparkling melodies, cheerful refrains, and enticing
songs. The witty composer of Jean de Paris and La Dame blanche,2 hoping
to stave off death a little longer, sadly left for Italy. The Tuscan sun seemed
momentarily to revive him. An adulatory welcome in Pisa recalled the high
points of his brilliant career and afforded Boieldieu a brief respite of mel-
ancholy happiness. Once back in France, however, his illness progressed
so rapidly that he could hardly venture out of his apartment. Only on days
when warm weather and a clear blue sky brought to mind the enchantment
of Italy could he be seen walking on the boulevard Montmartre. The cheerful
composer of Ma tante Aurore,3 warming his stick-thin legs in the sun, looked
more like a ghost than a man. It was a sad end for an artist who, having wit-
nessed the eclipse of his genius, now saw as well the daily decline of his physi-
cal strength. Kreutzer had a similar end.4 Like Boieldieu, the composer of
Lodoïska and La Mort d’Abel endured a slow, cruel death.5 At least the funeral
honors accorded Boieldieu were worthy of the renown that his many charm-
ing works had brought him, while poor Kreutzer passed away utterly forgot-
ten and alone.
All Paris’s artists of distinction in one genre or another were present yes-
terday for the solemn ceremony at the Invalides. Originally programmed for
the Church of Saint-Roch, the service had to be moved because Cherubini’s
Requiem requires sopranos, and the archbishop was not inclined to allow
worldly ladies onto sacred ground. At Choron’s funeral two months ago, the
same problem arose at the Sorbonne; there was nothing to do but appeal to
the chaplain of the Invalides. Obviously less dogmatic than the archbishop
(more soldier than priest), he was willing to close his eyes to the sopranos and
2. Jean de Paris, two-act opéra-comique (1812) beloved of Schumann and Wagner, earns
Berlioz’s praise for its lively melodies and elegant style. La Dame blanche (1825), Boieldieu’s
masterpiece, was based on Walter Scott’s dramatic poem The Lady of the Lake and imbued
with Romantic traits partly inspired by Weber.
3. Ma tante Aurore, opéra-bouffe (1803) whose comic verve and delicate instrumentation
must have appealed to Berlioz.
4. Berlioz in his Memoirs indicts Kreutzer’s jealous refusal of assistance to younger artists.
None of that here; merely sympathy for a sad decline and death.
5. Lodoïska, three-act opéra-comique (1791); La Mort d’Abel (1810), opera that aroused
Berlioz’s swooning enthusiasm as a student, along with indignation at audience indifference
at a performance of 1824 (CG 1:70–71).
just hear their voices. The same solution was adopted for Boieldieu. Though
there were fewer participants than at Choron’s funeral, the performance was
thoroughly satisfying. Cherubini’s fine work shone with new brilliance, and
some sections were particularly moving—the “Dies irae” above all, remark-
ably more grand and awesome than Mozart’s setting. Every part of it is
original, full of poetry and power and majesty. The throng of ashen specters
rushing madly to the feet of the supreme Judge, judicanti responsura, the tur-
bulence of the elements, the rips and tears in the earth as it opens to the fear-
some voice of the trumpets of the heavenly host, the stunned amazement of
nature, the hope of the just, the tears and groans of the sinful—in a word, all
that is sublime in the sacred text is expressed with rare felicity in Cherubini’s
work. We have often had occasion to note our admiration for this magnifi-
cent requiem, but never had we experienced its beauties more keenly than
yesterday.
The first section, “Requiem aeternam,” and the closing “Agnus Dei” pro-
vide a worthy frame for this vast conception. It is the humble supplication
of repentant hearts barely beating, oppressed by the thought of the Law to
which all living beings are ultimately subjected. To be properly performed,
such music calls not for fifty or a hundred or even two hundred participants,
but for an entire people. And so truthful is this music that each such per-
former would feel it as his own, oblivious of the composer and the work he
was interpreting. What a triumph of genius! M. Cherubini had nevertheless
to be satisfied with the small number of singers available to him. The voices
and the orchestra did their part with a degree of care and attention unusual
in such circumstances.
Before the Requiem, the instruments alone played a funeral march com-
posed by M. Berton.6 At the end of the ceremony, Ponchard, accompanied
by eight or ten other voices, sang a “Judicabit” set to a section of one of
Boieldieu’s earliest operas, “Les Chevaliers de la fidélité.”7 From the church
we all proceeded to the cemetery of Père-Lachaise, where the famous com-
poser was laid to rest.
A very large crowd filled not only the Invalides, but the surrounding
area as well. Following the catafalque came a military band playing funeral
marches and then a long stream of mourners’ carriages bearing the members
6. It was composed specifically for the occasion.

7. “The Knights of Fidelity,” romance that became popular from the opera Charles de France
that Boieldieu wrote with Hérold for the wedding of the duc de Berry in 1816.
15. Boieldieu 97
of the Institute, among them MM. Meyerbeer, Rossini, Berton, Paër, Auber,
Cherubini, Lesueur, Plantade, Reicha, et al.8
The ceremony seemed very well organized. Regrettably, the public’s behav-
ior was highly inappropriate. As the body was brought into the sanctuary and
the main doors swung open, the crowd poured wildly into the church, burst-
ing into shouts and even laughter. Some fell, while others clambered over
benches and balustrades with no respect for time or place. In the balconies,
the boisterous chattering sounded like the Stock Exchange on one of its most
frenetic days. The soldiers could barely bring order into this rowdy surge,
which at one point threatened to spill over into the orchestra and knock
down music stands and players alike.
This is what happens whenever a ceremony is open to the public at no
charge. My opinion may seem far-fetched, but I do believe that such occasions
call for a fee—say, five francs—and then everything would proceed in an
orderly and dignified manner. Not only because the crowd would be smaller,
but also because people who pay to admire a work of art or pause for prayerful
reflection usually show little resemblance to the noisy, idle horde who rush
stupidly toward any curiosity that beckons.
HECTOR BERLIOZ
8. Berlioz is listing all the famous composers of the day, the most obscure today being
Charles-Henri Plantade (1764–1839), conductor of the Chapelle royale orchestra under
Louis XVIII and Charles X, composer of religious music, songs and romances, seven
opéras-comiques and three operas.
16
Notice to Readers Idle Enough

to Read My Articles
Berlioz tacks this humorous announcement of one of his concerts onto a pedestrian
review (omitted here) of Le Marchand forain, a forgettable opéra-comique by a
certain M. Marliani.1 In an ingenious method of advertising, he spoofs his own
critics. For the third year in a row, he is giving a concert at the Conservatoire.
This year’s program includes his new second symphony with solo viola, Harold in
Italy, and a repeat performance of his first, the “Fantastico-Epileptic Symphony”
much attacked by critics such as Fétis for its program and special effects. Berlioz’s
satire forms an implicit defense of the music, while the closing jest about giving
his concerts for the benefit of “copyists, printers, gendarmes, poster makers, the
lamplighter, the wood merchant, the usherettes, and the poor poor-tax collector,”
carries undertones of real urgency: the obligatory poor tax, which can amount to
a quarter of the gross receipts, can easily drain all the profits. Though he revels in
the thought of his magnificent orchestra of 130 players plus conductor, he is well
aware that all of them, too, will need to be paid.
z November 2–3, 1834

Le Rénovateur
1. Marco Aurelio Marliani (1805–49) was an Italian composer who came to France around
1830 to study with Rossini. In February 1834 he enjoyed a notable success at the Théâtre-Italien
with an opera based on James Fenimore Cooper’s The Brave, which Berlioz reviewed favor-
ably (Rén., Feb. 9, 1834); Le Maréchal forain, written for the Opéra-Comique, elicits much
less sympathy.
16. Concert Notice: Harold in Italy 99
I have had a relapse of my concert mania.2 The editors of Le Rénovateur, gracious

colleagues that they are, wanted at all costs to assume the task of announcing
to the subscribers of our esteemed journal a certain rather uninteresting news
item. Since they would have thought it discourteous not to follow through with
a couple of charitably flattering words that readers would unfailingly impute
to me, I thought it more fair and honest to alert the public myself. And “alert”
is the word. Instead of promising the moon (as you might expect), I’ll tell you
bluntly that my music is a tissue of outlandish inanities such as you wouldn’t
find even at an insane asylum.3 I won’t even mention that rather cold rhapsody of
a quartet, “Sara la baigneuse,” in which Prince W. has kindly agreed to sing the
first bass part—or the Florentine engravers’ trio, to be accompanied, I’ve been
told, by three hundred little anvils and hammers (fine harmony!).4 Instead, I’ll
come straightaway to the new symphony: It is in four movements, with viola
solo, and is called Harold. I ask you, in good faith, what you understand by a
symphony titled Harold . . . The goal of the first movement is to depict “Scenes of
Melancholy, Happiness, and Joy”; the second is meant to present a “Procession
of Pilgrims Singing Their Evening Prayer”; the third bears the title “Serenades of
an Abruzzi Mountaineer to His Mistress”; the fourth drags us into an “Orgy of
brigands.” And all through the various scenes we hear the viola solo: Harold, the
dreamer, the wanderer—Byron’s hero, characterized by a languorous, wearisome
melody repeated with exasperating sameness.
There you have it: that’s Harold. I have no more to say about the four-voiced
Irish legend than about the fantasy for soprano and orchestra on a poem by
Victor Hugo.5 Such works might well be bearable. But my conscience forces
2. Besides his own works, the concert of November 9, 1834, that Berlioz is announcing fea-
tured works by Rossini and Panofka. Chrétien Urhan is the viola soloist in Harold in Italy.
The King Lear overture and Symphonie fantastique were repeats from the previous year’s con-
cert on December 22, 1833 at the Conservatoire (Salle des Menus-Plaisirs in the rue Bergère,
as Berlioz later alludes to it).
3. Berlioz names Charenton, the most notorious such institution in France.
4. A parody of critics who mock, by exaggeration, Berlioz’s use of brass and percussion. In
fact, he was highly sparing in the use of what he called les grands moyens—the orchestral big
guns—so as to reserve their power for the really big moments, such as the Last Judgment.
“Sara la baigneuse” was a recent composition based on one of Victor Hugo’s Orientales
(no. 19). The trio (ultimately removed from the program) was destined for Berlioz’s opera
Benvenuto Cellini. Alexander Nikititch, prince of Wolkonski, was a Russian bass whom
Berlioz may have met in Rome.
5. For this concert, Berlioz arranged both “Sara” and his Irish melody “La Belle Voyageuse”
for male vocal quartet and orchestra. The “fantasy for soprano and orchestra” was a new ver-
sion of “La Captive.”
me to tell all the many people who have not heard the demented cries of King
Lear or the buffoonery of the Fantastico-Epileptic Symphony that they should
have a talk with the unhappy souls who attended my concert last year. That
will surely leave them no doubt whatever about the horror of those sympho-
nies—which will nevertheless both appear in my next concert. I add that they
will be performed by 130 brave, robust players, conducted by Girard. After
that, it’s up to you if, next Sunday around two o’clock, you happen to be on the
rue Bergère and feel strangely inclined to enter the Hôtel des Menus-Plaisirs.
Not my fault! You will have been warned. The marquis de Mascarille claimed
to write just to fend off the booksellers who were hounding him.6 I give con-
certs only to make a living for copyists, printers, gendarmes, poster makers,
the lamplighter, the wood merchant, the usherettes, and the poor poor-tax
collector who takes no more than a quarter of the gross receipts (unless you
come to a friendly understanding with him ahead of time).7
HECTOR BERLIOZ
6. Mascarille is a pretentious writer in Molière’s Les Précieuses ridicules who plans to set all
Roman history into madrigals.
7. The tax could then be reduced by half—still exorbitant for a composer-conductor who has
to pay the musicians himself, as well as all those others he lists.
17
Gluck’s Iphigenia in Tauris
This piece, the introductory section of a four-part essay on the opera in question, sup-
plies some of the original text for the passage in the fifth chapter of Berlioz’s Memoirs
telling how his first experience of Gluck’s masterpiece at the Opéra clinched his deci-
sion to brave family opposition, abandon his medical studies, and follow his calling as
a composer—although, if this was true at the time of that performance in December
1821, he concealed his decision from his family for a long time, perhaps sensing the
prolonged battle that lay ahead. Gluck was for Berlioz as Chateaubriand was for
Hugo, who resolved to be “Chateaubriand or nothing.” That Berlioz should choose
to contribute two long essays on Gluck for the inaugural year of the Gazette musi-
cale testifies to the unshakable place of his first musical idol in his artistic pantheon.
z November 9, 1834
Not without reason is this opera considered Gluck’s masterpiece. In no other

score does the old athlete of musical drama show such sustained force of con-
viction. There are two shoals to avoid in studying this darkly vibrant work of
his profound genius. The more dangerous is perhaps the tendency to judge a
production of 1777 according to today’s musical standards, without consider-
ing the tremendous progress that performers have made in the interim. What
could not be done in Gluck’s time is very easy today, for practical knowledge
and competencies grow over the years, so that we are naturally capable of
more today than Gluck was in his time.1 The second shoal to steer clear of is
1. Berlioz is bending over backward to seem impartial; elsewhere he will maintain that such
historical considerations should not be exaggerated, nor offered as excuse.
unguarded enthusiasm, which may lead the impressionable and well-meaning

artist to see nothing but beauty in the works that aroused his earliest sensa-
tions of musical admiration, works that dazzled him when he was too young
and inexperienced to have clear ideas about the state of contemporary music.2
Excessive enthusiasm for Gluck may be unimaginable today, but the report
of my own early impressions, hard though it may be to credit, will prove how
different it was at that time; I exaggerate not.
I had never set foot in a theater before arriving in Paris in 1820.3 My only
knowledge of music came from Pleyel’s quartets;4 the four players in my local
Philharmonic Society treated me to them every Sunday after mass. Of music
for the stage I had no idea beyond what I could gather from an album of
old operatic arias arranged for guitar accompaniment. These arrangements
included two scenes from Orphée, which soon became my favorites. The idea
of hearing an entire orchestra or reading a whole score was only a dream that
I never expected to see fulfilled. My burgeoning passion for Gluck suddenly
came to full flower one day when I read the biographical sketch of the famous
composer in the newly published Biographie universelle.5 The description of
the storm in Iphigénie, the depiction of the Dance of the Scythians, the com-
mentary on the sleep of Orestes all gave me a burning desire to hear these
wonders.6 When my father decided to send me to Paris to continue my medi-
cal studies, the only thing that enabled me to overcome the horror of ana-
tomical dissection was the thought that I could go to the Opéra and finally
see Gluck in all his glory.
My wait continued for a long time. Three months of living in Paris, and
I still hadn’t seen any announcement of a Gluck opera! Every morning I made
a breathless run to the place Cambrai, only to find one more disappointing
2. In Art of Music, 105, Berlioz says he so passionately admired Gluck’s Alceste that, wish-
ing to avoid fanaticism, he criticized some things he secretly admired; later he felt no such
compunction. Here we have an example of early self-censorship, in a gesture repeated at the
end of the piece.
3. Actually, he arrived in Paris in October 1821, and the first performance he saw of Iphigénie
en Tauride was on November 26; he writes of it to his sister Nanci on December 13 (CG
1:34–37), giving an effusive description of the spectacle and the music.
4. Ignace-Joseph Pleyel (1757–1831), composer, music publisher, and piano manufacturer,
whose son Camille would marry the pianist Camille Moke, Berlioz’s fiancée, while he was in
Italy as a Prix de Rome recipient in 1831.
5. Berlioz’s father subscribed to Michaud’s encyclopedic Biographie. Vol. 17, featuring Gluck,
appeared in 1816, when Berlioz was twelve years old.
6. They also provided an early model of descriptive music criticism.
17. Gluck’s Iphigenia in Tauris 103
poster. After seeing an announcement for Le Rossignol or Le Devin du village

or Les Prétendus or Le Ballet de Nina, I’d turn back full of curses for Lebrun,
Rousseau, Lemoyne, Persuis,7 and the director of the Opéra.
I was rooming at the time with a fellow student (today a distinguished
physician)8 with whom I had shared some of my musical obsessions. Now,
programs at the Opéra are always announced twice—which gives the house
a chance to make a last-minute change to the schedule posted the day before.
One morning I went up to the billboards mechanically, expecting nothing of
interest, since the previous day’s poster had announced a triumphant Rossini
along with Pages du duc de Vendôme.9 After a hasty glance at the offerings of
the Théâtre-Français, the Opéra-Comique, and the Vaudeville, I looked at
the Opéra, expecting to find the same name I’d seen earlier. Well, not at all!
There was a change . . . My knees began to shake, my teeth to clatter . . . Barely
able to control my movements, I made my way home reeling with giddiness.
“What’s the matter?” asked R., seeing me all disheveled and clutching a
wet handkerchief to my nose. “Did you fall? Are you bleeding? What’s hap-
pened? Speak!”
“The Opéra . . . this evening . . . they’re doing . . . Iphi . . . Iphigénie en
Tauride!”
“Oh!”
We both stood there, speechless, stunned, spent, overcome at the realiza-
tion that we were about to see Gluck’s masterpiece on stage. Still, R. suffered
no nosebleed.
I have neglected to mention that sometime before this great day I had
managed to find my way into the library of the Conservatoire, where I learned
by heart the whole of the score. To describe what I felt on seeing it actually
performed is beyond my power. I will merely say that the effect of those som-
ber melodies stayed with me for a long while. I wept all night long. I twisted
and turned in my bed, singing and sobbing at one and the same time, like a
man going mad.
7. On the first three names, see Biographical Notes. Louis-Luc Loiseau de Persuis (1769–
1819), violinist, composer, and conductor, notably at the Opéra, composed an arrangement
for ballet of Dalayrac’s one-act Nina, or the Woman Crazed by Love, which under other cir-
cumstances Berlioz praised (see, e.g., Mem., chapter 5). In his short story of 1834, “The Suicide
from Enthusiasm,” the violinist hero turns to Persuis for help in Paris.
8. Alphonse Robert, of whom Berlioz speaks in Mem., chapter 5.
9. One-act opera by Adalbert Gyrowetz (1763–1850), first performed in Vienna in 1808.
The great vogue for Rossini was getting underway at that time. His admir-
ers, as fanatical in their way as I was in mine, filled me with almost unbeliev-
able hatred and horror. If I had had the means to put gunpowder under the
Salle Louvois and blow it up, sets and all, during a performance of La Gazza
ladra or The Barber of Seville, I would not have hesitated to do so. The reader
may well reflect that my blood has cooled considerably since then and my
opinions on music have greatly shifted. Nevertheless, the influence of initial
impressions is such, and my admiration for Gluck is still so great, that I shall
need to be cautious in analyzing what is to me his most striking work, wary
of both early memories and today’s unguarded enthusiasm.
(To be continued in the following issue.)10
10. For the remaining installments, see the companion website .

18
Music Review
à elle, Letters for Piano by Chrétien
Urhan with this epigr aph:
Peut-être dans la foule une âme que j’ignore

Aurait compris mon âme et m’aurait répondu1
(L a m a rti ne)
If Berlioz twice reviewed this curious cycle of piano-vocal pieces, it was because its
composer, the first solo violist for Harold in Italy, was a friend and fellow trav-
eler along the path of “poetic music,” the path Berlioz had in mind when he said
(in January 1829) that he wanted to take music “not farther than Beethoven,
that’s impossible, but as far in another direction.” More than a review of Urhan’s
work, this article represents one of Berlioz’s attempts to defend his own musi-
cal practice against charges of trying to make music do and say things it could
not. His rational arguments, enlivened by picturesque examples, are perhaps less
important than his many literary references, all of which implicitly make his case
for music as equal to the highest poetry. Ultimately, all arguments give way to a
resigned sense of the chasm between the happy few capable of appreciating music
as the highest expression of the human spirit and ordinary people—with varia-
tions in different cultures—who are content with music as casual amusement.
z November 16, 1834

Le Rénovateur
1. “Perchance in the crowd a soul unknown to me / might have understood my soul and sent
me a response.” From Méditations poétiques, no. XXIII, “L’Automne.”
Under this odd title, no doubt absurd to many people, M. Urhan has just pub-
lished a short work worthy of full attention from the friends of music.2 I am
probably not the only person who, when writing to a musician friend, has
chanced, in the absence of adequate terms in everyday speech, to use melodic
phrases or chordal sequences to complete a thought. This is no exaggeration
of the power of music, as maintained by certain people who would do much
better to blame their own ignorance when they fail to understand that higher
language. No, there is a point at which such use of a harmonic or melodic
expression conveys the most absolute truth. The proof is in nature itself,
which, when we are racked by some terrible emotion, leads us to substitute
cries for words. Napoleon, in school at Brienne, heard one of his classmates
one day refer to his mother, Mme. Lætitia Bonaparte, as “Madam Joy.”3 In the
fit of rage and indignation that this sobriquet aroused in him, he was unable
to articulate a single word; a fearsome howl, though, gave a truer notion of his
boundless anger than the most virulent imprecations could have done.
It is only one step from such random shouts to violent musical effects.
And if you grant the possibility of spelling out in music a violent, angry, furi-
ous feeling, I don’t really see how you could deny the ability to achieve oppo-
site effects by resorting to opposite means. I well recall writing to a friend
of mine a letter full of fury about the defilement of a masterpiece that I had
witnessed. The crescendo of my artist’s indignation grew to a point where
words were clearly failing me, so my trembling pen instinctively drew some
staves, which were instantly covered with horrible chords; these let my cor-
respondent know, better than the most infuriated railings, how disturbed
I was. Another time, it was a very sad farewell that I wanted to send; then too,
music was a faithful interpreter of the pain in my heart.4
Clearly, music will not ask: “How are you feeling?”—“Is your mother well
again?”—or say: “Come see us in a month” or any other question or statement
of the sort. But it will very well say: “I am sad, ill, unhappy.”—“I am bored and
depressed.”—“I am full of joy and happiness.” And in general anything that is
a particular and true feeling. What language, what poem can ever depict the
2. Paris: Richault, 1834. The other article in which Berlioz discusses this same work is in GM,
February 1, 1835; see the companion website .
3. Evidently fresh from Latin class, Napoleon’s classmates were impishly applying their new
knowledge: his mother’s name, Laetitia, means “joy” in Latin.
4. The letter with the horrible sounds has not survived; the sad farewell is one he addressed
to his sister Nanci on December 28, 1829 (CG 1:294), substituting her name for “Adieu, Bessy”
in a phrase from his Mélodies irlandaises (no. 8).
18. Urhan: À elle 107
isolation tormenting a great soul exiled in the midst of our prosaic world as
Beethoven does in the Adagio of his Symphony in C minor? Can Bossuet’s
grand style or the magical hues of Chateaubriand’s fill our soul with deeper or
graver thoughts than those arising from the sublime elegy that is the second
movement of the A major Symphony?5 And what of the headiness of triumph
or the noble outbursts of heroic joy? What verbal ode could equal the famous
finale of the first of the two works just cited?
The French, of all the peoples in the world, are perhaps those with the loud-
est claims to a musical sensibility and the least experience of it. The English
are not easily moved. There is certainly more fashion than true appreciation
in their frequent attendance at the Italian Theater and in all the money that
some rich dilettanti pour into music, but the fact remains that Handel is still
the center of a veritable cult among the British, while their neighbors on the
Continent would not sit through the Samson oratorio itself or would take it
for an endless drone.6
People are right to claim that opéra-comique is an eminently French genre.
Vaudeville and opéra-comique are twin brothers; 7 the musical baggage of the
one is almost as rich as the other’s. Barcarolles, ditties, chansonnettes, rounds,
galops, ariettas, contredanses disguised as romances, airs, duos, choruses,
ensemble pieces, finales, overtures are the single objects of their affection.
I speak of the French in general. There is of course, fortunately for the salvation
of the art of music, a special, intelligent public whose tastes are profoundly dif-
ferent from those of the unlettered crowd. Only to this tiny fraction can artists
speak. This is the group for which M. Urhan, an artist, can compose with no
fear of ridicule—an immediate punishment should he ever try to step outside
the tight circle imposed on him by the very nature of his ideas.
But let us speak of his work. The first letter, entitled “Absence,” is enchant-
ing in its melancholy grace. At the second repeat, a sequence of brief chords
5. Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet (1627–1704), orator-preacher of the court of Louis XIV.

6. Interesting corrective to Berlioz’s disparagements of Handel on other occasions, although
he no doubt counted himself among those bored Continentals.
7. Berlioz is historically correct to relate opéra-comique and vaudeville, both born in
eighteenth-century France as a mix of spoken and musical theater. French vaudeville is not
American vaudeville but the popular boulevard theater counterpart of opéra-comique. Scribe
wrote in both genres and developed vaudevilles into complex, multiplot comedies with much
music. The core of vaudeville, and the original basis of its legal “privilege,” was the couplet, or
multistanza set piece on popular songs. The Paris Théâtre du Vaudeville was founded in 1792,
at the height of the Revolution; it was strange, noted a contemporary writer, that the happiest
of genres should have gained its foothold in such a time of general distress.
cut by rests and followed by an octave hold on G-sharp, produces a most sce-
nic effect. Hearing it, you can’t help thinking of Hugo’s lines:
Climb, squirrel, climb to the great oak, and so on.8
Think of the folk legend of Bluebeard—“sister Anne, see you nothing

coming?” It is the voice of expectation and solitude, presented in the sharp-
est colors. Religious sentiment is rendered with no less success in the second
letter, “Memory of a Better World.” The palpitations of a human passion
gradually come through, but the emotion is so pure, so noble, so elevated,
that such love is still religion. We mustn’t mistake the intention of the third
letter, “Storm.” The only concern here is the portrayal of those tumultuous
feelings that occasionally arise in the most peaceful soul, not at all a storm in
the meteorological sense of the word. The same is true of “Calm,” the fourth
letter, in which the swaying movements of a slow waltz, simple and naive,
offer the touching image of a guileless, honest joy.
This new composition brought to mind Urhan’s violin and piano duets,
published a few years ago, in which the same traits and the same poetic ten-
dency as just noted in Lettres à elle were already very clearly in evidence. Such
works need to be heard in an intimate setting, performed simply, with not
a single note added to the small number on the page. We sincerely believe
that under such conditions few listeners—I assume, of course, that they come
from the elite group I spoke of earlier—few listeners, I say, will be able to
escape the gentle but profound emotion that Urhan’s music has always made
us feel. Hearing him, you think you’re reading Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, and
I could cite more than one page of Urhan which, for grace and innocent love,
has nothing to envy in the most charming chapters of Paul et Virginie.9
HECTOR BERLIOZ
8. From Les Orientales (1829), poem XX (“Attente”), Berlioz’s favorite volume of Hugo’s
poetry. The refrain recalls the famous one to Sister Anne in the Bluebeard story.
9. Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre (1737–1814), French writer, was best known for
this story, which Berlioz had cherished since childhood.
19
Gabussi’s Ernani at the

Théâtre-Italien
Enticed by the irresistible subject, Berlioz ventures into the enemy camp to
review an opera at the Théâtre-Italien: an Italian composer has tackled Victor
Hugo’s drama of 1830, object of the notorious Battle of Hernani at the Classical
bastion of the Théâtre-Français. In January 1846, on tour in Vienna, Berlioz
would miss Verdi’s Ernani at the same theater. Not only would a review of Verdi
have undoubtedly been far more favorable; one senses that Berlioz would have
been keen to do justice to the play himself. The review closes with an even-handed
assessment of the Théâtre-Italien orchestra, composed of fine players but ham-
pered by insufficient numbers and an inadequately resonant hall.
z December 5, 1834
Le Rénovateur
I was at the Théâtre-Italien a few days ago. I don’t go there often, but a
new opera, Ernani; a composer making his Paris debut; the names Rubini,
Tamburini, Santini, and Grisi1—all amounted to a reason to visit the Théâtre
Favart. God! What golden dreams the young composer of this score must
have had! He had no doubt heard quite a bit about the literary row occasioned
1. Primarily a salon composer and voice teacher, Vincenzo Gabussi (1800–1846) produced
three operas. The tenor Rubini, the baritone Tamburini, the soprano Giulia Grisi, and, to a
lesser extent, the bass-baritone Vincenzo Felice Santini (1798?–1836) were the current stars
sustaining the Théâtre-Italien’s reputation for extraordinary singing.
by the staging of Victor Hugo’s drama. The uproar at each performance, the
bursts of ironic laughter coming from the enemy camp, the furious threats,
the enthusiastic rapture of the partisans of the new school all found an echo
in his heart and made it beat with noble emulation.
“I have to translate Victor Hugo into music!” he must have said to himself.
“I’ll manage to get my work staged at the Théâtre-Italien in Paris! I’ll reignite
the war that the French poet started not long ago. People will clash; they’ll
hurl insults; they’ll do battle for and against me. Besides, with a troupe made
up of Europe’s top singers, I can’t fail to find all my ideas forcibly expressed
and presented in the most favorable light.”
Poor maestro! He must have had a cruel awakening. Nothing could have
been colder and more unmoved than the Théâtre-Italien audience at the
fourth performance of Ernani. There was no discussion, no shadow of a
squabble. On the contrary, there was unanimous agreement. As people exited,
they spoke of everything but the opera. You’d think they had just heard the
hundredth performance of a work they had known forever. Tough experi-
ence for a composer! But honestly, what is there to say about this Ernani,
which is no more the authentic Ernani than I am the pope? Where are those
volcanic passions, the bloody vengeance, the furious, consuming love, Donna
Sol’s pure, noble devotion—all the outstanding features of Victor Hugo’s
drama that make the work outrageous for some people, sublime for others,
and remarkable for all? The Italian opera is so lacking in distinctiveness that
it could be called Pietro or Francesco as easily as Ernani. The music shares the
same defect; it is weak and colorless. The cavatina follows the pattern of all
pieces of this kind. There’s the same kind of ritornello adopted by all the mae-
stri of the Italian school, with the same modulation at the same spot where
it is always supposed to occur. The melodies have sisters or first cousins in
the four corners of the world. And this shortcoming—this banality—which
I find very serious for any composition, becomes an egregious error for a work
as singular as Ernani should be. In short, to be perfectly frank, Ernani cannot
be adequately treated by an Italian composer whose goal is to succeed with
his fellow Italians. The music actually demanded by such a drama would be
mercilessly hissed, and the maestro responsible for it would even be running
a risk were he to appear at the piano on the day of the premiere. I wouldn’t be
surprised if the crowd tried to give him a good thrashing.
Let me add that, even if the score of Ernani had been so conceived as
to cause the same uproar as Victor Hugo’s drama four years ago at the
Théâtre-Français, the Théâtre-Italien would undoubtedly have refused to
stage it. Theater directors have admirable intuition. Show them a stack of
19. Gabussi: Ernani 111
four truly original works with one ordinary score hidden in the mix, and you
can be sure their instinct will guide them to that one. So, all things consid-
ered, you can’t really blame Monsieur Gabussi for not giving his subject an
innovative, poetic treatment. He created an Italian opera that is as good as
many others I could cite that our dilettanti think first-rate.
Mademoiselle Grisi is charming as Doña Sol. She strives to appear
pathetic, but you always sense the calculation and lack of true emotion in
her performance, even at the seemingly most impassioned moments. Rubini
knows how to produce some of those heart-melting sounds that instantly
change an indifferent audience into a crowd of enthusiasts. Tamburini, for
his part, offers his usual sustained vocal perfection and intelligent interpreta-
tion. He looks rather young for his role, though, and it is hard to picture him
as a “stupid old man.”2 The choruses are very funny, singing out of tune, out of
rhythm, never together—and with obvious delight. The orchestra comprises
some of the finest talents in Paris, among the winds no less than the strings.
Their sound, however, is feeble, neither soft in the piano passages nor ener-
getic in the fortes. This is no doubt due to the poor resonance of the hall and
the small number of players. All small orchestras are weak. You may choose
the most distinguished violinists, cellists, horn players, flutists, clarinetists—
all in vain: the sound will never be better than paltry.—But I’m forgetting
that, to accompany singers, there is no need for an orchestra of the symphonic
sort: singing is all that matters at the Théâtre-Italien.
[Berlioz goes on to give a long plot summary of La Sentinelle perdue, a one-act

opéra-comique by Rifaut. Plot summaries helped pad the text in a paper where
Berlioz was paid by the line. They also helped him avoid saying much about the
score.]
HECTOR BERLIOZ
2. Berlioz often referred to the “stupid old man” insult (vieillard stupide) that, in Hugo’s play,
was misheard by a hostile listener as viel as de pique (“old ace of spades”) and loudly ridiculed.
By extension, the Classics were all impotent “stupid old men” versus the virile Romantic
young lions ( jeunes lions).
20
Music Review
Opér a: W illiam Tell; Opér a-Comique:
Zémir e et Azor (Reprise); Concerts
One month before beginning his tenure at the prominent Journal des débats, where
he will have to be more cautious about speaking his mind, Berlioz decries the slacking
off in repertoire and performance standards at the Opéra: dance spectacles are given
primacy, while negligently staged masterpieces such as the second act of Rossini’s
William Tell fill out the bill. For once the Opéra-Comique deserves praise, both for
reviving a work from the late eighteenth-century opéra-comique repertoire, which
Berlioz holds dear, and for giving an instrumental concert, or what the manager
imagines to be such a concert—it’s a step in the right direction. Meanwhile, a festi-
val in Vienna has just given a Handel oratorio with over eight hundred performers.
In the 1840s Berlioz will create such festivals for the first time in Paris.
z December 23, 1834

Le Rénovateur
Opéra
It is generally understood that music is now no more than tolerated at the Opéra.
The title inscribed on the façade of the building will probably soon disappear to
make way for a more accurate inscription.1 Dance and stage sets have now taken
1. The inscription referred to is “Académie royale de musique.” Berlioz ironically suggests

that the word “music” no longer applies.
20. Opéra, Opéra-Comique, Concerts 113
over almost completely from the art of music, which the administration seems
bent on doing away with completely. Except for the performances of Robert le
diable, which always draw a crowd, the public seems to be endorsing the change.2
The Opéra is always full. Is the public therefore satisfied with the programs on
offer? No doubt. Well, then, the director’s purpose is fulfilled. It hardly matters
whether people come to see or hear; they come. That’s the important thing. That
is what’s important, at least, for the speculator with no purpose other than ring-
ing up ticket sales.
But we have to say, despite it all, that there are still a great many people for
whom music is a sublime art, evoking the noblest of thoughts and the most
exciting sensations. Those people would travel a hundred leagues to hear a
chorus sung the way the finale of Don Giovanni was on the first night of the
reprise of that admirable work a few months ago.3 Today they are astonished
by the cold lifelessness that they hear in the same piece. Their surprise gives
way to indignation and blame when individual acts of William Tell, Fernand
Cortez, and La Vestale, programmed like obscure foils to set off the brilliance
of such masterpieces of inspired originality as the ballets La Tempête and La
Révolte au sérail,4 are performed with the most contemptuous disdain. One
day we’ll hear the sopranos, in the Evening Prayer in La Vestale, start singing
ten measures too early, stop at the fourth, and burst out laughing when they
realize their mistake. Farther along, in the finale of this prodigious work, the
whole chorus will lose its place and sing two measures behind the orchestra,
until a fermata brings the whole orchestra to a halt and gives the laggards
time to catch up. Another time, we’ll have the first act of Cortez sung so far
out of tune that the violinists will drop their bows in shock. In the first scene,
2. In more optimistic moments (see #32), Berlioz implies that Meyerbeer’s Robert le diable
and the second act of Rossini’s William Tell, mentioned further on, have led the public to
appreciate finer works, including Mozart’s Don Giovanni, introduced in March of this year
to immense success. Here Berlioz suggests that the throngs may be flocking to Meyerbeer’s
opera for the wrong reasons—spectacle or fashion.
3. More than a few months ago: it was reprised on March 13, 1834. Berlioz wrote two enthu-
siastic articles on it in Rén., March 16 and 23. See #32 (November 1835), where he sums up the
main ideas of both earlier articles. On March 16 he testifies that the chorus, especially in the
finale of the second act, was “prodigious!!!” and that artists familiar with productions all over
Europe say they had never heard anything like it.
4. La Tempête (ballet by Coralli and Schneitzhœffer, which Berlioz reviewed in Rén.,
September 21, 1834); La Révolte au sérail (ballet by Taglioni and Labarre, which Berlioz
reviewed in Rén., December 8, 1833). Berlioz admired the great dancers Marie Taglioni and
Fanny Elssler but disliked ballet-pantomimes and detested the idea—sacrilege, to him—of
using great operas as curtain openers, especially Spontini’s masterpieces, La Vestale and
Fernand Cortez.
there is a Dance of Savages which the dancers are supposed to accompany

with cymbals and drums. 5 What’s the point, though, of tiring your arms
by thwacking all those barbaric instruments? Today’s dancers give up the
job completely; whatever they deign to do is good enough for Spontini. Just
recently it was Rossini’s turn to provide some background: they did the sec-
ond act of William Tell, no less. I won’t mention the musical performance but
simply turn to the sets. Does the stage manager hold Rossini in such contempt
that he won’t oversee the set changes for his operas? It’s hard to believe. Still,
at the end of the magnificent scene at the Grütli, when the woods, lakes, and
mountains are supposed to be brilliantly flooded with light, the sun failed to
appear. The backdrop, instead of rising gradually, made no move at all. The
war cry of the Swiss fighters boomed out in darkness.
I wager that M. Véron knows nothing of all that.6 He is unaware that
the choruses have forgotten the old repertoire and need to learn it anew. He
is unaware that some of the chorus members do not even sing. Nor does he
know that the sets are neglected, as I have just said, in the case of works that
happen to be out of fashion at the moment. It must be that no one has told
him! M. Véron is too much a man of taste, too exacting in all things, too
invested in the superiority of the theater he administers not to eradicate such
anomalies as soon as he learns of them.
Opéra-Comique
Here we have M. Crosnier resuscitating Grétry! Zémire et Azor, cut down
to two acts, has just reappeared at the Théâtre de la Bourse.7 At the risk of
being taken for an old fogey,8 let me thank the director for this welcome idea.
It was a good six months since I had had so keen a musical experience in the
theater. Human nature doesn’t change, and an artist capable of speaking the
5. Berlioz is citing high points of La Vestale (the Evening Prayer is itself part of the finale
of Act II that Berlioz considered the high point of the opera); the chorus and dance from
Fernand Cortez are in Act I, sc. 2.
6. Berlioz’s indictment of Véron, the director of the Opéra, someone with whom he needed
to stay on good terms, is couched in terms of polite disbelief.
7. Theater near the Stock Exchange. For the revival of Grétry’s opéra-comique on December
13, 1834, Scribe reduced the three-act work to two acts. The Opéra-Comique, having fallen
on hard times since the July Monarchy, became a for-profit venture in May 1834 under its new
director, Crosnier, whom Berlioz urges toward musical integrity and ambition.
8. Berlioz uses the word perruque, literally “wig,” a term used for mockery—by the young,
of course.
20. Opéra, Opéra-Comique, Concerts 115
language of the heart in one era is sure to be understood in another, however

the forms of his art may have changed in the interim. I thought, while listen-
ing to those songs, so true and expressive, that they could not fail to produce
their effect in any age. The overture, on the other hand, so poor, so pale, so
threadbare—so rococo, as our perfumed dilettanti murmur—struck me as
absolutely beyond merit for any age.
Ponchard gave a ravishing performance of the many arias in his role.
“Ah, quel tourment!,”9 which is justifiably his favorite, brought him repeated
ovations. It seems to me undeniable that Ponchard’s cantabile phrasing, his
wonderfully seamless way of linking melodies, his skill in bringing out the
most delicate nuances of expression, and his careful enunciation of the words
constitute the most precious—and most rare—of vocal qualities. Madame
Casimir produced a sparkling rendition of the interminable nonsense called
“La Fauvette.”10 This piece, accompanied by a fluttering flooo-t-t-t which is
said to imitate the song of the innocent bird, is a twin to the famous air in
Le Rossignol11—and almost equally stupid. About the trio, “Ah, laissez-moi
la pleurer,”12 I have nothing to say . . . except that, despite every effort to hold
them back, it made my tears flow, as modern dramatic music rarely does.
Concerts
M. Crosnier decided recently to add to his Saturday offerings what he calls
a concert—a string of vocal selections and violin, clarinet, and oboe solos.
We should be thankful to him for this, as it presages a move toward true
concerts. Besides, this is where the stars of his troupe can be most thoroughly
appreciated.
Panofka, the young Prussian violinist now making a name for himself
in Paris, shared the honors of the evening with Ponchard the night before
last.13 His playing is full of sweet emotion, which is promptly felt by every
9. “Ah, what torment!” Tenor aria (Azor) in Act III, sc. 1.

10. “The Warbler”: for all his delight in Grétry’s music, Berlioz cannot abide flute-and-voice
coloratura, the ultimate example of which is the popular Rossignol (see n. 11). Alphonsine
Casimir, née Dubois (1800–1888), French soprano who made her career at the Opéra-Comique
beginning in 1821.
11. The Nightingale, title of Lebrun’s comic opera known for its flute and voice trills.
12. “Ah, let me weep for her,” trio from Act III, sc. 6.
13. Henri (Heinrich) Panofka (1807–1887), German violinist, composer, critic, and voice
teacher, settled in Paris in 1834. Berlioz refers to a concert of December 13, the evening of the
listener. It is a simple, artless talent that strikes a sympathetic chord in the

tender, dreamy souls among us—who, to judge by the general direction of
ideas today, are far more numerous than we might have thought.
We shall before long report to our readers on a compatriot of M. Panofka’s,
a violinist whose talent is of a quite different nature. M. Ernst will present,
on Tuesday, December 23, in M. Stoepel’s handsome recital space at 6 rue de
Monsigny,14 an evening program featuring several of his own composition as
well as Mayseder’s Grande Polonaise.15 Mme. Degli Antoni and MM. Dorus,
Ch. Schunke, and Boulanger will fill out the program.16
While we are giving our little concerts in Paris, Germany and England
go on mounting the most magnificent musical events. The festival that took
place just last month in Vienna was extraordinarily brilliant. Its main objec-
tive was to present Handel’s great oratorio Belshazzar, which is performed all
too rarely. It was interpreted by 531 singers and an orchestra of 303 players. It
was extremely impressive. We shall return to it.17
HECTOR BERLIOZ
Grétry revival, when Panofka played a violin fantasy of his composition and Ponchard sang
several romances.
14. François (Franz) Stoepel (1794–1836), German piano teacher, music theory professor,
and founding contributor to RGM.
15. Ernst gave two ambitious recitals on December 23 and 25 featuring not only the artists
listed but also Liszt and Chopin playing four-hand and on two pianos (Liszt grand duo on a
Mendelssohn Song without Words).
16. Berlioz writes in Rén., January 5, 1835, that Degli Antoni, an Italian singer, is a
“mezzo-soprano rather than a true contralto,” that her command of coloratura is uncertain,
and that her voice screeches in the upper register; he recommends her for the Théâtre-Italien.
Boulanger had sung in Beethoven’s Ninth in February; Louis Dorus (1813–1896) was first
flutist of the Conservatoire Orchestra; Charles (Carl) Schunke was a German pianist and
friend of Ernst.
17. In fact, Berlioz never does get back to this event.
21
Conservatoire Orchestra
First Concert [Eighth Season]
This is Berlioz’s first official article as critic for the Journal des débats. In it
he helpfully follows the order of the Conservatoire program, giving an excel-
lent sense of its typically varied and uneven nature. Perhaps inspired by the
program’s inclusion of Beethoven’s “Eroica,” the work that had opened the
Conservatoire series seven years earlier, he looks back at the Parisian musical
scene on the eve of the new orchestra’s founding, and at the prejudices against
Beethoven that made it such a struggle to create. Yet in reviewing the concert
itself, Berlioz catches Beethoven committing the cardinal sin of a full-voiced
vocal fugue on “Amen.” At first diffident (after all, “this is Beethoven”), he works
his way toward a bristly catechism on the proper rendering of sacred text, to
which question-and-answer peppering even his idol falls prey. Exhibits of violin
virtuosity do little to appease his ill humor. Schubert’s dramatic song “The Nun”
and reflections on the composer’s untimely death change the mood to the elegiac
just in time to usher in the “Eroica,” which Berlioz understands as the funeral
oration of a hero—Napoleon, of course. After a choral interlude, the program
ends with the overture to Mozart’s Magic Flute, a lesson on fugal expressiveness
that Beethoven, we infer, might have profited from.
z January 25, 1835

Journal des débats
A few years ago this fine musical institution did not exist and was not
missed. The Opéra and the Théâtre-Italien satisfied the needs of the city’s
dilettantes. True, the Odéon had an almost yearlong success with Weber’s
magical Freischütz—a powerful contrast to Rossini’s operas, ever more popu-
lar—but no sooner had Robin des bois, as it was called, brought good for-
tune to its translators and impresario, no sooner had Weber died of illness
and exhaustion, than the Odéon went dark and silent.1 The Waltz and the
Hunters’ Chorus could still be heard for a few months, coming from stu-
dent dwellings in the Latin Quarter or backroom ladies’ quarters along the
rue Saint-Denis or dance halls around La Chaumière and Montparnasse. But
when the barrel organs took up the tunes, the concert was over. To hear the
Parisians tell it, these two trifles were the opera’s greatest numbers, and once
they had worn thin, Weber’s fame was snuffed out almost as suddenly as it
had burst forth. All attention then turned to Rossini alone. Don Giovanni
occasionally sparkled, but it no longer had the charm of novelty and could
thus attract little interest among the frivolous audiences that fill our lyric
theaters. Even Feydeau lost its appeal.2 Haydn’s white head was stripped of its
halo by a bunch of grubby musicians who sawed their way through his music
every night in the smoky pit of the Théâtre-Français or the Odéon and made
his finest symphonies unbearable. That left Spontini and the great shadow
of Gluck, but even they hardly counted anymore. Besides, the traditions of
their magnificent works were fading fast, while the new Italian school, full
of sap and vigor, was putting down deep roots and sending out shoots in all
directions.
Nevertheless, the appearance of Freischütz had not been fruitless. Despite
the fulminations of the Conservatoire and the Academy, several serious art-
ists, conscious of the import of Weber’s conception and profoundly stirred by
the varied, dramatic, and thoroughly original style of his opera, began to look
toward Germany as the mysterious birthplace of a new art. A few closed-door
readings of Beethoven’s first symphonies and easiest quartets initially met
with guffaws from people who are fervent admirers today. Nor could it be
otherwise. New styles in music are like foreign costumes—laughable to
narrow-minded, superficial, routine-bound observers. In Paris we are not
surprised to see the Persian ambassador on the boulevard des Italiens garbed
in his oriental robes. But if he had a mind to appear like that in some small
1. Castil-Blaze’s freewheeling adaptation of Freischütz as Robin des bois (Robin Hood) in

1824, in the days before international copyright, made him rich. Weber died poor in 1826, as
Berlioz often points out with indignation.
2. The Théâtre Feydeau was the original seat of the Opéra-Comique. The building was closed
down in 1829; Berlioz is speaking of the years before 1828.
21. Conservatoire: Schubert, Beethoven, Mozart 119
provincial town, the parish beadle would scoff; pious old ladies would cross
themselves at the sight of this veritable Antichrist; the neighborhood dogs
would start barking; and young rascals would jeer and throw mud pies. So
it was with Beethoven. Still, two or three men were sufficiently persuaded,
determined, and well-placed in musical circles to overcome at long last some
of the entrenched prejudices.
Already at the Opéra’s series of Concerts spirituels, the first movement
of the Second Symphony in D and the famous Adagio from the A major
Seventh had been tried with some success.3 In addition, Baillot had devoted
one of his popular soirées to a Beethoven quartet reputed to be unplayable
and unintelligible. The work was very well received.4 Of course, Beethoven
had just died. In the arts—music in particular—La Fontaine’s maxim must
be reversed to say: “Better a buried boor than a living emperor.”5 The man
who in his lifetime had been viewed by our savants as a wretched madman,
creator of incoherent, irrational works devoid of true harmony and melody,
stitched together with barbarous chords linked by even more barbarous mod-
ulations—that man had only to die to merit our esteem. His scores were now
studied with care; our violinists began to grasp the challenges of his style,
and people no longer shrugged off German talk of their great Beethoven. The
Conservatoire and the Academy, finally, deigned to admit that this compa-
triot of Weber, though just as outlandish, did sometimes show great formal
control and inspired energy.
That precious admission was seized upon by three or four Beethoven
fanatics, as they were known, to convert others to their new religion. Little
by little their numbers grew into today’s well-known Concert Society of the
Conservatoire Orchestra. After an uncertain start, their effort flung wide
open the portals of the temple. It is hard to imagine the astonishment of
those attending the first dress rehearsal of a Beethoven symphony.6 A famous
3. Berlioz means the Allegretto. “Adagio” was the all-purpose word at the time for any slow
movement.
4. Berlioz is probably referring to Beethoven’s op. 131 quartet in C-sharp minor, which he
heard Baillot’s quartet perform on March 24, 1829 (CG 1:244). At that later concert, how-
ever, only a select few in the audience responded so positively (see CM 1:56–7).
5. Cf. “La Matrone d’Éphèse,” Book 12, fable 26, final line: “Mieux vaut goujat debout
qu’empereur enterré.” The Société des Concerts du Conservatoire began its first con-
cert season in commemoration of the first anniversary of Beethoven’s death (March 26,
1827).
6. Probably the “Eroica,” performed at the Society’s first concert, March 9, 1828.
12 0 Be r l ioz on M usic
composer, deceased not long ago, was in the audience, score in hand.7 He
pointed to a certain passage as unplayable and unbearable. Yet the orchestra
brought it off. “It works,” he cried. “It works very well! What a remarkable
thing—that a harmony incomprehensible in the score should produce such
an effect in performance!” This naive exclamation constitutes the severest
criticism of the narrow-minded ways of the masters of the French school and
the blinkered attitudes they have imposed on their pupils like sacred dogmas.
That was when Beethoven, performed by the best orchestra in the world,
finally rising to his full majestic height, was hailed as the god of instrumental
music. Since that moment, the fervor of his worshippers has not ceased to
spread. The programs of the Conservatoire orchestra have become a neces-
sity for the musical public of Paris, as proven by their eager rush to fill the
hall. Boxes are reserved a year in advance. Many people come to Paris for a
four-month stay solely to attend these magnificent concerts. The 1835 season
has just begun. The first concert took place on Sunday, January 18, and a wor-
thy opening it was. The audience was no larger or smaller than usual—which
means the hall was full.
Let us look at the program, in order of presentation.
A portion of Beethoven’s Mass in D8

The movement in question was the “Credo.” The opening of this great work
is lofty and solemn. The brilliant orchestration is strong and majestic, while
the vocal part receives all the attention it deserves. Several sudden transitions
from very loud to very soft struck us as novel and made us aware of a singu-
lar rapport between visual and aural impressions. When you have been long
exposed to bright sunlight and then suddenly pass into a softly lit interior,
you find it impossible at first to distinguish objects. Likewise in these sud-
den drops from a violent tutti to a pianissimo solo bass, the first measure,
though rendered clearly by the orchestra, is barely perceptible. The opposition
is perhaps a bit excessive. The “Crucifixus” is admirable, as much in its ground
of dolorous harmonies as in the orchestra’s plaintive melodic line underlying
the vocal part. Admirable as well the “Resurrexit,” whose theme, stated by
the chorus alone, shows remarkable character. Why is that dazzling perora-
tion followed by a long, four-part vocalise on the word “Amen”? The audience
7. This was no doubt Boieldieu (see Berlioz’s obituary, #15).

8. The Missa solemnis.
21. Conservatoire: Schubert, Beethoven, Mozart 121
finds it tiring and cold. I speak here only of the general impression that the
passage makes; this is Beethoven, and I dare not comment negatively on the
reason for it or on the merit of the idea. Comparing the various parts of the
“Credo” with one another, however, we can see that the composer wrote them
following the simplest and most natural trajectory, constantly reflecting the
spirit of the words.
We understand the act of faith to consist in a solemn proclamation,
uttered with conviction, of the fundamental dogmas of Christianity.
The “Incarnatus” is mysterious, sweet, and virginal; the “Crucifixus,”
heart-rending and somber; the “Resurrexit,” triumphal and buoyant. There
is reason, then, to wonder why the word “Amen,” which means “May it be
so,” should occasion a noisy fugue, let alone, as regrettably in Beethoven, a
vocal one. If, instead of crying out “A-a-a-a-men” through two hundred mea-
sures, a French chorus decided to express its religious wishes with an allegro
furioso rendering of “May-ay-ay i-i-it be-ee-ee so-o” backed by trombones and
loud beats on the timpani—such as one of our most illustrious composers of
sacred music never fails to do—no discerning music lover could resist saying,
“This sounds like a chorus of drunken peasants hurling beer bottles in a vil-
lage bar or tankards in a tavern—or else some ungodly parody of religious
faith!” I remember once asking a learned, conscientious professor, a compa-
triot and friend of Beethoven, what he thought of vocal fugues on “Amen.”9
His frank answer was, “Oh, it’s a barbarous practice!”
“Why then do composers go on doing it?”
“My goodness, what do you expect? It’s simply what’s done! All composers
have done it.”
Heartbreaking, isn’t it? To think that routine can be powerful enough to
make even Beethoven bow to it, if only for a moment!
Violin Solo by Mayseder, performed by M. Urhan

Solos are not what the audience at the Conservatoire is most eager to hear.
We are not even very far from the time when they will completely disap-
pear from the schedule. But M. Urhan is an artist whom the public loves
and is always glad to hear. It is only unfortunate that the pleasure has to be
bought by sitting through an entire piece, one of hundreds streaming from
9. The “illustrious composer” guilty of such fugues was undoubtedly Cherubini, the
“learned, conscientious professor” most likely Reicha.
Mayseder’s great mill, all in his invariable key of E, with his long drum-major
stretches, his concluding staccato variation, and the stereotypical orchestral
platitudes he calls tutti. The unaccompanied solo in double stops that Urhan
began with is in a wholly different style, which more than tempts us to believe
he composed the piece himself. The final gesture, a punta d’arco, was carried
off with such agility that thunderous applause broke out several measures
before the end.10
“The Nun,” lyric scene for solo voice and orchestra,

by Schubert, sung by A. Nourrit
A young nun, alone in her cell, listens in terror as the sea, churned up by
storm and wind, breaks menacingly against the base of the tower in which she
is confined. A secret passion makes the storm in her heart even more fright-
ening than the one outside. She prays, and thunder replies. Her agitation and
terror redouble—until the sound of a hymn intoned by her companions in
the convent chapel below rises up to her. She joins in their song, and a new,
heavenly calm is restored to her soul. Such is the subject of the little poem
that Schubert set to music and turned into a masterpiece. The persistent
tremolos in the violins, the sinister cello phrases responding to each of the
nun’s cries, the gusts from the brasses that attempt in vain to drown out her
voice, and, above all, the admirable expressiveness of the song—it is a remark-
able dramatic achievement.
Ah, poor Schubert! dead at twenty-five—and with such a promising
future!11 At his untimely death, in Vienna, the young composer left behind
two volumes of songs for one or more voices, songs which are to our shame-
ful French romances what the overture to Coriolanus is to the opening of Le
Rossignol.12 He also left a few operas unknown in France and several quartets
and septets for strings, whose loftiness of style rivals their originality of form.
10. Urhan is exhibiting some of the techniques developed by Paganini, including the double
stopping mentioned here (he also pioneered multistopping, with three or more strings play-
ing arpeggiated chordal harmonies) and the contrasting fast section played with the tip of the
bow that brings the piece to a rousing close.
11. Schubert died in 1828, not at twenty-five but at the still heartbreaking age of thirty-one.
Berlioz was one of the first outside the German-speaking lands to recognize his genius. See
the mention of him in #23 as a composer “of whom you’ve probably never heard.”
12. Contrasted with Beethoven’s Coriolanus Overture is the overture to Lebrun’s one-act
comic opera, a frequent target of Berlioz’s satire.
21. Conservatoire: Schubert, Beethoven, Mozart 12 3
Before long, the world of Art in Europe will come to appreciate Schubert’s
rich legacy. Nor need we stop at “The Nun,” for the works are all in a position
to be performed and the composer honored—since he is dead.
Nourrit put soul and intellect into singing this remarkable work by one
of Germany’s greatest poet-musicians. He is reported to have prepared the
French translation himself; it is thanks to his dual role that the Conservatoire
audience was able to applaud the pathos of “The Nun.” That Nourrit could
discern the deep sensibility and inspiration in Schubert’s lyricism is greatly to
his credit; many another singer would have seen only a string of notes with no
purpose or melody. Schubert clearly offers nothing of what some people call
melody. How fortunate!
Beethoven: the “Eroica” Symphony

The title conveys a very wrong idea of this symphony. It was a grave mistake, in
my opinion, to truncate Beethoven’s original inscription: “Heroic symphony,
composed to celebrate the memory of a great man.” There is no question here
of battles or triumphal marches, as the erroneous title may lead people to
think. Rather, the work is filled with deeply serious reflections, melancholy
reminiscences, and ceremonies of mournfully impressive grandeur. In a word,
this is a funeral oration for a hero. I know of no other music whose style has
allowed so sustained, pure, and noble an expression of grief.
Berlioz now gives a protracted, movement-by-movement analysis of the sym-

phony, discussing, inter alia, a “ bizarre” passage in the first movement; the text
in Virgil’s Aeneid that apparently inspired the writing of the second (funeral
march); the third-movement Scherzo, which he sees as a celebration of ancient
funeral games; and the final theme and variations. Berlioz concludes as follows:
z
Beethoven wrote works perhaps more gripping than this symphony, and sev-
eral other compositions no doubt leave behind a deeper impression. It has to
be admitted, however, that the “Eroica” is so mighty in imagination and exe-
cution, so vibrant and elevated in style, and so poetic in form that it undeni-
ably ranks among the highest conceptions of this colossus of modern music.13
13. The entire “Eroica” review may be found in Art of Music, 13–17. Variants from the original
article are quite minor.
Laudi spirituali
This piece, unaccompanied, was honored with an encore. It is full of gentle
piety; its harmony has a sweet purity; and its old-fashioned color is reminis-
cent of the most beautiful of Palestrina’s choruses. Nevertheless, since not
one movement of the “Eroica” had been called for again, one might find it
odd that the parterre was eager for a second hearing of a work in no way
comparable.14
Overture to The Magic Flute

This immortal page of Mozart brought the concert to a worthy conclusion.
A fugue like this will be eternally beautiful and young. Its form does not
preclude thoughtfulness; everything is limpid and clear; the theme sparkles
through the orchestra like a many-faceted diamond; and the coda has an
engaging vigor. In this admirable overture, Mozart shows not the slightest
disadvantage as he competes with Beethoven’s rich orchestration. We don’t
believe there exist many works of which an unprejudiced listener could say as
much. The Conservatoire’s choruses always leave much to be desired when it
comes to musical feeling and voice quality, but the orchestra as a whole is the
ideal of perfection.
H...
14. The practice of clapping for and even encoring single movements of symphonies is
reflected in Berlioz’s huffy remark on this anonymous sixteenth-century work, often per-
formed at Conservatoire concerts.
22
Critical Review
“Le Moine,” Text by émilien Pacini,
Music by G. Meyerbeer
This brief laudatory review of Meyerbeer’s dramatic lied for solo voice and piano,
“The Monk,” invites comparison with Berlioz’s recent review of Schubert’s “The
Nun” (#21) on a similar theme, the struggle between religious vows and sensual
longing. Both reviews underline the popularity of religious subjects outside the
church for the generation of Meyerbeer, whose operas Robert le diable and Les
Huguenots draw equally on such themes. Berlioz’s enthusiasm for Meyerbeer’s dra-
matic song looks ahead to similar lyric projects of his own, notably Les Nuits d’été.
z February 8, 1835
This new work by the composer of Robert captured the attention of music
lovers and artists as soon as it appeared.1 No question here of one of those
colorless romances that some composers take the trouble to write even when
their copyists can do just as well. A monk with no calling, cursing the vows
1. Berlioz and his readers were on a first-name basis with the hero of Robert le diable,
Meyerbeer’s grand opera of 1831, famous for its fantastic scene of nuns rising from the grave;
Berlioz associates Robert of the opera with the nameless monk of the song. “Le Moine” was
published by Schlesinger, Berlioz’s own publisher—no doubt one reason Berlioz is reviewing
it—in a yearly album of romances, Hommage aux dames (1835, ninth year). Émilien Pacini
(1819–1898), French librettist, was to translate Weber’s Freischütz into French for the produc-
tion at the Opéra in 1841 that Berlioz oversaw and for which he composed the recitatives.
he rashly swore, implores the Blessed Virgin to come to his aid against the
passions raging in his heart. This was the poem that the composer decided to
set. He turned it into a tableau worthy of Eustache Lesueur’s paintings for the
Carthusian Cloister in the Luxembourg quarter,2 executed in broad strokes
within an outline of stark purity. The essentially dark and virile coloring
sometimes bursts into poignant tones marvelously reflecting the lubricious
hallucinations that drive the unfortunate recluse to a fever pitch. Even apart
from the words, the melody, rhythm, and harmonies are so original that the
work would be a masterpiece as music alone. Such lines as these, for example,
are rendered with admirable effectiveness:
Women and demons, bewitch and enchant me!

Your drunken sport makes my heart leap and prance;
It binds me with spells and orgies and dance
And orgasmic cries—oh! how damned I’ ll be!3
The modulations of that passage express utter pathos, as does the vocal part.
The return to F major from an opening in C-sharp minor is accomplished
with exemplary skill and imparts a delicate hint of hope to the phrase “O
Mary, holy Mother,”4 which softly rises from low F to middle F while the
accompaniment, descending in a long diatonic phrase, falls like a ray of heav-
enly light onto the monk’s plea.
This is the sort of music one would like to hear more often in our concert
halls. The French have an innate taste for light entertainment. Still, three or four
such compositions might well clear away the wretched products of commercial
balladry that, more than any material impediments, make us the laughingstock
of musicians around the world and have brought our musical progress to a halt.
Let me add that Meyerbeer’s song, full of faith and passion, shows off the voice to
every possible advantage. No wonder that “The Monk,” though published very
recently, already enjoys great success with singers and audiences alike.
[Unsigned]5
2. Eustache Lesueur (1617–1655), French painter responsible for decorating the Louvre in the
1650s and one of the founders of the French Academy of Painting. The paintings ended up in
the Louvre, where Berlioz would have seen them.
3. “Femmes, démons, jetez-moi vos magies, / À vos ébats mon cœur ivre bondit; / À moi les
chants dans les folles orgies, / Les cris d’amour, à moi. . . . je suis maudit!”
4. “Ô Marie, sainte mère.”
5. Berlioz refers to this article (“we already expressed our opinion”) in a signed review of
Meyerbeer’s songs later in the year (RGM, October 18, 1835).
23
Third Concert at the Conservatoire

Symphonies by Haydn and Beethoven
Entertaining even when bored, Berlioz tempers a devastating assessment of Haydn’s

symphonies with warm praise of his oratorio The Creation, though even there he
finds Haydn less powerful (though musically more gifted) than Gluck. A digres-
sion on Gluck seems designed to compensate for his absence from Conservatoire
programs, or simply to dwell on a higher plane than the concert under review. At
this one, a dozing dilettante awakens only for a Rossini aria. The one highlight of
the program for Berlioz is the first performance at the Conservatoire concert series
of Beethoven’s Eighth Symphony. Beethoven’s Gloria, by contrast, the concluding
work of the concert, contains a vigorous “Amen” fugue that ignites rash imprecations.
z February 20, 1835

Journal des débats
This concert was not one you remember for long. It offered nothing notable,
either good or bad. The audience was neither particularly moved nor exactly
bored. People wondered why the music left them so untouched, when it usu-
ally made their heart beat feverishly and stirred their blood. For the first
time since the founding of these superb concerts, I saw a member of the audi-
ence sleep through the whole program, waking only to hear the aria from
Semiramide.1 Was this some dilettante from the Théâtre-Italien whom chance
1. Rossini’s Semiramide was created in Venice in 1823. Stendhal calls it an “opera in the
German style,” but for Berlioz it is out of place except at Favart, the Théâtre-Italien.
had somehow led to the Conservatoire? I imagine so. I believe I saw him doz-
ing one evening at Favart, during a performance of Don Giovanni, and some-
time later at the Opéra, while Mlle. Falcon was singing the second act of La
Vestale.2 A neighbor of mine claimed to recognize him as the sleeper whose
snoring had recently disturbed a whole performance of Der Freischütz.3 What
compelling suppositions! A man who could sleep through Mozart, Spontini,
and Weber would hardly risk his reputation as a connoisseur by failing to
honor Beethoven in like manner.
The Conservatoire sleeper couldn’t have come away with a better opinion
of Beethoven than he had before the concert; he can’t have heard a note.
To some extent I can understand how a Haydn symphony might pro-
duce such lethargy: frankly, the work that opened Sunday’s concert was not
terribly electrifying.4 From the character of the music, it’s easy to form an
impression of the character of the composer. The first movement is intro-
duced by an adagio whose theme, initially stated by the basses and bassoons,
greatly resembles the plainchant melody of the Dies irae. Yet it is neither
awe-inspiring nor solemn—just grave and stolid, nothing more. The Allegro
is full of charming details; the principal melody is typical Haydn: neither
sad nor gay, neither impassioned nor soothing, nor mysterious, nor wild. It is
expressive of a tranquil soul and gentle, benevolent satisfaction.5 It is a melody
like those probably hummed by the good burghers in Faust when, outfitted in
their Sunday best, they enjoy “watching brightly painted vessels glide gently
down the stream.”6
The Adagio was warmly applauded, probably because of the ending, where
an unexpected modulation and a few ingenious instrumental effects pro-
vocatively hold off the final cadence. Everything before struck me as ample
2. On May 3, 1834, La Vestale at the Opéra produced only a “noble boredom”: Berlioz quotes
and agrees with that estimate by a colleague (Rén., May 18). The second act, of course, is for
Berlioz the summit of this adored work, which he makes the focus of his short story “The
Suicide from Enthusiasm,” published in GM in July. A second performance on August 13
fared better, as Berlioz reports in Rén., August 16–17.
3. It was in fact Robin des bois, the Castil-Blaze arrangement of 1824.
4. The symphony in question is no. 103 in E-flat, not one of the lesser ones.
5. Berlioz’s view of Haydn was widely shared. Hoffmann, in his essay on Beethoven’s instru-
mental music, speaks of Haydn’s “childlike, happy spirit” (Kreisleriana, 4).
6. The reference is from Goethe’s Faust I. Berlioz writes “regarder la rivière qui se bariolait de
bâtiments de toutes couleurs,” a slight reworking of Nerval’s translation of 1828 “et l’on voit
la rivière se barioler de bâtiments de toutes couleurs.” Goethe has “und sieht den Fluss hinab
die bunten Schiffe gleiten” (line 865).
23. Conservatoire: Haydn, Beethoven 129
justification for our music lover’s sleepiness. He stayed slumped over while
the violins stubbornly repeated each of the little minor-key recapitulations
that pile up to form the bulk of the movement. To hear the first two measures
of this movement, you’d think it was about to turn sad or, at least, solemn.
Well, no. Minor here is no more somber than major, and everything remains
tranquil and calm. It is obvious that, at this stage in his career, Haydn had
never questioned Hippocrates’ advice to keep your head cool and your feet
warm, and had never faced any true sorrow.
With such judgments as these, I will be accused of speaking irreverently
about the father of the symphony and not showing due regard for the period
when he was composing. I am not passing judgment, however, but simply
noting the impression that Haydn’s style, always bright and sunny, makes
on me as it does on most of his listeners. Should we be forever on our knees
before famous names? Surely criticism needs to be frank and unprejudiced!
In a recent article I bluntly called Schubert one of the greatest geniuses to
honor the art of music; yet it was a name you had probably never heard.7
Why, despite Haydn’s well-earned celebrity, should we not admit that many
of his instrumental compositions lack the warmth and vitality and deep
expressiveness that burst forth so brilliantly in his oratorio The Creation?8
In general, such qualities alone give life to works of art and ground the true
power of genius.
Whatever the progress or transformations of music since Haydn’s time,
they cannot be adduced in his defense. At issue here is not the form of his
works, but only the ideas and feelings that dictated their composition.
Gluck, the composer of Alceste, was certainly far from possessing the skill,
the knowledge of harmony, and the compositional talent that nature and
chance gave to Haydn—Gluck’s harmony shows little variety; his orches-
trations are sometimes heavy and monotonous; his rhythms often fail to
produce the movement and action that he expected of them. But consider,
even in his earliest works, written years before Haydn’s symphonies, what
warmth, what life, what passion, what profound feeling, what poetry breathe
forth! Nothing in music is more heart-rending than the anguish of Alceste,
nothing more forthright and artless than the Thessalians’ joy; nothing is
more terrifying than the oracle scene or more fantastical than the steady
7. See #20, JD, January 25, 1835.

8. Haydn’s three-part oratorio was created in 1799. Berlioz is an admirer, though he objects
to some of the work’s imitative effects.
beat of the recitative “Ove fuggo, ove m’ascondo”9—which is unfortunately

missing from the French version of the opera. And what, finally, could be
more colossal in concept and form, in feeling and execution, than the aria
“Divinités du Styx”?10
It would be hard, moreover, to find among the moderns many pieces that
could rival Ulysses’ aria “Non chiamarmi ingrato”—from Telemaco—for ten-
der gentleness or Asteria’s monologue “Mal fu per me quel giorno”—from the
same opera11—for the expression of loneliness and the pain of wistful memo-
ries. Very hard, indeed. Yet these works are old, dating from a period when
musical means were very limited in comparison to those available today. Such
bursts of passion have lost nothing of their animating spirit. They still make
us weep, for they arise not from the head, but from the heart. Gluck dreamt
with Asteria, consoled Circe with Ulysses, shed tears of love or fervor with
Alceste, quaked with holy fear with the priest of Apollo.
In writing The Creation, Haydn was no doubt similarly imbued with pro-
found religious emotion. Everything points to it: the biblical majesty of the
style, the great breadth of the form, the richness of the choruses, the very dar-
ing of certain harmonies. For this monumental work his soul opened wide,
his imagination took flight, and the musician became a Poet. Aside from a
few unimportant details, Haydn’s Creation has remained as beautiful as it
was at its conception, whereas his symphonies, the ingenious work of a musi-
cian—but only a musician—strike us today as cold and colorless productions
clearly unequal to their reputation.
An aria from Rossini’s Semiramide had been selected for the debut of a
young singer, Mme. Duflot.12 Her very entrance had left the audience wary
of her talent, but the performance was duly applauded. Mme. Duflot has a
very pure, sweet contralto voice, but it lacks power in the lower register. She
vocalizes easily and sings with correct phrasing and impeccable pitch—a trio
of qualities not often found together in one individual. Unfortunately, she
also has a flaw that no time or training can remedy: she lacks feeling and
9. “Where can I flee, where hide?” Act II, sc. 2 of the Italian Alceste. These words are in mm.
74–76. The recitative begins with the words “Chi mi parla?” (Who speaks to me?)
10. Act I, sc. 7 from the French Alceste.
11. “Don’t call me ungrateful” (Ulysses; actually preceded by “Ah!”: “Ah! Non chiamarmi
ingrato”) and “That day brought me misfortune” (Asteria) from Gluck’s Telemaco (Act I, sc.
5); see #9 for more on this opera.
12. Hortense Duflot (1807–1857), French contralto.
23. Conservatoire: Haydn, Beethoven 131
seems unaware of the lack. Her singing is glacial, and nothing, to my mind,
especially in opera, could ever compensate for such utter failure to convey
nuance and expressiveness.
Beethoven’s long-awaited Symphony in F began at last. This is the great
master’s eighth, the penultimate one. Undeniably smaller in its proportions
than most of the preceding symphonies and, of course, the choral work that
followed, it revealed in just a few measures its vast difference from the Haydn
we had just heard. Whereas the one is subdued and static, the other is bril-
liant and alive. Even Beethoven’s violins seem to have a fuller sound than his
predecessor’s.
The opening Allegro, in triple time, is charmingly fresh and original; it
was nonetheless granted faint applause, because of the softness and simplicity
of its ending. It will no doubt have a more marked effect on a second hearing.
The Andante scherzando is one of those compositions for which there is
no known model or match;13 it must have come to the composer in a single
flash of inspiration. He wrote it down at one go, and it leaves us in awe. The
winds do the opposite of what they ordinarily do; they accompany the light
dialogue of the violins and cellos with four-part chords, eight per bar. It is
gentle, naive, and gracefully indolent, like the song of two children gathering
flowers in a field on a beautiful spring day. But—would you believe it?—this
gorgeous idyll ends with one of those clichés that horrified Beethoven him-
self: an Italian cadence! Just when the movement turns most interesting, the
composer, as if suddenly forced to conclude, seizes upon the four notes B–G–
D–F,14 rushes through them four times—just as the Italians do when they
sing “felicità”—and stops short. I have never encountered another instance of
such caprice in music. Who’s to explain it?
A Minuet styled like Haydn’s replaces the Scherzo in quick triple
meter that Beethoven invented for his other symphonies and used with
such remarkable effectiveness. Truth to tell, this movement is quite ordi-
nary. Its old-fashioned form seems to have smothered any inventiveness.
The Finale, on the other hand, sparkles with freshness, novelty, and brio.
The ideas are developed lushly and the movement, though not as strikingly
expressive as the Andante scherzando, is at least worked through with care
right to the end.
13. The movement is in fact marked Allegretto scherzando. Such terms were used loosely, as
previously noted.
14. Berlioz corrected himself in Art of Music: the notes should read B-flat–G–F–A.
The concert closed with Beethoven’s Gloria in excelsis, an energetic work,

but at times harsher and more violent than religious ardor would properly call
for. Besides, the chorus ends—God forgive me for saying so!—with one of
those fugal exercises that I have pointed out time and again in other compos-
ers as a barbaric absurdity whose creator deserves to be damned for eternity.15
H.
15. See #21 for a more reasoned approach to the matter.

24
Music Review
Royal Academy of Music: First Performance
of La Juiv e, Oper a in Five Acts
by MM. Scribe and Halév y
This grand opera on the persecution of Jews anticipates Meyerbeer and Scribe’s
Les Huguenots of 1836 on the persecution of Protestants, but scenic spectacle will
not be outdone: La Juive has horses onstage! Berlioz’s opening outburst conveys
his distaste for the clanging, eye-popping excess and his revulsion at the con-
cluding horrors—he remains dubious about tragic endings, still uncommon in
opera—besides his avowed reason that the obligatory plot summary is inevitably
dreary, an axiom his nimble narrative quickly disproves. Still, he speaks well of
the music and is often sympathetic to Halévy, one of a new generation of progres-
sive Jews or “Israelites,” as they were called after France granted them citizen-
ship, the first nation to do so, during the Revolution.
z March 1, 1835
Le Rénovateur
Another awful nightmare!1 I am supposed to summarize M. Scribe’s libretto,

which you could buy for the modest sum of 20 sous. Nothing in our wretched
1. The opera opened on February 23 and was repeated twice that same week. In the original
title of his review, Berlioz also listed “MM. Diéterle, Despléchin, Séchan et Léon Feuchère,”
the team responsible for the scenery (MM. Philastre and Cambon are left out, as is Lormier
for the costumes and Taglioni for the choreography). The tenor, Nourrit, directed the staging
(mise en scène).
profession compares to the fatigue that this dreary task causes the critic,
unless it be the boredom it causes the reader. Many of my colleagues take no
more trouble with their plot summaries than they might with an academic
discourse, so that readers, faced with all that scribbling, skip to the final col-
umn to see whether, as usual, “the musician has shown great talent.”
It is in fact worth noting that critics treat librettists and composers dif-
ferently. If the work is a failure, the words alone are to blame; if a success, the
musician receives all the credit. In truth, if foreigners rely on the judgments of
the Paris press, they must think that no other country in the world is as rich
as ours in great composers. There is really no hideous little production—like
those that M. Crosnier brought by the dozen to the stage of the Théâtre de
la Bourse, until his lucky star guided him toward Weber2—not one where
the critics failed, more or less, to exalt the composer to the detriment of the
writer. They favor pronouncements such as: “The basic idea is quite weak;
the plot is uninteresting; it has, though, provided the composer with several
opportunities to demonstrate his skill”; “Monsieur X’s music has grace and
charm; the tenor aria will soon be on every piano”; and so on and so forth.
I think, in the end—God forgive me!—that if Lebrun came back from the
dead bearing some score in the style of his “immortal” Rossignol, there would
again be hands ready to applaud the melodiousness of his floo-oo-oot solos
and columnists eager to praise him.3
But none of that has any bearing on La Juive—believe me! My tirade was
only motivated by the irritation I always feel when I have to spell out a sce-
nario or provide some poor excerpt of the new work, which no one will read.4
So I hope this time that I can get by at little cost. I shall be brief. Let’s go.
Princess Eudoxie is very much in love with Prince Leopold, her husband.
This ingrate, this perfidious spouse, is carrying on a criminal affair with
Rachel, the Jewish girl of the title, daughter of an old usurer named Eleazar,
“who is said to be draped in gold.”5 The young man has introduced himself
2. The revival of Weber’s Freischütz, in its French guise of Robin des bois, premiered at the
Opéra-Comique on January 15, 1835. Berlioz reviews the production in Rén., January 18.
3. Berlioz frequently rails against Le Rossignol by Lebrun and its warbling flute solos.
4. When Berlioz says “the work,” in this context, he means the libretto.
5. “qu’on dit tout cousu d’or” (Act I, sc. 3). Scribe may have been thinking of a famous line
from La Fontaine, who so describes the financier of his fable “Le Savetier et le financier” (“The
Shoemaker and the Financier,” Book 8, no. 2). The action is set during the fifteenth-century
Council of Constance (Konstanz), which burned at the stake the pre-Lutheran Jan Hus.
Cardinal Jean-François Brogni is historical.
24. Halévy: La Juive 135
into the Jew’s house under the name of Samuel; he pretends to be a Jewish
painter, skilled in working “on gold and vellum.”6 But one evening, while the
family is celebrating Passover, Rachel notices that Samuel, instead of eating
the holy bread, throws it under the table. She asks her lover the reason for his
strange behavior; Leopold answers that, since the explanation will take a long
time, Rachel should agree to a private meeting that very night. That night,
the prince returns and admits to Rachel that he is . . . a Christian! Horrified,
the Jewish maiden reproaches him bitterly, but a moment later she agrees to
flee with him from her father’s house. They are about to leave when Eleazar
appears and stops them. Another explanation, another confession by Samuel,
another outburst of Jewish fury, another return to milder sentiments. Eleazar,
a priest of the law of Moses, consents to marry the two lovers and is ready
to proceed immediately to the ceremony.7 Samuel, however, half-dead with
fright and horror, rejects the hand of Rachel, crying out that this marriage is
impossible. Father and daughter then, with no way of suspecting the reason
for his rejection, hurl curses at Samuel and drive him from their house.
In the midst of a sumptuous feast that Princess Eudoxie is holding in
honor of Leopold, who has just returned from his victory over the Hussites,
Eleazar and his daughter, mingling with the crowd, recognize Samuel in the
prince, whom Eudoxie is calling her noble husband. Rachel unhesitatingly
rushes forward and, in the presence of the whole court and the members of
the royal council, reveals the dastardly betrayal that she has suffered at the
hand of Leopold. He was involved with an untouchable, a Jewish girl; he is
a Christian, and married; this double crime demands capital punishment!
The prince has no response to this devastating accusation except an agitated
silence. “So it’s the truth,”8 cries the venerable Cardinal de Brogni, president
of the council, who is impelled to call down on him (as well as on the two
Jews—which makes little sense) the anathema of the church, excommuni-
cating him on the spot. However, the unhappy Jewish maiden, won over by
the pleas of Princess Eudoxie and even more by the love for Leopold still lin-
gering in her heart, consents to save him by declaring to the judges that her
charge was a calumny and that the prince is entirely innocent. The boiling
cauldron will receive only two bodies instead of three! With the end in sight,
6. “sur l’or et le vélin” (Act II, sc. 2). Once again Berlioz lifts a phrase from the libretto.
7. In later versions of the libretto, Eleazar is no longer “priest of the law of Moses” and does
not attempt to marry the couple; he merely grants them his blessing.
8. “C’est donc la vérité”! (Act III, sc. 2)
Eleazar feels the courage drain away with which he has faced his executioners
till now: Rachel, you see, is not his daughter; he saved her from the sack of
Rome and raised her as his own child; her natural father is, in fact, the cardi-
nal, who has been unaware that his daughter is still alive. Eleazar, by revealing
the truth, could snatch the hapless girl from her horrible fate. He hesitates
a moment; then he discloses that a Jew, whom he will not identify, rescued
and raised the cardinal’s daughter. Brogni, on his knees, begs him to name
the man and say where the girl can be found. But the desire for vengeance is
too powerful,9 and only at the moment when Rachel is thrown into the fatal
cauldron does Eleazar, pointing at the girl, then at the cardinal, cry out with
a gruesome laugh, “There is your daughter!” Such horror makes the whole
final act exhausting and oppressive. It is a very Place de Grève on the day of
an execution. In place of the guillotine, picture a vat of boiling oil, which is
no less frightful; in place of gendarmes, picture black-robed penitents, which
is even worse.
I believe that the advocates of a happy ending at almost any cost are quite
right when it comes to opera. A tragic end may sometimes provide a perfect
denouement for a lyric drama, but this is very rarely the case, and, at any
event, the final scene needs to offer more than matters that, as Boileau wrote,
“judicious art should offer to the ear and withhold from the eyes.”10
The lavish sets and costumes and the extraordinary brilliance of this pro-
duction surpass everything we have yet seen in Paris.11 Above all, the impe-
rial procession in the first act is a magnificent sight. The soldiers wear none
of those nasty old cardboard helmets on their heads, but fine, handsome
armets a hundred times more solid and polished than the famous armet of
King Mambrin, Don Quixote’s Moorish adversary, or indeed the copper bar-
ber’s plate of the valiant Don himself. The breastplates, the thigh pieces, the
9. The “vengeance” is directed at Cardinal Brogni and the fanatically anti-Jewish crowd.
Berlioz conflates two different moments of decision. At the end of Act IV, Eleazar sings of
his love for his daughter in the famous aria “Rachel, quand du seigneur”; just as he is about
to renounce vengeance and save her, an offstage chorus repeats the death call for Jews and he
changes his mind. In Act V he wavers again, asking Rachel whether she wishes to convert and
be saved; she adamantly refuses, heroically embracing death.
10. “. . . l’art judicieux / Doit offrir à l’oreille et reculer des yeux” (Art poétique, part III, lines
53–54).
11. The cost of the scenery has been estimated at 46,540 francs vs. 44,000 francs for Les
Huguenots; the armor alone cost 30,000 francs. Total production costs came to 150,000
francs. See Diana R. Hallman, Opera, Liberalism, and Antisemitism in Nineteenth-Century
France: The Politics of Halévy’s “La Juive” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002),
p. 109.
helmets, and the coats of mail (all of them in shiny new steel), the horses
draped in cloth of gold . . . Add to all that the vivid purple of the cardinal’s
robe, the motley tights of the pages, and you still have only a slight picture
of the stage of the Opéra under the flood of this opulent throng. Then we
have immense gardens in which tables set up under a magnificent canopy
are served by men on horseback, a Gothic church whose only light comes
through stained-glass windows as at Notre Dame . . . Nor is the organ lack-
ing! Since Meyerbeer’s Robert le diable, it’s been out of the question to mount
an opera of whatever consequence without an organ.12 Musard himself found
it impossible to do without this majestic auxiliary for his quadrilles.13 Time
was, the use of the organ in a style so incompatible with religious gravity
would have been regarded not only as a scandalous impropriety but also as
a barbarous insult to art. Today, though, we have no such prejudices; every-
thing is as good as everything else, as Jean-Joseph Jacotot has claimed and
proven.14 Which explains why the public is charmed by a duo for organ and
flageolet: the infinitely grand, noble, and religious, paired with the infinitely
petty, trivial, and bouncy. It’s Handel paired with Collinet.15
But let’s return to La Juive. Despite the efforts made to prevent the audi-
ence from hearing the music, despite the clinking and clanging of all that
armor, the hoofbeats of the horses, the roar of the bystanders, the ringing of
bells and the rumble of cannon, the dances and overladen tables and foun-
tains of wine, despite all this antimusical racket at the Royal Academy of
Music, we were nevertheless able to catch a few snatches of the composer’s
inspirations.
A very fine trio in the second act, a chorus full of verve and originality
in the first, and a measured recitative of great character in the third all do
12. Meyerbeer’s Robert le diable (1831) exhibited the new emphasis placed on spectacle and
popular success at the Opéra under the July Monarchy. It also inaugurated operas on reli-
gious themes, still controversial.
13. For Berlioz, Musard’s popular orchestra embodies the facile opposite of grand opera.
14. Jean-Joseph Jacotot (1770–1840), educator, published his Enseignement universel
in Belgium in 1822; it was reissued in 1829 in Paris, where he came to live after 1830. His
book argues that all intelligences are equal and that education should be based on repeti-
tion, memory, and acquired knowledge tested against prior knowledge. Berlioz quotes his
much-repeated claim that “tout est dans tout,” literally “everything is in everything,” a dis-
tant echo of the claim underlying the famous eighteenth-century Encyclopédie.
15. Collinet fils, virtuoso (like his father) on the flageolet, or six-holed whistle flute, employed
by Musard. Balzac has him organize the ball that forms the high point of César Birotteau
(1837).
honor to M. Halévy’s expertise and energy. When a printed version of the

score allows us to evaluate the details of this music so mercilessly butchered
in performance by the choreographic exigencies of the day, I shall attempt to
provide a scrupulous analysis.16
At the rate at which things are moving at the Opéra, music will not be
the only art sacrificed to satisfy the least intelligent of all our senses: I mean
the sense of sight.17 Already the art of drama hardly aims for anything more
than big magic-lantern scenes. The large chorus of the Opéra is regarded as no
more than a crowd of extras that need only to be dressed and blocked to look
picturesque. The orchestra, good for nothing, is immobile and uncostumed,
and if it is still tolerated, it is no doubt thanks to the kettledrum, so useful to
beat the rhythm for the dancers, who would otherwise not always hear it. As
for the words, they have been beside the point for quite some time now. So
goes the Opéra from production to production. Every one of its responsibili-
ties and even its name will have to be changed to something less pompous
and more fitting.18 It brings to mind the great lord who, stopped one night
by a patrol of revolutionaries, bravely identified himself to the inquiring offi-
cer, saying, “I am the Marquis de Saint-Cyr.” “There are no more marquis in
France!” replied the heroic patriot. “Well, then, just de Saint-Cyr.”
“There are no more de’s!”

“Well, then, Saint-Cyr.”
“There are no more saints!”
“Well, then, Cyr.”
“There are no more sirs!”
“Well, then, . . .”
Sorry—the word is too gross for me to dare repeat it here.

Whatever the case, let us give credit to the artists charged with making the
most of the few scenes in which the iron-clad infantry and the gold-covered
cavalry graciously made way for a modicum of music. Nourrit and Levasseur
16. The lack of an overture (one was added in October 1835) may have contributed to Berlioz’s
judgment that the music received less than its due.
17. In a purposely outrageous comment, Berlioz reverses the Classical estimation of sight as
the supreme faculty.
18. As Berlioz has said before, the word “music” is no longer apt in the name Académie
Royale de Musique.
both gave us some memorable moments of singing and acting.19 Lafont and
Mme. Dorus had thankless roles in which they nevertheless managed to
attract well-deserved applause. Mlle. Falcon, however, rose to a tragic height
that astonished everyone.20 You could not have expected such enormous,
such sudden progress in the abilities of this young woman. She sang and
acted with the most convincing energy. I have only one critical observation to
make. In the heat of her performance, with words expressing great strength,
the singer, in order to reinforce their intensity, sometimes forgot herself and
descended to a canto parlato. Such license, tolerable in Italian buffooner-
ies like Gnecco’s La Prova d’un’ opera seria, will simply not do in a serious
opera.21 At any event, this criticism may well be irrelevant, for in her second
performance Mlle. Falcon had already thought to eliminate such forced pas-
sages. She remained within the bounds of singing, within pure music, and the
impression she produced was all the more stirring. Mlle. Falcon’s talent has
developed very significantly. All music lovers share the hope that her talent
will revive our old enthusiasms.22 It is for this voice, which in the next few
years will surely grow in power, that composers will write scores impossible
today but entirely appropriate once the reign of horses has come to an end.
H. BERLIOZ
19. The role of Eléazar was created for Nourrit as a tenor part—an unusual choice for a
father character—and includes the aria “Rachel, quand du seigneur.” Levasseur portrayed
the cardinal.
20. Marcelin Lafont (1800–1838), tenor, took the part of Prince Leopold originally intended
for Nourrit. Dorus-Gras played Princess Eudoxie. Rachel, the title character, was played by
Falcon, whom Berlioz encouraged, instructed, and admired.
21. Two-act comic opera, words and music by Gnecco (the title means“Rehearsal of a Serious
Opera—An opera seria”), which premiered at La Scala in Milan in 1805; the Théâtre-Italien
took it up in February 1835.
22. Berlioz is thinking notably of Mme. Branchu and Mme. Malibran, great dramatic sing-
ers he had heard in the 1820s.
25
Music Review
Concert by the Pupils of Choron
at the Hôtel de Ville
When Choron died, the fate of his school remained uncertain. Hopes of its sur-
vival are rekindled, then dashed, by a concert that disappoints in all respects.
Neither here nor in later articles do we find mention of the new director of the
school announced in an earlier article (#12). What we do find is further evi-
dence of Berlioz’s interest in early music and of his keen sense of the performance
requirements for various repertoires. We learn, along with Berlioz, that Choron
was not only a great pedagogue and historian but also an admirable composer.
Apropos of a lovely “madrigalesque duo” by Clari, an early eighteenth-century
composer, Berlioz formulates in extreme fashion his Gluck-derived creed: “The
composer is master; the performers are but slaves.” He is echoing class-conscious
arguments over the supremacy of music or words in late eighteenth-century
opera: for Gluck, music was the “ handmaiden of the word”; for Mozart, words
were but the servants of the music. Slavery in the French colonies had been
abolished under the Revolution but was reinstated under Napoleon, so it was
still an active question in the 1830s, when Berlioz met and sympathized with
Victor Schoelcher, abolitionist and future author of the French Emancipation
Proclamation of 1848.
z March 17, 1835

Le Rénovateur
25. Concert: Pupils of Choron 14 1
It was not a little surprising, a few days ago, to see an announcement that
Choron’s school was presenting a concert. We had not heard that this institu-
tion, so useful and interesting in every way, had remained functioning beyond
the death of its founder.1 All true friends of music were delighted to receive
this news of its continued existence and all were of course present at the event.
Unfortunately, the illusion that had led them to the Hôtel de Ville was quickly
dissipated. Several former pupils had combined forces, it’s true, but they were
too few to form a chorus like the massive one we used to hear with such plea-
sure, not long ago, in the small hall on the rue de Vaugirard. They had there-
fore sought the help of a fair number of choristers at the Opéra, who had no
training at the school for religious music. The concert, announced under the
name of Choron and his pupils, was thus something of a fiction. If the perfor-
mance had at least been excellent, one would gladly have closed one’s eyes to
the hoax; alas, it took only a few measures to realize that the master’s eye had
not overseen the preparation of the pieces we were hearing.2 We searched in
vain last Tuesday for the fine ensemble, the verve, the intonational precision
that made the reputation of this school rival that of the Conservatoire. There
was nothing more pallid, more colorless than the execution of the choruses.
Palestrina’s madrigal “Alla riva del Tebro”—whose sweet harmony, pure, calm,
and serene as a beautiful summer night, had produced a profound impres-
sion on the huge audience that filled the church of the Invalides at Choron’s
funeral service3—here passed almost unnoticed. A good part of the difference
between the two performances may be attributed to the participation of a few
girls, whose children’s voices were far from having the sharp accuracy that such
a work demands. Nothing is harder than sustained delivery; and if Palestrina is
rarely well performed these days, it is because his style requires special training
in a tradition that is fast being lost. When last year at the Invalides we heard
the madrigal in question here, the number of singers was very high; we know
that in such a case details that get lost are far less in evidence. Moreover, it is
likely that there had been more numerous rehearsals, better conducted and
done more carefully. The chorus “Il ciel risuona,” from Handel’s Alexander’s
1. See Rén., August 11, 1834 (#12) on the new director and Berlioz’s appeals for support of the
school by the relevant ministry.
2. The phrase “master’s eye” refers to La Fontaine’s fable “L’Œil du maître”(Book 4, no. 22).
Only the master’s eye detects all that needs attending to in the cattle barn—including a hid-
den stag.
3. The service was held on August 9, 1834; Choron died on June 29. See #12 and #13.
Feast,4 struck us as similarly devoid of ensemble and energy, and it was thus
sapped of all effect. Let’s be less harsh toward the “Parvulus” from Messiah:5
some parts were rendered properly. The same may be said of Choron’s hymn
“Grâce! Grâce!,” which includes a tenor solo that Jansenne sang remark-
ably well.6 Endowed with the most valuable abilities and a rare intelligence,
Jansenne also has a masterly technique that makes one quickly forget the
shortcomings of his voice.
This composition gave me the opportunity to observe how poorly
Choron was understood and appreciated in his lifetime. He was taken
to be one of those theoreticians unable to produce anything creative. He
himself was never willing to display the important pieces that he com-
posed. Now, at last, we hear one—and I am filled with true admiration!
Despite my fanatical appreciation of Gluck, if Choron’s hymn had been
attributed to him, I would not only have believed it; I would have called
the work one of the finest compositions by the author of Iphigénie.7 No
purer style could be heard, no harmony more distinguished, above all no
expressiveness more profound. The melody is one of unalloyed charm and
simplicity, with none of those banal turns of phrase or vulgar endings that
so often disfigure the most felicitous melodies. The audience appeared
deeply moved.
Clari’s brief madrigalesque duo “Cantando un di,” perfectly performed
by Mlle. Massy and M. Jansenne, quite rightly prompted calls for an
encore.8 This ingenious badinage by an old-school composer—Clari is his
name, not the title of the work—shines with a freshness and originality
that put our modern cavatinas in the shade. It demands precise, correct,
elegant execution, and does not allow the singers the slightest ornamenta-
tion or rhythmic distortion. The composer is master and governs as a des-
pot; the performers are but slaves of varying intelligence. That is precisely
4. Alexander’s Feast, Ode for Saint Cecilia (1736), Part I, no. 18, “The many rend the skies
with loud applause,” sung by the chorus in Italian on this occasion.
5. CM 2:84 identifies this from its Latin title “Parvulus filius hodie natus est” as the chorus
“For unto us a child is born,” Messiah, part I, no. 11.
6. Lenten hymn, no. 13 (Choron, Corps complet de musique religieuse, 1826). Louis Jansenne
(1809–?), French tenor. Berlioz’s phrasing is ambiguous, but he seems to imply that Choron’s
piece was on the whole well rendered.
7. The highest possible praise from Berlioz, who admired both of Gluck’s operas by that
name; but the greater was Iphigénie en Tauride, presumably the reference intended.
8. Giovanni Carlo Maria Clari (1677–1754), composer for the Medici. His “madrigalesque
duo” is occasionally still heard. Marie Massy (1813–1875), French soprano.
25. Concert: Pupils of Choron 143
the reason for the power of this music and the scorn it generally elicits
from the gods of song. Might it be that the challenge of skillfully bringing
out such delicate nuances accounts in part for the disdain expressed by
these immortals?
I do not know whether Mlle. Massy is to be counted among the pupils
of Choron, but it seemed to me that she was at one with his severe style and
could not have learned it except through studies analogous to those that
made for the ephemeral glory of his Institution de musique religieuse. And
what of those essential studies? Is there anyplace in France today where they
are promoted? Certainly not in Paris.
The young singer felt it necessary to offer us, along with such a remark-
able piece, the inevitable aria from The Court Concert,9 whose brilliant flour-
ishes and little coquetries, however, brought her far fewer plaudits than the
elegantly simple duetto by Clari.
The scene from Le Juif errant, very well rendered by Dérivis, struck us as
encompassing intentions of the greatest beauty and having in general been
composed under the influence of a very lofty poetic inspiration.10 The work
would surely place M. Monpou high in the esteem of the musical public, if it
were ever possible for an artist who avoids the crowd’s beaten path to obtain
early on the justice he deserves.
MM. Hiller and Baillot, with their performance of a Beethoven sonata
for violin and piano, showed as ever that they are talents of the first rank,
less notable perhaps for their great technical skill than for the profound
intelligence that allows them to identify completely with the genius of the
composer and the character of the work.11 What can I say about the sonata
itself? Well, what Voltaire said about Racine’s Iphigénie: Sublime! A wonder!
Sublime! Absolutely sublime!
The works of Beethoven, to those of us eager for memorable musical sen-
sations, are a veritable affliction: they make you cruelly demanding. After
9. Le Concert à la cour, one-act opéra-comique by Auber (1824; revived December 1834).

10. Hippolyte Monpou (1804–1841), French organist and composer, studied at Choron’s
school from 1817, and served as accompanist and rehearsal pianist for its concerts between
1828 and 1830. Like Berlioz, he rebelled against scholastic dogma and drew on Romantic
themes of the day, such as the wandering Jew ( juif errant) of the piece here. It is labeled a
“prose scene,” meaning that it used prose instead of verse for its text, the ultimate sign of
rebellion; Berlioz did likewise in some numbers of the 1832 version of Lélio. He would review
favorably Monpou’s opéra-comique Piquillo, on a libretto by Dumas ( JD, November 2, 1837).
11. Hiller and Baillot had been performing a series of recitals with other musicians. The
sonata in question was probably the “Kreutzer,” which they often featured in their series.
the emotions they arouse, it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to enjoy

listening to anything else. And so I left the hall at the opening chords of
an Italian cavatina, even though the program still called for the Bataille de
Marignan by Clément Janequin and Handel’s famous “Hallelujah” chorus.12
H. BERLIOZ
12. Famous four-part polyphonic song by Clément Janequin (1485–1558); the chorus from
Handel’s Messiah.
26
Concert Society of the Conservatoire

Fourth Concert
A superb program of music by Beethoven and Weber inspires Berlioz to poetic

heights. This is a good sample of his critique admirative, including a moment
when words fail and he falls back on the simplest of utterances: “Beautiful!
Admirable! Sublime!” Reflecting on the nature of great art, he defines admira-
tion as a form of love that demands fidelity, notably from performers. From the
critic, admiration leaves room for objections—to Weber’s treatment of thematic
material, for instance, or to some extreme dissonance in Beethoven. The review
of Beethoven’s “Pastoral” Symphony, expanded from an earlier effort (#4), ends
with a postlude that echoes the mix of humorous dialogue and philosophical
reflection at the start of the article. Both framing sections pay tribute to music as
Art in the highest sense of the word, while lamenting its ill-treatment—except
at the Conservatoire—in the “capital of the civilized world.”
z March 22, 1835

Journal des débats
So much has been said about the power of art, its importance in the life of
civilized men, its influence on our mores, and the deep pleasures it affords us
that many people, failing ever to find this El Dorado of poetry, have in the
end taken the whole story as mere bombast propounded by certain pundits
who wish to pass themselves off to the crowd as persons of exceptionally lofty
discernment. It must be admitted that nothing is more arduous than initia-
tion into art, which remains closed even to many people who feel a genuine
calling for it. It takes the convergence of a host of favorable circumstances and
the fulfillment of many conditions, the lack of even one of which can negate
the effect of all the others.1
Thus, to speak only of the art of music, let us imagine an enthusiast com-
ing to Paris to acquaint himself with “great music.” The fellow has never expe-
rienced an opera or a symphony. So far he has been able to hear only chamber
music: sonatas, duos, trios, quartets, romances, etc. A number of these works
have moved him deeply, and he owes to them the most enjoyable moments of
his life. How will such a young and impressionable organism respond, then,
when confronted with the masterworks of the lyric stage, magnificently per-
formed by the finest artists in Europe? 2
He arrives in Paris, then, and rushes off to the Opéra. What could be
more natural? The Opéra is the Royal Academy of Music, isn’t it? Where
could music enjoy greater honor? Let’s suppose the visitor asks my opinion:
“The orchestra is excellent, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” I answer.
“It is the largest in Paris?”
“Yes.”
“The choruses are strong?”
“Yes.”
“Nourrit, Levasseur, Mlle. Falcon are all highly talented musicians?”
“Yes indeed.”
“Well, then, with such performers, the music must be extraordinary,
overwhelming . . .?”
“No.”
“No? How can that be?”
“Oh, heavens! It would take forever to spell out the thousand reasons—and
the first would be that music at the Opéra doesn’t enjoy the importance
you might assume: music is far from being the center of attention.”
“But that’s deplorable! Where, then, can I find music in all its splendor? At
the Théâtre-Italien, no doubt?”
1. The idea that the practice and appreciation of music require a delicate mix of conditions,
and that not all music is made for all people permeates Berlioz’s criticism in 1834–35, when
his hostility was at its height toward Fétis and his book on music for everyone (La Musique
mise à la portée de tout le monde, 1830).
2. Berlioz writes as one who experienced such an arrival in Paris after growing up in La Côte-
Saint-André, a small town near Grenoble.
26. Conservatoire: Weber, Beethoven 147
“Not there either: music is not, to be sure, reduced to the level of the choreog-
raphy, the dance, and the sets, as at the Opéra, but it is confined exclusively
to the singing, which is a distortion in itself. Italian composers today care
for one thing only: to show off the singers.”
“What of the Opéra-Comique?”
“Oh, goodness! It’s easy to see that you’ve just arrived from the provinces.
It won’t take you long to notice that the Opéra-Comique is never men-
tioned in serious conversation about music. If you really want to know
how powerful modern music can be on its own, uncoupled from the
pomp and frills that crush it in the theaters, and freed from the demands
of the current divas, try to find a seat at the Conservatoire on the day of
a concert. There you won’t need to ask your neighbors to be quiet; you
won’t be disturbed by a thousand different sounds covering up the voice
of the orchestra as if the music itself were an intrusion; you won’t hear any
enthusiastic nonsense from the fashionable dilettantes about a D from
the bass or some cadenza from the soprano. Instead, you will be moved
by deep and noble feelings springing from the music alone. You will be
free to breathe an air fragrant with poetry, for you will be in the one and
only true temple, alas, that the capital of the civilized world has till now
erected to the art of music.”
That is what I would say to our man from the country, with no fear of
contradiction from experience. Just ask the audience at the fourth concert
of the season if they don’t consider the two hours they recently spent there
among the happiest in their lives! This time the program was bound to satisfy
even the most demanding of listeners. The first part was devoted wholly to
Beethoven; the second half was entirely set aside for Weber. There was a brief
interlude in which Henri Brod performed a well-composed oboe solo with
the impeccable purity of sound and graceful expressiveness that he is known
for.3
The chorus of Weber’s Euryanthe—do excuse me for not following the
order of the program—produced its usual effect: an encore in response to
enthusiastic, even feverish clamor, and once again it electrified the audience.
3. The solo was evidently of his composition. Although its inclusion mars the perfect pro-
gram, free of frivolities, that Berlioz has just acclaimed, he is not about to offend Henri Brod
(1799–1839), oboist, composer, oboe manufacturer, founding member of the Conservatoire
orchestra, and principal oboe at the Opéra from 1819 until his early death, at the news of
which Cherubini is reported to have muttered: “Small sound!”
Nothing could be more forthright and energetic than the apparently irregular
form of the piece. The horns are put to work with the technical skill of a man
who knows the instrument thoroughly and delights in its special qualities.
With its particular mix of melody, harmony, and modulations, this Hunters’
Chorus has been endlessly imitated and is no doubt destined to be imitated
well into the future. The famous D-flat at the end, on the last syllable of the
line “Chasseurs égarés dans les bois,” has been turning up everywhere. No one
today composes an even slightly energetic men’s chorus without, like it or not,
an outburst on the flatted seventh of the key, just as, after the appearance of
Weber’s Freischütz, all new overtures had to start with a horn quartet.4 Today
the tide has turned to ensemble pieces sung in unison. Ever since M. Bellini
composed a duet full of verve and passion for I Capuleti in which the two
soprano lovers perform in unison to singularly beautiful effect,5 we’ve had uni-
son singing everywhere, even in scenes where characters in conflict with one
another have no reason whatever to merge their voices in the same melody.
The scene from Euryanthe as performed at the Conservatoire forms a col-
orful whole; the two stanzas with horn accompaniment are interrupted by
a tender prayer that contrasts admirably with the wild melody and uneven
rhythm of the principal theme. Still, the scene is not Weber’s, and while
we acknowledge the French arranger, Castil-Blaze, for his talent in giving
shape and prominence to the fine inspiration of the German composer,
that hardly means we condone such lack of respect on the part of arrangers
toward the original works entrusted to them. No man, however gifted, has
the right to trim and transpose the parts of an opera or tragedy, still less to
patch his own ideas freely onto those of the creator or, worse yet, call them
his own. It reminds me of David Garrick, who, despite his idolization of
Shakespeare, took it into his head to rewrite the ending of Romeo and Juliet.6
4. “Hunters lost in the woods” (Act III, no. 21). What was actually heard at the Conservatoire
were the arrangements by Castil-Blaze of Weber’s Euryanthe and Freischütz, titled respec-
tively Euriante and Robin des bois. Marie-Hélène Coudroy- Saghaï, who checked the manu-
script copy of Euriante in the Opéra library, found no prayer inserted between the two parts
of the Hunters’ Chorus (CM 2:89). Whatever piece Castil-Blaze may have used, his tripartite
arrangement of the chorus seems to represent, for Berlioz, one of those rare happy inventions
by an arranger that he cannot help praising, as with David Garrick’s ending to Romeo and
Juliet, mentioned further on.
5. Berlioz tells in Mem., chapter 35, of applauding vigorously at the unison duet by the soprano
and mezzo-soprano when he heard Bellini’s I Capuleti e i Montecchi in Florence in 1832.
6. David Garrick (1716–1779), British Shakespearean actor, who, in accordance with
Neoclassical custom, freely adapted the plays. Berlioz himself, in the Tomb Scene of his
Roméo et Juliette symphony, would take his inspiration from Garrick’s ending.
His example led to the senseless disfigurement of several other masterpieces

by the immortal poet: the introduction of extra characters into The Tempest,
for example, or the Antony and Cleopatra that Byron jokingly called a salad
of Shakespeare and Dryden.7 For one successful arrangement, we can expect
a hundred absurd travesties. Besides, who gives you the right to consider your-
self more inspired than the creator of so many marvelous works? And, even
if your revisions are ingenious and perfectly reasonable, why strip the image
of a great man of any of its features, even the most defective? Do you think
the imperfections of such powerful minds hold no real charm, no stamp of
originality, for persons capable of understanding them? And don’t you know
that fervent admiration is the brother of love? If, in the darkness of night, you
mistake some other woman’s hand for your beloved’s, then, even if it gives you
pleasure, will you not instinctively recoil once you’ve discovered the error?
Unless you are one of those men for whom anything is acceptable as long as
it’s enjoyable, the answer is clear. But for people like that, admiration and love
have always been beyond their grasp.8
The overture to Euryanthe is, in line with Weber’s usual method, made up
of the main themes of the opera. The system is not new; it has brought us a
good number of patchworks that the composers of comic operas pompously
label overtures and that in reality are just wretched nonsense. How is it that
the same approach can yield so different a result? . . . Patriotism stops me from
answering. A thunderously energetic opening is followed by a wispy andante
whose charm stems almost wholly from the orchestration. The harmony,
voiced pianissimo by the violins divided into four parts and by the violas con
sordini, produces a sweet, mysterious effect, in which you might find a vague
reflection of the introduction to Weber’s Oberon.9 Then the allegro picks up
again with an odd sort of vehemence that marvelously depicts the frenetic
hatred and jealousy in the character of Églantine, so admirably portrayed in
the opera itself. Perhaps the frenzied cries of the orchestra would have greater
impact if they did not go on so long; perhaps, too, the svelte and elegant
melody, clearly meant to represent the beautiful Euryanthe and serve as the
principal theme, would work to greater effect if it recurred more often—as if,
instead of running away in alarm from these tumultuously roaring, infernal
7. See Byron’s journal entry of November 16, 1813 (Leslie A. Marchand, Lord Byron: Selected
Letters and Journals [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982], p. 85).
8. This diatribe against arrangers represents an early version of the one in Mem., chapter 16.
9. Berlioz refers to the horn quartet following the Freischütz overture’s opening adagio.
passions, the modest virgin held them off with the sweetness of her angelic
voice and the eloquence of her tears. But these observations, which I advance
with some hesitancy, do not keep the overture to Euryanthe from being a
worthy sibling to the Oberon and Freischütz overtures, and a magnificent
third in that celebrated trilogy.
The chorus of Fidelio is a touch too delicate to excite much applause.
Moreover, listeners unaware of the scene for which it was composed can eas-
ily miss the composer’s intention altogether. Prisoners weakened by long and
harsh captivity are allowed the special favor of a moment in the courtyard of
their fortress, a moment of clean air and sunlight; they hardly dare believe such
good fortune, and only warily expose their aching limbs to the vivifying rays
of the sun. Such is the situation that the composer had to depict. In my opin-
ion, his work is perfect. I have searched this chorus meticulously, with a sharp
critical eye, for any weaknesses in melody, expressiveness, harmony, orches-
tration—for mistakes in vocal balance, feeling, composition, inspiration, or
technical skill; and at every page I can do nothing but exclaim: “Beautiful!
Admirable! Sublime!” The same is true of the string quartet movement per-
formed by all the violins, violas, and cellos of the orchestra. The nimbleness,
the ensemble, and the vigor of this mass of strings in executing a complicated
fugue, filled with ascents to high C and staccato phrases on the fourth string,
are stunning accomplishments—not for us, of course, long accustomed to let
nothing astonish us, but for listeners who are not regular concertgoers at the
Conservatoire. It was most regrettable, in the performance of that rousing
finale, that the preceding Andante in A minor was omitted.10 It is one of
Beethoven’s most original conceptions; as you listen, you imagine yourself in
a Gothic castle of the sort so well depicted by Sir Walter Scott, listening on
a dark winter’s night to some hair-raising ancient legend. The wind is howl-
ing outside; the hearth has died down to a faint glow; a secret terror beats in
every listener’s heart, and all huddle closer and closer together, tightening the
circle, while their eyes, wide with dread, remain fixed upon the speaker.
10. The references to “finale” and to the preceding Andante in A minor (actually the second
movement, not the preceding Minuet, which leads directly into the fourth movement) make
it clear that the work in question was the Razumovsky Quartet in C major, op. 59, no. 3,
sometimes called the “Eroica” Quartet. What Berlioz hears as Walter Scott in the Andante is
more likely to have been a nod to Beethoven’s Russian sponsor: think Russian steppes rather
than Scottish moors. As for the finale itself, the opening furiously paced fugue is notoriously
demanding for solo instruments, let alone a full string section—proof of the extraordinary
virtuosity of French string playing at the Conservatoire.
But it is time to speak of the “Pastoral” Symphony, that astonish-

ing landscape that seems to have been colored by Poussin and sketched by
Michelangelo.11 The composer of Fidelio and the “Eroica” wants to depict the
calm of the countryside and the gentle ways of the shepherds. Yes, but let’s
be clear: these are not the pink-and-green-beribboned shepherds of M. de
Florian or, even less, those of M. Lebrun and his opera Le Rossignol, or those
of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who wrote Le Devin du village.12 No; this is nature
itself. The first movement is called “Pleasant Feelings Inspired by the Sight of
a Cheerful Landscape.” The shepherds are beginning to move about in the
fields at their easygoing pace, playing their reed pipes in the distance and up
close. Ravishing phrases caress you like the morning’s soft, fragrant breeze;
flights, or, rather, whole flocks of twittering birds swish past overhead; and
from time to time the air seems laden with mist. Great clouds come along to
blot out the sun; then, all of a sudden, they roll back and let torrents of daz-
zling light stream down onto the fields and woods. That is what I imagined on
hearing this movement, and I think that, despite the haziness of instrumental
expression, many other listeners may have experienced similar imaginings.
Next comes a “Scene by the Brook.” Contemplation . . . The composer no
doubt created this admirable Adagio stretched out on the grass, eyes gazing
upward and ear to the wind, fascinated by thousands of shimmering reflec-
tions of sound and light, attending to all the sparkling white wavelets in
the brook as they break almost noiselessly against the stone bank; it is pure
delight. Some people have strongly criticized Beethoven for trying, at the end
of the Adagio, to imitate, successively and then together, the songs of three
birds. Since, to my mind, success or failure usually determines whether such
efforts are right or absurd, I say to Beethoven’s critics that they are right in
the case of the nightingale, whose song is hardly better imitated here than
in M. Lebrun’s famous flute solo, for the simple reason that the nightingale,
which emits only negligible or variable sounds, cannot be imitated by instru-
ments with fixed notes tuned to a particular pitch; but it seems to me that
11. Berlioz’s earlier formulation, though less polished stylistically, makes the meaning
clear: “It is as if Michelangelo had decided to borrow the palette of Poussin and created a
great, admirable landscape” (#4). In other words, Michelangelo’s power is combined with
Poussin’s palette. There follows the analysis—complete with concluding dialogue—that
Berlioz will incorporate in Art of Music.
12. The Village Soothsayer, Rousseau’s great popular success of 1752. All three of the authors
mentioned were known for their scenes of idyllic nature; in comparison with Beethoven’s,
those now seemed hopelessly artificial.
the case is different for the quail, whose cry is limited to two notes, or for the
cuckoo, to only one. In these two instances, the notes are fixed and precise,
thus permitting an accurate and complete imitation.
Beyond that, to anyone who complains that it was puerile to attempt to
render precise bird calls in a scene where all the gentle voices of earth, sky,
and water are supposed to sound as they do in nature, I say that the same
objection may be raised when, in a storm, the composer just as precisely imi-
tates the wind, the bolts of lightning, and the bleating of sheep. And God
knows whether it has ever entered the mind of a critic to call the storm in
the “Pastoral” Symphony absurd! Let’s go on. The poet-composer takes us at
this point into the midst of a “Merry Gathering of Peasants.” There is danc-
ing; there is laughter—in moderation at first; a musette plays a cheerful tune,
accompanied by a bassoon capable of sounding only two notes. Beethoven no
doubt had in mind some good old German peasant standing on a cask and
equipped with a poor, broken-down instrument from which he can barely
draw the two main sounds of A major, the dominant and the tonic. Each
time the oboe takes up the musette tune, artless and gay as a young girl in
her Sunday best, the old bassoon comes along with his two notes; whenever
the melodic phrase modulates, he stops playing and patiently counts his
rests until the opening note returns and lets him repeat his imperturbable
A–C–A. (This highly comical effect almost completely escapes the audi-
ence’s notice.) Then the dancing quickens, turns wild and noisy. The rhythm
changes; a coarse, two-beat tune announces the arrival of heavy-clogged
highlanders. The first section, in triple time, starts up again, livelier than
ever: everything piles up in one great sweep; the women’s hair goes whirling
around their shoulders; the highlanders contribute their noisy, tipsy excite-
ment; hands clap; voices shout; there is a mad rush about; it is utter frenzy . . .
Suddenly, a distant clap of thunder alarms the country revelers and puts them
all to flight.
“Storm and Lightning.” I despair of being able to give you an adequate idea
of this prodigious movement; you have to hear it to realize how natural and
sublime pictorial music can be in the hands of a man like Beethoven. Listen,
just listen to those blasts of rain-soaked wind, those muffled rumblings in the
basses, the sharp whistling of the piccolos warning of a terrible storm about
to burst! The hurricane draws near; the threat grows; an immense chromatic
flash, starting from the upper reaches of the orchestra, comes drilling down
into the lowest depths, grabbing the basses and pulling them back up, throb-
bing and whirling like a cyclone overturning everything in the way. Then the
trombones burst forth; the timpani double the violence of their thunder; no
longer is it rain and wind but a frightful cataclysm, a universal flood, the end
of the world. Truly, it makes your head reel, and many people are not sure if
what they are feeling is pleasure or pain.
The symphony closes with “The Peasants’ Hymn of Thanksgiving after
the Return of Fair Weather.” Everything turns cheerful again; the shepherds
reappear and cry back and forth across the mountainside as they gather up
their scattered flocks. The sky is clear and bright; the swollen streams gradu-
ally drain back to normal; calm is restored and with it come rustic strains
whose sweetness brings repose to the soul shaken and unsettled by the sub-
lime horror of the foregoing scene.
After that, how am I to point out the singularities of style that mark this
gigantic work—the groups of five notes in the cellos, for example, played
against four-note phrases in the basses, which rub against each other instead
of merging into real unison? Am I to mention the horn call that sets an arpeg-
giated C chord against an A chord held by the strings? . . . In truth, I cannot.
For a task of that nature, one needs to reason coolly, and who can stay cool
when engrossed in such a subject? . . . No, it’s not possible. You would like to
sleep—sleep for months on end and let your dreams dwell in that unknown
world of which genius has allowed us a momentary glimpse. How unfortu-
nate, after such a concert, to have to hear some comic opera, some recital of
popular cavatinas and a flute concerto. If someone asks you: “How do you
like that Italian duo?,” you will look blank, and reply with due seriousness:
“It’s quite lovely.”
“And the variations for clarinet?”
“Superb.”
“And the finale of the new opera?”
“Admirable.”
Then some distinguished artist, who has heard your answers without
knowing what is really on your mind, will point at you and say: “Who is that
imbecile?”
H***
27
Sixth Conservatoire Concert
Of all the versions Berlioz produced of his analysis of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony,
this is the most striking; and what is striking about it is less the evocation of the
music, compelling though it is, than the description of audience responses. It is
hard to gauge today the part played by figurative language in tales of fainting
and sobbing, of cries drowning out the orchestra, and of audience members ris-
ing en masse at the C major opening of the Finale. Certainly Berlioz’s descrip-
tion is highly staged: it portrays the audience in the manner of sections of an
orchestra, as though they form part of the performance. What we know is that
it was not the now iconic first movement but the apotheosis Finale, heard as a
triumphal march, that was for the French the core of the work. In fact this is
the first performance, Berlioz testifies, at which the first movement has begun
to be properly “understood.” If he can judge with such confidence, it is because
applause between movements was standard practice.
z April 18, 1835

Journal des débats
The Symphony in C minor, perhaps Beethoven’s greatest work, was sched-
uled for this concert.1 After all we have said about the other symphonies, it
1. Also programmed for this concert on March 29, 1835 were the “Benedictus” and “Credo”
from Beethoven’s Missa solemnis, a Romance for violin by Beethoven, a harp concertino
by Naderman (probably François-Joseph, 1781–1835, appointed first harp professor at the
Conservatoire in 1825, rather than his brother Henri, like him both a harpist and harp manu-
facturer), an Andante for violin by Pierre Baillot, and the overture to Etienne Méhul’s opera
Le Jeune Henri.
27. Conservatoire: Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony 155
becomes especially difficult to speak about this one. “Good God! not another
hymn!” I hear the reader exclaim. “Mr. Ranter is boring us senseless with
his enthusiasm. He can’t say the word ‘music’ without falling into ecstasies.
Beethoven is a god to him; he bows down at the very name. Beethoven’s
works are beyond compare, always beautiful, always great, original, energetic,
dreamy, tender, touching, moving, impassioned, fiery, stirring! Beethoven is
the nec plus ultra of poetry, the zenith of art. It’s unbearable.” That’s what so
many people will say. Still, is it our fault if Beethoven is . . . Beethoven? If his
works leave us riveted, confounded, overwhelmed? Besides, no one can justly
accuse us of ignoring the imperfections that tie his genius to humanity. Have
we not more than once deplored certain supposedly religious compositions
whose effect, alas, was quite different from the one we observe in the case of
his symphonies? Do we not have to record as a sad fact, notable in the annals
of music, the recent open revolt against the “Credo” in his Missa solemnis? It
is a movement in which a few grandiose passages hardly suffice to redeem an
overall lack of clarity, absence of true inspiration, occasional clashes in har-
mony, and a notably inappropriate vocal distribution. As for the charge that
I can’t mention music without going into ecstasies, I have an easy answer! If
I were to analyze certain productions that are also commonly called music,
I might have to replace the vocabulary of admiration with some rather unwel-
come epithets.
But let us turn back to Beethoven and speak of his masterpiece with as
much calm and composure as possible. The first movement of the C minor
Symphony, which opened the concert, depicts the unsettled emotions of a
great soul fallen prey to despair—not the concentrated, calm despair that
looks like resignation, not the mute, mournful despair of Romeo at the news
of Juliet’s death, but rather the terrible fury of Othello hearing Iago spew the
venomous calumnies that convince him of Desdemona’s crime. It is now a
frenetic delirium that bursts into frightening cries, now a bottomless dejec-
tion expressed in regret and self-pity . . . now a torrent of execrations, a rage
that tumbles into convulsions or unconsciousness.2 This last word will surely
make people laugh: how can music depict a loss of consciousness? In truth,
I can hardly give you the recipe, the method, the rule by which to obtain
that result. All I know is that these orchestral gasps, these chordal dialogues
2. Compare with the program of the Symphonie fantastique: “The passage from this state of
melancholy reverie, interrupted by a few fits of groundless joy, to one of frenzied passion, with
its movements of fury, of jealousy, its return of tenderness, its tears . . .—this is the subject of
the first movement” (Cone, Berlioz Fantastic Symphony, 23).
among the winds that come and go, trailing off like the labored breathing of a
dying person, then give way to a phrase full of violence in which the orchestra
seems to revive in a flash of anger, impressed me musically very much the way
a dramatic presentation of such a scene could do. At the five or six earlier per-
formances of this movement, the public responded rather coolly to the com-
poser’s frenzied cries. People did not yet understand this impassioned style; it
was too far outside their experience of instrumental music. But last year their
education already showed real progress; and at this most recent performance,
a shiver went through the hall at the moment in the recapitulation when the
second violins, merging with the first in thunderous unison, seem to rise
above the instrumental mass only to bring their full weight back down upon
them a moment later, like those flaming rocks hurled up by volcanoes. At that
point the audience could barely contain itself, and there was no more silence.
“The adagio is a theme-and-variations such as a man like Beethoven could
compose.” In these few words, a well-known music critic, now regrettably
departed from France, not long ago summed up the second movement of the
C minor Symphony.3 The great man has little appreciation for the movement
in question because of a high pedal on the dominant in the clarinet part under
which the composer placed the sixth chord D-flat–F-natural–B-flat, whose
two lower notes jar with the dominant E-flat in the key of A-flat major. It is
true that the pedal and the dissonant harmony beneath it produce a lovely
effect; it is equally true that a great number of composers skilled in harmony
have made use of such upper or middle pedals passing through alien chords.
Still, Paris professors having opposed such a practice in their treatises, there is
more than sufficient reason to disdain a movement in which Beethoven was
so insolent as to flout the “prescriptions of the Ancients” and to stir our emo-
tions by means condemned by men of such high importance. But don’t you
find “theme and variations” a charming term to apply to the Adagio of the
Symphony in C minor? It is true that the sublime bass melody that opens the
movement reappears several times, varied by the violas and cellos, and it leads
to a phrase for the winds which returns constantly, unchanged to the end,
without a single additional note ever coming along to distort its magnificent
3. The critic in question was none other than Fétis, who established himself in Brussels in
1833. Fétis may well have intended as praise his description of this “Adagio” (actually Andante
con moto) as “a theme and variations such as a man endowed with Beethoven’s superiority
could compose” (RM 3:13, p. 343, 1828).
expressiveness. We are astonished that the illustrious critic didn’t dub this
phrase the ritornello of his “theme and variations.”4
Although it shows no formal or stylistic resemblance to them, this move-
ment shares several characteristics with the Adagio in A minor of the Seventh
Symphony and the Adagio in E-flat of the Fourth. It has something of the sad
gravity of the former and of the touching gracefulness of the latter. That is no
doubt why some people prefer it to all the other Beethoven slow movements.
The scherzo is a strange composition whose opening measures, while not
expressing terror, bring about the same uncanny feeling as the magnetic gaze
of certain individuals. Everything is dark and mysterious. The somewhat
sinister orchestral play stems from the same order of ideas as the famous
Blocksberg scene in Goethe’s Faust.5 Mezzo-fortes and pianos predominate;
the middle section, a trio, is marked by a double bass part played with the full
force of the bow; its heavy roughness rattles all the stands in the orchestra and
sounds a bit like the romping of a drunken elephant. But the monster soon
backs away, and the sound of its antics fades out. The Scherzo motif reap-
pears pizzicato. Silence gradually spreads through the whole orchestra. We
hear only a few spare notes lightly plucked by the violins, along with strange
little clucks from the bassoon on a high A flat, contradicted immediately by
the low G, which is the root of the dominant ninth chord, Then, in a decep-
tive cadence, the strings, arco, gently sustain, as though sleeping on it, the
chord of A-flat major. The timpani alone keep up the rhythm by striking,
with sponge-headed sticks, the muffled beats that stand out against the gen-
eral stillness in the rest of the orchestra. The timpani play a C, which is also
the key, C minor, of the movement. But the A-flat chord, long sustained by
the strings, seems to introduce a different tonality, while the lone timpani’s
persistent C tends to preserve a sense of the original key. The ear hesitates . . .
you don’t know where this harmonic mystery is heading . . . until the muffled
beats of the timpani, gradually intensifying as the violins reawaken, reach the
dominant seventh chord G–B–E–F while the timpani doggedly maintain
their tonic C. Then the entire orchestra, reinforced by the trombones now
making their first appearance, bursts into a triumphal march in C major, and
the Finale is underway.
4. Berlioz’s sarcasm makes sense only if you realize that theme and variations was, for him,
an outmoded genre that he disliked especially in its current virtuosic forms. He uses the
term “ritornello” in a very old-fashioned sense having little to do with theme and variations,
perhaps to mock Fétis, known for his involvement with early music.
5. Otherwise known as Walpurgisnacht.
I promised earlier to refrain from any show of enthusiasm. I shall therefore

not say what I think of such a creation; I shall limit myself to its effect, not
on me, but on the public at the Conservatoire. At the fourth measure of the
entrance of the Finale, it has happened, not once, but at every performance of
this symphony in France, that the whole audience has stood up as one body
and covered the thundering orchestra with its cries. Often certain performers,
themselves paralyzed by emotion, become incapable of holding up the bow.
In the front boxes, many a delicate young face looks down to stifle convul-
sive sobs; some young men break into laughter, while others tear their hair or
go through a thousand wild contortions. Mme. Malibran, upon hearing this
movement for the first time, six or seven years ago, experienced such a violent
seizure that she had to be carried out of the hall; another lady was forced to
depart in a fit of tears, while an old soldier threw up his arms, shouting rap-
turously, “It’s the emperor! the emperor!” A celebrated French composer, who
until then had regarded Beethoven as a musician of no consequence, admit-
ted, trembling uncontrollably, that he feared he was going mad.6 After that,
let caviling critics tell us that the whole effect of the Finale is due to the explo-
sion of the major mode suddenly flooding its light over the darkness of the
minor pianissimo—that the triumphal theme has no great originality—that
its interest wanes rather than grows as it moves toward the end! Here is our
answer: it doesn’t matter what route the composer follows if he can excite his
audience as Beethoven does. Is there any less merit in his work—did it take
any less genius to create it—just because you have discovered that he made use
of a well-worn device, moving from piano to forte and minor to major? Does it
matter that other composers have used the device before? And how have their
results been comparable to the sublime ode, the gigantic song of victory with
which the soul of our poet-musician, now freed from earthly shackles and
sufferings, seems to soar radiantly to the heavens? Achilles, too, like the least
of his soldiers, carried only a spear, but he alone knew how to wield it; and the
shout of the hero standing weaponless at the entrance to his tent was enough
to strike fear into the Trojans and send them fleeing—the very men who had
merely laughed at the howls of the Myrmidons.7
The first four measures of the theme are not, to be sure, of any great
originality, but fanfares are inherently limited, and their combinations were
exhausted some time ago; we do not believe it possible to invent new ones
6. Mem., chapter 20, describes precisely such a response from Berlioz’s teacher, Lesueur.
7. See Book 16 of Homer’s Iliad.
without frankly abandoning the simple, grandiose pomp typical of a fanfare.

So it is that, for the opening of his Finale, Beethoven chose only a fanfare
introduction. In the rest of the movement and even in the continuation of
the main phrase, he returns to the originality and loftiness of style that are
ever his.
As for blaming Beethoven for failing to intensify the movement right up
to the end, I think the reproach can be answered as follows: short of kill-
ing its listeners, the symphony cannot produce an effect more overpowering
than the one already marking the passage from Scherzo to triumphal march.8
There was no room for further intensification. Sustaining so high a level of
energy requires an almost superhuman effort; but despite lengthy develop-
ments, Beethoven succeeded. There is an impression of a decrescendo, how-
ever, because the terrible shock to the listeners’ ears at the outset raises their
nervous tension to its greatest possible height, thus decreasing the impact of
what follows. It is like the optical illusion that makes a long row of identi-
cally sized columns appear gradually shorter as they recede from view. Our
weak constitution would perhaps have welcomed a more laconic summation,
something like the trio “Notre général vous rappelle” at the end of Gluck’s
Armide.9 In that way, the audience would not have had time to cool down or
become too exhausted to understand the intention behind the symphony’s
thunderous conclusion. Still, this observation applies only to the staging of
the work, so to speak, and does not diminish the rich, incomparable magnifi-
cence of the Finale itself.
This phenomenon of greatness and inspired power was followed, in the
same concert, by Beethoven’s “Benedictus” and his Romance for violin. The
first of the two is a finely colored expression of gentle piety and deep religious
sentiment. It is further marked by a rather odd combination of instruments
that produces an ethereal harmony somewhat like the sound of a harmon-
ica: two flutes and a violin in their highest registers. Pierre Baillot rendered
the violin part with clarity and distinction, after which he performed the
romance with a simplicity full of a charm rarely achieved together with such
purity of tone. This great artist then managed to surpass himself in a perfor-
mance of his own Andante for muted strings. Nothing could be more delicate
8. Killing its listeners? An idea worthy of Hoffmann’s tales of the fantastic. Balzac takes
Berlioz literally at the end of his novel César Birotteau, where the hero is killed by a heart
attack at the sudden memory of this very moment of Beethoven’s Finale. Berlioz deleted the
“fantastic” suggestion from all subsequent versions of this piece.
9. “Our general calls you back”; Act V, sc. 3.
than the arabesques further embellishing the already exquisite melody of this
charming piece. Despite its placement near the end of the program and the
fatigue induced just before by Beethoven’s long, harsh “Credo”—which the
audience almost refused to hear to the end—M. Baillot was recalled for an
encore.
Méhul’s overture to Le Jeune Henri ended the concert.10 It was performed
with all the precision and verve we have come to expect of such an orchestra,
and with four times the usual number of horns. This music did not come
easily to Méhul’s contemporaries. For our young musicians today it is child’s
play: they render it with a zest and brio that double its excitement.
Obviously pleased to rediscover this old favorite, the audience gave it rev-
erent attention up to the last note, then acknowledged the end with unani-
mous applause.
H***
10. Le Jeune Henri by Méhul was a comédie mêlée de musique (1797), a variant of opéra-comique,
of which only the overture survived. It represents a major piece of program music on the
theme of the hunt, featuring horn fanfares and dazzling violin work, and may be considered
a distant ancestor of the Royal Hunt and Storm scene in Les Troyens.
28
Concert by Franz Liszt

Hôtel de Ville (Salle Saint-Jean)
Berlioz has a special stake in the concert reviewed here. Liszt is a close friend, and he
has just premiered a work for piano and orchestra based on two themes from Berlioz’s
Lélio—a second major tribute after his recent piano arrangement of the Symphonie
fantastique. In discussing Liszt’s first effort at orchestral composition, Berlioz speaks
from experience about the problems of bringing to life ambitious new works depen-
dent on numerous performers. Liszt, to be sure, has the advantage of being able to
perform—incomparably—the all-important solo part of his own work. As for the
work itself, Berlioz praises its “poetic” approach to the theme-and-variations form,
one he generally dislikes as an exercise in formal ingenuity. Conversely, he rather dis-
ingenuously defends the second movement of Hiller's symphony, devoid of dramatic
interest, by analogy with the sculptor Cellini, whose great Perseus sculpture should
not make us despise his purely decorative works. At the end he gently criticizes the
inadequately rendered crescendo and decrescendo in the “Pilgrims’ March” from his
own Harold in Italy, also part of this very long, mixed program.
z April 25, 1835

Journal des débats
Symphony by M. Hiller;1 “Ballade du pêcheur” by Hector Berlioz; Grande

fantaisie symphonique on two themes from Berlioz’s Mélologue (“Ballade
1. Composed in 1829 and first performed on March 23, 1833, the symphony was destined to
remain unpublished: RM (April 12, 1835) reports that Hiller had wanted to hear it one last time.
du pêcheur” and “Chanson de brigands”);2 recitative and aria from Der

Freischütz, sung by Mlle. Lambert;3 theme and variations for violin, played
by M. Massart;4 the first movement (Adagio) of Beethoven’s Sonata quasi
una fantasia played by the orchestra in an arrangement by M. Girard,5 the
second and third movements (Allegretto and Presto appassionata) played by
M. Liszt; the “Pilgrims’ March” from Harold in Italy by M. Berlioz; character
scenes for four male voices by M. Clapisson;6 Grande Polonaise for viola by
Mayseder, played by M. Urhan.7
Such was the program organized by M. Liszt for the elegant audience that
filled the Hôtel de Ville.8 It was almost impossible, with so large a number of
works, to retain the posted order of presentation. Nevertheless, things had
been so well arranged that this difficulty, greater than people think, would
have been overcome if not for the regrettable illness that deprived us of the
pleasure of hearing Mlle. Lambert. Is the young singer perhaps a descendant
of the famous Lambert whose name has come down to us from Boileau?9
That able singer, always on his way and never appearing, was evidently the
object of such a craze that the satirist, wanting to ridicule the sort of prig who
would invite him to dinner, fears no charge of exaggerating when he has the
man refer to Lambert as greater than France’s greatest genius:
Molière, with Tartuffe, will be there to play his part,

And Lambert, better yet, will come taste my cook’s art.10
2. “Fisher’s Ballad” and “Brigand’s Song.” The program thus introduces Liszt’s composition
with one of the pieces on which it is based, namely the song on Goethe’s “Der Fischer,” incor-
porated in Lélio.
3. Antonia Lambert (?–?), French contralto.
4. Lambert Massart (1811–1892), Belgian-born violinist, composer, and teacher. He and his
wife, the pianist Louise-Aglaé Masson Massart, became close friends of Berlioz, who greatly
admired their playing.
5. The first movement of the “Moonlight” Sonata, op. 27 no. 2, marked Adagio sostenuto.
6. Antoine-Louis Clapisson (1808–1866), composer, violinist, collector of early instruments: his
collection launched the early instrument museum at the Conservatoire, of which he was named
curator in 1862. He was elected to the Academy of Fine Arts in 1854, two years before Berlioz.
7. On Berlioz’s disdain for Mayseder, see #21 ( JD, January 25, 1835).
8. The venue was too small; indeed, the crush, heat, and stress caused Liszt to faint and leave
early (RGM, April 12, 1835, p. 113). Could he have had to leave before his promised performance of
the last two movements of the “Moonlight” Sonata, which Berlioz strangely does not mention?
9. Michel Lambert (1610–1696), French singer and composer, son-in-law of Lully.
10. “Molière avec Tartuffe y doit jouer son rôle, / Et Lambert, qui plus est, m’a donné sa
parole.” Boileau, Satire III, “Sur un repas ridicule [On a Ridiculous Meal],” lines 25–26.
28. Concert by Liszt: Hiller, Berlioz, Beethoven 163
In any case, Mlle. Lambert was missed—we missed her well-trained,

sweet and pure though rather feeble voice—as well as the magnificent aria
from Freischütz that she had promised us.
The opening symphony by Hiller is one of the composer’s earliest composi-
tions. Although the later ones show greater variety in form, more striking effects,
and fuller, richer orchestration, I find this work nonetheless quite remarkable in
many respects. The style is firm and concise, the melodic lines distinguished,
the harmony always pure and clear, the overall arrangement tactful and tasteful.
The first movement contains a syncopated phrase of great expressive delicacy—
though it went by unnoticed, as will always happen unless such forms are pre-
sented in isolation, freed of distraction, forcing the audience to concentrate on
them alone. The Andante scherzando that follows was found a bit cold, despite
an abundance of charming details and the piquant character of the principal
idea. We are today unfortunately so accustomed to seeing drama everywhere
that when we find none, even where none was meant to be, the composer strikes
us as having fallen short of the mark. Is it the artist’s fault if we don’t discern in
his work intentions that he probably never had? If you admire Cellini’s Perseus
triumphing over the beheaded Medusa, are you going to blame the sculptor for
carving other gorgeous works without any thought of drama or passion? His
imagination was no less fertile, his creativity no less original.11
The other two parts of Hiller’s symphony are distinguished by a poetic
tendency in closer keeping with the expectations of the age. A quite origi-
nal march is followed by a finale entitled “Chant de pirates” notable for its
expressiveness and highly energetic orchestration. The plaintive melody
thrown into the midst of this orchestral commotion, like the lament of cap-
tive women cutting through the jubilation of their savage abductors, is as
attractive for its strangeness as for the contrast it effects. It would probably
be better for the general development of the movement, though, were this
passage not repeated. The long tremolo that accompanies it, moreover, calls
for some strongly marked bass pattern to revive the rhythm, which slackens
under the slow lament and broad harmony.
M. Boulanger offered a very graceful rendering of the “Ballade du pêcheur.”
He has a light tenor voice, very flexible and high-ranging but incompatible
with any call for vigor and passion. He has the good sense to sing only com-
positions that fit his particular talent and to prefer piano accompaniment to
orchestral. His voice is lovely and his intonations pure from middle E to high
11. Cellini did indeed create many decorative objects in addition to the famous Perseus
statue that would star in the dramatic finale of Berlioz’s Benvenuto Cellini.
C-sharp, this last produced in head voice. We encourage him never to force
his lower notes, as this would distort the timbre without any gain in power.
Boulanger’s voice is like those excellent Pleyel square unicord pianos perfect
for playing Chopin’s sparkling mazurkas or ingenious caprices in the elegant
boudoirs of high society but unequal to the thunderous execution and more
orchestral compositions of Liszt.
M. Liszt’s Symphonic Fantasy on the “Ballade du pêcheur” and the
“Chanson de brigands” was the piece most keenly awaited by the audience.
Before reaching the public, this work had had to overcome the prejudices and
obstacles that never fail to get in the way of high-minded departures from
the norm. First, following the laudable custom we have in France of acknowl-
edging no more than one outstanding talent in a given artist, disparaging
all the others, the mere announcement of a large-scale composition by Liszt
provoked the outcry that he was too gifted a pianist to be a good composer.
As if the one necessarily barred the other! Likewise, everyone agrees on
Beethoven’s superior standing in instrumental music, and there is very little
talk of his sole work for the operatic stage—although, with five or six excep-
tions, Fidelio, in my opinion, eclipses all other operas of the last twenty years.
The same was true of Gluck in the past century. Since no one could match his
power, his truth, his grandeur and energy in the exploration of dark passions,
in the expression of sorrow, in the depiction of horror, people denied him the
powers of melody, grace, and freshness evident in the Elysian Fields scene in
Orphée, the finale of Écho et Narcisse, the Thessalians’ choruses in the second
act of Alceste, and the dances in Armide.12 And just look what’s become of the
vapid trifles that people flocked to instead!
There was a second, still more threatening obstacle for Liszt to over-
come: the almost invisible material difficulties of performance. For it is not
enough that a musical work be playable and that able musicians be found.
You also need time—time for the players to study the music and familiar-
ize themselves with the composer’s intentions; time for long and frequent
rehearsals. You need accurate, clear, and intelligently presented scores. None
of that is as readily attainable as you might think, and young composers usu-
ally experience a number of cruel disappointments before they can reach
their desired goal. That explains why, in drawing up his program, Liszt had to
take care to schedule only selections that would be easy to perform, reserving
12. Berlioz, having made his name as a symphonist, likewise had trouble gaining acceptance
in other domains, while the fire-and-brimstone of the last two movements of his Symphonie
fantastique blocked memories of his lyricism and delicacy.
almost all rehearsal time for his new work. Otherwise, after a few useless
attempts to read through it, the orchestra would have become discouraged
and declared it unplayable, and the Symphonic Fantasy would not have been
heard. It happens all the time.13 Happily things didn’t work out that way, and
though the performance included a few rough moments due to hesitancies in
the orchestra, it was at least faithful enough for the composer’s conception
never to be markedly distorted. Success was never in doubt. Several times,
in fact, applause broke out in the course of the performance, and at the end,
when the composer, who had played his part with his well-known mastery,
rose from the piano, the hall rang out with the liveliest ovations.
There were two opposing ways to treat the subject that Liszt had chosen.
He could take the themes of the “Ballade” and the “Chanson” as combina-
tions of notes suited to some degree or other of development; he could subject
them to various transformations, parade them through key after key, present
them in augmentation and diminution, canon and fugue, independently of
their individual expressive value or that of their separate scenes.14 Or else,
deeply imbuing himself with the dramatic motives that inspired each of the
songs, he could enter into the composer’s conception, delve into the spirit
of the subject, and not write notes for the sake of writing notes, but rather
enlarge and enrich the canvas that the original work—the two songs—had
no room to develop further. Liszt chose the second way. Since his approach
to music is absolutely the same as mine, I hardly dare say that he was right! In
any case, he proceeded along this path with rare determination and in short
order reached his goal: to stir the emotions.
The opening andante contains a wealth of effects. Those stemming from
the piano accompaniment struck me as especially novel; only a pianist, and
a great one at that, could have imagined them. The recitative over a string
tremolo is as astonishing for its formal daring as for its immense techni-
cal difficulty—hardly a problem, though, for Liszt, who no doubt wrote it
without even realizing how difficult it was. A skillful transition leads us far
from the choppy waters where the Fisherman is singing into the midst of the
most terrible storm that human passions could arouse. I mean the “Chanson
de brigands.” (I seize this opportunity to tell the critics who have confused
this song with the “Orgie de brigands” in Harold in Italy that the two works
have only their names in common, one being for voices and instruments, the
13. It happened to Berlioz with his Symphonie fantastique on the first run-through (see #5).
14. A good explanation of why Berlioz generally dislikes the theme-and-variations form.
other for orchestra alone.) In the finale, Liszt took every opportunity to give
free rein to his high-spirited temperament. His orchestra advances, rushes
on, stops, out of breath, then runs off again, and in this whole frenzied
dash the music never once loses its clear sense of direction. A few persons
of simple tastes and gentle ways, accustomed to the calm decorousness of
bourgeois life, voiced a protest against the style and high color of this com-
position. Understandable, no doubt—but their criticism was misdirected. It
should have been aimed not at the execution of the canvas, but only at the
ideas that inspired its subject.
“Poetic superstitions, a guardian madonna, rich spoils piled high in
caves, disheveled women trembling with fear, cries of horror mingled with
the noise of carabines, sabers, and daggers, blood and Lacryma Christi: a
bed of lava rocked by earthquakes”—that is the description of a brigand’s
life sketched by the main character in the Mélologue, which provided Liszt
with his motifs.15 He was perhaps wrong to make such a choice, but we can-
not fault the result—a musical translation as proficient as it is faithful to
the spoken scene at its origin. It seemed to me that the middle of the allegro
included a few overlong passages. The orchestral development of the first four
notes of the theme might also gain from being shortened. There may also be
a few too many enharmonic modulations; such frequent key changes may
rob the chords of some of their vibratory power. The listener (especially if
he is French!) has to pay close attention to follow the bursts and surges of
creative thought in a musician like Liszt. It’s like a capricious fairy playfully
picking flowers at the side of the road and giving struggling followers barely a
moment to catch their breath and keep up with her.
M. Liszt performed as he always does. He was prodigious, dazzling,
beyond compare. When his fingers travel up and down an Érard keyboard,
you think you’re hearing two instruments played by four nimble hands.
Nothing equals the speed of his most complicated moves other than the
graceful delicacy of his embroidery and the exquisite taste of his ornamenta-
tion. I will criticize him, though, for sometimes being carried away to the
point of distorting the features of certain works whose style and form call
for greater simplicity, calm, and reserve. But is this flaw not found in all
great virtuosos? It stems from the incredible technical facility and vitality
of feeling with which they are endowed. It would be a fine thing if Liszt set
15. Mélologue was the original designation of Lélio, later called a Monodrame. Berlioz quotes
the passage in the work that introduces the “Brigand’s Song.”
himself apart in this regard as in all others. But for this, his talent strikes me
as nothing short of perfect.16
The concert included a work of unique interest: the adagio from
Beethoven’s Sonata in C-sharp minor. What the composer had written for
piano alone, M. Girard determined to arrange for full orchestra—a very
challenging proposition, for many of the work’s effects are inherent in the
keyboard itself, such as the prolonged, diminishing vibration of undampered
metallic strings. Girard successfully reproduced the gradually fading struck
tones by pairing muted timpani beats with pianissimo attacks in the double
basses, immediately taken over and sustained by the cellos.
The wind instruments are used with skillful reserve; the horns especially,
as well as the clarinets in their lowest register, are turned to excellent use. In a
word, Girard’s accomplishment of his perilous task demonstrated both a thor-
ough knowledge of orchestral resources and an acute sense of instrumenta-
tion. Very few conductors could emerge from such a trial with honor. As for
the Adagio itself, for lack of a word that is to “sublime” what “sublime” is to
“beautiful,” I will not even attempt a descriptive adjective. It is sundown in the
Roman countryside. All is profoundly sad, calm, majestic, and solemn. The
ball of fire slowly sinks behind the cross atop Saint Peter’s, which stands out
in a final blaze at the horizon; no living being disturbs the peace of the tombs
that cover this desolate land. You look on; you marvel; you weep . . . in silence.
MM. Urhan and Massart, violist and violinist respectively, won enthusi-
astic and well-merited applause despite the extreme fatigue of the audience.
M. Clapisson’s unaccompanied vocal scenes were likewise well appreciated.
If, in conclusion, the writer of this article were permitted to mention a
work of his own, he would say that, despite the precision with which the
“Pilgrims’ March” was performed, the orchestra did not mark clearly enough
the nuances of pianissimo at the beginning and end. The crescendo and decre-
scendo need to be set forth on a vaster scale. But it would take much time
and many rehearsals to meet such a challenge, and hardly any musicians out-
side of Paris could have learned such a complicated work on short notice and
betrayed only imperfections of this nature.17
H***
16. Liszt will have turned a new page in this regard by 1836, according to Berlioz’s great trib-
ute (#38) at the time of his return from Geneva and his rivalry with Thalberg.
17. Not wanting to offend Girard, Berlioz blames the orchestra for the problem; but the cri-
tique suggests why he felt the need to take over the conducting himself, as he is beginning to
do at this time.
29
M. Cherubini’s Requiem at the

Invalides and M. Lesueur’s Te
Deum at Notre Dame
This magnificent article, occasioned by the ceremony for the victims of Fieschi’s
proto–machine gun attempt on the life of Louis-Philippe, carries the reader
along in an irresistible sweep, giving us Berlioz’s fullest single account of his
imaginative approach to the requiem text he will set two years later, and of his
vision for mass music in general. Nuanced assessments of requiems by his two
most famous precursors, Mozart and Cherubini, and of his teacher Lesueur’s
special talent for “cathedral music,” include both eloquent praise and colorful
diatribe (against Mozart’s “Tuba mirum” and a Cherubini fugue). Sounding
a memorable call for a “Napoleonic” composer capable of using modern musi-
cal means to endow the biblical text with its full measure of expressive power,
and for nationwide musical education to provide the necessary means of perfor-
mance, Berlioz insists once again on the need to deploy those means on a scale
commensurate with the performing space.
z August 9, 1835
Journal des débats
Composers of funeral music suffer no dearth of opportunities to have their

works performed. If the arts have just experienced a cruel loss or a prince is
felled by some fanatic’s dagger or a madman bent on cutting down a crowned
head massacres some military luminaries of France, composers are naturally
29. Cherubini, Lesueur 169
called on to express the public’s grief. The sad privilege of commemorating

death through music opens the way to performances incomparably grander
than ordinary concerts. Since on such solemn occasions artists are laudably
eager to render final honors fittingly, the number of performers is always
large, and the zeal and gravity each brings to the task produce the finest
results. No question here of our little theater orchestras, the best of which has
a mere twenty violins, eight violas, and eighteen bass instruments; no ques-
tion of a thirty-voice chorus; no, everything numbers in the hundreds, and
if our places of worship were not still far out of proportion to such massed
forces,1 we could appreciate the awesome power of music when let loose with
means less stingy than usual. A sad fatality seems to cling to M. Cherubini’s
Requiem, performed for the first time at the funeral of the duc de Berry and
now heard again for a major political assassination.2 The particular genius of
this celebrated composer has brought his work into perfect harmony with
catastrophes of this nature.
This is not the sort of death that mortality generally imposes on us all;
even less is it Thomas Moore’s beautiful death, “dreamlike and calm as the
night,” which with outstretched wings descends in silence to put its victim to
sleep.3 The death depicted by M. Cherubini is violent, furious, pitiless, sear-
ing, senseless, suddenly swooping down on a man in the prime of his life,
mutilating and torturing as it strikes, crushing and tearing apart. At that
death there are not peaceful sighs but frightful shouts and blasts of murder-
ous machines and the sickening sound of shattered skulls—“conquassat cap-
ita in terra multorum.”4 M. Cherubini uncovers elements in his subject that
1. Berlioz uses the general word temple rather than église or cathédrale, which in French are
always Catholic. At the very end of the article he uses the word monument, which we retain.
2. The attempted assassination of Louis-Philippe and his sons occurred on July 28, 1835. It
was the work of Giuseppe Marco Fieschi, chief conspirator in a plot using a machine infernale
containing twenty gun-barrels fired simultaneously. Seventeen people were killed, but the
king and his sons emerged unscathed. The celebration of their escape took place on August 3
at the Invalides. Cherubini’s Requiem in C minor, commissioned by Louis XVIII, was actu-
ally performed first in 1817 for the anniversary of the death of Louis XVI on January 21, 1793.
It was again performed at the funeral of the second son of Charles X, the duc de Berry, who
was stabbed while leaving the Opéra on February 13, 1820. In Rén., March 30, 1834, Berlioz
tells of the work’s recent performance in Marseille with five hundred performers for an event
commemorating Beethoven, who admired Cherubini above all other living composers.
3. Berlioz quotes “rêveuse et calme comme la nuit” from Swanton-Belloc’s translation of Irish
Melodies, published in 1823 as Mélodies irlandaises, adding the image of outstretched wings.
Moore’s original phrase, from “Oh, had we some bright little isle,” reads “holy and calm as
the night.”
4. Psalm 110: 6: “He shatters heads over the wide earth.”
had eluded all his predecessors and let him emerge gloriously from the contest
with Mozart. Not that Mozart’s Requiem fails to merit its immense reputa-
tion: it contains a wealth of beauties worthy of the immortal composer of
Don Giovanni. The “Rex tremendae” in particular is a model of strength and
majesty; the “Lacrymosa” expresses a gentle affliction that touches the heart
from the very first measures, grips and penetrates, overwhelming the listener
with deep emotion. But we know that Mozart died before finishing his score.
Several parts are either not by him or only outlined; the work was completed
by his pupil Süssmayer.
A score of the Requiem printed in Germany shows which measures are
Mozart’s (“M”) and which were composed by his pupil (“S”). This curious
edition makes it easy to see that the latter was responsible for a consider-
able portion of his master’s work. In addition, the theme of the first verse,
“Requiem aeternam,” is drawn from a funeral cantata by Handel. These facts
are undeniable. All the fanciful stories about this composition—a stranger’s
request that Mozart write it, the mysterious appearances of the stranger, his
insistence that Mozart not undertake another score before completing his
mass for the dead, the effect of this work on the composer’s health—all these
fantastic tales that have promoted the work’s fame more than the work itself
and the great name of its composer are actually far from proven and hard
to prove. We may therefore, without blaspheming, doubt that, had Mozart
lived, the Requiem would be nothing more than the work we have. Frankly,
is the “Dies irae,” despite several beautifully frightening moments, broadly
enough conceived? Is the music truly equal to its poetic inspiration? Does
the work really express our idea of universal fear at the arrival of the Supreme
Judge, when Death himself, amazed to see his victims reborn, trembles to
see his rule shattered? Is the melodic design of this chorus, meant to thun-
der through cathedrals, grand enough? Does the movement’s governing
rhythm—two short beats and two long—really offer the appropriate expres-
siveness? Does not even the most unimaginative mind picture more than this
music suggests? And is art truly powerless, here, to satisfy the imagination?
The effect of the “Tuba mirum” is generally flat, if not frankly disappoint-
ing. The opening phrase is sublime but goes nowhere, and the orchestration
is pallid and weak. A single voice recites the verse. The terrible call meant to
resonate throughout the world and wake the dead from their deep slumber is
sounded by a single trombone. Why only one, when thirty, even three hun-
dred, would not be too many? Because the word tuba is a singular rather than
a plural? It would be an insult to think Mozart capable of so foolish an idea.
And how to explain, right after this call and the corresponding vocal phrase,
such an unexpected calm throughout the movement and an even more

unexpected accompaniment by bassoons warbling in the middle register?
Yes, bassoons! Yes, a few pretty notes for a singer when we expect the death
throes of the whole universe! This is the poet’s “clamorque virum clangorque
tubarum.”5 It is inconceivable, even impossible, that Mozart was in error.
Better to believe that he only outlined this part of the Requiem and that
his pupil failed to grasp its spirit. I have heard defenders of this movement
claim that the singer and trombone were intended only as symbols and that
a requiem not being meant for the theater, Mozart was right to conceive his
“Tuba mirum” as he did. That is just playing with words. If the trombone and
singer are mere symbols, a contralto and a cello would have been as effective
a choice as a bass voice and a brass instrument. The notion of symbolic music
is all too convenient, for it justifies any misconceived ideas. Then again, if you
deny a requiem all dramatic form while at the same time accepting operatic
means for its execution, you are questioning Mozart’s whole score. The agi-
tated, quivering “Dies irae” is dramatic; the “Lacrymosa,” with its laments,
tears, and groans, is dramatic; so are the darkly menacing “Confutatis” and
the “Rex tremendae.” The “Pie Jesu” itself is dramatic, for everything expres-
sive is necessarily so the moment you use the melody, harmony, tonal system,
rhythmic forms, instrumental color, and the very instruments of dramatic
music. The two genres overlap these days, inevitably so with the abandon-
ment of Palestrina’s style of church music. For proof, take a grave and somber
operatic chorus—the one in Alceste, for example: “Ah! que le songe de la vie
avec rapidité s’enfuit”;6 substitute the Latin words of the mass for the dead,
and you have an admirable fragment of a requiem. Move Cherubini’s “Dies
irae” onto the stage, in contrast, and you will hear the overpowering final
scene of an opera. If Mozart’s “Tuba mirum”, then, lacks strength and color,
if it lacks the drama of the rest of his Requiem, it is because the work is unfin-
ished, or poorly finished, or a failure. That’s it.
I remember that, on the death of an artist at the Opéra, all the orches-
tras of Paris gathered at Notre Dame for a mass performance of the Mozart.
The concert included an unannounced march for the dead at the battle of
Austerlitz composed by Desvignes, the cathedral’s music director under
the empire and almost unknown.7 The public, struck by the grandeur and
5. Virgil, Aeneid, 2:313: “The bellowing of men and the blaring of trumpets.”
6. “Ah, how quickly the dream of life flees!” Act II, sc. 4 (in two parts: GSW, 244 and 253).
7. Pierre-Augustin Desvignes (1764–1827), French composer born and trained in Dijon
before coming to Notre Dame in Paris.
expressive beauty of the piece, voiced great admiration at the end for what
they thought was Mozart’s work, even regretting that the rest of the Requiem
was not of the same quality. The musicians were amused. But I will admit
naively that, though not finding the work superior or even equal to the beau-
tiful parts of the Requiem, I too had been deeply impressed by it, while a
number of Mozart’s choruses had left me cold. I still think of Desvigne’s
funeral march as a flash of genius.
The widespread European bias in favor of Mozart’s Requiem has long
prevented other great composers from attempting a contest they’ve viewed
as lost in advance. M. Cherubini has proven such fears groundless, at least
for him. His Requiem appeared to immediate acclaim, its success since then
ratified all over Germany. The work always excites the enthusiasm of its per-
formers, and the same would surely be true of its audiences, if they could hear
Cherubini’s masterpiece in rehearsal. There alone can its qualities be truly
appreciated. For, as I said earlier, the considerable mass of voices and instru-
ments assembled for great religious ceremonies is still small in relation to the
capacity of our places of worship. At the Conservatoire, in contrast, the small
size of the hall gives the vibrations prodigious force. As it happens, rehearsals
for funeral services and the like sponsored by the government usually take
place at the Conservatoire.
Simple arithmetic explains why identical means show different results
at rehearsals and at public performances. The Conservatoire accommodates
twelve hundred persons. If it takes three hundred performers there to pro-
duce the great effects that, given proper space, the whole public could expe-
rience, then to reproduce them in a locale seating twelve thousand, such as
the church of the Invalides, we need three thousand musicians. This fact is
discouraging, since in the current state of our institutions, the great, sol-
emn music of national holidays, intended for a whole people and not only
some privileged listeners—music as imagined by the genius of great masters,
music of pomp and colossal power—is impossible of realization in France. In
Germany, by contrast, a musical congress of the various states would astonish
the rest of Europe. Berlin’s Singakademie alone could contribute more than
seven hundred talented singers who are also skilled music readers. Add the
prodigious number of pupils and university students in the music academies
of Frankfurt, Munich, Dresden, Vienna, Stuttgart, Weimar, Darmstadt,
Kassel, and Leipzig, young people of all schools, and even workers and peas-
ants who know music, and you can see arising a chorus whose power defies
the imagination. As for the instrumentalists, no need to speak of them: they
number in the thousands.
Suppose that, through some happy confluence of circumstances, a com-

poser of extraordinary, Napoleonic genius, a musical titan, were charged
with breathing his sublime essence into these performing masses and that a
Michelangelesque monument were thrown open to him for the enjoyment of
such an orchestra. . . . Well, this utopian dream, this wild idea could within
twenty years become, even in France, a magnificent reality, if music were inte-
grated into general education, and if army musicians in their leisure time were
brought in to teach singing.8 Germany has shown the way; sooner or later,
we will surely follow. Everything today is leading toward music on a grand
scale. Audiences at the Conservatoire show scant interest in vocal and instru-
mental solos, whatever virtuosos may appear there. Even at the Opéra new
works include ever fewer solos. I know people for whom any aria is unbear-
able. Unison choruses—in effect, just arias for many voices—have become
increasingly frequent and successful. The monks’ chorus in the fifth act of
Robert le diable, “Malheureux ou coupable,”9 is a celebrated example. Is there
a Lablache or a Levasseur to compete with those twelve basses singing in
superb unison? I don’t think so. In church music solos disappeared long ago,
leaving no trace in the sacred compositions of today’s masters. M. Lesueur
has gone even further in this respect than M. Cherubini. He has dared, in his
magnificent motet “Super flumina Babylonis,” to have fifteen basses perform
in unison an unmeasured recitative. True, the original conductor deemed the
innovation unperformable: he could not see how to coordinate all those met-
rically unconstrained voices. M. Lesueur had to yield and have the recitative
delivered, as is usual, by a single voice. Since then, however, other conductors
have come along, and this unperformable music has been performed very well
indeed at the Chapelle royale.10
But let us return to the Requiem. There is another problem, which I first
noted at the funeral of Louis XVIII at Saint-Denis.11 Heavy draperies cov-
ering an already oversized nave at the Invalides greatly reduce resonance.
8. For more on Berlioz’s dream of nationwide musical education, see #40 and #41.
9. “Wretched or guilty,” Act V, no. 9 (“Malheureux, malheureux ou coupable”). Robert le
diable (1831) was Meyerbeer’s first great success at the Opéra. With Auber’s La Muette de
Portici and Rossini’s William Tell (both 1829), it launched the genre of French grand opera,
which brought to the stage, among other things, large, active choruses—hence less emphasis
on solo numbers.
10. Once again, Berlioz mocks the charge of “unplayable” (see #28, on Liszt). See CM 2:252n11
on the motet and special effect in question.
11. Louis XVIII died on September 16; the service was held on October 24, 1824.
Funeral trappings are always deadly to music, stifling sounds as soon as they
are produced. Black hangings muffle orchestra and voices just as crepe affects
drums. But whereas muffled drums take on a special character, a muffled
orchestra loses its character and becomes powerless. It is unfortunate that a
masterpiece like M. Cherubini’s Mass for the Dead has to be executed under
conditions so burdensome as to paralyze its effect.
It is a great and beautiful creation. The “Requiem aeternam” is humble,
subdued, dismayed. It is followed by a “Dies irae” not divided into separate
movements like Mozart’s, but composed as a single development; the various
elements of the poetry are nevertheless each perfectly expressed in all their
individuality across the broad sweep of the whole. Everything is new, strong,
and dynamic. It would be possible to conceive of an even more striking, more
fully developed rendering of this scene of terror, but not with the means used
here. Far more than today’s very limited orchestral capabilities would be
needed to portray grandly this crowd of pale human beings rushing madly
toward the feet of the Supreme Arbiter, “judicanti responsura”—this disor-
der of the elements, these upheavals in an earth splitting open at the frightful
trumpeted voice of the heavenly host, the astonishment, the amazement of
nature, the hope of the just, the tears and anguish of the reprobates—in a
word, the sublime totality of the sacred text. One could hardly go further
along M. Cherubini’s path with the means to which he confined himself.
The middle of the score is regrettably given over to a fugue whose musical
effect, however great, is antireligious and out of keeping with the words and
overall tenor of the work. Funeral festivities are no longer part of our mores,
and yet it would appear that the composer wants nothing less than an orgy.
Scholastic prejudices have led to innumerable such contradictions in even the
most vaunted religious compositions. A composer would fear being taken for
an ignoramus, mocked by schoolboys and conservatory porters, if he didn’t
willy-nilly stuff into his mass a really good, brutal fugue, really violent, with
choristers braying wildly while the orchestra jerks madly in every direction as
if seized by convulsions.
M. Lesueur is the only composer of sacred music I know of who has not
fallen into this trap. His fugues are always well motivated and perfectly in line
with the words. Those familiar with the Chapelle royale no doubt remember
the admirable chorus, “Quis enarrabit caelorum gloriam? Concentum caeli
quis dormire faciet?”12 It is a fugue, but how expressive and noble! Enthusiasm
12. “Who will tell the glory of the heavens? Who will put the concert of the heavens to
sleep?” Fugue in E-flat major for chorus and orchestra from Lesueur’s F minor Mass.
comes through, not just a cold, laborious string of notes! The very form of
the fugue is at one with its expressiveness. When, after the statement of the
subject attacked on the dominant, the response bursts in on the tonic, repeat-
ing the words “Who will tell the glory of the heavens?,” it seems that this part
of the chorus, aroused by the enthusiasm of the other, rushes in to celebrate
with even greater exaltation the wonders of the firmament. In addition, on
the word “concentum” there is a leap of a sixth in the theme—a marvelous
expression of admiration, whose recurrence in the different voices, as neces-
sitated by the rules of the fugue, leads to effects of a rare majesty. And how
radiantly the instrumentation colors all that vocal harmony! What immense
clusters of chords! Powerful basses move under the violin patterns that twin-
kle like stars in the highest register. What a dazzling stretta!
A few works by M. Lesueur and even his compositional system may well
be open to criticism, but I cannot help exclaiming how infinitely beautiful
that fugue is. Much the same could be said of many pieces in this great mas-
ter’s rich repertoire. The effect of the Te Deum recently performed at Notre
Dame was all the greater for being so unexpected, following by a day the lack-
luster experience with Cherubini’s Requiem at the Invalides. The final verse,
“Non confundar in aeternum,” has awesome energy. Some musicians find the
style too simple, but it is precisely this simplicity—even crudeness—that ren-
ders the forms perceptible at a distance. M. Lesueur takes care never to give
a chord less than an entire measure’s duration and is careful always to distin-
guish the nuances of piano and forte by silences or by the use of wind instru-
ments. Thanks to his painstaking observance of such rules for sacred music,
M. Lesueur needs fear less than other composers the scantiness of our means
of performance in the vastness of our monuments. His music is essentially
music for cathedrals, and that is where it should be heard and judged.
H***
30
On the Score of Hérold’s Zampa
Since the composer is no longer living, Berlioz allows himself to speak with bru-
tal frankness of Hérold’s Zampa, newly revived at the Opéra-Comique, where
it was created in 1831. He conveys the flavor of the work, a watered-down Don
Giovanni, by quoting from its insipid verse, which contrasts with the vigor both
of Mozart’s libretto and of the Molière text familiar to his readers. Yet he warmly
praises certain parts of the score. His real target is the Paris coterie—very much
alive—of Adam, Auber, and others, whose crowd-pleasing “Parisian music,” as
he disdainfully calls it, he finds devoid of any distinctive style. The opening evo-
cation of grandiose open-air concerts in the wilds of Italy, played by the winds or
by an erupting Vesuvius, is vintage Berlioz—a reinvigorating plunge into fan-
tasy and memory before returning to Parisian pettiness and prettiness.
z September 27, 1835

Journal des débats
Before the recent reprise of Hérold’s Zampa, which I can hardly approach
without stepping on the toes of my witty colleague, J. J.,1 I knew nothing
of the work apart from the odds and ends torn from it by the barrel organs,
comic theaters, and quadrilles. When it was first performed, I was in Italy,
with little concern for what was happening at the Opéra-Comique in Paris.
I was spending much time in theaters—not the San Carlo, the del Fondo,
the Valle, the Pergola, or La Scala, where I would have heard nothing better
1. Jules Janin, Berlioz’s colleague at the Journal des débats, had provided the standard plot
summary; Berlioz may thus confine himself to the score.
30. Hérold: Zampa 177
than what we have at Favart, or even comparable with it, but the ancient the-
aters of Pompei, San Germano, Tusculum, Rome, where the evening breeze,
rushing over stone steps, under arches, along deserted corridors, sings arias
of an expressiveness that Coccia, Schiafogatti, Focolo, or even Vaccai will
never equal.2 In truth, sound and setting contribute not a little to the splen-
dor of these nocturnal strains. The wind, faithful to the text entrusted to it
by the great Composer of Worlds, sounds sad or cheerful, violent or sprightly,
as ordered by the eterno maestro. It roars or weeps or softly sighs, but never
embellishes or overloads its original melodies with sickening appoggiaturas
or fanciful cadenzas. As for the settings, they surpass all attempt at descrip-
tion, especially the tragic theater at Pompei. From the top, to your right, you
could see Vesuvius, whose head was noisily brandishing a frightful plume,
while a red necklace of lava lay in dark majesty across its weary breast. To your
left, you had the sparkling bay of Naples, where
The moon spread on the tide

Its open fan of silver.3
And over the whole magical scene of heaven and earth, fire and water, lay a
sublime silence, with no annoying chatter, no stupid observations, no irritat-
ing applause—in short, no audience, save now and then a single spectator for
this remarkable opera.
What memories! O Italy! O poetry! Oh, damn! Here I am, forced to think
about the Opéra-Comique! I’ve read the work and seen it, so the hardest part
is over. I refer to Zampa, or The Marble Bride. I’ll probably be stoned for say-
ing what I think of this highly touted production, but no matter. Hérold is
gone now, and although some think you have to “show respect for the dead,”
my duty, as I see it, lies in speaking the truth to an art that lives and moves
forward. And so, in a word, I don’t like Zampa, and I’ll tell you why. It does
contain something not often found at the Opéra-Comique: I mean music;
it even has some fine ensemble pieces. As a whole work, however, and as a
2. Nicola Vaccai (1790–1848) was evidently the least obscure of these names even then.
Berlioz did venture into all these theaters, except for La Scala, during his travels in Italy—the
San Carlo and del Fondo in Naples; the Valle in Rome; the Pergola in Florence—as well as
the ancient ones he lists.
3. From Victor Hugo’s poem “La Captive” (Les Orientales, no. IX), which Berlioz set to
music in Rome, where, feeling in exile from Paris, he identified with the white slave protago-
nist in a North African harem.
score that is, all told, just a poorly disguised attempt to match Mozart’s Don
Giovanni, Zampa strikes me as frankly bad. One is true, spirited, elegant, and
noble, while the other is false and riddled with vulgar commonplaces.
A comparison of the two libretti points up the difference between the two
scores. We all know the bite, the originality, and the rather raw frankness of
Mozart’s dialogue. Here is Hérold’s dialogue in an orgy:
Let wind and storm scoff!

When with such good wine
My glass is full,
Let’s drink! For a shipwreck tomorrow
Will perhaps put an end
To our destiny.4
Elsewhere, as he is about to rape a girl, he says to her in all seriousness:
Yield, yield to my rule!
to which his disheveled victim replies:
Dispel my fears!
Does it really take tears
To make you happy?
Abide by my wishes!5
Only at the Opéra-Comique can you hear such lines! And the music in
Zampa is hardly more elevated in thought, truthful in expression, or dis-
tinguished in form. It is clear that the librettist attached no importance to
the rhymes he handed off to the composer, who struggled mightily to rise
above his collaborator, but to no avail. I was affected by the music exactly as
poets must be by the verses just quoted. Furthermore, Hérold’s style lacks
any distinctive color. It is not pure and austere like Méhul’s, nor exuberant
and bright like Rossini’s, nor fiery, passionate, and dreamy like Weber’s. All
4. “Nargue du vent et de l’orage, / Quand d’aussi bon vin / Mon verre est plein, / ‘Buvons!
car peut-être un naufrage / Finira demain / Notre destin.’ ” Act I, sc. 5 (finale).
5. “Cède, cède à mes lois!/ — Dissipez mes alarmes; / Est-ce donc par des larmes / Que l’on
peut être heureux? / Souscrivez à mes voeux.” Act III, sc. 13
told, then, while Hérold partakes of all three schools—German, Italian, and
French—he has no real style of his own. He is not Italian, nor is he French
or German.6 His music bears a strong resemblance to those industrial prod-
ucts prepared in Paris according to slightly modified versions of techniques
invented elsewhere. It’s Parisian music. And that is the reason for its popular-
ity at the Opéra-Comique, the seat of the capital’s middle class. Such music
has little success among music lovers and professionals, whose more refined
taste, fuller competencies, and more disciplined habits of thought eminently
distinguish them from the crowd.
Plausible reasons for this harsh judgment will emerge from the following
study of the score.
The overture to Zampa seems to me as poor in form as in substance.
It comprises four or five different motifs borrowed from the opera and
strung together with no link whatever. Overall harmony—in other words,
unity—is not to be found. It is a potpourri, not an overture. I know that
this convenient approach was adopted by Weber for his immortal overtures
to Freischütz, Oberon, Euryanthe, and Preciosa.7 But when Weber borrowed
themes from his score for the overture, he had the skill needed to give them
a fundamental unity, tying them together and blending them into a homo-
geneous whole. He had such ingenuity and exquisite feeling that the process
vanished behind the beauty of the result. Indeed, he cast silver, copper, and
gold into the same melting pot, but he knew how to gauge his alloy, and
when the statue emerged from the mold, its dark color revealed but a single
metal: bronze.8 Furthermore, in the overture—apart from the first allegro,
which has a certain wild and fiery energy—the melodies are neither new nor
remarkable. The next to last in particular, formed of little skipping phrases
such as Rossini sometimes lapsed into on a bad day, strikes me as wretchedly,
stupidly coquettish. The overture also exhibits a flaw that runs throughout
the opera: the overuse of appoggiaturas, which distort all the chords, blur
and befog the harmony, dull the edge of certain dissonances or sharpen them
to the point of discordance, turn gentleness into blandness, trade graceful-
ness for mincing, and, in a word, seem to me the most unbearable of all the
6. In fairness, Hérold prefigured Meyerbeer in attempting a fusion of these three national

traditions.
7. Weber’s Preciosa (1820) consists of scenic music to a German play by Pius Alexander Wolff,
taken from Cervantes’s novella La Gitanilla.
8. It may be his preoccupation with his opera on the life of Cellini that leads Berlioz to draw
his comparison from a sculptor’s firing of a statue.
affectations of the Paris school. As for the orchestration, there is nothing to say
except that it is generally adequate but that the thumping of the bass drum in
the coda is so excessive, so wild and furious you’re tempted to laugh or run away.
Camilla’s first aria, in A-flat, “À ce bonheur suprême,”9 is, however, full of
innocence and purity. The harmony is simple, and the accompanying figures
well chosen—until the entry of the allegro in E major, at which point the
pretentious blather of the Paris school starts up again.
This piece is followed by a male chorus whose lively, gay melody is not
free of affectation, but whose main shortcoming is its subordination of the
voices.10 The theme is played by the first violins while onstage the chorus
hammers out a rhythmic harmony on the strong beats. This means that the
first tenors, instead of sketching an even slightly melodic line, just belt out Cs
through the first eight measures. This is no chorus but only an instrumen-
tal theme burdened with a pointless vocal accompaniment. The procedure
greatly facilitates the task of the choristers, which makes them dearly love the
composers who resort to it. To their mind, those are the only composers who
know how to write for the voice.
The obligatory ballad in the first act is extremely plain.11 It has all the
appearance of a maidens’ lament; but this girlish style soon degenerates
into inanity, wouldn’t you say? What I see here is the Paris school in all its
childishness.
After a rather lackluster trio comes the great quartet marking the entrance
of Zampa. This piece, strong, essentially dramatic, with well worked-out
modulations free of those exasperating appoggiaturas criticized above, is
beyond question the best in the opera.12 The role of the cowardly Dandolo
is genuinely comical. The idea of having him sing mostly triplets against the
binary rhythm of all the rest is ingenious, and the allegro that follows his
aside is full of vigor and sparkle.
The grand progression of descending thirds sung in unison near the
coda directly contradicts the import of the words, for this is no way to
say, “ ‘Alas, my strength is gone!”13 You don’t usually shout like that when
you feel you’re dying. However, since the general tone of the scene is one
9. “To this supreme happiness,” Act I, no. 1, aria.

10. “Enfants de la Sicile,” Act I, no. 1, male chorus.
11. Act I, no. 2, “D’une haute naissance.”
12. Act I, no. 3, Trio (“Qu’as-tu donc?”); Act I, no. 4, Quartet (“Le voilà”).
13. “Hélas, la force m’abandonne!” Act I, no. 4.
of anxiety and alarm, and this line perfectly expresses the second of those
feelings, it would be unfair to quibble about the matter. Still, the composer
might have demanded that his librettist provide words better suited to his
fine musical inspiration. Nothing could have been simpler than a change
of wording.
The finale opens with a chorus of corsairs, a true chorus, for the musical
idea is indeed expressed in the voices.14 The section is divided into three-bar
phrases, and the rhythm, intermixed with syncopations, is rather striking; it
cannot count as a whole piece, though, because of its brevity.
The entrance of the maidens brings back the problem noted above: the
melodic line is in the orchestra, and the three parts for soprano and contralto
offer only harmonic filler devoid of any interest. Such choruses are veritable
fictions. The art of deploying choral groups in the theater does not reside in
having a clarinet part sung by the sopranos or a second or third horn part
sung by the tenors or a bassoon part by the basses. That discovery we owe to
the Italians; it is precious for lazy composers and incompetent performers.
Through the rest of the finale, however, the voice is back to its rightful place
in the musical hierarchy. The theme of “Au plaisir, à la folie,”15 first heard in
the overture, reappears at the end interrupted by an aside full of terror, and
the contrast has a refreshingly comic effect. There you have a truly musical
idea such as writers of libretti don’t often think of—and the composer did
not fail to see it.
The women’s prayer at the opening of the second act is a bit too innocent;16
the ritornello nevertheless includes a series of perfect chords that show a wel-
come originality.
The big aria “Toi, dont la grâce séduisante” has melodic charm,17 though
its rhythmic scheme is not faultless and the musky odor of its Paris style is
present throughout.
The duet that ends as a trio, “Juste Ciel! qu’ai-je vu! c’est ma femme!”
has great verve.18 Several moments of the ensemble are well developed, and
14. Act I, no. 5, Finale (“Au signal qui se fait entendre”).

15. “To pleasure, to folly” (Act I, no. 5, Finale). Berlioz’s defense of the traditional vocal/
instrumental hierarchy throughout this review may surprise, given his own stunning (but
exceptional) reversal of that hierarchy in the “Offertorium” of his Requiem. As usual, he
objects not to the use but to the abuse of a given technique.
16. Act II, no. 6 (“Aux pieds de la madone”).
17. “You, whose seductive grace,” Act II, no. 7, aria (Zampa).
18. “Good heavens! what do I see! it’s my wife!” Act II, no. 8, duo and trio.
there are a few rather unexpected harmonic features. As for the lovers’ duet,
“Pourquoi vous troubler à ma vue?,”19 it is jasmine, vanilla, and amber in
heavy doses.
The second-act finale is a falling off from that of the first act, despite a
pretty little barcarolle in six-eight time,20 in the same vein as all the sugary
songs, rounds, ballads, and romances that the authors of this work sprin-
kled through the score for the benefit of organ grinders and music dealers.
Its development is labored, and several forced modulations introduce disso-
nances that are hard to bear.
The last act includes a delightful serenade, full of freshness and sweet mel-
ancholy, as well as the duet of Camilla and Zampa, “Pourquoi trembler?,”21
whose allegro contains an elegant melody that the two characters tack inap-
propriately onto two sentences of diametrically opposite meaning.
As for all the rest, I see absolutely nothing beyond the very flower of the
Paris style adorned with all the gewgaws of Italian orchestration and chro-
matic harmonies bristling with dissonance—whose abuse by Spohr and
Marschner brought discredit to the German school.22 I add that when Hérold
resorts to these would-be wild and fantastic chords, he very rarely achieves his
aim. It is a weapon that he does not know how to wield. Almost always he hits
with the handle instead of the blade, and his strikes, unlike those of Mozart,
Beethoven, and Weber, bruise without drawing blood.
There, then, is our unvarnished opinion of Zampa. If anything can soften
its harshness for Hérold’s admirers, we can say in closing that the score does
fulfill all the conditions required these days—in Paris—for a veritable comic
opera, and that its creators have fully succeeded, having clearly won over their
intended audience.
H*****
19. “Why so troubled at my sight?” Act II, no. 9, duo.

20. Act II, no. 10. There is another barcarolle in Act III, no. 11.
21. The choral Serenade (“La nuit profonde”) is in Act III, no. 12; the duo “Why tremble?” a
cavatine, is in Act III, no. 13.
22. Ludwig Spohr (1784–1859), German composer and violinist, author of interesting period
Memoirs; Heinrich August Marschner (1795–1861), German composer. Berlioz frequently
reproached both for excesses of chromaticism and dissonant harmony.
31
Music Review
This review satirizes the production of reviews or feuilletons, as they were called,
the writer being a feuilletoniste. Both terms tend to deflate the loftier revue
(review) and critique (piece of criticism). In this piece, Berlioz practices what
he later dubs the feuilleton de silence, namely a mode of spinning his literary
wheels while remaining silent about Parisian musical events that he is assigned
to review but finds trivial by comparison, for example, with choral festivals in
Germany. A compliment on his writing by the poet Vigny leads him to playful
questions on his literary identity: does he qualify as a man of letters? Even if he
does, we are reminded at the end that, as a reviewer, he is expected to confine
himself to his assigned domain.
z October 5, 1835
Le Rénovateur
Oh, reviews are a rugged and foolish business! Why do them, then? people
will ask. Good question. Why, sir, do you, a banker, spend three-fourths of
your day totting up figures, when you have a stableful of horses eager to be
saddled for a run in the woods, where you could enjoy the last rays of the
autumn sun? Why do you, a doctor with the tastes and sensibility of an artist,
exhaust your life in the poisoned atmosphere of amphitheaters, in the midst
of hospital miseries, where you hear not harmonious melodies but only cries
of pain and, too often, despite your skill, the last gasps of the dying? For pre-
cisely the same reason I grumble through reviews that take time I might put to
infinitely better use. I share completely Méhul’s view when he says in the pref-
ace to Ariodant that a good score is far more powerful for the advancement
of art than all the arguments of the most polished criticism.1 True, he says a
good score, which has ever been a most uncommon thing. But, as we know,
composers have no doubts, and when they take pen in hand for even the sim-
plest composition, they are always convinced that they are writing for poster-
ity. Some deny it’s so and affect a harsh appraisal of their works—but only to
have the pleasure, I assure you, of hearing a firm contradiction. And if anyone
ventures—as I was impertinent enough to do in a recent conversation with
one of those self-effacing hypocrites—to take them at their word and agree
with their modest talk, their sudden facial tics and the nervous agitation of
their whole person make it clear that nothing in the world could be less wel-
come than such ready acceptance of their opinions. It is understood, then,
that composing is always done for posterity, whether it’s the most innocu-
ous one-act comic opera, like the Habit du chevalier de Grammont by Eler
or some other such that I might cite among the supine, mewling newborns.2
Look, the proof that composers are often right to trust in the noble des-
tiny of their work is that you had surely never heard of Eler or his Habit,
and then all of a sudden, thanks to the fancy of my pen’s pure caprice,
there he is, cited and famous. Merely famous? No, immortal! For I do not
doubt—please believe me—the immortality of the present review. And so,
if I can as readily compose an immortal score as an immortal review, and if
immortality and immortality are as alike as two cats in the dark,3 you can
well understand that I would prefer, infinitely prefer, musical immortality
to the literary kind. You see (I have to point this out, since you certainly
didn’t suspect it any more than you did the existence of most one-act comic
operas), I am a man of letters. With the greatest seriousness M. Alfred de
Vigny himself told me so the other day.4 I was about to laugh, then changed
my mind, thinking that, all things considered, I could be a man of letters,
since he is a musician. Yes, the author of Chatterton is an excellent musi-
cian. He gave me a flawless rendition of more than twenty measures of the
Symphonie fantastique, sung almost as exactly as you could do. I asked him,
1. Méhul created Ariodant in 1799, along with a thoughtful preface.

2. André-Frédéric Eler (1764–1821), French composer diversely active at the Conservatoire
from the time of its founding.
3. Berlioz uses the French proverb “il y a fagots et fagots” (there are sticks and sticks), which
affirms potential differences between items from the same category.
4. Vigny’s play of 1835, Chatterton, written to dramatize the poet’s plight in contemporary
society, came with a preface in which Vigny famously divides literary talents into three
unequal types: the man of letters, the great writer, and the poet. By Vigny’s definition, Berlioz
plainly qualifies for the first rung. Later he will aim higher.
31. Berlioz as Writer 185
of course, to write a critique in the Revue des deux mondes of my new piece
on the death of the emperor,5 which I hope to present at my next concert,
and I promised in return to do a review in the Gazette musicale of the fine
work Servitude et grandeur militaires, which he published two days ago.6 In
any case, since I don’t have a choice between writing a review and drafting an
overture, let’s proceed with the review. As Sancho learnedly demonstrated,
“Where the goat grazes, that’s where it must be tied.”7 I quote proverbs as
readily as Sganarelle; pay no attention.8
What shall I write about in this immortal review? The latest music
festival in Germany, where there was heard a superb choral work by
Meyerbeer in memory of Gutenberg—executed by a chorus of 421 voices?9
Oh, no! It’s not polite to talk about young girls in front of an old coquette
or the Café de Paris in front of a student in the rue Saint-Jacques or the
Conservatoire orchestra in front of M. Crosnier—we all know what trou-
ble M. Duponchel had getting only twenty voices added to the chorus of
the Opéra.10 Let’s not speak, then, about those armies of singers who never
cross the Rhine.
Should I discuss the premiere of I Puritani at the Italiens, the emotion
conveyed by Mlle. Grisi and the huge bouquet that was tossed to her, the
intense feeling in the voice of Lablache, the unfailing perfection of Rubini’s
singing, Tamburini’s thunderous success, the general sadness that Bellini’s
5. Le Cinq mai: chant sur la mort de l’empereur (The Fifth of May: Song on the Death of the
Emperor) for solo bass, chorus, and orchestra on a text by Béranger, is a tribute to Napoleon,
who died on May 5, 1821. It had its first performance at the Conservatoire on November 22,
1835, a second on December 23.
6. This newly published collection of short stories and essays expresses Vigny’s disenchanted
view of the modern military, from which he rescues a philosophy of duty and noble resigna-
tion congenial to Berlioz.
7. An approximate restatement of Sancho Panza’s expression, which in a clearer and more
faithful French translation gives: “Où la chèvre est attachée, il faut qu’elle broute” (Where
the goat is tied, that’s where it has to graze).
8. Sganarelle is a comic character in Molière, or rather a series of related characters, such as
the valet in Don Juan who inspires Leporello in Mozart’s opera.
9. According to RM (September 20, 1835), the count was closer to 460. The festival was held
in Mainz as a benefit for a monument to Gutenberg. Meyerbeer composed his hymn in honor
of the occasion.
10. Berlioz contrasts social groups: poor students vs. wealthy patrons of the elegant Café
de Paris; the elite Conservatoire orchestra vs. the paltry Opéra-Comique orchestra. He had
recently written on the difficulties encountered in attempting to increase the number of
voices in the Opéra chorus (Rén., August 30, 1835).
death brought to all faces?11 It’s old news, already reported and re-reported.
Besides, I am sure that I’d be upsetting the able directors of the Théâtre-Italien
if I told you what’s going on there. These gentlemen don’t care for musicians
who write reviews: such people sometimes allow themselves rather excessive
observations, under the guise of serving the interests of Art—as if Art might
have interests other than those of the gentlemen directing the Théâre-Italien,
who are the very incarnation of Art—which usually passes for true at the Café
Anglais and all along the boulevard des Italiens, from Pacini’s store down to
the rue de Richelieu.12 I shall therefore refrain as much as possible from dis-
turbing them in the contemplation of their glory and infinite perfections.
What the devil should I tell you, then? . . . All right: I feel like writing my
piece on the charming little volume of poetry, Les Bords de la coupe, which
my young compatriot M. Chaudesaigues brought me this morning; he asked
me to write a critique of it.13 He had heard from a friend of his, who had
it from Mme. D***, who had been assured by a quite distinguished painter
that M. Antony Deschamps had sworn to him that he knew for a fact that
M. Alfred de Vigny (as I said earlier) claimed that I was a man of letters.14 That
is all it took for the young poet, emboldened by this idea and credulous as one
can be at the age of eighteen though affecting to believe in nothing, came to
submit his work to me. Ask me to judge verse, when I’ve never in my life man-
aged to rhyme two words!15 Ah, my dear de Vigny, if this is a challenge, I shall
forthwith retaliate by sending you the publisher of M. Cherubini’s Traité du
contrepoint, with a letter of recommendation entreating you to write a criti-
cal review of that scholarly work. Nevertheless, I was ready to start citing the
loveliest bits in M. Chaudesaigues’s collection, justifying my choices to the
11. Berlioz gives a nod here to the great voices of the Théâtre-Italien, and to the recent passing
of Bellini, one of that theater’s favorite composers.
12. Antonio Pacini (1778–1866) was Rossini’s publisher.
13. Jacques-Germain Chaudesaigues (1814–1847), French author and critic, whom Berlioz
salutes as a fellow countryman from the Dauphiné region of France.
14. Antony Deschamps (1800–1869), poet and friend and supporter of Berlioz’s, who will
compose the text for the Apotheosis of his Funeral and Triumphal Symphony (1840).
15. Berlioz is being modest. As Reynaud notes (Berlioz: Textes et contextes, 62), he composed
an extra stanza of verse for his cantata in the Prix de Rome contest of 1827 (The Death of
Orpheus), and he created verse of an unusual sort—in an invented language—for the Chorus
of Shades in the 1832 version of Lélio. At that time, he is iconoclastic enough to declare that
prose will serve music as well as verse. Later, he will render into verse all the texts for music of
Lélio. Beginning with The Damnation of Faust (1846) he becomes his own librettist, display-
ing a fine talent as versifier.
31. Berlioz as Writer 187
best of my ability, when M. M***,16 who is a fellow reviewer here at the same
desk, noticed that I was busy with a sort of work I don’t habitually do. He
stopped me short, pointing out that criticism of poetry was his area exclu-
sively and I had no right to step in.
So there’s still another subject that I have to give up. What if I wrote about
the difficulty of writing a review when you have nothing to review?17 . . . No!
I dealt with that subject last winter and, if my readers have forgotten it, the editor
of Le Rénovateur, I fear, remembers it all too well.18 . . . Ah, now I have it! I have
it. My review is done. You doubt it? I’ll bet 100 francs. Listen: “Gentlemen”—
ah, it begins—“Gentlemen, I have the honor of taking my leave.”
HECTOR BERLIOZ
16. A certain “M.” had recently signed two reviews of L’Histoire des Francs by the Comte de
Peyronnet.
17. Berlioz writes “l’inconvénient de feuilletoniser,” creating the verb feuilletoniser to refer
to the writing of feuilletons.
18. Rén., October 9, 1834.
32
Mozart’s Don Juan
Don Giovanni had long been in the repertoire of the Théâtre-Italien. Translated
into French for the Opéra, it enjoyed great success—a sign, for Berlioz, of prog-
ress in middle-class musical taste, and one for which Rossini's William Tell and
Meyerbeer's Robert le diable, Berlioz interestingly believes, have paved the way.
For Mozart's opera is still in the vanguard of musical culture, Berlioz declares;
and besides, progress is sometimes a matter of restraint. To composers of his day
who squander the orchestral brass and percussion in their search for novelty or
effect, Berlioz repeatedly urges moderation: he wants those resources fresh for
audience ears when his turn comes to unleash them, and he finds in Mozart
a magnificent lesson in power through restraint. On the whole, the Opéra per-
formances vastly outshine those of the Théâtre-Italien, especially the grand
finale, now given its due. Berlioz ends with praise for the new administration
at the Opéra, on whom he pins his own operatic hopes. Note the unabashedly
class-bound way in which he defines a hierarchy of style, counting on examples
such as Mozart’s—and Rossini’s and Meyerbeer’s—to raise the level of musical
understanding and taste among all classes.
z November 15, 1835

Journal des débats
Don Juan was presented last evening at the Opéra.1 I am not about to do
a critique of it. Oh, no! So many learned critics, musicians, poets—or
1. On November 13, 1835. The singers were Nourrit (Don Juan), Dabadie (Mazetto), Levasseur
(Leporello), Dérivis (the Commendatore), Rubini—borrowed from the Théâtre-Italien
poet-musicians, such as Hoffmann2—have delved into this vast subject that

there is nothing left for me to glean. I will limit myself to a few general ideas
about this stunning opera, still youthful, still strong, still in the vanguard of
musical culture, while so many others not even half as old are already forgot-
ten corpses lying in roadside ditches or beggars rasping for a recognition they
hardly ever get. When Mozart wrote it, he was aware that success for such a
work would be slow to come and that its creator might not even live to see
it. He often said, speaking of Don Giovanni: “I composed it for myself and a
few friends.” Mozart was right to expect no more admiration than that of the
few advanced musicians of his time. The broad public’s cold reception of the
musical monument he had just raised proved him right. Even today, though
no one in France contests Mozart’s superiority, it is due less to a true feel-
ing among operagoers than to the influence of the constantly reiterated and
unchanging opinion of distinguished artists from all nations—an opinion
that the mind of the crowd has accepted in the end as a religious dogma no
longer subject to dispute, and which it would be a crime to doubt.
Nevertheless, the success of Don Juan at the Opéra—a box-office success
if ever there was one—can be regarded as a demonstration of notable progress
in our musical education. It is solid evidence that a large part of the public can
already enjoy a kind of music that is intellectually strong, carefully composed,
orchestrated with taste and dignity, always expressive, dramatic, and true—
music that is free and proud; that, no slave to the crowd, prefers the approba-
tion of the judicious few—as Shakespeare might have it—to the applause of a
theaterful of untutored groundlings.3 Yes, the initiates have grown numerous
enough by now for a man of genius no longer to feel obliged to mutilate his
work by shrinking it to fit a stunted audience.
It is true that most of our operagoers are still under the influence of quite
narrow ideas, but these very ideas are gradually losing their sway. And in the
uncertainty brought about by the successive failure of their illusions, the
stragglers ultimately give up, blindly taking the word of their more advanced
predecessors. They congratulate themselves daily for having followed the oth-
ers’ way into marvelous discoveries. Certain parts of great compositions no
doubt remain a while opaque to most people; but at least the crowd no longer
(Ottavio), Jawurek (Zerlina), Dorus-Gras (Elvire), and Falcon (Anna). Berlioz reviewed this
production in Rén. (March 16 and 23, 1834; see also #7).
2. Berlioz’s readers would have been familiar with Hoffmann’s short story “Don Juan”.
3. An allusion to Hamlet’s instructions to the players in Hamlet, Act III, sc. 2.
insists that those hieroglyphs are senseless and no longer despairs of ever pen-
etrating their meaning. People are beginning to understand that there is a
style in music, as in poetry, and that there is consequently a low-class kind of
music, just as there is cheap literature—musical shows for soldiers and their
girlfriends, like novels for scullery maids and grooms. People will gradually
come to realize that it is not enough for a piece of music to be pleasing to the
ear; it must also fulfill other conditions, without which the art of music could
not rise far above the art of the Carêmes and Vatels.4
People will come to understand that, while it makes no sense to try to
rid the orchestra of the least of its instruments, since they can all produce
interesting effects if used appropriately and wisely, it is a hundred times more
senseless to play the orchestra as if it were a piano without dampers, to hear
all sounds blended together with no distinction of character, with no regard
for vanishing melody, for twisted harmony, for flouted dramatic conventions,
or for offense to sensitive ears. People will see that it is monstrous to have
Mlle. Taglioni come on stage to the bellowing of the ophicleide and a roar
of bass drum rolls—that such barbaric orchestration, suitable for Herculean
maneuvers, becomes pure nonsense when employed for the dancing of the
most graceful of sylphs, that it is no less bizarre than hearing a piccolo double
a bass voice at a distance of three octaves, or violins perk up a priests’ grave-
side hymn with an accompaniment played on the tip of the bow. People will
finally take note of the deplorable consequences of our circus-music customs.
How, indeed, do you expect such means to produce powerful contrasts? How
is a conscientious composer to find the wherewithal to bring out those special
nuances without which music is not music? Should he want to draw from his
orchestra a frightening, grandiose, terrible sound, he can resort to his trom-
bones, ophicleide, trumpets, and horns, and set them into play . . . But they
fail to convey to the audience the impression that he was hoping for—the din
of all that brass is neither frightening nor grandiose. Every day, the public is
exposed to such noise in the accompaniment to love duets or wedding songs.
It is a familiar sound, and the explosive effect that the composer was counting
on falls flat for lack of novelty. If, on the other hand, the composer needs a
soft and delicate instrumentation, then, unless the dramatic situation is grip-
ping in the extreme, you can be sure that the audience, accustomed to having
its conversations drowned out by the fracas of orchestral frenzy, will not give
4. Vatel was the chef who famously committed suicide when a seafood delivery failed to
arrive for a dinner at the court of Louis XIV. Marie-Antoine Carême (1784–1833), known for
his treatises on the culinary art, served the courts of Russia, Austria, and England.
the music the appreciative attention it demands. That is why I believe that,
prior to the appearance of Robert le diable and the second act of Willliam
Tell, it would have been folly to hope that Don Juan would achieve a brilliant
success at the Opéra. The public had grown numb. Thanks to the welcome
influence of those two models in the art of dispensing the treasures of orches-
tral composition, we have now seen its sensibilities reawaken. At last, Mozart
has come—and just in time.5
Unfortunately, someone thought it necessary to riddle Don Juan with
dance airs made up of odds and ends torn from other works by Mozart,
stretched out, cut down, broken up, and reinstrumented according to a
method that strikes me as quite contrary to musical sense and the interests
of art. If not for that, the constantly pure style of the sublime score, which
unapologetically breaks with all the habits ingrained in the public over the
last eight or ten years, would have completed that important revolution. And
note that Mozart alone could carry off such an effort. No one has yet ven-
tured to call his orchestra thin or his melodic style outmoded. His name has
retained all its prestige among the learnèd as among the uneducated, among
young composers as among their erstwhile teachers. It was thus possible—
without fear of being blamed for dusting off old-fashioned things—to revive
an opera that both globally and in detail constitutes a searing repudiation
of the ways of a certain modern musical school. Such an undertaking would
have been utterly unwise in the case of a new work. “It’s colorless music,” we
would have heard on all sides. “The orchestra is thin, lacking brilliance and
vigor.” All that, because the bass drum would not have boomed throughout,
flanked by a drum, a pair of timpani, cymbals and a triangle, and accom-
panied by the whole gleaming cohort of brasses. Oh, wretches! You don’t
know, then, that Weber never allowed the bass drum into his orchestra—that
Beethoven, whose power I trust you don’t impugn, used it only once—and
that in The Barber of Seville and a few other of Rossini’s works you don’t hear
one bass drum note! So if every orchestra lacking that crude support strikes
you as weak and meager, you have only to blame the composers whose over-
use of violent means has left you numb—and to pay closer attention to one
clear-sighted enough about the real sources of power in music to resort to
noise only rarely and exceptionally.
5. A paraphrase of Boileau’s famous line “Enfin Malherbe vint” (At last Malherbe came),
Malherbe having ushered in the reign of classical restraint in French after the verbal profu-
sions of the age of Rabelais and Shakespeare.
That is the case today with Mozart. Proof is the religious silence that
greets the statue’s appearance at the Opéra, whereas, at the Théâtre-Italien,
it is usually the signal to exit the hall.6 There is no prima donna at that point,
no honey-voiced tenor to offer the elegant ladies in the first tier a singing
lesson; there is no question of a modish duet in which the two virtuosos do
battle with their talent and inspiration. It is simply a death chant, a sort of
recitative, but sublime in its truth and grandeur. And since the orchestration
in the preceding acts was handled with discernment and moderation, it fol-
lows that, when the ghost appears, the sound of the trombones, unheard for
a long while, sends a fearful shiver through you, and a simple beat of the tim-
pani, struck from time to time beneath a sinister harmony, seems to shake the
entire audience. The scene is so extraordinary, the composer has achieved such
wonders, that it crushes the actor singing the Commendatore. Imagination
gets out of hand, and ten Lablaches would hardly seem equal to the task.
Things are different for the frantic cries of the Don, struggling against the icy
embrace of the marble colossus. Donna Anna’s impious seducer being a mere
human, our mind asks no more of him than human sounds, and, of all the
parts of his varied role, this is perhaps the one usually best rendered. At least
that was my impression with Garcia, Nourrit, and Tamburini.7
The hopeless perfection with which Rubini renders the famous aria “Il
mio tesoro” has made the role of Ottavio almost untouchable by any other
singer.8 I mention only this aria because it is impossible to discern the same
superiority in his way of executing the rest of the role. In the ensemble pieces
as in the first-act duet, Rubini seems bent on effacing himself completely. The
great number of phrases composed in the low or at least in the middle register
must present a real projection problem for this admirable voice destined to
soar above all the others instead of accompanying them. The result is that the
duet in question here ordinarily produces a much greater effect at the Opéra
than at the Théâtre-Italien.9 Let’s say too that Mlle. Falcon is responsible for
much of the difference. Mlle. Grisi cares little for Mozart and sings Donna
6. Don Giovanni had its last run at the Théâtre-Italien between December 1833 and February
1834.
7. Manuel Garcia sang the Don at the Théâtre-Italien on December 8, 1821 and December 23,
1823. Nourrit took the role at the Opéra from March 10, 1834. Tamburini sang the part at the
Théâtre-Italien in December 1833. Berlioz attests to having heard all three.
8. Don Ottavio’s famous aria is in Act II, sc. 10 (no. 21).
9. Act I, sc. 3 (no. 2): “Fuggi, crudele, fuggi!” (Donna Anna, Don Ottavio).
Anna only reluctantly; not in Italy, where Don Giovanni never gained accep-
tance, could she learn to appreciate this music. Mlle. Falcon, in contrast, sings
it with love, even passion. It shows in the emotion that torments her, in the
way her voice trembles in certain touching passages, in her energetic deliv-
ery of certain notes, in her ability to highlight various corners of the picture
that most of her rivals leave in the shadows. I have not heard Mlle. Sontag
as Donna Anna,10 but of all the other sopranos whom I have heard in that
difficult role, Mlle. Falcon seems to me undeniably the best in all respects.
I will criticize only the style she has adopted to vocalize phrases made up of
diatonic gruppetti where the notes are tied in twos, as in her first-act duet
with Ottavio. In such an instance, Mlle. Falcon gives so much stress to the
first note of each gruppetto that the second almost disappears, and at some
distance the resulting inequality has an effect quite different from the one the
singer no doubt intends; it is roughly analogous to the phrasing of the horns
when they alternate open and stopped sounds. Performed that way, the fea-
ture I have just noted in the Don Juan duet loses much of its force rather than
gaining any. Unless she is told of this, Mlle. Falcon cannot possibly become
aware of it, since the effect is not the same up close.
I cannot fail to comment on the astonishing execution of the grand finale
in the early performances. This was the result not only of the care with which
the dress rehearsals had been carried out and the confidence that the choris-
ters had acquired from a meticulous and well-directed study of their parts.
All the singers at the Opéra who had no part in the production had asked
to join in the chorus of the finale. This unusual increase in the number of
voices, the warm singing of these auxiliary forces, the genuine enthusiasm
felt by some and then communicated to the rest—all of this helped turn the
piece into a marvel of choral singing at the Opéra. Besides, since Mozart’s
orchestra, for all its richness and strength, does not drown out the singers, we
could see at last what such a chorus was capable of becoming. That is dramatic
music!!
M. Duponchel was no doubt struck,11 as we were, by the need to produce
such effects more often at the Opéra—and without merely resorting to the
available soloists, costly to do because of the fees they are entitled to for each
10. Henrietta Sontag (1806–1854), German soprano, performed Donna Anna in Paris in
1829.
11. Duponchel had just taken over as head of the Opéra on September 1. He promised Berlioz,
in tacit return for critical support, that his first act on becoming director would be to engage
him to compose an opera. Here Berlioz does his part with praise and tactful exhortation.
appearance. As soon as he became director, therefore, he took on the task

of improving and enriching the chorus. He brought the number of choris-
ters up to one hundred and appointed inspectors charged with seeing that
all fulfilled their duties in performance. That had not always been the case
beforehand, since on occasion some members of the chorus, whether out of
indolence or lapsing memory, simply failed to sing—whence on certain days
the inexplicable lifelessness of choral entries and the glacial cold that brought
to the finest pieces.
Friends of music, who under the last administration rightly complained
that musical concerns were being sacrificed to lavish sets and stagings, must
regard M. Duponchel’s early administrative decisions as the welcome sign of
a reaction in favor of music and as a firm dismissal of the fears that his previ-
ous undertakings had created. Cleverly seconding the views of M. Véron, he
succeeded in bringing poetry to the art of costume design, and, thanks to his
knowledgeable efforts, spectacle at the Opéra has attained a level of splendor
and brilliance unknown before him. That is progress, and it is fair to bear it
in mind. But to people who think that M. Véron’s approach is going to be fol-
lowed by his successor, I have this to say: M. Duponchel is above all an art-
ist. Attracted to Italy by the inexhaustible riches that that land offered to his
architectural and archaeological investigations, he drew from that mine the
love for beauty, the hatred for everything cheap and tawdry that we recognize
in his slightest productions. He favors the visual arts, but he is no less sensitive
to the art that must take precedence in an opera house, and, as I have just said,
his early decisions make that evident. Besides, even were M. Duponchel a mere
speculator—which no one who knows him would credit—he is too tactful a
man and knows too well what leads to the rise or fall of theatrical institutions
to have any illusions about the longevity of an approach pushed to its ultimate
consequences in five years of implementation. He is not unaware that visual
pleasure is the most superficial kind, the pleasure that we tire of most easily. He
knows that the audience at the Opéra has had its fill of dazzling sights and that
much remains to be done to foster an equal interest in the independent vitality
of music. He knows that to attempt to give music dominance over the other
arts without causing these to decline from their current high level is to reach
for both fame and fortune. M. Duponchel knows all this, and that should be
reason enough to reassure those inclined to go on doubting his intentions.
H*****
33
Religious Music
M. Lesueur: R achel, Noémi, Ruth et Booz,
Or atorios; M. Urhan: Auditions
Berlioz pays tribute here to his teacher, Lesueur, a kindred spirit and father fig-
ure whose influence on him was profound, though with the advent of Beethoven,
teacher and student parted ways. Beethoven is the obvious reference in this arti-
cle’s opening riff on the three-period norm for composers’ lives, a notion applied
early on to Beethoven at a time when three-part evolutionary schemes—like
Hegel’s—were themselves the norm.1 As it happens, the three-part scheme does
not at all fit Lesueur and will only partially fit Berlioz, who, from the full matu-
rity of his own talent, eloquently acknowledges and describes what is compelling
about his teacher’s, notably his unique use of chordal harmony, his strong expres-
sive sense, and his mastery of music for vast spaces. Berlioz closes with a nod to
his friend Urhan, another composer who, like Lesueur, exhibits deep religious
convictions and idiosyncratic musical practices.
z November 21, 1835

Journal des débats
1. Berlioz refers to three phases in Beethoven’s artistic development as early as 1829, in his
biography of Beethoven (CM 1:51), though the idea is often assumed to date from the book
Beethoven and His Three Styles (1852) by Wilhelm Lenz. Curiously, Berlioz gives a very dif-
ferent version of the idea here from the one he gave in 1829. There, the third period is one of
musical daring and independence; here, it is simply a matter of being subject to imitation,
although daring may be inferred from the composer’s impatient shaking off of his admirers,
in this version, and taking flight into his own sphere.
There are in the lives of great artists three quite distinct phases, which become
evident almost every time Nature, stamping a man’s forehead with the mark
of genius, chooses to raise him above the crowd to be admired . . . or deni-
grated. In the first phase, such men, usually without realizing it, imitate the
works of their predecessors that impressed them most deeply. To speak only
of musicians, if a young composer gained his first appreciation of music from
the Italian school, almost all his early efforts will be cast in the Italian mold.
Melody will dominate; it will be simple, elegant, easy to perform, nicely
rhythmic but rather unoriginal, and full of formulas that the favored maestro
of the moment put into circulation.
Should he, on the other hand, have been charmed by the productions of
the German school, with their graceful dreaminess and untamed energy, he
will seek originality in the blurred shapes of vague melody, in abrupt chord
sequences, in the frequent use of certain uncommon rhythms, but original-
ity will necessarily escape his grasp, since imitation cannot be original. If the
composer, yielding to the temptations of vanity, publishes works under the
inevitable influences of this transitional stage, he is paving the way for real
problems and useless regrets in the mature period of his talent. The press, like
greedy Acheron, “relinquishes not its prey.”2 We may well hear that this or
that work stems from the composer’s youth, that it doesn’t represent his style
and his habitual practice, that we have to avoid drawing from it any portent
of his creative spirit and the direction of his ideas—but what pointless words!
The work is no less bad for all that; no less does it bear a name that adheres
to its maker and suffers all the more as his popularity grows. Thus Beethoven
was tormented toward the end of his life by seeing the proliferation of edi-
tions of some of his early works; he disavowed them but was powerless to
expunge them from the record. He flew into an inexpressible rage whenever
anyone spoke to him about them, even with the sincerest admiration.
In the second phase of a great artist’s life, his creative genius, which till
then was like a child following in his father’s footsteps, becomes a mature
man and develops a serious, profound, enthusiastic love for all the wonders
of a world whose immensity he is beginning to grasp. Eyes open, he advances
in a sublime reverie, leaves the beaten paths and, without even realizing it,
ventures onto new ones. That is when he becomes himself, when he creates,
2. Quotation from Racine’s Phèdre, Act II, sc. 5, line 46, itself referring to the river leading
to Hades, the hell of Greek mythology. Berlioz himself was skittish about publishing his
works—he withdrew his first “op. 1,” Eight Scenes from Faust, reassigning the number to his
Waverly Overture. He waited until 1845 to publish the Symphonie fantastique.
33. Religious Music 197
taking creation as far as human nature allows, when he is happy and pays no
heed to the sufferings and dangers inherent in his bold exploration of the
“great garden of poetry,” where, especially for him, “there is no forbidden
fruit.”3
In the third period of his life, a life of labor and idleness, contemplation
and passion, egotism and selflessness, the artist is suddenly troubled in his
self-made solitude. His voice no longer resounds there all alone; it sends back
unwelcome echoes, for the crowd has tracked him down. He becomes in his
turn prey to imitators—not those ingenious imitators such as he himself was
at one time, but that ignorant, uncultivated horde whose presence every-
where is a plague, a horde that torments the creative genius till he unfolds
his wings and flies upward to his true home, leaving the vile herd to ravage
the land that he cultivated and waste the delicious fruits with which his able
hands once covered it.
M. Lesueur, whose sacred works are the subject of this article, is a very
rare exception among composers. His artistic career does not, it seems to
me, show the three distinct periods that I have just noted. He did not begin
by imitating and, until now at least, he has had no reason to complain of
imitators. His style is a style apart. Its artless simplicity and calm strength
distinguish it from today’s musical forms just as the Bible differs from our
modern poetry. His singular turn of mind and musical disposition makes
M. Lesueur marvelously well suited to treat subjects drawn from Hebrew
and Ossianic poetry.4 And so, of all his compositions, those related to such
themes are considered his masterworks. Paisiello, no friend of French culture,
once wrote of M. Lesueur: “His music is in its essence expressive and origi-
nal. It reveals an ancient simplicity quite unknown to our contemporaries
and whose beauty seems to have been perceived, among earlier composers,
by Adolf Hasse alone.5 The people who have rendered resounding justice to
Lesueur are not all capable of knowing his works well enough to pass such
judgment. Otherwise, they would not have established a parallel between his
manner and that of Gluck or Mozart; the one is as far removed from the oth-
ers as I am from the antipodes. There is a great inclination in France to try
3. Victor Hugo, 1829 preface to Les Orientales (1828).

4. The Poems of Ossian, published in 1760 by James MacPherson as the copy of an ancient
manuscript by the Gaelic bard Ossian. Though Ossian was fictitious, the poems drew on
genuine Irish sources; they captivated and inspired many Romantics.
5. Johann Adolf Hasse (1699–1783), a major composer of his day, active in the development
of opera seria.
and justify such assertions by appealing to the authority of certain authors

who have written on the art of music, some of whom have never been capable
of composing a minuet.”6
Harmony is the point on which M. Lesueur’s music differs most tellingly
from all other known types of music. It almost always has a strange qual-
ity and takes unexpected turns—and is nonetheless profoundly expressive.
Gluck was able to render emotions and passions through melodic recitation;
Paisiello, through accented melody; M. Lesueur, sometimes through har-
mony alone. Nor is it a dry harmony, bristling with figures, modulations,
reversible phrases, imitations, canons, and fugal entries—a musical mosaic,
worthless because heading nowhere, created to startle the eyes and torment
the ears, proving only the patience of the composer while challenging the lis-
teners’ tolerance—whence one might conclude that, if the musician excelling
at it had applied the same amount of time and effort to grappling with any
other difficulty, such as shooting a pea into the eye of a needle at ten paces’
distance, he would have succeeded just as well and, as a fitting reward for his
achievement, earned a whole bushel of peas.
M. Lesueur’s harmony is of a different nature. It is pure harmony, undis-
guised, with no laughable cheap trappings. It dreams, it prays, it weeps, it
bursts into grandiose sounds and fills the temple with varied and solemn
vibrations like the colors that the sun takes on as it traverses the stained-glass
windows of a cathedral. It is true harmony—or at least what is so called by
all persons sensitive to the beauty of chords. Beyond its fitting expressiveness
and undeniable originality, M. Lesueur’s harmony is further enhanced by the
very special melody that it produces. By saying that the melody springs from
the chords, I do not mean to imply that M. Lesueur writes his melodies after
the fact, only that his sense of harmony is so strong that it dominates all else
and covers everything with its unmistakable glow. Even in his bare—that is,
unaccompanied—melodies, the listener is aware of the harmonic underlay of
the canvas. Since M. Lesueur makes very limited use of chromatic harmonies
and prefers the natural chords of the diatonic scale, one readily infers that his
melodies are easy to execute. That is not always true. Although the intervals
are simple, they are nevertheless quite often presented in an order so unan-
ticipated as to be jarring to the ears, and a voice unfamiliar with this style
6. Berlioz arranges a part of Paisiello’s open letter to Lesueur from Le Journal de Paris of July
20, 1804 (“after the second performance of Les Bardes”), presenting it as though addressed
to others. Paisiello was notorious for his jealousy of other composers, so his public defense of
Lesueur is noteworthy.
33. Religious Music 199
hesitates to attempt them. Besides, what is truly easy for singers is what is
common and crude. That is their sphere of comfort: there is nothing for them
to understand or study; everything is obvious, everything known in advance,
and the larynx has no more to do than the mind.
M. Lesueur’s instrumentation offers a quite similar picture. It presents
no material difficulty, but its accents and nuances are so many and expressive
of such delicate feeling that some sort of special training is needed if musi-
cians are to perform it faithfully. I make an exception, however, of his grand
solemn masses, in which, according to an excellent practice motivated by
the vast size of the performing space and the small number of performers,
M. Lesueur avoids resorting to half-tone effects, which would be inaudible.
Instead, he maintains a dominant—or rather, a constant—volume of forte;
the principal contrasts result from the presence or absence of the mass of
wind instruments. He plays the orchestra like an organ.
Among the particular features of this instrumentation, there are several
to be noted: First, the frequent use of clarinets and bassoons in groups of four,
which thereby doubles the number of clarinets.7 Second, the division of the
cellos into two parts, one following the violas and the other the double basses.
Third, the separation of the cellos into two unequal groups, the larger playing
the bass part and the smaller, made up of two or, at most, three cellos play-
ing an octave below the melody. Fourth, the ingenious use of the bass drum,
booming at the end of a few movements, when the intensity of the rhythmic
beat has become too great to be increased in any other way. At this point it
initiates a dialogue with the kettledrums, these striking the second and third
beats (in four-beat measures) and the bass drum the fourth or the first. The
seesaw effect of these concordant beats gives the orchestra an extraordinarily
majestic drive. It is through such use of noise that music is made. M. Lesueur
furnished this example twenty-five years ago. That has not prevented more
recent composers from introducing the bass drum into theater orchestras and
making the most revolting abuse of it; this ruins instrumental power by dull-
ing the auditory faculties with an absurd, relentless din.
M. Lesueur’s vocal distribution is also markedly different from that prac-
ticed by the majority of composers. Instead of soprano, contralto, tenor, and
bass, he writes for a first and second soprano, first and second tenor, and first
and second bass, thus setting his choruses for six parts, or at least three, dou-
bled an octave apart.
7. The bassoons, in French practice, were regularly used in groups of four.

In his oratorio Noémi, the choruses are written in four parts, but without
the bass; there are only sopranos and tenors, divided in two. This arrange-
ment makes for an extreme softness; after M. Lesueur, Weber used it to give
voice to the spirits in Oberon.8 Noémi, like Ruth et Booz and Rachel composed
specifically for the Chapelle Royale,9 is one of M. Lesueur’s most remarkable
works. There is no other, to my mind, where biblical color is better respected
and depicted in more touching ways. The subject itself is essentially musical,
but that hardly diminishes the composer’s role in this admirable achievement.
I still remember my impression of deep sadness when I heard this oratorio
performed a few years ago at the Tuileries. It is rare for a composition, even a
dramatic one, to succeed in so stirring the emotions.
It comprises several scenes, the first of them devoted to Naomi’s fare-
well to Ruth and Orpha, her daughters-in-law. Having lost her husband
and her two sons, deceased in the land of Moab, Naomi resolves to return
to Bethlehem. Ruth and Orpha, followed by several of their young kinsmen,
Moabites like them, accompany them back to Judea. There Naomi moves to
leave them, urging the others to return to their country. Ruth alone refuses,
unable to bear that separation. Naomi tells her: “Behold, your sister Orpha
has embraced her mother-in-law and is going back to her land.” Ruth says: “I
wish to stay here with Naomi,” and Naomi answers: “Your sister has returned
to her people and her gods; with me, you would remain poor. Go with her, to
your mother and your close kin, and you will enjoy abundance again.” “Do
not dispute my will,” says Ruth, “urging me to leave you and go my way. For
wherever your steps may lead you, there will I go, there will I run. And where
you find lodging, there I too will stay. Your people will be my people, and
your God will be my God.”10
The artless, dolorous charm of these words is fully reflected in the music.
You are deeply stirred—and surprised to be, so modest is the composer’s
effort to move you. The form of the first movement is highly unusual: Ruth,
8. Lesueur’s vocal distribution in three and six parts was that of eighteenth-century French
tragédie lyrique and of Berlioz’s own Messe solennelle. Weber, in Oberon (1826), omits the
basses in the elfin chorus from Act I (no. 1) and the Ensemble (no. 4)—though divided tenors
produce a four-part texture—but uses them in the Chorus of Spirits from Act II (no. 12).
9. Rachel, oratorio historique et prophétique; Ruth et Noémi, oratorio historique suivi de Ruth
et Booz et qui est le complément du premier. These works were in fact composed for the impe-
rial chapel under Napoleon. For this article Berlioz uses editions of 1834–35, which differ
somewhat from the versions he heard performed in the 1820s.
10. Lesueur himself evidently wrote the Latin libretto, based on the biblical text from Ruth
1; the translations are Berlioz’s.
33. Religious Music 2 01
Orpha, and their kin express their sorrow in choral measured phrases, to
which Naomi constantly responds in recitative. The orchestra is then silent
and, with its silence, renders even more salient and complete the expression
of isolation in Naomi’s recitative.11 Further on, Ruth sings an aria of inef-
fable beauty. Aside from its general arrangement, which is magnificent, I will
point out a phrase whose accompanying harmony doubles its expressive force;
I refer to the phrase that occurs in the middle of the movement on the words
“Ibique locum accipiam sepulturae; hanc mihi faciat Dominus.”12 Devotion,
filial love, hope, and fear could hardly, in song, be expressed more delicately,
while the idea of death surfaces in the lugubrious accents of the basses and
the somber dissonance they murmur beneath the melody.13
But what I have always thought the finest passage in the work is the distant
farewell of Orpha and her companions once they have left Ruth and Naomi.
It is supremely evocative, and whatever I might say would probably convey
only a false idea of it; better to refer any musically literate reader to the score
itself. The oratorio Noémi is not too complicated to read. I am convinced that
perusing it will yield genuine delight and that, for musicians capable of sens-
ing the sublimity of biblical style, it will be an undertaking of the highest
interest.
I don’t think it will be too great a departure from my subject to turn to
the work that M. Urhan has just published. The compositions of this distin-
guished artist always show a particular cast, owing to his religious beliefs and
to his mystical turn of mind. He is known for his compositions for piano,
two- and four-hand. Last year’s success of the charming idyll called Lettres
à elle means that I have no reason to discuss it today.14 The work this time
is a song followed by two pieces for piano solo, which the composer calls
Auditions. The verses are by Reboul, the baker-poet of Nîmes.15 These sev-
eral stanzas, full of wide-eyed religious melancholy, strike us as justifying
M. Urhan’s choice. An angel beside a child’s cradle intones the happiness of
the innocent about to die.
11. Allusion to the First Religious Scene: “Noemi! Egressa es.”

12. Fluent as he is in Latin, Berlioz forgets to translate this: “May I receive a place for burial
there [with you]; may God grant this to me.”
13. Allusion to a passage in Ruth’s melodic line (sc. 4).
14. See #18, Rén., November 16, 1834. À elle, Letters for piano.
15. Jean Reboul (1796–1864), nicknamed the Baker of Nîmes, a minor poet whom Lamartine
took under his wing.
Since no harmony appeared pure enough to join the voice of the heaven
dweller, the composer had the idea of drawing the accompaniment from the
mysterious chords of the Aeolian harp, reproduced to the extent possible on
the piano. As we know, this harp, whose strange sounds make the sweetest
music appear crude, produces a perfect chord, interrupted from time to time
by a built-in dissonance, depending on the greater or lesser intensity of the
wind that sets the strings to vibrate and thus divides them harmonically.16
The seventh, being only a minor third above the fifth of the already exist-
ing perfect chord, transforms the tonic into a dominant, but this unresolved
dissonance, fading after only an instant, allows the perfect chord again to
vibrate alone and the tonic accent, which had disappeared, thus gradually to
re-emerge. M. Urhan dares to have his melody accompanied by this constant,
monotone succession. The piano invariably strikes the three notes A-flat,
E-flat, C (perfect tonic chord), occasionally joined by G-flat (dominant sev-
enth). This decision shows great daring—and has been crowned by success.
The same is true of several other uncommon harmonic effects that occur
in the final piece (Le Désir du ciel). M. Urhan composed them not with the
puerile goal of defying the rules, but only because he found those effects
appropriate for the expression of his ideas. To those not sharing the com-
poser’s perspective, Auditions is an absurdity. To those, on the other hand,
who have enough religion in their soul to understand the exaltation of an
artist as pious and impassioned as M. Urhan, this daringly simple work will
be the source of deep emotion.
H*****
16. The Aeolian harp, rather mysterious to us today, was a favorite Romantic object and a
symbol for the soul, played upon by the winds. Berlioz makes striking use of it in his article
on Liszt (#38) and again in his story “Euphonia” of 1844 (Evenings).
34
Opéra-Comique—Concerts
Virtuosos and Composers
What starts out as a diagnosis of persistent woes at the Opéra-Comique—it can-

not make up its mind whether to aim for progress or dwell in the past—turns
into a colorful, quasi-novelistic comparison of two musical types: the virtuoso
and the composer. Taking off from mentions of Hauman and Ole Bull, violin-
ists currently in the limelight, Berlioz imagines a young virtuoso on a pictur-
esque trail of success that begins in Paris salons, continues in the provinces, and
ends with a triumphant return to Paris. He then turns to his main theme, that
of the composer's uphill path, including yet another report on the difficulties
of gaining a hearing for large-scale works. At a time when he himself stands
poised for success—over the next few months he will compose the bulk of his opera
Benvenuto Cellini, which the Opéra has finally deigned to accept—he remains
ever mindful of the crushing odds against novice composers. Though fictional-
ized, his lively tale of bitter cold in a morning rehearsal at the Conservatoire,
an unexpected behind-the-scenes view of that august institution, is an example
obviously drawn from experience. In a dramatic close, he gives a litany of famous
composers rejected by the Opéra, ending with the one most revered by conserva-
tives and progressives alike.
z January 17, 1836

Journal des débats
The Opéra-Comique has long sought to take its proper place among the musi-
cal institutions of France. Unfortunately, its directors have been confused
about the way to reach this goal. Having themselves no knowledge of the
art whose products they speculate on (the first condition in France for being
called upon to judge said art), they grope along, retrace their steps, hesitate,
stop, dangle promises of reform, then dishearten the public by obstinately
preserving old routines. They stage Der Freischütz, but revive Le Diable à
quatre;1 engage a German chorus and singing master, then dismiss them six
months later. They decide to provide a home for modern opera, with all its
action-filled pomp and impassioned exuberance; then repent of that rash
impulse and, yielding to influences contrary to any elevated notion of art, run
back to arietta-studded comedies and fairground operas in which old-style
French ditties blossom anew before our eyes. One day they inveigh against
any artist outside the coterie of household regulars; another day they trumpet
the new names they have deigned to summon to their aid. In the end, after all
those efforts, they see no salvation for themselves and the theater outside the
arms of an ever ready subsidy. This worrisome instability in the administra-
tion of the Opéra-Comique points to a keen, ongoing desire for success. But
only a steady march along the right road—once it’s been identified—can, in
our opinion, lead to the prosperity that the directors have been aiming for
and give the theater, which is so expensive for France, the importance that it
should have acquired long ago.
Still, the various efforts undertaken in the course of the year just ended
will not have been wholly without result. The idea is starting to take hold
that music in its own right might well have a positive effect on box-office
receipts. The proof is in the concerts that M. Crosnier occasionally adds to his
programs.2 As early as last winter he had the idea of using the intermissions
to present four Styrian singers whom we were pleased to hear.3 These men
were endowed with a quite good musical sense and showed a fine understand-
ing of the nuances of harmony. The lack of culture in the hearty approach of
these Danube peasants was evident, but their method, for all its limitations,
1. Berlioz contrasts a recent great German opera, Weber’s Freischütz, with one of the most
trivial of the French, Le Diable à quatre, ou la Femme acariâtre [The Devil at his Heels, or the
Shrew], by Jean-Pierre Solié (1755-1812). Elsewhere, Berlioz brands the latter as “a pitiful rhap-
sody by an actor who imagined himself called upon to compose, because he was in a position
to have his works performed. It never had the least shred of life in it” (Rén., May 13, 1835).
2. See#20, in which Berlioz reports on this initiative.
3. Berlioz gives more details about these singers in Rén., January 5, 1835. They consisted of
a vocal quartet that also performed at the Hôtel de Ville. Styria, an ancient province of the
Roman, then Austrian empire in the picturesque mountain region around Graz, is now one
of the nine states of modern Austria.
34. Opéra-Comique, Concerts 2 05
produced effects that could hardly be obtained from the Seine’s own sing-
ers after thirty rehearsals. They were particularly effective in the contrasts
between forte and piano or pianissimo. In the final stanzas of their songs, the
echo of an echo generally brought forth bursts of applause from the whole
house. Unfortunately, one can’t escape the impression that these picturesque
echoes are a commonplace no less inevitable among the singers from across
the Rhine than the clichés in the cavatinas of Italian virtuosos. Not content
with resorting to this vocal artifice to conclude their folk songs, they also
allow themselves to use it on occasion in more elevated compositions, against
the express intentions of the composer.
Concerts at the Opéra-Comique are still far from having the appeal they
can eventually acquire. Solos keep things going; at least they are well cho-
sen and entrusted to talented artists. These include the quite exceptional
M. Hauman, a young violinist who has made great progress in the last two
years. His talent has changed manner so drastically in the course of its devel-
opment that, despite the celebrity he had earlier attained in France and in
Belgium, he can be regarded today as almost a different artist. At the time of
M. Hauman’s first appearances in Paris, he met the same malicious opposi-
tion that M. Ole Bull inevitably encountered in his turn.4 This is the experi-
ence of all musicians gifted with any originality who come into our musical
world without the patronage of a school or a famous teacher. Happily, no
malice can stop a performer from making his mark as long as he has courage
and perseverance. His debut will not lack for listeners; the drawing rooms of
fashionable society will always be ready to welcome him, provided a gentle
hand is there to open the door; and, despite our frivolous ways, it is fair to say
that many of our lovely ladies view this task as a duty and acquit themselves
of it with both pleasure and grace. If he passes this initial test, he is invited
everywhere. He is in demand for lessons; he plays at a few afternoon recit-
als, where he begins to acquaint himself with the paying public. Once well
positioned and befriended, and braced by the small number of supporters
he has been able to gather, he organizes his own concert. He engages fifteen
or twenty instrumentalists to back him and to scratch out some misbegot-
ten opening composition pompously programmed as an overture for large
orchestra. The audience is indulgent, sitting through this grotesquerie, then
through the silliness of a flute solo, a soprano’s out-of-tune delivery, and a
tenor’s maudlin romances. It is the young artist alone they have come to hear.
4. On Hauman, whose violin “weeps beautifully,” see #8.

He appears at last. They applaud; he plays; they applaud some more. When
he leaves the stage, the applause redoubles. It does sometimes happen that his
associates are not up to standards, but the weakness of the other musicians
never really compromises the virtuoso’s success more than once, since, all
things considered, if he were forced to appear without them and play alone,
he would be even more readily appreciated.
There he is then, known, pampered, celebrated, and, by the end of the
year, richly rewarded by the directors of our lyric theaters who, three months
earlier, had kept him waiting out back like a lackey and didn’t deign to answer
his letters. After which come tours through the provinces, small-town excite-
ment and town-hall dinners, serenades by the police band, panegyrics in
which the local poet compares him to Paganini. Whether he plays the vio-
lin, the piano, the flute, or the bassoon matters not: he is always a Paganini.
It’s just a matter of specifying the instrument. Then he returns to Paris in
triumph to pick up his normal activity, remember himself to the dilettanti
on the verge of forgetting him, and enjoy his success, the friendship of distin-
guished artists, and the animosity of jealous mediocrities. All of that has its
value, of course, and fortune, which never fails to add luster to the fame of
celebrated virtuosos, doesn’t do any harm, either.
The fate of a composer is quite different. The public is far from suspect-
ing the strains, troubles, sorrows, cruel disappointments, humiliations, and
injustices of every sort that he constantly has to face in the early stages of his
career. If he is counting on the established musical institutions to make him
known, the first requirement he will have to meet is that he be already known.
The Opéra sends him off to the Opéra-Comique, the Opéra-Comique to
the Vaudeville, the Vaudeville to the writers of romances, the romance writ-
ers to Musard, Musard to Dufresne, Dufresne to Collinet, and Collinet to
the devil.5 Only with great effort may he at last succeed, after a half year’s
attempts, in having a contredanse performed. If the poor fellow is so unfor-
tunate as to have composed a substantial score, in a style even a little removed
from the banal, with some complexity of means demanding the cooperation
of a number of talented musicians, he has only one way to get his work per-
formed with a modicum of success: find the players himself and stage an ad
hoc concert.
5. Venues evoked in descending order, from the Opéra to the sites of popular balls. Musard,
at the high end, was known for his balls (even at the Opéra), Dufresne for his cornet playing,
Collinet for his whistle flute or flageolet, a popular cousin of the recorder.
Here are the hurdles, preliminary costs, and results that a novice can
expect from such an undertaking.
He must first of all see to the copying of the orchestral parts. If he does
not have the patience to do that long, boring work himself, he will have to
spend at least five or six hundred francs and then very carefully proofread
the copyist’s work. Otherwise, he risks having gross errors surface at any
moment to interrupt the rehearsals, try the patience of the musicians, and
subvert their well-meaning dispositions. He must then look into a venue for
the performance. The theaters are very seldom available; besides, there is not
one in Paris where, without tremendous expense, five tiers of steps can be
set up on stage in a closed circle—which is the only right way to seat a large
orchestra. That leaves the concert halls. Except for the Menus-Plaisirs, which
the Conservatoire programs have made so familiar, all the others are faulty to
some extent or other. Even the Menus-Plaisirs offers a serious drawback that
I am surprised no one has yet been able to remedy: the hall is freezing, and it is
impossible to heat the interior. The consequence of this unfortunate situation
is sadder for the poor composer than one might think. Since the musicians
in his orchestra are all attached to the theaters and cannot, without risking
a heavy fine, miss the rehearsals that normally take place there at noon, the
concertgiver is forced to schedule his own rehearsals at nine o’clock in the
morning—and to do so during the winter, which is the musical season.
Just imagine such rehearsals with people barely out of bed and having to
sit still in such cold that even the most energetic activity would hardly make
it bearable. Two pieces have barely been played before the group starts thin-
ning out. Suddenly some of the violinists are missing. The conductor looks
around in vain. What’s become of them? They’re warming up in the foyer.
It takes a big effort to pull them back. As they re-enter through one door, a
squad of violists and cellists slips through another to gather around a stove
in the corridor.
“Gentlemen, please—don’t leave the orchestra. The concert will be a
failure.”
“We can’t hold our bows any longer. Wait for our fingers to thaw!”
“Let’s go, let’s go! We have to go on!” shout those who have remained in
place. “We have a rehearsal at the Opéra.”
“And we have one at the Italiens!”
“And I have a lesson that I can’t afford to miss!”
“I am on duty at the Tuileries. I have to leave at ten o’clock.”
“Where are the trombones?”
“They’ll be back. They’re having breakfast.”
“All right—what about the first double bass?”

“He’s got a headache.”
In the midst of this turmoil, the conductor has no sooner brought things
back on track with the players he still has than a jarring dissonance stalls
them at the first measure. Some of the instruments had got too close to the
stove while the others had remained exposed to the glacial temperature inside
the hall: they are no longer in tune with one another. No time to remedy the
problem; the only recourse is to grin and bear it, reading through the main
pieces on the program as quickly as possible. It was one of the composer’s
dreams to see them studied with care—a wish he has to give up.
Not everything, though, goes as badly on the day of the concert as you
might expect. In performance, the intelligence of the artists, their attentive-
ness—all the sharper because none is sure of his part—and the presence of
the audience wipe out many blemishes. Besides, if some instrument comes in
wrong or a very obvious error makes a muddle of an interesting passage, the
composer won’t suffer any worse consequence than the next day’s newspaper
report that “the young man has ideas, but his harmony is often incorrect; he
also enjoys producing bizarre and charmless effects that nothing can justify.”
Cruel, this torture that our unhappy beginner has to undergo. It will nev-
ertheless be repeated every time he tries to mount a full-scale performance of
a new work. The impossibility of obtaining good rehearsals will always cause
him the same agonies as at his first trial. If he can offer the orchestra frequent
opportunities to repeat the same composition in public, the players will grad-
ually learn it, and one day the composer will be delighted to hear it emerge
in all its brilliance. But won’t it be too late? And will he ever be able to make
his judges forget their first, unfavorable, impression? I doubt it. In any case,
it is sad to think and almost laughable to say that a chain of events so puerile
and mundane could have such an impact on art. That shouldn’t be—and if
we had in Paris a permanent home for concerts such as the admirable one in
Berlin, it wouldn’t.6
The Société du Conservatoire does not disprove my claim. The only rea-
son performances there are perfect is that they result from numerous and
careful rehearsals. Every member of the orchestra is a member of the Société
6. Berlioz is evidently referring to the great Berliner Singakademie, which had acquired its
own concert hall in 1827 and became the locale where many young performers and compos-
ers gained a hearing. It was there that Mendelssohn famously revealed Bach’s St. Matthew
Passion in 1829, and that Berlioz, visiting Berlin in 1842, had occasion to attend a perfor-
mance of the same work.
and thus personally concerned with the success of the institution. In addi-
tion, the gentlemen in charge are clever enough to schedule their concerts
through the mildest time of winter, from the end of January to mid-April.
The new hall of the Gymnase-Musical (now closed) seemed, despite its
obvious shortcomings, to promise a reliable haven for young composers eager
to make their works known. However, the absolute prohibition against sing-
ing, even in concerts given by musicians unconnected with the administra-
tion of the Gymnase, necessarily robbed them of this resource and inevitably
led to the demise of the institution.7
If we now follow our composer through the often fruitless, almost always
humiliating ins and outs leading to the stage, the picture darkens further.
Whatever his true merit, and even with a fine reputation acquired outside the
theater that he is humbly attempting to enter, almost always, if he somehow
succeeds in getting in, house composers will be a step ahead of him. If the
doorman’s son had the outlandish notion of writing an opera, he could surely
mount it more easily than a great composer already known for his master-
pieces on the best stages in Europe.
To speak only of our Royal Academy of Music, its directors have never
yet engaged a new composer unless forced to, or almost. Thus Gluck writes
Iphigenia in Aulis and brings it to Paris to be staged. The Opéra won’t have
it. “German music!” they say; “barbarous music—can’t be played!” It takes
Queen Marie Antoinette, once a pupil of Gluck’s and still filled with the keen-
est admiration, to intervene and force the administration to accept Iphigenia.
Later on, Spontini writes La Vestale. The score is accepted—conditionally; it
goes into rehearsal only after years of delay. “Freakish music!” they cry; “no
chorus, no orchestra, no singer could possibly understand it—can’t be done!”
It takes nothing less than Napoleon’s irresistible will to compel the Opéra to
mount La Vestale. Barely six years ago, as we all know, M. Meyerbeer, who
had written Robert le diable only after signing a contract in due form with
the Opéra, found himself blocked from staging it, because the director at that
time deemed the opera detestable and objected to producing it. It has even
been alleged that M. Véron himself held up the proceedings before venturing
to present Robert le diable, which made his fortune. That, in my opinion, is
7. The qualifier “unconnected with the administration” refers notably to Berlioz himself,
who at one point was named director of the Gymnase-Musical, with a healthy salary and
a promise of two cost-free concerts a year. As he writes to Liszt (CG 2:281), the prohibition
against singing at the theater—to which he had planned to add a singing school in the man-
ner of Choron’s—doomed both his own position and the establishment itself.
slander. I have far too much respect for M. Véron’s competence, knowledge,
and musical taste ever to believe such a claim.8
In the end, however, Gluck, Spontini, and Meyerbeer did get to the Opéra.
But there is another composer, now hailed as the god of his art, who did not
have the backing of an emperor, queen, or minister; he had only the force of
his genius—and he never made it. He was very young when he came to Paris,
and once his talent as a boy wonder had had its day in the fashionable circles
of the city, he went out of style and was forgotten.9
At the first performance of Alceste, which, as we know, met with very little
success, he was perhaps the sole member of the audience capable of feeling
such music. Outraged by the indifference of the public, he rushed in a fit of
enthusiasm and indignation to embrace Gluck and to accuse the Parisians
of barbarism. “They have no heart, no guts,” he cried; “God keep me from
ever composing anything for them!”10 And true it is that the many immor-
tal works that he left for the stage include not one composed for France.
Although the episode just mentioned would more than suffice to explain
such a man’s determination, so deplorable and insulting for us, I have learned
from my investigations that there was another reason for it, too, which the
artist had no doubt not forgotten when he was railing against the insensitiv-
ity of the Parisians. Despite all the masterpieces he had already produced,
despite Gluck’s backing and friendship, despite quite flattering successes on
the very stage of the Opéra in the Holy Week concerts, he was never able to
find a poet or a director inclined to accept his music.11
There were indeed in those days men of such great standing that this
German fellow’s ambition to write for the stage—this maker of quartets,
symphonies, and piano sonatas—could only appear supremely ridiculous.
That was roughly the time when Paris theaters were mounting the creations
of MM. Desormery, Méreaux, Beaumesnil, Mondonville, Bruni, Propiac,
8. This is, of course, ironic. Berlioz will tell many times the story of Véron’s resistance to the
very work that filled the Opéra’s coffers.
9. The allusion is to Mozart’s difficult year in Paris in 1778, further clouded by the death of
his mother back in Austria.
10. Berlioz liked to tell this anecdote about Mozart and Alceste. Cf. his 1834 biography of
Gluck (Gluck Life, part II, companion website ).
11. At the Opéra, the first step toward performance was the production and acceptance of
a libretto. Without a poet and a “poem,” nothing could go forward. The Holy Week con-
certs Berlioz refers to were the Concerts spirituels founded by Philidor in 1725, which lasted
through the Revolution. Various concerts by that name were held in the early decades of the
new century for Holy Week and other religious holidays.
34. Opéra-Comique, Concerts 211
Chapelle, Dauvergne. . . . 12 When you think of all the greatness and beauty
in Myrtil et Lycoris, Alexandre aux Indes, Tibule et Délie, La Fausse paysanne,
L’Heureux dépit, Les Troqueurs,13 and other such, you realize immediately
how little time poets and directors would have had for Mozart!
H*****
12. Léopold Bastien Desormery (1740–1810), composer, singer, actor; Nicolas Jean Le Froid
de Méreaux (1745–1797), organist and composer; Jean Joseph Cassanéa de Mondonville
(1711–1772), violinist, conductor, composer; Antonio Bartolomeo Bruni (1757–1821), vio-
linist, conductor, composer; Catherine-Joseph Ferdinand Girard de Propiac (1759–1823),
composer and writer; Pierre David Augustin Chapelle (1756–1821), composer; Antoine
Dauvergne (1713–1797), composer, violinist; Henriette Adélaïde Villards de Beaumesnil
(1758–1813), composer—the one woman in this list.
13. Myrtil et Lycoris, one-act pastorale by Desormery (1777); Alexandre aux Indes, three-act
opera by Méreaux (1783); Tibule et Délie ou Les Saturnales, one-act opera by Beaumesnil
(1784); La Fausse Paysanne ou L’Heureuse Inconséquence, three-act comedy by Propiac (1789);
L’Heureux Dépit, one-act opéra-comique by Chapelle (1785); Les Troqueurs, one-act inter-
mezzo by Dauvergne (1753).
35
First Conservatoire Concert

of the Season
This article begins with an impassioned diatribe—one of many in Berlioz’s

career—against the ruinous tax imposed on Paris concerts. If the Conservatoire
itself is threatened with closure by such a tax, how much worse for lesser concert
societies, let alone independent artists such as Berlioz! Then there is the lack of
a good concert hall in Paris beyond the special preserve of the Conservatoire, a
lack Berlioz never ceases to deplore. The concert under review hails the as yet
unknown pianist Thalberg, who rose to rival Liszt during the latter’s escapade
in Switzerland with Marie d’Agoult. Also on the program is a chorus from
Mozart’s Idomeneo, which Berlioz singles out as the highlight of the concert,
even in the company of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony.1
z February 24, 1836

Journal des débats
These afternoon concerts surely offer Europe’s closest thing to perfection in

orchestral performance, and this opinion is shared even by the foreigners most
protective of their countries’ own institutions. Thus the English admit that our
orchestra is superior to that of the Argyll-Rooms Philharmonic Society. The
1. On January 31, 1836, Berlioz published an article similar to this one in RGM. There, he
ends by noting the presence at the concert of a group of blind youths who manifested the
greatest enthusiasm: “We can well believe,” writes Berlioz, “that this must have been for them
a joy comparable to none other.”
35. Conservatoire: Thalberg, Mozart, Beethoven 213
Germans insist on the excellence of their wind instruments but still confess that
nothing could be compared to our French violins, so talented, so energetic, so
warm, and so unified an ensemble that thirty-six bows give a listener the impres-
sion of hearing a single instrument. As for the Italians, I don’t believe they could
ever imagine mentioning their players once they have heard a concert at the
Menus-Plaisirs, though the orchestras of San Carlo, in Naples, and La Scala, in
Milan, enjoy quite a reputation at home. Then, too, the music at the heart of the
Conservatoire’s fine concert programs, music not to be heard elsewhere in France,
is generally the greatest, most lofty, most exquisite that the art has produced. Only
at the Conservatoire can you find Beethoven, Mozart, and Weber; only there can
you be assured of not seeing these illustrious names share the bill with certain
third-rate names that the eye of the music lover sadly encounters all too often.2
Well, this magnificent veritable museum of music was almost shut down
this year as a direct outcome of the state of vassalage in which music is still held
in our country. At every turn, it is taxed and tariffed and made to pay exorbi-
tant duties as if it were forbidden merchandise. An unjust law authorizes, as a
poor tax, a revenue deduction from gross receipts: one-eleventh for theaters and
one-fourth for concert spaces. Charity is a noble thing, of course, and artists are
far from denying it; they might perhaps even claim to possess that fine virtue
more truly than the people ever ready to distribute alms with the wealth of oth-
ers. At no time have musician, actors, or dancers remained deaf to the voice of
poverty. Countless benefit concerts and performances of every sort and in every
theater are given by Paris artists for people completely unknown to them and
often without any claim to their benevolence other than misfortune.
The well-grounded complaints that they voice every day about the oppres-
sion they suffer cannot therefore justify anyone’s calling them selfish or cal-
lous. Moreover, the law intended to alleviate the suffering of the poor is a long
way from its moral and philanthropic goal when it brings about, as we see all
too often, the total ruin of an impresario and the spoliation—there is no other
word—of an impoverished artist. Besides, why such an enormous difference
between the tax on dramatic performances and the one that is crushing to con-
certs? . . . . Why one-eleventh for one and one-fourth for the other? . . . What
has music done to our legislators to inspire such hatred, while light comedy is
honored with obvious protection? Music, after all, is innocent of the jibes and
digs and puns that the theaters so often hurl at our representatives. Music by
2. In fact, lesser names appeared rather frequently—Berlioz duly objected to them—espe-

cially in the early years.
itself cannot mock or jeer; at least, we’ve never heard of the slumber of these
gentlemen being disturbed by the music performed for them in Paris: serenades
are not the custom there and musical rackets, even less so. This bias against
music is not limited to striking it down as soon as it raises its voice. It is pursued
right into the storage rooms of publishers and booksellers. I refer to the require-
ment that new works be registered with the national repository. The number of
deposit copies required for a volume of verse or prose has remained fixed at two;
it was the same for music a few years ago. But the number for music was raised
to three and now, since last November, to four. Next year, perhaps, it will be
five, and there is no reason to think the climb will stop there.
The same path has been followed in recent times for the tax burden on con-
certs. At first, the poor-tax collectors, recognizing the enormity of the amount
that the law allowed them to impose and not daring to take advantage of such
authority, came to a friendly understanding with the artists: concertgivers would
be discharged of their liability by paying an advance determined by the content
of the program and an estimate of the expected income. Later on they came to
disallow any such arrangement, but, still not daring to demand a quarter of the
receipts, they stopped at one-eighth—a huge tax when you realize how costly
most concerts are, and that the amount in question was an eighth not of the
net, but of the gross receipts. The result of such a rate could leave no doubt, since
earlier, under terms incomparably less harsh, the Concert Society found that the
sum intended to cover their material expenses left barely enough to compensate
them for their rehearsal time. They would therefore have been obliged to pay
dearly this year for the pleasure of performing Beethoven—which they could
not resolve to do; nor should they have to. We would have been deprived, in the
end, of an institution with no peer in the world, if the gentlemen collecting the
poor tax had not reflected—I suppose—that it was better to give a little rather
than lose all and wisely proceeded to curtail their demands.
It is right that the public be informed of the situation. One example does
not suffice, however—here are some others. The tax on concerts has brought
about the ruin of a host of individuals, as of a great number of establishments
that could have contributed much to the propagation and progress of music
in Paris. They include the Gymnase-Musical above all.3 True, it was very
3. Built on the boulevard Bonne-Nouvelle and inaugurated on May 23, 1835 by Franz Liszt,
the Gymnase-Musical was constructed in response to the lack of good concert halls other
than the Conservatoire in the French capital. Two concerts at the Gymnase in June 1835
were devoted to the music of Berlioz. The enterprise foundered in the very next season, both
because of the poor tax and because of the decree against the use of vocal forces, so as to avert
competition with the highly subsidized lyric theaters.
difficult to support it with instrumental music alone, choral or other singing

being strictly prohibited there. Still, with an orchestra improving by the day,
the Gymnase would have developed, for symphonic concerts, into a branch
of the Conservatoire. Today it stands ruined and closed. I can say as much
of the concert space that was opened two years ago in the rue Montesquieu;
it didn’t last six months. The same is true of the Hôtel Lafitte, founded by
M. Masson de Puitneuf,4 although his concerts had a far greater chance of
success than the others, since they presented contredanses; moreover, the
halls were arranged like those of Musard, so that people could circulate and
talk and not have to listen to the music—a fact that, I must admit, appeals to
the French almost as much as the Italians. (Poor music!) The concerts at the
Hôtel Lafitte are no more.
It is all easy to fathom. A mere 400 francs an evening would have been
sufficient to cover expenses and pay the musicians. But with the tax drain-
ing off one-eighth of that amount every day, the impresarios, despite their
best efforts, could not avoid sooner or later going under. The injustice of the
law is still more blatant in the case of private, ad hoc concerts, which, being
irregular, entail expenditures four times as great. Here is an instance, one of
a thousand, that proves it.
Last summer a certain foreign virtuoso,5 eager to make himself known in
Paris and pressed by need to put his talent to use, arranges with M. Masson
to give a concert at the Hôtel Lafitte. The contract signed, the artist naively
displays his program, along with his completely unknown name. On the day
of the concert, with the till fairly empty, M. Masson generously reduces the
already minimal rental fee for the hall. Nevertheless, at the end of the con-
cert, the poor beneficiary counts his proceeds and sadly realizes that he has
barely enough to pay the owner, the maintenance man, the copyist, the bill-
board man, the ushers, and the musicians, and that the two or three hundred
francs he had been counting on to cover his stay in Paris and return home are
not to be had. His disappointment can only be measured against the cruel
straits he is now in.
As he is wondering how to manage, the tax collector arrives, gravely
counts the receipts, and prepares to take the eighth which is due him. It is
easier to imagine than to describe the despair and rage that overtake the poor
devil when he feels the law suddenly clawing at his throat. What, indeed, can
4. Masson de Puitneuf (or Puyneuf) inaugurated a concert hall at the Hôtel Lafitte in
October 1834; the theater went bankrupt in August 1835.
5. Perhaps a composite, semifictional character: Berlioz is in storytelling mode.
he do? Sell his instrument? It won’t bring half of what’s required. His suit? He
has only one. There was no prospect of anything but being arrested and led off
to police headquarters . . . had not M. Masson, moved by his plight, reached
an understanding with the tax collector to settle the debt.
Just imagine that miserable artist wending his way through the streets
of Paris under police escort, like a criminal! “What’s he done?” ask the
passers-by. “Did he steal, murder, cause a fire, commit an indecent assault,
conspire against state security?”
“No; he gave a concert. The rogue earned nothing. He has the gall to have
talent but no money, and is shamefully unable to make a donation of fifty écus!”
But let’s turn to the Conservatoire’s first afternoon concert. Besides, it is
useless to dwell on such injustice, since pointing it out gives the writer both
headache and heartache and doesn’t end the abuse.
A symphony by M. Täglichsbeck, 6 new to us, opened the program. This
respectable, occasionally energetic work by a learned musician, rather favor-
ably received in some parts, very coldly in others, seems to me to combine
the usual strengths and weaknesses of scholastic music. The composer treats
his ideas with skill; he runs them through all the transformations that he
finds interesting; he displays them in all the high and low registers of the
orchestra; he presents them in all their configurations, but without appear-
ing to care much about their intrinsic worth. The first movement is undeni-
ably the best—it’s forthright and warm. The Adagio and Scherzo have the
disagreeable flaw of being modeled, in the first case, on the funeral march
in Beethoven’s “Eroica,” and in the second case, on the D major Scherzo of
his Second Symphony. The Finale—insofar as I remember—sounded like
a competent fabric of notes with no clear purpose or color: a good musical
web. “It is a fact,” says Faust’s Mephistopheles, “that a thought factory is like
a weaver’s loom, where threads cross in all directions. Teachers everywhere
love that comparison; it is odd that not one of them has become a weaver.”
If I could quote the original of this passage, it would be easier to understand
how I mean it to apply to music. The German word for “weaver” is Weber.7
6. Thomas Täglichsbeck (1799–1867), German violinist and composer, successively theater

director in Munich, director of court music for the princes of Hohenlohe-Hechingen, and
professor at the Dresden Conservatory. Berlioz enjoyed seeing him at the court of Hechingen
in 1842 (Memoirs, “Travels in Germany I,” 2nd letter).
7. Berlioz freely adapts the 1828 Faust translation by Gérard de Nerval. Translated into English,
the passage says: “A thought factory is like a loom, where the foot moves thousands of threads,
where the shuttle incessantly rises and falls, where the threads slip invisibly, where thousands of
knots form at one time: the philosopher comes on the scene and demonstrates that this is the
Following this orchestral composition, there was a Haydn chorus on

words we found inaudible. Although the meaning of this motet conse-
quently remained a mystery to us, considered simply as a piece of church
music, it seemed to me quite lovely—full of power and majesty at the
beginning, grace and delicacy in the middle, and, throughout, youthful
and bright as though composed just yesterday.8 Next, there appeared an
unknown young man of distinguished but modest appearance. He took his
place at the piano alone, without music or anyone to accompany him. He
began to play quite calmly, with no hint of pretension. A few dozen people
in the hall must have thought, “I could do just as well.” Little by little, how-
ever, his playing grew animated. It took on depth and brilliance. Then came
three or four little figures, or gruppetti, suddenly tossed off at the ends of his
phrases like those showers of dazzling brightness when fireworks are shot
high into the air and fill the sky with noise and light. After that, dividing
each of his hands—multiplying them as it were—he first separated out the
melody from the midst of the harmony and played it with his thumb alone.
Then he let it ripple above the harmony with his ring finger and little finger,
while the left hand and the rest of the right played accompaniments that
would have been no small feat for two ordinary pianists. Finally, after a mass
of daringly strange and gripping chromatic modulations, his musical torrent
roared ahead like an orchestra. The unused music stands shook where they
stood. The orchestra musicians were transfixed, their eyes riveted to the vir-
tuoso; the audience rustled and murmured, barely able to contain its cries of
pleasure and surprise, until the pianist struck his final chord and the whole
house burst into shouts and stamping loud enough to rattle the floorboards.
This admirable pianist was known by reputation to only a few Parisians.
Today his name is on everyone’s lips, and there is nothing but enthusiastic
praise for M. Thalberg. Whence endless comparisons: Has he the extraordi-
nary power of Liszt—the elegant delicacy of Chopin’s capricious works—
the disciplined, distinguished style of Kalkbrenner9—the calm strength of
way things should be. . . . Students all over the world think highly of this reasoning, but none has
yet become a weaver.” Gérard de Nerval, Les Deux Faust de Goethe, ed. Fernand Baldensperger
(Paris, 1932), 83–84. The pun on weaver/Weber alludes, of course, to the author of Freischütz.
8. A notably positive judgment, for Berlioz, of a work by Haydn. An obvious candidate for
the motet so described, according to one anonymous press reader for this anthology (whom
I hereby thank), would be “Inanae et vanae curae.”
9. Frédéric (Friedrich Wilhelm) Kalkbrenner (1785–1849), German pianist, composer,
teacher; the only pianist to appear regularly in Conservatoire programs until his career began
to slow down in 1836. He helped launch Chopin’s career in Paris.
Moscheles,10 and so forth? Rather than take sides amid all these opinions
and connections, let’s just say that M. Thalberg possesses an immense talent
and that we thank the Viennese for lending him to us for the winter. This
way, we are sure no one will contradict us.11
A rather long intermission preceded the sublime scene from Idomeneo.12
The audience needed that time to recover from the electrifying impact of the
young pianist’s performance. Calm once restored, the chorus entered, and
related the heart-rending story of the king of Crete forced by a hasty vow
to sacrifice his child to Neptune. The work shows Mozart great and pure as
ever—simple, moving, and above all as pristine as Gluck. This beautiful style,
from which over the last ten years we have been studiously weaned, made
a reappearance that day with all its emotional power, piercing charm, and
tears. Not even Beethoven’s A major Symphony, which closed the program,
could efface the impression made by the chorus and religious procession in
Idomeneo. To Mozart, this time, go the honors of the day!
H*****
10. Ignaz Moscheles (1794–1870), pianist, conductor, composer, friend of Beethoven’s,

teacher of Mendelssohn’s, collaborator with Fétis on a Méthode des méthodes for piano, friend
of Berlioz and Chopin.
11. On March 19, 1837 (Chronique de Paris), Berlioz states unequivocally: “[Thalberg] suc-
ceeds better with his own music than with the inspired, complex works of the great masters.
Liszt possesses the same qualities, certainly to the same degree; but he is also infinitely pas-
sionate and varied: he can take on any mood, assume any form, and is never more admirable
than when interpreting Beethoven, Hummel, or Weber. The advantage goes thus incontest-
ably to him. This has always seemed to us both obvious and unnecessary to say. But as our
culture is fanatically given to comparisons, the author of this article would have appeared
inexcusable to have written of Liszt and Thalberg without pronouncing himself for the one
or the other” (CM 3:84).
12. Most likely Act III, sc. 6–7, where Idomeneo reveals that the victim is to be his own son.
Idomeneo, rè di Creta (1781), Mozart’s most Gluckian opera, enchanted Berlioz.
36
Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots

Acts 4 and 5
After the enormous success of Robert le diable in 1831, Meyerbeer waited five years
before his next grand opera—meaning a five-act drama replete with choral and
dance numbers, crowd scenes, and a love plot set within the grand march of his-
tory, in this case the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 1572. Writing from
memory and brief jottings during rehearsals and the premiere on February 29,
Berlioz performs the tour de force of assessing the strengths and weaknesses of the
vast work, analyzing selected numbers and singling out innovations in dramatic
structure and instrumentation.1 His three-part article proceeds in crescendo. On
March 6 he gives a plot summary and a glimpse of some highlights. On March
13 he begins the analysis proper (for both, see companion website ), rapidly
reviewing the first three acts—the “crowd” acts portraying, as he says, the passions
of the populace. In the third and last piece, given here, he turns to the final acts,
those portraying the passions of the main characters. These acts are, for Berlioz,
the soul of the work. Genuinely moved, he pulls out all the stops in praise of a
complex, inventive, demanding style whose popular success may bode well for his
own upcoming opera.
z March 20, 1836

Revue et gazette musicale de Paris
1. Directly following the publication of the score on November 6, Berlioz provided two
articles on Les Huguenots for the Journal des débats (November 10 and December 10, 1836),
in anticipation of his new charge of opera reviews for the paper beginning in January 1837.
What I admire most in these last two acts, despite their tremendous effect as
pure music, is the great dramatic feeling and trueness of expression evident in
the slightest parts, and the prodigious power discernible in every idea. In the
earlier acts, the composer occasionally bowed to certain demands—or, if you
will, conventions—that always impinge to some extent on artistic integrity.
Here, guided only by his creative genius, he rises to a height that very few of
his rivals can ever hope to attain. No more question here of light cavatinas
studded with vocal embellishments and pyrotechnics; no question even of
those sparkling, picturesque vocal or instrumental groupings that could be
detached from the drama without harming their appeal. Here he will depict
frighteningly potent emotions; what unfolds will be the drama itself, to
which the first three acts are but a prologue.
Let us try to follow the composer in his monumental progression. Without
stopping to consider the sorrowful, passionate dialogue in recitative, burning
with anguish, between Raoul and Valentine, let us go right to the magnificent
scene of the Oath.2 The principal theme of the ensemble first appears sung
by Saint-Bris alone. It is a clever move by the composer to give his listener
this initial exposure to the solemn melody which, developed and presented
in all its inherent musical richness, will later assume a dark and terrible char-
acter, with no loss of majesty. The idea, moreover, seems to me profoundly
dramatic. In order to win over the Catholic lords to his hateful, all-devouring
fanaticism, Saint-Bris uses music that will soon, after a few episodic phrases
preparing the great outburst, spring with fury from all those heaving breasts.
It is a marvelous representation of the complete unity of purpose that has just
been achieved between the conspirators and their leader. They think like him
and feel like him; they express their feelings and thoughts as he does: nothing
could be more natural. The fiery apostle of murder has converted his listeners;
they repeat his death cry. The spark has ignited a fire. I do not believe that,
as he worked on his score, the composer was following some coldly reasoned
scheme. No; it is inspiration and lyric instinct that speak here, and speak with
all their power.
Still, what craft went into this musical edifice! Saint-Bris’s solo is followed
by a chorus in triple time whose theme, pitting a second against the tonic
right from the start, produces a dissonance with an effect all the greater for
being emphasized by the biting timbre of the valve trumpets. The stringed
2. Berlioz is actually referring to Act IV, no. 23, “Conspiracy and Blessing of Daggers.” There
is an oath scene in Act II, no. 12 (Finale).
36. Les Huguenots: Acts 4 and 5 2 21
instruments accompany this brassy harmony with a constant heavily beating

figure introduced a mezza voce and gradually rising in intensity. During their
sacrilegious hymn, the monks bless the conspirators’ weapons. Everyone’s
excitement is at fever pitch. Then Saint-Bris’s theme, discussed above, reap-
pears in a faster tempo and the choral mass takes hold of it. It thunders and
roars; the orchestra swells and rumbles like the sea at the approach of a storm.
Finally, on the words “Ni grâce, ni pitié,”3 there enters that frightening inter-
mittent drumroll—mentioned in my first article4—played not by two tim-
pani, as I had thought at first, but by only one and a drum: the combination
produces a mixed sound, a hundred times harsher than the sound of two
like instruments. It is impossible to convey an idea of that sublime horror
to anyone who has not heard it. I could say the same of the duet that fol-
lows, which I have not yet been able to listen to with enough detachment to
analyze as I would an Italian duetto. I will therefore not discuss this thrill-
ing music in detail—the modulations, melodies, or general form of the piece.
Two ideas alone have remained clear to me. First, Raoul’s reaction, the sud-
den revolution in the depths of his being when Valentine confesses her love
to him; his astonished cry “Tu m’aimes!” comes from nature itself.5 Greater
truth of expression can hardly be imagined. Then, the conclusion struck me
by its well-motivated and realistic boldness: the duet ends more or less in rec-
itative, with a solo. This denouement, so contrary to our usual expectations,
seems bound to lack the strength and warmth needed to close such an act.
Far from it, however: Raoul’s exclamation “Dieu veille sur ses jours! et moi
je vais mourir!” is so searing that the most energetic ensemble could not be
more effective.6
The style of the fifth act maintains the same high level. I except only
Raoul’s aria when he enters in the middle of the ball. The piece has little
3. “Neither grace nor pity.” This quotation and the next two follow the action of Act IV.
4. In his article of March 6, Berlioz writes: “The most frightening conception, in my opinion,
is that of the chorus ‘Dieu le veut, Dieu l’ordonne’ in the fourth act, after the three monks
have blessed the conspirators’ weapons. The concentrated rage, the bloodthirsty frenzy, the
infernal fanaticism of this passage are beyond description; and when the double rolls of
two timpani players on two timpani join in with the menacing rhythms of the orchestra
and chorus, coming and going every two measures, beginning softly and rising to fortissimo,
I thought, in Grétry’s expression, that the heads of the listeners were about to explode, along
with the roof of the theater.”
5. “You love me!”
6. “May God watch over her life! And I am going to die!” This line from the libretto is in
fact altered in the score to read, in the second phrase: “Dieu! Secourable!” (God! of mercy!)
intrinsic interest; besides, it goes on too long for the occasion. Hearing of the
massacre of their brethren, the Protestants should shout down the bearer of
the news on the instant and rush out of the hall without listening to pointless
details. This flaw is due to the librettist, of course, but the composer could
perhaps have done more to mitigate its effect. The more verbose a libretto, the
more quickly the score needs to move ahead.
The conception of the following trio is quite different. Although very
long, constituting the bulk of the last act all by itself, the trio moves along so
admirably and its development is so carefully managed that it hardly appears
longer than an ordinary piece. The beginning is cast in a novel mold. Marcel’s
stern interrogations, to which the two lovers piously respond in a single voice;
the grave, sad sounds of the bass clarinet,7 sole accompaniment to Marcel’s
melody; the very silence of the orchestra—all of this helps give the scene’s
musical ensemble a solemnity both grand and unexpected.
The choruses emanating from the neighboring Protestant temple reviv-
ify the movement every time it risks slackening, and in the midst of these
hymns, the fanfares of the Catholic murderers pursuing their victims make
for a frightening contrast. Let me add that the fanfares convey in themselves
an horrific message, produced by a single major note cast into a phrase in
the minor. The trumpets play the G minor chord G–B-flat–D, then attack
E–D–C–D. This E, the sixth note of the minor scale altered by a half step, has
a grating effect of diabolic ferocity. As for the aria of Marcel’s vision, “Voyez,
le ciel s’ouvre,”8 with its accompaniment of eight skillfully deployed harps,
it seems to me lacking in originality; its interest depends almost entirely on
the sudden shift from somber scenes to its warm and lively rhythm. But the
composer quickly returns to his habitual style in the conclusion when the
three main characters, embracing one another, refuse to abjure their faith
and force their assassins back as they walk forward, chests bared, into their
blows. This finale, giving voice serially and collectively to so many diverse
emotions—love, piety, religious exaltation, fanaticism, hatred, ferocity, the
enthusiastic resignation of the three martyrs, and the hideous rage of the
populace—offers a magnificent demonstration of the formidable abilities
7. Berlioz, particularly interested in Meyerbeer’s instrumental innovations, notes in a previ-

ous article that the bass clarinet is a new instrument (RGM, March 6, 1836). The trio with bass
clarinet is Act V, no. 27 (Interrogatoire).
8. “See, heaven is opening.” Berlioz has been following the three-part trio of Act V, in which
the bass clarinet accompanies the first section (Interrogatoire); the trumpets, the second
(Chorus of Assassins); eight harps, the third (Marcel’s Vision).
36. Les Huguenots: Acts 4 and 5 223
with which the composer is endowed. Amid this tumult, this clash and clat-
ter of various effects, the organizing principle remains in charge, guiding all
other ideas and never once letting them stray from the path of reason and
good taste. I maintain my claim: Les Huguenots is superior to Robert le diable
and consequently stands as Meyerbeer’s masterpiece.
H. BERLIOZ
37
Concerts at the Conservatoire

The Magic Flute and Les Mystèr es d’Isis;
Mozart’s Corrector
What purports to be a concert review opens with a burlesque description of audi-

ence behavior at the Conservatoire, mirrored in this case by the players, who
are having an off day and fail to do justice to the program, which happens to
include excerpts from Mozart’s Magic Flute. In fact, the topic of the review serves
as a pretext for discussing an issue of general import: the tradition of adapting
foreign works to the supposedly refined taste of the French. With scathing irony,
Berlioz denounces the mangling of Mozart’s Magic Flute by an arranger who,
as a German, he says, should have known better.1 Like Victor Hugo, quoted at
the end of the piece, Berlioz is among those who fought to establish the principle
of fidelity to an original work and conception, something as far from Parisian
habits as could be imagined. We find him here in high gear as crusader, his satire
unfolding in waves of indignation as he warms to his subject.
z May 1, 1836
Journal des débats
Unusually, this concert at the Conservatoire was cold. The audience, unmoved
and rarely applauding, seemed to be at one of those lackluster concerts which
1. Actually, Lachnith was a German-speaking Czech. Note the late date of this so-called
review, which takes as its point of departure a concert held three months earlier, on February
7, 1836. Berlioz gave an actual review of the concert in the RGM on February 14.
37. Magic Flute and Mystères d’Isis 2 25
it attends not in expectation of pleasure but only out of goodwill toward the
concertgiver. Moreover, the players themselves seemed under one of those dis-
agreeable influences of unknown origin that appear every year, with variable
strength, at one or another of these musical solemnities. On such occasions,
the listeners look puzzlingly out of touch with an experience that, just a few
days earlier, would have prompted cries of enthusiasm. The performers are dis-
tracted and inattentive, and their faces show fatigue or boredom. The instru-
ments don’t hold their tuning; at any moment you can hear the worrisome
sound of breaking E strings and popping bridges. The usherettes don’t close
the box doors, but slam them shut. A few latecomers disturb a whole row in
the balcony to reach their seats. During a Beethoven or Mozart Adagio, one
of the stragglers falls; another loses his hat. A third, taking too big a stride,
lurches against his own jacket, which sends loose change spilling out of his
coin pocket. The poor man grows red in the face as everyone turns to look his
way; he stoops nevertheless to track down the francs and half francs rolling
about under the feet of the audience, making little silver clinks that cover the
sounds of the orchestra. Everything seems to work against the music. Thus, on
leaving, you see in the courtyard of the Menus-Plaisirs serious countenances
that two weeks before you could see beaming with excitement. This time there
are no lively conversations, no enthusiastic exclamations, no shaking of hands.
The crowd disperses quietly, everyone eager to return home, thinking more
about the dinner awaiting them than about the music just heard—or if you do
chance upon some discussion, it will contain such snippets as:
“Lovely as ever, that symphony!”

To which the interlocutor replies, “Oh, yes—quite.”
“That Mozart is an impressive fellow, after all.”
“Yes, indeed.”
“Now, that ministry . . .”
“Yes, what of it? . . .”
That is the sort of thing you heard after this concert among the ordinar-
ily ardent admirers of the great German school. It had actually bored them.
One of Haydn’s most youthful symphonies, full of charming details, had
been performed with great care, but in a style appropriate only for Weber and
Beethoven. Haydn is calmer, indifferent to the soul-searching, the raging pas-
sions, the dark and disillusioned meditations so ably depicted by his two rivals.
He requires less dramatic expressiveness of his interpreters, transitions less jar-
ring, contrasts less emphatic, and an overall concern for gentleness, simplicity,
and kindheartedness.2 And so the same orchestra appeared much more com-
fortable in Beethoven’s Symphony in B-flat, although the otherwise flawless
execution of this magnificent work, to my mind not yet representative of the
composer’s grand manner, included two or three quite serious mistakes that
we can consider veritable accidents. Last year I discussed so lengthily the trea-
sures of knowledge and inspiration Beethoven poured into this composition
that I won’t return to the subject now.3 I will not dwell again on the astonishing
enharmonic crescendo in the first movement, the lively rhythm of the Scherzo,
the mad dash of the theme in the Finale, or the pure and truly ethereal tender-
ness of the Adagio. Let us pass on to the day’s excerpts from The Magic Flute.
These scenes had been preceded by a motet for large choirs, also by
Mozart. The grandiose opening would be powerfully effective in a church,
but in the middle there are a few regrettable phrases in a form now old and
worn out—as well as an Italianate coda with the sort of insipid cadence that
the composer of Don Giovanni managed so well to avoid elsewhere.
Of all the works of Mozart, The Magic Flute enjoys in France perhaps the
greatest dissemination as individual pieces and the slightest appreciation as
a complete score. It obtained no more than middling success in Paris when
a German troupe undertook to stage it at the Opéra-Comique six or seven
years ago.4 However, there is almost no concert that fails to include parts of
it. Its opening is without a doubt one of the most admired and admirable of
overtures. The religious march figures in all Protestant church ceremonies.
Fitted out with a few new verses, the melody has been made into a hymn
sung by thousands of children in England. The minor arias have long been
popular, serving the fabricators of variations as material for the greater joy of
guitarists, flutists, clarinetists, and players of that plague of modern music,
the flageolet. And though hardly danceable, those excerpts along with a few
others have even been turned into ballets. You would never guess how much
Mozart earned from this score, which, before reaching us, had made a for-
tune for thirty theaters in Germany and saved from ruin the director who
2. In his review of February 14, 1836 (see previous note), Berlioz portrays Haydn as “a kindly
father in the midst of his children, who smiles at their games and applauds their exercises, but
only insofar as those games and those exercises don’t overstep the bounds of what he regards
as turbulence, immorality, inebriation, and madness.”
3. Actually, two years before, Rén., February 17, 1834.
4. Two performances of Die Zauberflöte (in German) were given in Paris by a company from
Aachen (Aix-la-Chapelle) on May 21 and 23, 1829—not at the Opéra-Comique, as Berlioz
says here, but at the Théâtre-Italien, with the house orchestra. Berlioz briefly reviewed those
early performances in BAMZ on February 6 and 27, 1829.
had commissioned it. Six hundred francs all told! That is how much publish-
ers pay one of our fashionable songsmiths for a romance; and Rubini or Mlle.
Grisi doesn’t make any less for ten minutes’ worth of Vaccai cavatinas. Poor
Mozart! All he needed was the final blow of having his sublime work brought
up to the standards of the French stage—which is what happened.
The Opéra, having only a few years earlier disdainfully refused to admit
him—the Opéra, ordinarily so proud of its prerogatives and its title of Royal
Academy of Music—the Opéra, which until then would have thought itself
dishonored to accept a work already presented at another theater, had reached
the point of considering itself happy to stage a translation of The Magic Flute.
A “translation”? I should say a “pastiche”—a formless, absurd pastiche retained
in the repertoire under the title Les Mystères d’Isis.5 Come now, a translation!
Could the demands of a French audience allow for a straight translation of
the libretto that had inspired such beautiful music? Isn’t it always necessary to
correct, more or less, a foreign poet or composer—even a Shakespeare, Goethe,
Schiller, Beethoven, or Mozart—when a Paris director deigns to grant him the
honor of appearing in his theater? Don’t we have to civilize him a bit? There
is such abundant good taste, intelligence, even genius in our theater adminis-
trations that barbarians like those I’ve just named must needs consider them-
selves fortunate to pass through such able hands. We may not realize it, but
Paris has a host of people with as much creative power as Mozart, Beethoven,
Schiller, Goethe, or Shakespeare. More than one prompter would have been
capable of creating Faust or Hamlet or Don Carlos. Any number of clarinetists
or bassoonists could have composed Fidelio or Don Giovanni. If they didn’t,
well, they were just shiftless or lazy or indifferent to fame. Whatever the rea-
son, they simply chose not to. We couldn’t, then, have Mozart’s German opera
at the Opéra without serious changes not only in the libretto, but in the music
as well. The result is the fine drama in question, that poetic achievement called
The Mysteries of Isis, a mystery in its own right, which no one has ever been able
to penetrate. Once this poetic masterpiece was duly restructured for the stage,
the Opéra’s director, no doubt thinking it a master stroke, turned to a German
musician to restructure Mozart’s music as well, to bring it up to the demands of
that fine poetry. Any Frenchman, Italian, or Englishman who had agreed to
take on that sacrilegious task would look to us like some poor devil with no
5. This version, first performed at the Opéra on August 23, 1801, was based on a French
text; the music was borrowed from several Mozart operas and from a Haydn symphony. The
arranger’s name, Lachnith, could be read as “laugh not”: Berlioz, a lover of puns, regrettably
lacked the German to see its potential.
feeling for true art, just a common laborer with no concept of the respect owed
to genius. But for a German, a man who, at least out of national pride, was
bound to venerate Mozart as a god—a composer (true enough, one responsible
for some incredible platitudes he dubbed symphonies) to dare put his boorish
hand on such a masterpiece! Not blush to mutilate it, sully it, insult it in every
way! It beggars belief. With both scores in hand, I can be sure of what I say.6
The overture to The Magic Flute ends very crisply: Mozart is content to strike
the tonic three times—that’s all. To make it worthy of The Mysteries of Isis, the
arranger-restructurer added four bars, thus pounding out the same chord thir-
teen times in a row, in imitation of the Italians’ ingenious economical way of
prolonging their operas. Sarastro’s first aria, “Ô déesse immortelle,”7 written
for a basso profundo, is performed with the soprano part of the chorus “Per voi
risplende il giorno,”8 enriched with four extra measures due to the genius of our
restructurer-arranger. The chorus then returns, but with various equally remark-
able “corrections,” even the complete elimination of the flutes, trumpets, and
timpani so admirably used in the original. Mozart’s orchestration “corrected” by
such a fellow. What inconceivable impertinence! What a joke!
Elsewhere the impertinence shows up differently. Here our carpenter uses
his plane not on the orchestration, but on the melody, harmony, and accom-
paniments. It happens first in that sublime aria, perhaps Mozart’s most beau-
tiful composition, in which the high priest depicts the profound calm that
the initiates encounter in the temple of Isis.9 At the end of the final phrase,
“N’est-ce pas imiter les dieux,” our carpenter puts C–C–A instead of the two
6. Berlioz is comparing the Lachnith arrangement (Sieber edition) not with an original
German version but one in Italian (Frey edition, with French and Italian texts). References
to Sieber and Frey in the following notes are taken from CM 2:458–60.
7. “O immortal goddess” (Sarastro and chorus, Lachnith/Sieber Act I, sc. 1); cf. Zauberflöte
“O Isis und Osiris schenket,” NMA 19: 194–96, Act II, sc. 1, no. 10.
8. “For you shines forth the day” (Sarastro and chorus, Mozart /Frey Act II, no. 25). “O
Isis und Osiris schenket” is scored not for flutes, trumpets and timpani but for basset horns,
bassoons, and trombones. Flutes and timpani (along with oboes and horns) join in during
the following number, the Duet “Bewahret euch vor Weibestücken,” but not trumpets. The
arranger gremlins must have been at work.
9. The piece in question is evidently a version of Sarastro’s aria “In diesen heil’gen Hallen,” Act
II, sc. 2, no. 15 (NMA 19:233–34). In his article of February 14, 1836, Berlioz evokes this aria as
“the most sublime manifestation in music of the antique spirit of religion. One feels suddenly
transported into the vast Egyptian temples of Isis. One breathes in an atmosphere of peace
and coolness. Through the dim light of the sanctuary, one glimpses the opulent victims of the
priests who instructed Moses and Christ, the sages who initiated Orpheus into their myster-
ies.” And he cites Pierre-Simon Ballanche (1776–1847), a Catholic social thinker and an epic
poet whose Orphée, much admired by the French Romantics, appeared in 1829.
low notes G–F to which the priest’s voice descends with such serene majesty.10
In addition, the viola part is changed, and the two chords per measure set by
Mozart, separated by brief, admirably planned rests, are here replaced by six
notes in the violins and “enriched” by two horns holding a long note that the
composer never imagined.
Further on, it is the slaves’ chorus, “O cara armonia,”11 that the carpenter
pitilessly mangled, using it to fabricate an aria that is neverthess charming,
“Soyez sensibles à nos peines.” Elsewhere, he turned the duet “Là dove prende
amor ricetto” into a trio.12 And as if the score of The Magic Flute were too pal-
try to still this harpy’s hunger, he helps himself to portions of La Clemenza di
Tito and Don Giovanni. The aria “Quel charme à mes esprits rappelle” comes
from Tito,13 but only the andante section, since the very original allegro that
complements it seems not to have appealed to our handyman. Though the alle-
gro could have met the demands of the scene, he pulled it out and wedged in
a substitute of his own making, allowing in a few shards of Mozart’s original.
Do you know what our gentleman then did with the famous “Fin ch’han
dal vino,”14 that burst of libertine fervor which sums up the whole character
of Don Juan? He turned it into a trio for a bass and two sopranos who sing,
along with other sentimental fluff, the following lines:
Oh, I’m enraptured!

My heart’s been captured!
My fate’s uniquely mine!
Let others sit and pine.
You know I love you
As birds above do!
The truest love is mine! (repeat)
10. “Is it not to imitate the gods”: Lachnith/Sieber, Act III, sc. 4; Mozart/Frey, Act II, no. 14.
Again, the given specifics differ markedly from the German version, where the aria is in E major
and the solo part does not, even in the different key, “descend” in the way that Berlioz indicates.
11. “O dear harmony”: Mozart/Frey, Act I, no. 9 (Chorus of Slaves); Lachnith/Sieber, Act
II, sc. 7; corresponding to “Das klinget so herrlich, ” the famous children's chorus from the
Act I finale.
12. “There where love finds a haven”: Mozart/Frey, Act I, no. 7 (Pamina, Papageno);
Lachnith/Sieber, Act II, sc. 2, Trio.
13. “What charm brings back to mind”: Lachnith/Sieber, Act III, sc. 2; Mozart/NMA, La
Clemenza di Tito, Act II, sc. 15, no. 23, Vitellia's “Non più di fiori vaghe catene.”
14. Don Giovanni, Act I, sc. 15, no. 11 (NMA); Lachnith/Sieber, Act II, sc. 2, trio.
Oh, sweet excitement!

It’s no affrightment
When dear your hand meets mine!15
That’s how—dressed like a monkey, fitted out in tawdry castoffs, missing

an eye, an arm twisted and a leg shattered—they dared present the greatest
composer in the world to the oh, so delicate French public, so demanding of
standards. “Look,” they say, “this is Mozart!” Oh, wretches, how lucky you
were to be dealing with decent people who suspected no wrong and trusted
your word! If you had waited twenty-five years to commit your masterpiece
to the stage I know someone who would have sent you a furious rejoinder.16
We have always, in France, thought of ourselves as great lovers of music.
Let us hope there are better grounds for this opinion today than at the time
when Mozart was so torn to shreds at the Opéra. In any case, when a nation
is prepared to tolerate such travesties, it is clearly still in a state of barbarism,
and all its claims to appreciate art are nothing short of ridiculous.
I have not named the culprit who thus flung his rags onto the splendid
mantle of the king of harmony. Deliberately. He died a long while ago, so let
him rest in peace; it would be pointless to afford his name any celebrity. I have
wished simply to underline the intelligence with which musical interests have
long been defended in France and to show the consequences of a system that
tends to place the scepter of the arts in the hands of persons who, wanting to
use it only for monetary gain, are always ready, at the slightest hint of profit, to
encourage the discount sale of culture. For a handful of coins they would—to
quote Victor Hugo—“correct Homer and put the chisel to Phidias.”17
H*****
15. “Heureux délire! / Mon cœur soupire! / Que mon sort diffère du sien! / Quel plaisir est
égal au mien? / Crois ton amie, / C’est pour la vie / Que ton sort va s’unir au mien. (bis) Ô
douce ivresse / De la tendresse! / Ma main te presse, / Dieu! quel grand bien!
16. The “someone” is of course Berlioz himself. In Mem., 65–66, he links Lachnith’s crimes
with those of Castil-Blaze against Weber’s Freischütz, turned into Robin des bois.
17. Berlioz’s defense of original works parallels Victor Hugo’s defense of medieval architec-
ture in The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (Notre-Dame de Paris, 1832) and later of the Greek
Parthenon, subject to irreverent restorations beginning in 1834. The inaccurate quota-
tion, which leaves the line one foot short (“corriger Homère et gratter Phidias”), is from “À
Canaris” (Chants du crepuscule, no. XII, 1835). Hugo flays foreigners come to “restore” and
“civilize” Greece: “Qui viennent au pays des rudes Palikares, / Tout restaurer, mœurs, peuple
et monuments, hélas! / Civiliser la Grèce et gratter Phidias!” Phidias was the preeminent
sculptor of ancient Greece (fifth century BCE).
38
Liszt
A year earlier, in June 1835, the dashing young Liszt had scandalized Parisian
high society by taking off to Geneva with Countess Marie d’Agoult, a woman of
high intellect and social standing with whom he would father three children,
one of them destined to become Cosima Wagner. During Liszt’s absence, an
upstart rival arose—the brilliant pianist Thalberg, who found an immediate
champion in Fétis. In this piece, Berlioz implicitly sides with his friend Liszt,
who has returned to take up the challenge. His liaison and the break from con-
cert life have transformed him, both as a performer and as a budding composer.
Berlioz hails the new, mature Liszt in classical images: as Aeolus, god of winds,
able to curb at will his tempestuous spirit—notably, his former tendency to cover
original works with crowd-pleasing embellishments; as Oedipus, able to deci-
pher Beethoven’s “Hammerklavier” Sonata, that pianistic riddle of the Sphinx.
Berlioz ends by evoking a hierarchy of artistic types in which Liszt stands at the
summit. No question, despite Thalberg’s brilliance, whom Berlioz places higher.
z June 12, 1836

This great artist has shaken the musical world of Paris more in the last few
weeks than perhaps ever before. His departure for Geneva cleared the way
for his rivals (and God knows how many pianists can legitimately claim that
title).1 His unexpected return just when Thalberg’s successes could easily have
1. On Thalberg’s momentous first appearance at a Conservatoire concert, see #35.

been used as a weapon against Liszt suddenly reawakened all their old feelings
of support and created new ones. He gave no concert as such, but the throng
of music lovers and distinguished artists following Liszt about wherever there
was some hope of hearing him play was as impressive as anything we see at
the Conservatoire. M. Érard’s reception rooms were thus invaded more than
once2—as they are often not, even when a full-scale concert there is trum-
peted by all the city’s newspapers and huge billboards. Yet nothing more was
at hand than Liszt alone, performing his latest compositions. Not the slight-
est Italian cavatina; not the flimsiest flute concerto; not the least buffo duet;
no hint of the music that so enchants certain aficionados. Nor was there a
gigantic Beethoven symphony or Gluck chorus or Weber overture meant to
appeal to those other, quite different listeners who, together with the fans
of cavatinas, constitute the musical crowd. Yet the crowd came—despite the
fact that ten or twelve invitations, at most, had been issued. But the news of
Liszt’s reappearance had spread so fast and excited such curiosity that four or
five hundred persons showed up nonetheless, so that, instead of his expected
circle of friends, Liszt faced a real audience, including some people curious
but indifferent and others curious but hostile. His immense success, the diz-
zying effect of his playing, can be compared only to the astonishment felt
even by those he rightly considered his most fervent supporters. At the same
time, a strange and quite unexpected fact struck his auditors: this reappear-
ance was rather an appearance. The Liszt we all knew, last year’s Liszt, has
been left far behind by today’s Liszt. Despite the high point his talent had
already reached when he left us, it has since flown so high, soaring with such
speed far above all known heights, that to anyone who has not heard him
anew I can boldly say: You don’t know Liszt.
It would take an able pianist to enumerate and do justice to the diverse
resources, the novel approaches, the unknown effects with which he has
enriched his already rich playing. Though I keenly felt the impression of all
this, the truth is that even with my right hand alone I have never managed to
play a C major scale at the piano, so I must disclaim any technical competence
to analyze the sources of this incredible power. What I have been able to iden-
tify in the way of new technical feats, in the boundless harmonies spring-
ing from Liszt’s fingers, is limited to nuances and expressive means hitherto
2. Two large salons, or drawing rooms, had been linked to make a concert space on the
ground floor of the house owned by Pierre Érard, of the family of piano, harp, and organ
manufacturers. The greatest pianists of the day frequently performed there, as in a similar
venue maintained by Érard’s chief rival, Pleyel. Berlioz and Liszt were faithful to Érard.
38. Liszt 2 33
universally considered beyond the reach of the piano. These include broad,
simple melodies sustained in perfect legato, and clusters of notes sometimes
flung out with great violence, yet with no harshness or loss in harmonic gran-
deur. They include melodic progressions of minor thirds, or diatonic runs in
the low or middle registers of the instrument (where vibrations last longest),
played staccato at the most incredible speed, in such a way that every note
comes out dry and clean, fading instantly, wholly detached from the notes
before and after. The effect is like something that might be played by a steam
engine on a fine double bass with the heel of the bow—for I cannot imagine a
human arm, even the arm of a Dragonetti or a legion of Dragonettis,3 capable
of ever attaining such celerity. I won’t speak of the dazzling brilliance of his
runs or of his magnificently composed accompaniments; it is indescribable.
Moreover, in this regard even the people least disposed to admire Liszt real-
ized long ago that he was capable of anything.
But the most astonishing aspect of his new development, the feature that
his youth and nervous temperament gave us least reason to expect, is the
notable change he has brought to the expressive side of his playing. Liszt had
often been severely criticized for the sometimes excessive decorative nuances
with which he marbled his playing, the frequent alterations in tempo, and
the ornaments with which he almost unconsciously overlaid certain composi-
tions that required only simplicity and calm. Such criticism, though it might
have been voiced differently, at least served to draw the artist’s attention to
an important point. It led him to ask himself this question: “Should the
poet-artist let himself be carried away by feverish inspiration while creating
his work and tremble with the impassioned emotion that he aims to arouse
in others—or is he to remain constantly above such feelings, mastering them,
controlling them, shutting them away in the deepest caverns of his heart and
ruling over them like Aeolus over the winds, ready to give them free rein on
occasion to whirl about madly until his genius calls a halt, like Neptune pro-
nouncing ‘Quos ego,’ 4 and calms the storm that they unleashed?”
Between these two positions, Liszt’s good sense allowed no hesitation.
Master or slave, mover or moved, the will or its instrument. Remain midway
up the mountain, where mist and storm and darkness reign, or climb to the
3. Domenico Dragonetti (1763–1846), Italian double bass virtuoso and composer, whom
Berlioz elsewhere praised for having vastly simplified and improved the playing of his instru-
ment by tuning it in fourths, rather than fifths (Rén., October 12, 1835).
4. With this unfinished exclamation, literally “which I . . . !” Neptune reasserts his authority
over the winds (Virgil, Aeneid, 1:135).
summit and from that pure, calm height survey the torrential rains and flash-
ing streaks of thunderous lightning below . . . The choice was clear. And, in
taking the higher position, Liszt had no need to fear being classed among
those cold and powerless beings who remain inert and incapable of action.
There is no mistaking the true sensibility discernible in his every move. By its
slightest gestures the soul, like Venus in her gait, reveals its divinity. A phleg-
matic man may aim to look imperturbable, but his most strenuous efforts to
demonstrate energy and warmth—which he never had—can only look ridic-
ulous; whereas a hot-blooded fellow uncloaking himself for only a moment
will burn everything with the merest touch of his flame. There are clearly
artists who feel nothing, who have never been moved by their art, and who
consequently have never been perturbed by emotion in the exercise of their
profession (for they view art as a profession, an occupation, a trade). Such
men usurp the name of artists; they have never merited it and never will. They
cannot even be critics, since criticism requires understanding, and under-
standing requires feeling. They are practitioners, mechanics, theoreticians of
greater or lesser skill—men often useful but often, too, the banes of art.
There are other artists endowed with the opposite qualities: those tor-
mented, crushed, sometimes killed by inspiration.5 They are indeed artists,
but they are not yet mature. If they live, they will reach the age of strength
and reason, unless they are imbeciles whose vanity makes them persist to the
end in the failings and follies of youth. All the same, only rarely is true sen-
sibility not accompanied by sound judgment and an intelligence that, if not
vast, is at least lucid.
Finally, there are artists who are fully formed: men who, endowed with
imagination, strength, and sensibility, nevertheless remain in command of
these precious faculties and dispense them only as they wish. If caught up
in turbulent excesses of passion, they still retain enough levelheadedness to
determine how and when to suppress them. There you have the total artist,
the eldest son of Art. He alone is the friend and almost the equal of his father,
surrounded by his younger siblings, Art’s spoiled children, and followed by
his more or less faithful servants. Liszt today has entered this solemn stage in
the life of the artist, as proven by the compositions we have lately heard no
less than by his steadily evolving talent as a performer. In numerous passages
5. A type coincident with the Romantic hero of Goethe’s Werther or Vigny’s recent
Chatterton, premiered on February 12, 1835; Berlioz himself contemplated suicide at various
junctures but has now passed that dangerous stage in the artistic trajectory. On the artistic
hierarchy he is postulating and its implications, see Kolb, “Primal Scenes.”
38. Liszt 2 35
of his new works it is easy to recognize the highest purely conceptual merit,
which leaves an impression wholly independent of his powers of execution.
I can cite, among other similarly remarkable passages, the introduction to
his “Pirate Fantasy,”6 where a two-bar phrase is treated with admirable skill,
without ornaments or runs or any of the musical pyrotechnics at his disposal.
The piece on themes from La Juive is no less effective.7 There you have the
great modern school of pianism. We can well expect anything of Liszt as a
composer today, just as we cannot guess where he will stop as a performer.
A transformation as sharp and sudden as the one I have noted bespeaks an
inner impulse whose ultimate significance is impossible to calculate. In sup-
port of my opinion I can cite the reaction of everyone who heard him play
Beethoven’s great sonata, that sublime poem regarded by almost all pianists
till now as the riddle of the Sphinx.8 A modern Oedipus, Liszt interpreted
it in such a way that the composer must have quivered with joy and pride
in his grave. Not one note was omitted; not one, added (I was following the
score). Not a single tempo change occurred that the text did not call for;
no inflection, no idea was weakened or diverted from its true intent. In the
slow movement above all, in the playing of that extraordinary hymn which
Beethoven’s genius seems to have sung to itself while gliding alone through
the immensity of space, he constantly maintained himself at the height of
the author’s thought. Nothing more can be said, but anything less would be
wrong, because it is true. It was the ideal performance of a work reputed to be
unperformable. In his playing of a work still barely understood, Liszt proved
himself to be the pianist of the future. To his great honor.
6. “Fantaisie sur le pirate.” Though Liszt never published anything by this title, he might
have improvised a fantasy on themes from Bellini’s Il Pirata (1827). Or Berlioz might have
confused it, absent a program, with “Reminiscences of Bellini’s Norma” (1841).
7. “Réminiscences de La Juive,” op. 9, based on Halévy’s opera of 1835.
8. I.e., the nec plus ultra of piano sonatas, the “Hammerklavier,” op. 106.
39
Antoine Reicha
The old misbelief that Berlioz was poorly trained can easily be refuted by the
simple fact that he studied counterpoint at the Conservatoire with the famously
rigorous Reicha. Here Berlioz pays tribute not only to his former teacher, but
also to other recently departed musicians, including Boieldieu, Bellini, and espe-
cially Choron, the ardent defender of religious music whose loss Berlioz cannot
seem to lament often enough. Here he waxes lyrical about this picturesque figure,
bringing him to life in his daily activities as an imaginative teacher, a keeper
of precious musical traditions, and an artist devoted body and soul to his art.
The passionate Choron is thus the antithesis of Reicha, whose love of scholastic
music—“ for the eye rather than the ear”—Berlioz deplores, while praising his
integrity as a pedagogue open to innovation and change.
z July 3, 1836
Journal des débats
The world of music has sustained a number of cruel losses in the last two
years. In rapid succession, Choron, Boieldieu, Bellini, and now Reicha have
followed one another to the grave.1 The deaths of the first two were foresee-
able; the others, on the contrary, came to their admirers as painful shocks.
Boieldieu, long afflicted by a respiratory illness whose progress would yield
1. Choron died on June 29, 1834; Boieldieu on October 8, 1834; Bellini on September 23,
1835; and Reicha on May 28, 1836. Berlioz wrote obituaries on Choron in Rén., August 11 and
GM, September 7, 1834; on Boieldieu in Rén., October 14, 1834 (#15); and on Bellini in Rén.,
September 30, 1835.
39. Reicha 2 37
to neither the mild climate of Nice nor the pure air of Tuscany—Boieldieu,
whom we could all see out on the boulevard, near the end of his life, weak
and pale, exposing his wasted limbs to the hot sun of July—Boieldieu dying
looked already dead.
Choron, ardent and tenacious, unusually active and persevering, pas-
sionate about the art to which he sacrificed his entire fortune, was rightly
persuaded of the utility of his undertakings, of the magnificent result that
would inevitably reward them, and convinced of the excellence of his educa-
tional system; his many efforts were compensated in part by the fine success
of his pupils and the well-deserved celebrity of his musical matinees, which
introduced us to many magnificent long-forgotten compositions. Choron
was the sole spokesman that choral music has ever had in France; he would
have brought it within reach of everyone in Paris and extended its appeal
to the main cities of the kingdom if only the government had supported
his endeavors. Choron would at last have put an end to the well-justified
rebuke by England, Germany, and Italy that we utterly fail to understand the
monumental works of Handel, Bach, Durante, Leo, Hasse, and Palestrina.2
Choron’s whole life was the life of his work; his pupils were his very self—
beyond that, there was no Choron. He embodied in full the captivating
ideal that Hoffmann’s genius made so appealing in “The Cremona Violin.”3
Wedding Crespel’s bizarre nature to Antonia’s fantastic sensibility, Choron’s
soul lay not in an instrument but in a school of music, and, like Antonia
dying when the mysterious violin shatters, Choron was doomed to die of the
blow that struck his school. He was an artist in the highest sense of the word,
one of those fiery, fanatical, committed, jealous martyrs to their faith—a race
more rare every day. He was a man out of his time; he should have been born
in Italy in the era of the Masaccios and the Domenichinos.4 He loved his
pupils, gave them his time and his money, glorified their merits, inflated their
successes, swooned upon hearing them. At other times, when their under-
standing was too slow to catch up with his, he would berate them violently
2. Except for the sixteenth-century Palestrina, the others number among the most famous
composers of the eighteenth century.
3. Hoffmann’s story appeared around the time of this article in a volume of collected transla-
tions by Loève-Veimars. The title character of “Rat Crespel” (Councilor Crespel), as the story
is known in German, is a fanatically idealistic violinist whose daughter Antonia’s voice and
being are mysteriously linked to his Cremona-made violin.
4. Tommaso di Ser Giovanni, known as Masaccio (1402–1428) and Domenico Zampieri,
known as Domenichino (1581–1641), much-admired Italian painters.
in word and deed, beat them, ready to kill them for one more wrong note.
After the highest hopes, he must have suffered cruelly from the many dis-
appointments that came one after another. He must have died a thousand
deaths before the last. And yet he could not have been more eager to live. In
his moments of happiness, he was utterly, deeply happy. How the face of this
poor great artist would beam when, at the head of his band of children and
youths of both sexes, he headed out of Paris to breathe the fresh air of the
countryside!
Reaching the plains of Montrouge, near his home, how often these chil-
dren of harmony, nestled among the springtime blossoms, would surprise the
coarse peasants with the magic of the sublime hymns their master had taught
them, hymns he also knew how to stage with an exquisite touch. On one such
beautiful day in May, when nature seemed to smile anew, when heaven and
earth, flowers and birds all sang of love, Choron might cry, “Come, children!
Let’s do the chorus from Écho et Narcisse, ‘Le Dieu de Paphos’:”!5 And all
those fresh young voices would intone as one the immortal hymn that the
spirit of ancient times had dictated to Gluck. If, on the contrary, autumn
storm clouds darkened the sky, they might sing a melancholy chorus from
Lesueur’s Les Bardes—“Que le rivage retentisse,” perhaps, or “Le Chant de
Selma, la Chasse des bardes.”6 At still other times, when the summer sun
flooded the fields and woods with its glory, dazzling but calm, placid, and
serene, Choron’s children, seated all together in the shade of some vener-
able tree and singing the famous Palestrina madrigal “Alla riva del Tebro,”7
seemed to refresh themselves with delight in those harmonious waters, pure
and deep—but barred to us today. How could artistic sensibility not develop
in young beings trained with such care, by studies so skillfully directed! Poor
Choron! What spirit! What innate exuberance was his! What he could have
accomplished with his intelligence, had it been understood and appreciated!
What an instrument to lift up anyone capable of rising! But his school was
slandered as useless and censured during the July Revolution by the absurd
prejudice against an Institution of Religious Music. Gradually it was sapped
of its means of existence. The school’s foremost students had already left for
5. “Dieu de Paphos et de Gnide,” the final chorus from Echo et Narcisse, Gluck’s last complete
opera (1779), Act III, sc. 5.
6. Berlioz refers to Lesueur’s five-act opera Ossian ou Les Bardes, first to the introductory
Chorus of Bards, Act I, sc. 1 (“Let the shores resound”), then to Act II, sc. 3.
7. “On the shore of the Tiber,” a four-voice madrigal that Berlioz loved and admired, despite
his sometimes dismissive general verdict on Palestrina.
39. Reicha 2 39
French or foreign theaters to reap the benefits of the excellent method and
the elegant musical taste that Choron had imparted to them. One of them,
the celebrated tenor Duprez, now demonstrates that success before Italian
audiences. The others, held back a while longer by the sacrifices of every sort
through which Choron endeavored to shore up his crumbling edifice, were
forced in the end to scatter, as the unfortunate director found it absolutely
impossible to go on providing for their needs. And once the door of the
school had closed behind them, it never reopened save to permit the passage
of its founder’s bier. His death, as I have said, surprised no one: whoever knew
Choron recognized it as the natural consequence of the deplorable error—to
say nothing more—that pitilessly demolished a lifetime of labor and a future
rich in hope.
Bellini, on the contrary, dying at the age of twenty-eight in mid-career,
adulated and embraced by all of Europe’s opera lovers, barely touched by the
good-natured admonishments that critics occasionally wrote on sand and
that were blown away the next day by the gust of success—Bellini was bound
to stir regrets all the deeper, as his particular talent had brought him into
fashion and his demise was wholly unexpected.8
Reicha’s death, less cruelly premature, was hardly more foreseeable.
Despite his sixty-six years, he still enjoyed robust health and youthful vigor
that could hardly be spoiled by a lifetime of quiet work wholly free of ambi-
tion and of the cares that even the most justifiable ambition always entails.
Unruffled by nature and more inclined to observe than to act, Reicha real-
ized early on that he lacked the necessary perseverance to face the many diffi-
culties, sorrows, and disappointments that a composer inevitably encounters
at every step, especially in France, before he can make his works known to the
public. With philosophical resignation, he determined to take advantage of
whatever performance opportunity might arise but not to waste time or effort
seeking to create any and especially not to set out in desperate pursuit of one.
He calmly wrote what he was pleased to write, piling up work after work—
masses, oratorios, quartets, quintets, piano fugues, symphonies, operas, trea-
tises. He had some performed when he could, printed others whenever he
had the means, and trusted to his lucky stars for the survival of the rest. He
always moved with deliberate calm, deaf to the voices of the critics, uncon-
cerned by praise. He showed no attachment to awards when they marked the
8. Bellini’s first success in Paris with I Puritani, in 1831, sealed his worldwide celebrity. He
was praised for sensibility and melodic grace, and criticized for deficiencies in rhythmic vari-
ety, harmonic depth and orchestral color.
success of the young artists whose education at the Conservatoire was in his
hands and whom he taught with all the care and attention imaginable. His
uneventful life was thus placid but certainly not unproductive, to judge only
by his pedagogical works and by the many talented pupils whom he trained—
rather than by his compositions, most of which remain unknown to us. All
we know of Reicha’s rich output is his famous quintets for wind instruments,
two quite lovely septets that we were able to hear a few times at the Tilmant
brothers’ matinees, and a Schiller ode for double chorus, this last, along with
a number of fugues, included in his Treatise on Advanced Composition.9
This learned musician was born in Prague on February 27, 1770.10 He was
not yet ten months old when he lost his father. He consequently became the
ward of his uncle Joseph Reicha, who lived in Bonn on the Rhine and served
as music director for the elector of Cologne. Educated by his uncle, Reicha
entered the elector’s service as a chapel musician at the age of fifteen. From
the start he was an avid student, not only of musical performance and com-
position but also of algebra, physics, philosophy, and the other disciplines
taught at the University of Bonn. He attached particular importance to his
study of mathematics. “That is the study,” he said one day during a lesson,
“that enabled me to be in complete control of my ideas. It tamed and cooled
my imagination, which had been running wild; subjecting it to reasoning and
reflection doubled its power.”
I am not sure whether this idea—that his imagination gained so much
from his study of the hard sciences—is as sound as Reicha thought. Perhaps,
on the contrary, it fostered his love for abstract combinations and mental
games in music and his pleasure in resolving certain thorny propositions that
serve only to turn art away from its true goal. That was perhaps what pre-
cluded the success of his works and made them lose in purely musical expres-
siveness, melodic or harmonic, what they gained (if it was in fact a gain) in
combinations explored, difficulties overcome, and curious operations meant
more for the eyes than the ears. Whatever the explanation, his early compo-
sitions that obtained a hearing in Bonn were very encouragingly received.
9. Traité de haute composition. No record seems to exist of the septet performances by the
Tilmant brothers: see CM, 2:486n8. As for the hymn on words by Schiller, Berlioz alludes to
it in an article hailing Reicha’s accession to the Institute in May 1835 as proof that Reicha was
a “veritable revolutionary” (Rén., June 7, 1835). It is the hymn with double chorus (“Horch!
Horch!”), whose accompaniment by strings and eight timpani, each tuned to a different
pitch, was indeed something to capture Berlioz’s attention.
10. Actually, February 26.
39. Reicha 241
That was when he threw himself into the study of composition in company
with his colleague and childhood friend Beethoven. The closeness of the two
great musicians appears not to have lasted long, very likely because of the
utter divergence of their views in matters of musical poetics. I am led to that
thought by memories of hearing Reicha speak quite coldly about Beethoven’s
works and with ill-disguised irony about the enthusiasm they aroused.
In 1794 the French took over the electorate of Cologne; the court dis-
persed, and Reicha took up residence in Hamburg, where he stayed five years.
To train himself in French prosody, he composed a two-act opera called
Obaldi ou les Français en Égypte.11 The administration of the Théâtre-Français,
established at the time in Hamburg, heard good reports about this score and
offered the composer a handsome fee for the right to stage it. But Reicha, on
the advice of some friends, preferred to take his opera intact to Paris, where
he arrived for the first time in late 1799. The Opéra-Comique refused to
mount Obaldi without a complete redrafting of the libretto. Since in that
case the music, too, would have required a complete revision if the best parts
of the score were not to be ruined, it is easy to understand the composer’s
readiness to forgo the then widely sought honor of being performed at the
Opéra-Comique. He preferred to make his debut with a symphony, which
had considerable success at the concert hall in the rue de Cléry.12 The desire to
hone his skills and profit by the counsel of a great artist led Reicha to spend a
few years in Vienna with Joseph Haydn. On his arrival in Austria toward the
end of 1802, Reicha received from Louis Ferdinand of Prussia—a music lover
no less zealous than distinguished, the prince who would fall a few years later
at the Battle of Jena—a flattering letter offering him remarkably attractive
terms to join his household and teach him counterpoint.13 Reicha, however,
preferred to sacrifice such benefits in favor of the company of Haydn, which
was more precious to him. During his time in Vienna, he composed and pub-
lished a considerable number of works, one of which, dedicated to Haydn—
Thirty-six Fugues for Piano—is regarded as extraordinary in its genre.
11. Obaldi, or the French in Egypt.

12. The Concerts de la rue de Cléry, founded in 1799 to revive orchestral music (notably
Haydn symphonies) that the Revolution had put out of favor, lasted until 1804. Reicha’s sym-
phony was performed in 1801. The conductor at the time, Jean-Jacques Grasset, was the same
who would lead an ill-fated performance of Berlioz’s prizewinning cantata in 1830. See CG
1:380 and Mem., 117, chapter 30.
13. Ludwig Ferdinand of Prussia (1772–1806) was killed at the Battle of Saalfeld, not Jena.
Besides the job teaching counterpoint, he had promised Reicha a future position as chapel
master in Berlin.
In 1808 he returned to Paris, never to leave again. On his arrival he had a

new symphony performed at the Conservatoire, to no less acclaim than his
first.14 Known until then only as a composer, Reicha in 1809 entered the pro-
fessoriate and took on the doubly demanding task of teaching the art and
science of music. He demonstrated such superiority that finding an apt suc-
cessor seems to us today, if not impossible, at least extremely difficult. The
post that he left vacant will probably best fall to the student most thoroughly
identified with his method and his system, the one showing the most con-
vincing combination of the requisite qualities. M. Barbereau, a winner of the
Prix de Rome and, I believe, a longtime assistant in Reicha’s class,15 strikes us
as well qualified to succeed the master. Among others who similarly stand
out, M. Auguste Seuriot should not be overlooked.16 Reicha thought so well
of him that he included a five-part fugue by this talented pupil as a model
in his Treatise on Advanced Composition. A great number of other musicians
scattered throughout Europe today, who have achieved varying degrees of
fame, had the honor of studying with Reicha. Some have become success-
ful conductors; others, first-rank virtuosos, with no small part of their musi-
cal intelligence and superior technique stemming from the lessons of their
teacher of composition. Still others are composers of works remarkable for
their pure and vigorous style.17 A few nonprofessional musicians, well deserv-
ing of far greater recognition than they have yet had, owe to Reicha their
understanding of harmony, which had earlier been a mystery to them.
The most celebrated of his disciples, whose name, because of its very celeb-
rity, had hardly occurred to me when I was speaking of pupils, is our great
composer of orchestral music and creator, too, of two works for the stage that
glitter with gems of the first order. I refer to M. Georges Onslow.18
14. Reicha’s new symphony was programmed at the Conservatoire on May 7, 1809.
15. Auguste Barbereau (1799–1879), Prix de Rome in 1824, conductor at the Théâtre-Français
and the Odéon (both 1832–42) at the time of this article, seems not in fact to have been one
of Reicha’s assistants. He was, however, a theorist of note in his own right, who published a
Traité théorique et pratique de composition musicale in 1844.
16. Louis-Auguste Seuriot (1801–?), violist and composer, was Reicha’s assistant in the teach-
ing of counterpoint and fugue (1823–30). A composer of violin duos, he was a violist in the
Société des concerts du Conservatoire.
17. Besides Berlioz, Liszt and Gounod numbered among Reicha’s famous students.
18. Though he devoted his life to music and gained considerable renown, especially for his
instrumental works, André-Georges Onslow (1784–1853) probably comes up in connection
with nonprofessionals because his fortune made him independent of the usual opera-oriented
career path for composers in France. Between Onslow and Berlioz the respect was mutual,
39. Reicha 2 43
It is notable that, despite the apparent austerity of Reicha’s precepts, no

teacher living has been more readily inclined than he to acknowledge an
innovation running counter to established rules, as long as it produced a suc-
cessful effect and showed a hint of progress for the art. When I think how
tightly swaddled our schools still try to keep the art of music, I have to say
that, in the man possessing it, this virtue reveals the greatest integrity and the
keenest intellect. In 1816 and in 1822 Reicha staged two grand operas at the
Royal Academy of Music, Nathalie and Sapho.19 But the composer had not
much to applaud in either of these productions, for the weakness of the libret-
tos dampened the success of the scores. Reicha became a French citizen in
1829. In 1831 he was awarded—belatedly, in my view—the cross of the Legion
of Honor. In 1835, more belatedly still, considering his many qualifications
for the honor, he was named to succeed Boieldieu at the Institute, a position
he occupied only briefly.
More than a hundred of Reicha’s compositions are in print. Numerous
others exist in manuscript form, among them several of the greatest impor-
tance for the art of music. His pedagogical works, used by anyone devoted to
the serious study of music theory, are:
1. Treatise on Melody (without its relation to harmony);

2. Complete Course in Practical Harmony;
3. Treatise on Advanced Composition (in two volumes);
4. The Art of the Opera Composer.20
H*****
although in 1835 (Letters, 125) Berlioz discounts Onslow’s praise of the Pilgrim’s March in
Harold in Italy.
19. Reicha’s two operas, both in three acts, both performed at the Opéra, were Nathalie ou
La Famille russe (July 1815) and Sapho (December 1822).
20. Traité de mélodie; Cours complet d’ harmonie pratique; Traité de haute composition; L’Art
du compositeur dramatique.
40
Musical Entertainments
Le Siège de Corinthe at the Opér a; M. Ole Bull;
M. Labarre and His Harp School; The Music
of Public Festivals; Paris Artists and Music
Lovers Celebr ating the Victory at Fleurus in
1794; Amateur Fund-r aiser for the Wounded in
1830; The Huge Chorus in the Galerie Colbert
Dismissing in few words a Rossini revival at the Opéra, Berlioz takes us in slow
crescendo from a severe yet encouraging critique of the Norwegian violinist Ole
Bull to the season’s improbable hero, a virtuoso harpist and founder of a harp
school—then on to a climactic evocation of two extraordinary events from the
Revolutions of 1789 and 1830, each bearing witness to the power of music to cel-
ebrate and ennoble the masses. The link is the harp school, which triggers visions
of universal musical education and of vocal and instrumental resources suffi-
cient to produce modern, monumental works of as yet unsuspected spiritual and
emotional power.
z July 23, 1836

Journal des débats
The musical season just ended was brilliant. The immense success of Les
Huguenots, of L’Éclair at the Opéra-Comique, the fine concerts at the
Conservatoire, the discovery of M. Thalberg’s breathtaking talent, the appear-
ances of M. Ole Bull at the Opéra, and finally the revival of Le Siège de Corinthe
40. Musical Entertainments 2 45
turned Paris this winter into the musical center of Europe.1 Rossini’s opera
had not been performed for quite some time. Although the current staging is
incomparably better than the original, the unevenness of the music and the
unrelieved triviality of the libretto made the limited success of the revival
easy to foresee. Most people cannot listen to three hours of singing without
the support of some dramatic interest or the appeal of brilliant spectacle.
True lovers of opera, on the other hand, like it too well to appreciate hearing
the noblest inspirations intermixed with pieces in a style unworthy of the
composer of William Tell and ill-conceived for a discerning audience.
The public’s obvious pleasure at hearing M. Ole Bull must have proven to
M. Duponchel that he was right to include the Norwegian musician in the
Opéra’s concert schedule.2 To listen to certain persons not entirely disinter-
ested, any number of Parisian violinists could easily have replaced the foreign
virtuoso, who evidently owed his success on Europe’s foremost lyric stage to
his foreignness and the effect of his peculiar name. Though I cannot deny
that France all too often favors artists who have nothing French about them,
I am compelled to do justice to M. Bull. His talent is indisputably of the sort
that commands the attention and interest of true friends of music. What he
lacks, time alone can provide: confidence, stage presence, familiarity with the
audience, more polish in his virtuoso passages, more rigorous melodic into-
nation, the art of proper phrase endings, and skill in managing effects. What
he possesses, and what neither time nor patience nor the most learned stud-
ies can ever provide, is deep expressiveness, true feeling for melody, natural
elegance of style, and great warmth and originality. We urge him to practice
attentively the melodies he plays on the G string in order to correct an intona-
tional flaw that too often destroys their charm. It seems to me that he should
also be more demanding of his own compositions, which reveal considerable
inexperience, a dearth of strong ideas, and inadequate integration of the solo
part with the orchestral ensemble.
I would not voice all these criticisms if Ole Bull merely struck me as one
of the two or three hundred first-rank violinists trilling high C and ripping
through the scale with left-hand pizzicato like Paganini. Instead, I see the
1. Respectively: Meyerbeer’s new opera (see #36); opéra-comique by Halévy; piano virtuoso;
violin virtuoso; opera by Rossini (1825).
2. As Berlioz predicts further on, Ole Bull was indeed destined to a stellar career and did
return to Paris in 1840. During his early years in Paris (from 1832) he roomed with the violin-
ist Ernst, who would become a good friend of Berlioz’s (see #20).
young Norwegian as destined to make a great name for himself among the
artists of the new school. We look forward to his concerts in 1840.
There is another talent of the first order whom I am glad to discuss with
my readers: M. Labarre.3 Despite the contempt for the harp professed by most
orchestral players and by every last pianist, I confess my own weakness for
this noble instrument. Everything about it is poetic—its sound as well as its
shape. Its rich harmonic trellis is pleasing to the eye, as are the graceful con-
tours that the Irish poet Thomas Moore likened to the body, the outstretched
arms and the flowing tresses of a tearful siren.4 The timbre of its upper strings,
when gently plucked, has a melancholy charm unrivaled, in my view, by any
other instrument.
It is true that, with little variety in its resources, the harp has a limited role
to play. Despite recent improvements in the mechanism, it is capable of few
chromatic effects and nothing in the way of sustained sounds. But an artist
like Labarre is able to overcome such significant difficulties and even turn
them into a source of power, while taking care to respect the instrument’s
natural character and not ask of it more than it can offer. In his hands, the
harp, despite its imperfections, is one of the most sublime of musical instru-
ments. I know of none more graceful and elegant in certain melodic forms,
smoother in certain runs, more energetic in chordal harmonies. I must nev-
ertheless criticize Labarre for a persistent inclination toward showy effects
and displays of force verging on harshness. This flaw will no doubt soon dis-
appear, given that the artist has already succeeded in completely hiding any
awkwardness or labor in his most complicated passages. He hasn’t the slight-
est problem with fingering. He makes light of it on the harp as Liszt does on
the piano. And what exquisite taste! What delicacy of feeling! Labarre is an
admirable harpist, and personally, I am sorry not to have more frequent occa-
sions to hear him.
The success he has had in the great cities of Europe, particularly in Naples,
London, and Dublin, can almost compare with the fanatical response to
3. In 1833 Berlioz referred to Labarre as a fine harpist in reviewing the music he had com-
posed for Taglioni’s new ballet, La Révolte au serail (Rén., December 8). The review is not
ungenerous, but it was clearly as harpist that Berlioz most valued Labarre.
4. Of the nine poems by Moore Berlioz set to music in 1830 (Nine Irish Melodies, op. 2), no. 7,
“The Origin of the Harp,” is the one he is thinking of here. It evokes the metamorphosis of a
siren unhappy in love into a beautiful harp. Berlioz used harps frequently in his music, most
famously in the Ball Scene of the Symphonie fantastique.
Paganini’s appearance in Paris.5 Labarre is moreover one of our most grace-

ful composers. Troupenas has just published an album of his containing
several delightfully fresh vocal pieces, notably Victor Hugo’s “La jeune fille
d’O-Taïti.”6 But what we are especially glad to announce is that Labarre, yield-
ing to the wishes of many amateur and professional musicians eager for les-
sons, recently opened a school specifically for harp, and we have already had
a chance to appreciate its brilliant results at a public recital that included his
pupils. In a short time the harp has become even more fashionable than the
piano, which is now such a fixture in the backrooms of the rue Saint-Denis
and even in the garrets of grisettes that musical chic has madly rushed into
the study of the harp, a fine instrument sadly neglected since its palmy days
under the Empire.7 It would be a great plus for the future of music if this chic
whim were to grow into a true taste and composers could avail themselves
of the talent of numerous skilled harpists, as they now can of fine violinists.
The harp became in earliest antiquity the instrument of religious ceremonies
and public festivities. Today it still today enjoys a sort of cult status among
the peoples of Ireland and Wales, faithful guardians as they are of the poetic
traditions of their Milesian ancestors.8 Who could stop these same traditions,
further enhanced by all the prestige that recent musical progress could afford
them, from one day becoming part of our way of life?
Where would be the harm if the already pomp-filled ceremonies of
Catholic worship were divested of the ridiculous tatters of barbarous
music that are meant to adorn them? In Corpus Christi processions, for
5. Paganini’s appearances in Paris in 1831 and 1832 gave rise to a veritable frenzy. They hap-
pened to coincide with Berlioz’s absence in Rome as prizewinner of the French Institute’s
competition for composers, and Berlioz consequently never heard him in concert. But
Paganini heard Berlioz, commissioned the viola concerto that would become Harold in Italy
(1834), and financed the Roméo et Juliette symphony (1839).
6. “The Girl from Tahiti.” Victor Hugo’s poem on a native beauty who kills herself when her
foreign lover departs, “La Fille d’O-Taïti,” is from Odes et Ballades (1822), IV:7.
7. The harp was an instrument for the aristocracy in the late eighteenth century and still dur-
ing the Empire: Marie Antoinette and Josephine both played the harp. Its popularity under
the Empire grew in relation to its associations with the Irish bards dear to the Romantics, on
the one hand, and to improvements in the mechanism, on the other. Berlioz speaks ironi-
cally about the piano’s popularity, which (he says) is such that even in the working-class rue
Saint-Denis the grisettes—young women of modest circumstances who flirt with upper-class
men—have pianos in their garrets. Upper-class women must therefore turn to the harp to set
themselves apart.
8. The Milesians (from miles hispaniae [soldier of Hispania]) were the mythic invaders of
Ireland representing the Gaelic-speaking Celts.
example—instead of the sour falsetto of a few hideous castrati, as in Rome,

or the wild bellowings of five or six cathedral cantors, as in Paris, followed by
a military band performing old saws, as everywhere, what if there were sacred
hymns composed by the greatest masters and sung by a huge choir of fresh-
and pure-voiced young women and men accompanied by a hundred harps?
Would the thrilling harmony of three thousand vibrating strings joined with
the voices’ religious melody not be at least as impressive as the bass drum
beating time for the duet from I Puritani?9
Musical sensibility must be a rare thing indeed if the Catholic clergy, so
jealous of the splendor of its worship, so openhanded in attracting master-
pieces of architecture and the representational arts, not only does so little to
promote religious music, but does not even realize that if the Devil himself
were to parody the sacred rites, he would produce nothing worse than what we
hear every day. Yet so many means are available today! So many materials are
there to be used! We can see, when the government organizes musical festivals,
what a mass of artists, singers, and instrumentalists we have in the city of Paris
alone, even though we lack the choral institutions of Germany. The number of
trained music lovers who could, if need be, take part in such gigantic concerts
is still greater. At a time when music was much less widely disseminated in
France than it is today—in 1794—there came an opportunity to appreciate
the effect of such a gathering of all the musicians, artists, and music lovers in
the capital. On June 26 at daybreak, couriers arrived with the news that the
Austrians had been routed at Fleurus by General Jourdan.10 It was the vic-
tory that secured our borders and earned us mastery over Belgium. That same
morning the National Convention assembled and, after the reading of the
bulletin, decreed that the great event be celebrated that very evening with an
extraordinary concert in the Tuileries Garden. All theaters were immediately
closed, and all the musicians in Paris, men and women, were requisitioned;
although immense, the orchestra pit could not contain the whole crowd. The
9. There are many duets in I Puritani, Bellini’s last opera (Théâtre-Italien, January 1835), but
in a review of February 1, 1835 (Rén.), Berlioz singles out the famous “Suoni la tromba” in the
second act, with its unison duo between Tamburini and Lablache (baritone and bass) that
makes the audience “roar with delight,” even though the main theme “lacks originality and
presumably produces such an effect on the masses only because of the frightful volume of
sound emanating from those two incomparable voices.”
10. The victory over the Austrians by General Jean-Baptiste Jourdan (1762–1833) at Fleury,
in Belgium, was indeed celebrated by a great musical concert, which featured a victory hymn
composed for the occasion by Charles-Simon Catel (1773–1830), a composer remembered
especially for his Treatise on Harmony (1802), which Berlioz discovered as a boy.
program comprised pieces fitting the occasion and known broadly enough
to be performed without rehearsal: the chorus from Armide, “Poursuivons
jusqu’au trépas l’ennemi qui nous offense”;11 the chorus from Tarare, “Brama,
si la vertu t’est chère”;12 the chorus from La Caravane, “La victoire est à nous”;13
from Philidor’s Ernelinde, “Jurons sur nos glaives sanglants”;14 and a few other
pieces, concluding with “La Marseillaise.”15 The final stanza, “Amour sacré de
la patrie,” was sung slowly and reverently by the women while everyone stood,
bareheaded. After the final lines, “Que nos ennemis expirants / Voient ton
triomphe et notre gloire,”16 there was a moment of silence. All of a sudden the
windows on the balcony of the Marshalls’ Hall flew open; three bells rang the
alarm; one hundred drums sounded the charge; twelve cannon on the river
terrace and an infantry regiment fired simultaneously—and the whole chorus
broke once more into “Aux armes, citoyens!”
At this thunderous and unexpected roar, terror seized the crowd. All took
flight, rushing toward the garden exits in frightening disarray. “In all my
life,” reported M. G***, once a musician in the imperial chapel, from whom
I learned all these details, “in all my life, I’ve never heard music of so ter-
rifying an effect, with such an accompaniment.”17 The audience’s panic was
no doubt due in part to that accompaniment. However, I can cite a similar
impression, caused solely by the power of voices, that I experienced myself.
It was in 1830, a few days after the Revolution.18 I was crossing the court-
yard of the Palais-Royal when I thought I heard some music I happened to
know quite well. I approached the source and to my great surprise found ten
or twelve young men singing a warriors’ hymn of my own composition. The
11. “Let us pursue to the death the foe who offends us,” from Gluck’s Armide (1777).
12. “Brama, if virtue is dear to you,” from Salieri’s Tarare (1787; libretto by Beaumarchais).
13. “Victory is ours,” from Grétry’s La Caravane du Caire (1783).
14. “Let us swear on our bloodstained swords,” from Philidor’s Ernelinde, princesse de
Norvège (1767)
15. Claude-Joseph-Rouget de Lisle (1760–1836) composed a Chant de guerre (War Song) for
the Army of the Rhine (1792), which became the Republican “Marseillaise,” banished under
the Empire and Restoration but reinstated as national anthem after 1830.
16. “Sacred love of our country”—“May our dying foes / Behold thy triumph and our glory.”
17. Most likely Jean-Jacques Grasset, whose name comes up in CG 1:380n. and 563.
18. The narrative that follows is taken up by Berlioz in Mem., c hapter 29, pp. 109–11, with a
few small changes, up to the words “like birds after a burst of thunder.”
words, translated from Moore’s Irish Melodies, were by chance ideally suited
to the occasion.19
Not accustomed to that kind of authorial success, I was delighted by
the discovery. I stepped into the circle of singers and asked their permission
to join in—which they granted, adding a bass part that, for this chorus at
least, was perfectly useless. But I took care to remain anonymous, and I even
remember a rather sharp exchange with the fellow who was conducting about
the tempo he was giving my piece. Happily, I got back into his good graces
by singing correctly my part in Béranger’s “Le Vieux Drapeau,” which he had
set to music and we performed a moment later.20 Between the selections in
this open-air concert, three men of the National Guard, our protectors from
the crowd, went up and down the rows of listeners, shakos in hand, solicit-
ing contributions for those wounded during the Revolution’s three-day tur-
moil. Their gesture struck the Parisians as so bizarre that the collection was
a success. We saw a hail of 100-sou coins that would no doubt have gladly
remained in their owners’ pockets if driven only by public commiseration
and the charm of our harmonies. Meanwhile the crowd continued to expand
as the space surrounding our patriotic Orpheuses contracted more and more,
and the veritable armed force protecting us was about to prove powerless
against the mounting tide of curious onlookers. We managed to escape, but
the flood followed us. When we reached the Galerie Colbert, which leads to
the rue Vivienne, surrounded, trapped like circus bears, we were charged to
start singing again. A pretty clerk, whose notions store faced the windows
of the Galerie’s rotunda, then invited us up to the second floor of her shop,
from which, with no risk of being trampled, we might “pour torrents of music
onto our ardent admirers.”21 The proposal was accepted, and we began “La
Marseillaise.” At the opening notes, the noisy horde milling below us stopped
and fell silent. Stillness could be no deeper or more solemn when the pope
appears on his balcony over Saint Peter’s Square to utter the benediction “urbi
et orbi.” After the first stanza, the crowd was still silent; after the third, more
19. Berlioz refers to “Le Chant Guerrier,” the third of his Irish Melodies. The apt words
are: “Oh! ne’er forget the brave who fought and bled, / Who for their country’s cause their
blood have shed; / Oh! shall a tear, a prayer be now denied / To those who fought for Freedom
and who died.”
20. Pierre-Jean de Béranger (1780–1857), the most popular song writer of the age, wrote “Le
Vieux Drapeau” (The Old Flag) in 1820. Its refrain is: “When will I shake off the dust / That
tarnishes its noble colors” (Quand secouerai-je la poussière / Qui ternit ses nobles couleurs).
21. Berlioz is parodying a line from a poem by Lefranc de Pompignan on the death of
Rousseau.
40. Musical Entertainments 251
silence. This was not at all what I wanted. Looking at that immense gather-
ing, I recalled that I had just arranged Rouget de Lisle’s immortal anthem
for large orchestra and double choir and that, instead of assigning the parts
to “tenors” and “basses,” I had written across the score: “Everyone who has
a voice, a heart, and blood in his veins.”22 “Ah!” I thought. “That’s just the
thing!” I was terribly disappointed by the stubborn silence of all those listen-
ers, and at the fourth stanza, I couldn’t take it anymore. I shouted, “Good
Lord! Let’s go! Sing, why don’t you!” At that, at last, the crowd belted out its
“Aux armes, citoyens” with the ensemble and energy of a trained choir. Just
imagine: the gallery leading up to the rue Vivienne was packed; the rotunda
in the middle was filled; four or five thousand voices were crowded into a
resonant space closed to right and left and above by glass partitions, and
below by resounding stone slabs. Think: most of the singers—men, women,
and children—were still feeling the hot breath of cannon fire. Imagine, if you
can, what must have been the effect of that thunderous refrain! I literally fell
to the ground, and our little troupe, frightened by the explosion, was struck
absolutely dumb, like birds after a burst of thunder.
No drums were there, no bells, no artillery—only the power of a great
mass of voices that good fortune chanced to assemble.
It is hard to predict when French music will be able to reap the fruits of
the Minister of Public Education’s recent decision to introduce singing into
the primary-school curriculum.23 There will be a shortage of teachers for quite
some time. Little by little, however, instructors will be trained. And when
musical sensibility that was developed first in teachers’ colleges can finally
emerge and be transmitted to the enormous number of young pupils deprived
till now of means of instruction—when musical notation has become as famil-
iar to much of the nation as the letters of the alphabet—then, I believe, we shall
recognize the truth of an opinion already expressed by a number of eminent
artists: that the future of music lies in the artistic deployment of the masses.
H*****
22. Hymne des Marseillais, published by Schlesinger in 1830 and dedicated to Rouget de
Lisle, who responded with delight and asked Berlioz to collaborate on an opera. Berlioz left
for Rome at the time and no such collaboration occurred. Rouget de Lisle died just a month
before this article appeared, on June 20, 1836, and was undoubtedly on Berlioz’s mind when
he wrote.
23. On February 22, 1836, a new minister, Baron Pelet de la Lozère, replaced François Guizot
(1787–1874), who had established free universal elementary education in France. The addi-
tion of singing classes seems to have been an initiative of the new minister.
41
The Progress of Musical

Education in France
M. Joseph Mainzer and M. Aubéry du Boulley
Fired by tales of the great mass festivals of the French Revolution, Berlioz dreamed
of making music on a grand scale, but the times were against him: the institu-
tions that had made those festivals possible, notably the church choir schools, had
gone under with the old regime. Yet the recent decree of universal primary-school
education, new initiatives for military music, and efforts at workers’ education
stirred his hopes for a broader propagation of music than ever before. His impa-
tience for results is palpable in this piece, written a mere six months before he
received a government commission for a requiem—his first major chance to turn
dreams into reality. In the following decade he himself would organize and con-
duct mass concerts far eclipsing the recent ones he writes of here. Before evoking
visions of the future, he begins with a wide-ranging analysis, punctuated with
charges of “ barbarousness,” of the types of music currently practiced in Paris and
in the provinces. He then turns to the two brave pioneers of popular music edu-
cation who occasion this article. There is a ring of Saint-Simonian fervor in the
final call for a “great and beautiful revolution in our culture,” a call to educate
the masses for the benefit of humanity and of his own cherished art.
z September 18, 1836

Journal des débats
41. Musical Education 253
Our national culture, still barbarous when it comes to the art of sound, will
have undergone a massive and splendid revolution if the next twenty years
can maintain the impetus of today’s extraordinary progress in musical edu-
cation, both in Paris and in the provinces. The charge of barbarousness will
perhaps repel many people and lead them to accuse me of pedantry; I can
easily justify it, however. Ignorance of the basic principles of an art, inability
to experience its effects, indifference to its power: are these not sufficient to
constitute barbary in this regard? I think it hard to deny. All I have to do,
then, to vindicate so harsh a judgment is to show proof of this lack of musical
culture and inclination in the nation’s masses.
At the stage that the art has now reached, music in Europe can hardly
count more than five types: religious, dramatic, concert, chamber, and mili-
tary. Barely thirty years ago, the large number of choir schools operating in
the main cities of France bore witness to the existence of an art of religious
music no doubt quite imperfect and very far from its inherent sublimity, but
nonetheless making evident progress and giving rise to reasonable expecta-
tions. Several of today’s well-known composers came out of the provincial
choir schools and owe their early training to the often distinguished organ-
ists who directed them. Lesueur, Méhul, and Boieldieu are examples. What is
called a choir school nowadays in the few churches that attempt to cultivate
the art of music is not really worthy of the term. All you need to be convinced
is to hear, at religious festivals, the poor children who have supposedly been
taught choral singing. Paris in this respect can claim no great superiority
over the provinces. The school at Notre Dame is a pitiful ruin; and although
from time to time, thanks to the ad hoc cooperation of a few outside artists,
music makes a timid appearance in important ceremonies at Saint-Roch or
Saint-Eustache,1 the poor choice of compositions, their mediocre execution,
and the generally secular tone of the proceedings reveal that the organizers
of these concerts, priests or laymen, have not the slightest feeling for music
in general and are absolutely ignorant of religious music in particular. A cer-
tain set of people will go to Saint-Roch on certain days “for the music” and
because the players will include Musard’s first lieutenant, the hero of the con-
tredanse, the valve cornet, shining in the front row.2
1. Berlioz made his concert debut at the Church of Saint-Roch with his Messe solennelle; his
Requiem would be performed in Saint-Eustache at three different times in his life.
2. Berlioz ironizes about the intrusion of musical vulgarities in religious spaces.
The Chapelle royale no longer exists; nor does Choron’s school. In a word,
Paris today is as stripped as the provinces of institutions of religious music.
Their decline—or rather, the destruction of those we had—must be attrib-
uted as much to political turmoil and the cooling of the Catholic faith as to
the all too real disregard for the art of music among most of the higher clergy.
They spend large sums to adorn the interior of their churches; they buy paint-
ings; they even pay a high price for an organ, since that fine instrument can
be considered part of the adornment; but only reluctantly will they engage an
organist. No question, of course, of a singing school or a choir—it costs too
much! It seems that these gentlemen value only what can be seen and touched;
what can be heard is too fleeting for them, too far beyond their appreciation
and understanding.
What leads to this singular materialist tendency among the priests of
the most spiritual of religions? Ignorance, inability to feel and appreciate
the effects of music, incomprehension of that sublime language—in short,
barbary!
With few exceptions, the lyric theaters in the provinces lack the where-
withal for properly performing the masterpieces of modern composers. That
takes choruses and an orchestra, and even if the solo parts were sung by artists
of true talent, the choral and instrumental forces generally available outside
Paris are such that great scores would nonetheless be disfigured. It is hard to
imagine the ruthless cutting that conductors are forced to do in the scores
of Weber, of Spontini, of Meyerbeer, of Rossini, so their musicians can play
them. Is this not barbarous?
I shall not speak of chamber music or concert music, meaning notably
quartets and symphonies, the most difficult types by far. Such music can
be heard, rarely, only in Paris, where music lovers consider it a luxury. This
restriction is going to provoke loud protests from more than one of our phil-
harmonic societies, many of which boast of playing Haydn, Mozart, and even
Beethoven. Provincial virtuosi will perhaps forgive me for wounding their
sense of pride when they realize that it takes nothing less than the orches-
tra of the Conservatoire to execute a complete Beethoven symphony, that
no other among the many Paris orchestras has to date attempted to do so,3
and that even the finest musicians in all of Italy could hardly constitute the
elite force capable of carrying off such an honor. Besides (and I don’t mind
3. At this date other Parisian musical societies seem to have ventured only excerpts, e.g.,
Valentino’s Concerts Saint-Honoré, whose performance of the last movement of Beethoven’s
Fifth in October 1837 inspired the Beethoven passage of Balzac’s César Birotteau.
mentioning here what I think about the matter), even if provincial musicians
did not lack the needed instrumental skill, an even more serious fault would
clearly reveal the vanity of their ambitions. I refer to their presumptuous,
self-flattering refusal to rehearse. A provincial orchestra would deem itself
dishonored if asked for four rehearsals of a symphony. Well, gentlemen! Do
you know that the Conservatoire devoted more than thirty to Beethoven’s
last symphony, the D minor? Yes, that marvelous orchestra, admirably disci-
plined and conducted, made up of the foremost musicians in Europe, each of
whom, far from seeking to flaunt his own talent, endeavors rather to blend his
part as ably as possible into the general harmony, bringing to the rehearsals
a patience, an intelligent attention, and a respect for the conductor that you
probably don’t even suspect. The flute isn’t there to outshine the clarinet, nor
the oboe to overshadow the bassoon; the violins don’t attempt to out-muscle
one another; they don’t do battle with one other in agility or strength; and
when a part presents serious problems, no one is embarrassed to take it home
and work on it. As for those musicians, professional or not, who without a
second thought and just to pass the time, pick up their instrument and fear-
lessly plant themselves before a Beethoven trio or quartet and make bold
to “carry it off” unrehearsed, as they say, I cannot call them anything but
barbarians. What they rip up with their overworked bows harbors a depth
of meaning that they don’t begin to understand, a poignancy of expression
that they don’t feel, a challenge of ensemble, of nuance, of finish and preci-
sion to which they are completely blind. What they perform bears almost
no resemblance to the composer’s creation. Delicate shades are made crude,
vibrant sounds weak, tempos either plodding or rushed. Certain strange har-
monies become monstrous knots of sound, original melodies sheer nonsense,
and unusual rhythms ridiculous confusion. Horrible. But they go on playing,
because they are mindless—barbarians.
Of all branches of the art, military music is perhaps the least retrograde in
our provinces. We are far from the Germans in this respect, yet less than in all
others. Here again I have to set Paris apart; almost all theater musicians play
in the capital’s military bands, which gives these bands an enormous superi-
ority over all others. But it will not be long before we see astonishing progress
in the playing of wind instruments. An artist of great, well-deserved reputa-
tion, M. Beer, first solo clarinet at the Théâtre-Italien, has been appointed to
head a special school for military music.4 It was the Minister of War’s good
4. Frédéric Beer, or Berr (1794–1838), German clarinetist, professor at the Conservatoire.

The Minister of War at the time, Nicolas-Joseph Maison, assigned Beer the task of creating
idea, and the army will lose no time in benefiting from it. Soldiers showing
the greatest musical aptitude and wishing to leave the ordinary ranks in order
to learn how to play wind instruments will be sent to Beer’s school for three
years. Their studies there will be notably more fruitful than those they would
have had available in their provincial barracks at the hands of teachers often
devoid of talent. Afterward, back within the army, they will little by little
train a mass of talented instrumentalists, and ultimately, before long, France
will be well provided with a large number of excellent and complete military
bands. But this is not the sole instance of progress. There is another to be
cited, one no less important and even more extraordinary, in that the govern-
ment has no part in it. It is due solely to the tireless perseverance and enlight-
ened zeal of a private music lover.
M. Aubéry du Boulley has founded in the departments of Eure, Eure-et
Loir, and Orme a far-reaching Philharmonic Society that encompasses the
towns and villages of Évreux, Nonancourt, Damville, Bernay, Beaumont-le-
Roger, Conches, Breteuil, Verneuil, Tillières, Grosbois, Chartres, Dreux,
Brezolles, Alençon, Mortagne, Gacé, and Longny.5 Bringing to bear all his
influence as a resident landowner in Grosbois over the people more or less
dependent on him, he has taught them music and, undaunted by the consid-
erable costs, furnished most of his pupils with the expensive instruments they
needed. He began by instructing his brother, his sons, his gardener, his other
workers, and a few villagers. He thus constituted an excellent brass band com-
prising three bugles, six clarion trumpets, a valve cornet, a valve trumpet, an
alto ophicleide, three bass ophicleides, two buccinas,6 and three trombones.
Not content to stop at that, he gathered new pupils from the towns and vil-
lages just named and eventually brought them together as a single group that
today numbers two hundred musicians. It is hard to say which is more to be
admired in this man: his exceptional lack of self-interest or his unshakable
persistence. It is certainly a rare expression of the love of music when someone
a school for military music (Gymnase de Musique militaire) in 1836. Each student was to
study a wind instrument, chamber music, and conducting, so as to be able to teach and direct
others.
5. Prudent-Louis Aubéry du Boulley (1796–1870), author of several books on music, ama-
teur (but Conservatoire-trained) composer whose Les Amants querelleurs was performed at
the Opéra-Comique in 1824, is remembered chiefly for the seminal work Berlioz applauds
here: that of disseminating music in the provinces.
6. Buccin in French, the buccina was “a pseudo-antique variety of trombone used during the
French Revolution for festive occasions, with the bell shaped into a dragon’s head” (Apel,
Harvard Dictionary of Music, 103).
like M. Aubéry du Boulley, possessing only a modest fortune, puts his time and
money to such use. What labors, what studies, what sheer running about he has
had to undertake, first to find the right candidates, then to train them and bring
them together!7 The entire group assembles twice a year. Before each gathering,
the tireless mentor travels around to all the villages, towns, and hamlets where
little bands of pupils are scattered, spends two weeks carefully rehearsing with
each of them, and takes his leave only once they are well prepared and perfectly
ready to do him honor on the day of the great assembly. The musical ardor that
animates him has already spread so far among the people living in his depart-
ments that the main towns vie with one another for the favor of hosting the
Philharmonic Society, even though the favor is conditioned on their willingness
to house all the musicians free of charge. The latest festival of this sort took place
in Breteuil (Eure) this past July.8 There were two hundred players. At eleven
o’clock in the morning they gathered at the church, which was surrounded by a
huge crowd of listeners who had streamed in from over fifteen leagues all around.
M. Aubéry conducted. The pieces he had composed especially for the event were
performed with perfect ensemble. No sense of rivalry disturbed this brotherly
gathering; the desire for collective success was the only force motivating the
members of the association. In the evening they staged an outdoor ball at a spot
prepared for them, where they performed several quadrilles while five hundred
people, surrounded by fifteen thousand onlookers, danced to the music of that
huge orchestra.9 Monday morning at six o’clock, drums and clarion trumpets
called the little army of musicians back to Breteuil’s main square, where, after a
farewell piece played by the entire association, each separate division sounded a
joyous fanfare and started on its way home. The effect of this concert, as can well
be imagined, was immense, and there is every reason to believe that the Society’s
membership will promptly double.
An analogous phenomenon is at this moment drawing the attention of all
the friends of music in Paris. M. Mainzer, a very worthy German musician
and, moreover, a distinguished critic, long an advocate in his articles of intro-
ducing music into public education and tired of awaiting the implementation
7. Almost all Berlioz’s concerts required such “running about”—finding, assembling, and
rehearsing ad hoc groups of musicians.
8. July 13, eve of Bastille Day, celebrated since the advent of the new regime in 1830.
9. In French, the word orchestre can also mean “band.”
of the Guizot statute concerning elementary schools,10 took the lead with
the unpaid initiative—and rugged task—of teaching choral singing to Paris
workmen. Seconded by only one other artist similarly devoted to the progress
of music, he has succeeded in bringing together some six hundred adult stu-
dents between twenty and thirty years of age from three different neighbor-
hoods. Already, thanks to the patience of the two teachers, the assiduousness
of the learners, and a clear and simple method of instruction, these voices,
untrained barely eight months ago, now sing, accurately and with proper
intonation, multipart ensemble pieces composed for them.
Their sessions take place at eight o’clock in the evening in various lec-
ture halls that the administration has made available to the two professors.
The eagerness of these workers to take their seats in singing school after the
day’s demanding labors, their obvious pleasure in assembling, their surprise,
enthusiasm, applause at each new achievement all clearly prove that they are
already acutely sensitive to the appeal of the powerful art they have just come
to know. Several of them possess magnificent voices, of rare breadth and
purity. Who knows but that in a few years they may not contribute to the
brilliance and prosperity of our lyric theaters! But, without going so far as to
stir more than reasonable hopes in their teachers, I fail to see what could stop
the new institution from progressing rapidly enough for the public soon to
take notice.
I give M. Mainzer two years at most, and if he maintains the same steady
pace, nothing will prevent him from staging a public-holiday concert at the
Louvre or in the courtyard of the Luxembourg.11 For ears accustomed to our
coarse street cries, it will be a cause of no little astonishment suddenly to hear
the vibrant harmony of these robust male voices. I think that such a chorus of
six hundred men, whose training would have cost France not one sou, would
be a present worthy of being offered to her, and that our two unpretentious
artists, M. Mainzer and his follower (whose name unfortunately escapes
me),12 would have deserved well of the nation.
Let’s be patient. The artistic horizon is broadening on its own. But when
the government has come to recognize that, of all the channels of civilization,
10. François-Pierre-Guillaume Guizot (1787–1874), Minister of Education and noted histo-

rian, succeeded in passing the law that took his name on June 28, 1833. It decreed free elemen-
tary public education for the first time in France.
11. In fact, Mainzer would venture a first concert less than three months later, on November
27 (see #42).
12. His name was Mermoud (?–?), and he was the director of the École protestante in 1830.
the study of music is for the population at large one of the most reliable, one of
the most promptly effective and least dangerous—when this idea, only barely
glimpsed today, has become a serious conviction, oh! then, as I said at the out-
set, we shall see a great and beautiful revolution in our culture whose marvels
can be admired even now and whose consequences for music are incalculable.
H*****
42
Polytechnical Society
Awards Ceremony
Much sooner than Berlioz had predicted (see #41), the workers’ chorus founded
a year earlier has given its first concert. In reviewing it, he falls into some of the
quasi-religious rhetoric of the proto-socialist Saint-Simonians, with whom he
has sympathized. It is interesting to learn that Mainzer’s chorus forms only one
part of the curriculum offered to the workmen at the Polytechnical Association;
music was added in the belief that moral education is best provided by cultivat-
ing an “artistic sensibility.” Though generous in his critique, Berlioz will later
become disenchanted with this particular choral initiative, which turns out to
have distinct limitations. At this point it resonates with his own deeply held
belief in music’s civilizing power, a belief touchingly confirmed by the workers’
serenade, after the concert, for their choir director.
z December 4, 1836
The auditorium in the Hôtel de Ville looked impressive last Sunday. A huge
crowd was bustling about in the section set aside for the public; another,
calmer crowd, looking grave and almost reverent, occupied the entire per-
formance area. The student workers of the Polytechnical Association, who
made up the latter group, were there to taste the first joys of their initiation
and taste the reward for their yearlong efforts to reach for the fruits of the
tree of knowledge. From a philosophical point of view, this solemn ceremony
was both noble and touching. It revealed what results the patience and true
42. Polytechnical Society 2 61
humanity of a few generous souls could produce; it admirably demonstrated

the effects of the potent fellow feeling for the suffering of common folk that
led them to bundle together their various areas of expertise in order to free
their brethren from the basic cause of most of their woes: ignorance. There
were several speeches. The last, by a professor of geometry whose name unfor-
tunately escapes me, struck me as notable in all respects.1 The audience was
particularly impressed toward the end, when the speaker, referring to the
moral instruction that some persons had been surprised to find missing from
the association’s curriculum, declared that only a Franklin could believe him-
self capable of teaching such a course;2 but that, absent the participation of a
great philosopher like him, the surest motivating force behind any attempt to
direct popular education toward the Good would appear to be an artistic sen-
sibility. The workers’ teachers thought they could most effectively reach their
goal by developing that sensibility in their students. This year, then, a class
in music and choral singing was added to the classes in drawing, geometry,
arithmetic, and so on. One could not, of course, have expected six months’
study to turn this huge number of workers, whose vocal organs were still so
far from accommodating musical utterances, and who had probably never
sung anything but drinking songs—one could not imagine, as I was saying,
that after so few lessons these men could manage a correct, even spirited, per-
formance of often quite complicated choruses. And yet that is what we wit-
nessed, with as much surprise as interest. MM. Mainzer and Mermoud, the
two music instructors,3 must have felt warm satisfaction when they heard the
applause that greeted each of the pieces performed by their novices. Given the
singers’ circumstances, their rendition of Naumann’s oratorio was a true sur-
prise.4 A quite lovely fugue, which we believe was composed by M. Mainzer,
was rendered with as sure and vigorous a touch as all the rest; all the entries
were made with confidence and precision, and a number of rather delicate
nuances led the performance of this remarkable piece, too, to be applauded
with astonishment. Nourrit sang the solos, and his presence electrified these
good people, so proud of joining forces with one of the greatest artists to
1. The professor of “descriptive geometry” was one Martelet, who as part of the proceedings
was awarded the Legion of Honor by the presiding duc de Choiseul.
2. A reminder that Benjamin Franklin had won the undying admiration and love of the
French during his years in Paris as first ambassador of the fledgling American Republic; his
stature with the French remains similar to that of Lafayette for Americans.
3. Mermoud (?–?) was the director, in 1830, of a Protestant school in Paris.
4. I Pellegrini al sepolcro (1798) by Johann Gottlieb Naumann, German composer.
honor a European stage.5 How worthy of him! . . . And what a good and grand
deed by MM. Mainzer and Mermoud! It earns them the esteem and apprecia-
tion of all friends of Art and Humanity.
After the event, Mainzer’s many pupils, eager to show their teacher all the
gratitude they felt, appeared en masse at his door and serenaded him, unac-
companied, with several of the pieces he had taught them. The neighbors,
who had initially feared a riot at the sight of so large a gathering of young
men, demonstrated with their bravos and applause how much they enjoyed
this concert improvised by the grateful workmen.
H. BERLIOZ
5. Adolphe Nourrit, lead tenor at the Opéra, was an adept of the Saint-Simonians.
43
Opéra
William Tell; Debut of Duprez
This article tells of an epoch-making debut in operatic history, that of the

tenor who dared to sing his high notes from the chest rather than in the then
customary falsetto, thereby inaugurating the modern heroic tenor voice. This
article also marks a new turn for Berlioz as critic. Initially, the Opéra was
outside his purview at the Journal des débats. By fortunate coincidence, he
has recently inherited that fiefdom from his colleague Jules Janin. Since he
has followed Duprez’s career from the start (Duprez performed at Berlioz's
first concert on May 28, 1828), he is well placed to give a full account of it
to the singer’s new admirers. First, however, he pays tribute to the depart-
ing, much-loved Nourrit, who has retired in the face of the new competition.
Turning to Duprez, Berlioz evokes with imaginative feeling the singer’s ten-
der schooling by Choron, then his long struggles with his voice before it blos-
somed, in Italy, into the organ that has just dazzled at the Opéra. More than
a great singer, Duprez has proved himself an artist of the first rank, drawing
new emotional power from William Tell—and from Berlioz’s pen in describ-
ing that work. In measuring the success of this phenomenal debut, Berlioz
compares it to that of the Finale of Beethoven’s Fifth at the Conservatoire in
1828: his praise could go no further.
z April 19, 1837

Journal des débats
Duprez made his debut at the Opéra last evening.1 The hall was filled to the
rafters, and the crowd, which would show such keen judgment afterward, did
not look inclined beforehand to make an impartial assessment. Memories of a
great artist who had deservedly won deep admiration left the ground slippery
for his successor.2 The public’s fidelity to the memory of the singer who had
inspired so much cherished enjoyment and left so many varied impressions is,
to my mind, perfectly honorable and needs to be appreciated by Duprez him-
self; for nothing could be more dispiriting to an artist than seeing long ser-
vice to his art, a distinguished talent, and natural abilities developed through
years of rigorous study swept aside from one day to the next with no trace or
regret.
Nourrit chose to leave us despite the most insistent appeals of his many
friends, and the director of the Opéra made every attempt to keep him. His
departure is a misfortune that we feel as sharply as anyone else, but it must
not be allowed to cast a shadow over Duprez’s efforts to console us for it.
The great majority of the audience was nevertheless armed in advance with a
harsh prejudgment obvious from the conversations we overheard all around
us in the lobby and in the boxes. The new singer, people said, was cold and
bloodless, with no understanding of dramatic art, and extremely ugly to
boot. Once the curtain was up, it took only a few moments to prove these
early condemnations utterly wrong. To put it plainly, Duprez was a huge suc-
cess. It was the greatest triumph of the sort that I had ever seen at the Opéra.
Before examining the causes of such enthusiasm, of such a thrill coursing sev-
eral times through the whole audience, let me briefly trace Duprez’s career
and the route he followed to arrive so suddenly and triumphantly, at the age
of thirty-one, as a major figure on our principal lyric stage.
He received his first music lessons in Choron’s school.3 To Choron, that
able teacher, so perceptive in ferreting out promising talents and so expert
in cultivating them, he owes the broad, pure method that no one calls into
question. He made rapid and remarkable progress, and at fourteen Gilbert
1. April 17, 1837. Duprez held the tenor role of Arnold in Rossini’s opera. His powerful but
punishing use of the tenor voice, producing his high notes “from the chest,” as Berlioz will
describe, became a new ideal through his example. Rossini himself did not care for it, but the
very scale of French grand opera seemed to call for it.
2. Nourrit, the tenor who felt himself supplanted by the younger Duprez, was unequaled in
his day for the breadth of his dramatic talents; in May 1832 Berlioz reports from Florence that
Duprez is “not as great an actor as Nourrit but a better singer” (CG1:549).
3. On Choron’s school, see #12, #13, and #39.
43. Rossini, Duprez début 2 65
Duprez, already an accomplished sight-reader well versed in harmony, was

using his soprano voice to sing the beautiful arias of Gluck, Piccinni, and
Méhul in such a manner as to throw his teacher, that personification of
Hoffmann’s Crespel,4 into the most comical fits of ecstasy. In such moments
of relaxation and good cheer, less rare at that time than after the woes that
shortened his life, Choron, ensconced in his armchair, his little otter-skin cap
pulled down over one ear, stern-faced and with a piercingly ironic look in his
eye, would suddenly summon the boy not for a lesson—it was not the right
time—but to perform a little concert for him alone.
“Sing me Pylades’ aria from Iphigenia in Tauris—right now!” And, strik-
ing a tuning fork on the arm of his chair, he would add, “Here’s your A!
Listen!” The boy would immediately intone, not without trembling, that
admirable piece, “Unis dès la plus tendre enfance”5—and his small angelic
voice already rendered so well Gluck’s poignant inspirations that, after futile
attempts to hide his feelings of pleasure and pride, Choron would usually
interrupt him before the end, exclaiming, “Stop, Gilbert, stop! Do stop!
You’re hurting me! You sing like . . . you sing . . . Go! go out and play, you ras-
cal!” Poor man! What would he say if he could hear him today?
At the age when his voice changed, Duprez had inevitably to say goodbye
to his schoolboy successes, which he must have felt more precious and chal-
lenging than those he has so often achieved since then. But the change made
him study music all the more assiduously and seriously. If he wasn’t singing,
he was learning to play the piano, developing his skill in figured-bass accom-
paniment, filling his head with masterpieces, and broadening his knowledge
of harmony and counterpoint.
Once his voice had matured, he thought of appearing onstage. The
Odéon was then fashionable, and the director, Bernard,6 was making its for-
tune thanks to the genius of Weber, who in Germany was struggling with
poverty in a timeless validation of the old adage sic vos non vobis.7 Duprez
4. Hero of Hoffmann’s famous short story “Rat Crespel” (Councilor Crespel), apt in this
context for its echoes of the Pygmalion myth (see #39 on Choron as Crespel).
5. “United from our earliest childhood.” On Gluck’s opera, see #17.
6. Claude Wolf Bernard (1785–?), actor, singer, playwright and theater director, brought to
the Odéon, between 1824 and 1828, many works of import to Berlioz and the Romantic gen-
eration, including early opéras-comiques (Grétry, Monsigny, Dalayrac), Weber’s Freischütz (as
Robin des bois), and most notably the Shakespeare performances of 1827–28 at which Berlioz
fell in love with Harriet Smithson.
7. Virgil’s proverbial line, “Thus not for yourselves do you bees make honey,” used for people
who help themselves to the work of others.
at that point had a flexible, high tenor voice, sweet and engaging in timbre,
but utterly lacking in energy. He was consequently not greatly appreciated by
the students from the rue Saint-Jacques, who much preferred our provincial
squallers. However, the orchestra already recognized his talent; and at every
performance of Don Giovanni, the musicians would applaud Don Ottavio’s
aria “Il mio tesoro,”8 not with the audience’s indifferent clapping but with
bow-breaking enthusiasm. I recall one evening when, to hear Duprez, I had
furtively taken over the timpanist’s place. Carried away by the example of
the violinists drumming on their instruments, I applauded by beating my
applause on the timpani, which scandalized the audience.
The closing of the Odéon left Duprez adrift. He turned to the
Opéra-Comique for a humble third-class post, where his weak voice, unfit
in any case for the style in constant demand at that theater, encountered fur-
ther obstacles. He occasionally wandered off-key, enough for the theater’s
regulars—not known for their refined taste—to take notice. And so he soon
met with a very harsh response from those street-song dilettanti who were
incensed, besides, that professional musicians insisted on treating Duprez as
a singer of the first rank. The virtuoso’s voice was starting to undergo a new
transformation. This fact, with its then unforeseeable brilliant results, was no
doubt the cause of his unsteady intonations, and it led to the sudden, won-
derfully fortunate resolution that we so appreciate today. Displeased with his
position but not discouraged, Duprez came to a friendly parting of ways with
the Opéra-Comique and, whispering “Inter oves locum praesta / Et ab haedis
me sequestra” from Mozart’s Requiem,9 he took off for Italy.
Passing through Florence two years later, I heard local people sing the
praises of the “primo tenore, il signor Duprez,” whose marvelous voice
enchanted them. “Could it be the same . . . ?” I wondered. “Let’s see.” I ran
to the Pergola theater, which was presenting Bellini’s Sonnambula. I cannot
describe my astonishment on realizing that this powerful singer, called back
for encores as many as three times before the end of the opera by the Florentine
audience bursting with enthusiasm, was the same young man so little appreci-
ated in Paris. His voice was now set. It had become full, strong, penetrating,
with admirable intonation; it was as perfectly suited to the expression of deep
8. Act II, sc. 10, no. 21. Mozart’s opera was performed several times at the Odéon in January
1828.
9. “Provide me a place among the sheep / and separate me from the goats”—conclusion of
the “Recordare.”
passions as to that of the gentlest feelings. It had also gained in purity, fresh-
ness, and artless charm. These qualities have become even more pronounced
with time, and today they constitute a talent of the first order, whose effect,
even on a public originally quite indifferent, is irresistible. We have just had
the proof of it.
Cheers of pleasure and surprise greeted the phrase “Ô Mathilde, idole de
mon âme!”10 in the first-act duet, and from that moment Duprez’s success was
assured. Still, that was only a foretaste of the excitement yet to come before
the final curtain. What was so wonderful in this passage was the union of
sensibility and skill in a vocal instrument of magical delicacy. We had still
to hear his way with drama, with the cries of passion. The second-act trio
came along, and I was almost as surprised as the rest of the house, to whom
Duprez was still unknown, to hear that daring artist sing, from the chest and
accentuating every syllable, the high Bs of the andante “Ô ciel! ô ciel! je ne
te verrai plus!”11 This he did with powerful vibrancy, a heart-rending pain,
and a silken beauty the likes of which we had never before imagined. There
was silent stupefaction in the hall, bated breath all around, astonishment and
admiration fused in a feeling akin to fear; and indeed, one could well fear for
the remainder of this unprecedented delivery. But when the line reached a
triumphant conclusion, then, at the last measure, what an indescribable roar!
Wait; there is still the third act. Arnold has just revisited his father’s cot-
tage; his heart is laden with a hopeless love and plans for revenge; his senses,
unsettled by scenes of bloody carnage still haunting his memory, give way
under the weight of the most sorrowful contrast. His father is dead. The cot-
tage is deserted. All is calm and silent. This is peace, the peace of the grave.
And the breast on which, heart against beating heart, he would gladly shed
tears of filial piety, the only one that could still his pain at such a moment, is
an infinity away. Mathilde will never be his. . . . The situation is poetic, and
the composer renders it worthily. It is without a doubt one of Rossini’s fin-
est pages. Here the singer rose to a height that even I, who knew him, would
never have thought him capable of reaching. He was sublime. After giving
the theme a simple but dramatic tone of deep despondency, he returned to
the vibrant high notes of the trio in the phrase “J’appelle, il n’entend plus ma
voix.”12 And his grief was so noble, so real that, in all honesty, a good half of
10. “Oh, Mathilde, idol of my soul,” Act I, no. 2, Duo.

11. “Heaven—heaven—I will see you no more!” Act II, no. 11, Trio.
12. “I call [but] he no longer hears my voice.” CM 3:115 gives the reference as Act IV, no. 19;
Berlioz refers to Act III. Evidently a three-act version is being performed.
the audience could not hold back their tears. Then from those two thousand
excited breasts rose one of those acclamations that an artist hears only once
or twice in his lifetime and that suffice to wipe away any number of painful
memories and to reward his long and demanding years of preparation.
Before the allegro could begin, the audience called for an encore of the
andante; it was repeated with the same mastery and the same effect. Of the
fiery, vehement stretta that follows nothing could be heard but the theme;
for at the phrase “Suivez-moi!”—at that prodigious enharmonic gruppetto,
with the G-sharp going to G-natural,13 which the indefatigable singer pro-
duced once again from the chest—unstoppable shouts drowned out, almost
to the end of the scene, the choruses, the orchestra, and Duprez himself. This
extraordinary phenomenon paralleled the effect produced eight years ago, at
the Conservatoire, by the premiere of the final movement of the C minor
Symphony.14 Art cannot, must not, venture any further.
At present, if asked for my opinion of Duprez as an actor, I can offer you
the testimony of two celebrated actresses, Mlle. Mars and Mme. Berlioz
(Miss Smithson), who found his impersonations natural and always distin-
guished, his stage presence perfect, and his overall conception of the role of
Arnold in particular remarkable. Duprez shows no trace of certain habits
I had feared he might bring back from Italy; he never steps out of character,
not even while singing. He stands where the dramatic action tells him to, and
not always out front, like the Italians. He has none of our French preconcep-
tions about the stance of the actor with respect to the public and has not the
slightest hesitation to turn his back to the audience when necessary. His face
is expressive; his eyes flash. True, he is short, but let’s remember that Kean
was no taller.15 Moreover, his enunciation never lets you miss a single word,
and I doubt it is possible to deliver a recitative more convincingly. But we’ll
13. “Follow me!” Berlioz is describing the point in the cabaletta theme where Arnold sings
“d’Altorf les chemins sont ouverts,” ending on a G-sharp, which is held; it is followed by a
G-natural for “Suivez-moi.” At that point he does not go higher, but returns several times to
the G; at “l’espérance homicide” he goes to A-flat (the enharmonic equivalent of G-sharp)
before singing a high C on “arrachons Guillaume.” (Thanks to Philip Gossett for check-
ing the score for me on these specifics.—Ed.) The high C was the nec plus ultra of Duprez’s
high-wire act.
14. On the overpowering effect of the Finale of Beethoven’s Fifth on the French public at the
Conservatoire, see #27. Although the aria “Asile héréditaire” comes at the start of Act III in
the three-act version that was being performed, Duprez eventually took to singing it at the
very end of the opera.
15. Edmund Kean (1787–1833), the great British tragic actor of his day. In 1828 Berlioz may
have seen him perform in Paris in the title role of Shakespeare’s Richard III.
return to that subject.16 Meanwhile, this performance brought the Opéra a

success that almost no one had expected. With William Tell, Robert, and
Les Huguenots, M. Duponchel is going to see the excitement of the first per-
formances repeated every evening.17 His engagement of Duprez was a master
stroke.
The other singers were obviously eager to honor their new colleague, for
they have never sung better or shown greater verve and ensemble.
H*****
16. Berlioz next speaks of Duprez in a review of the Opéra’s revival of Halévy’s La Juive (JD,
August 6, 1837), once again calling him “sublime” but saying nothing specific about enuncia-
tion or recitative. More relevant is the Débats article of August 27, which relates Duprez’s
debut from the point of view of his trembling wife and friends: “Duprez steps forward, the
listeners hold their breath . . . ; he sings two measures of recitative, and already that great mon-
ster of a thousand heads called the public grunts out an expression of pleasure and surprise.”
Duprez was evidently a master of recitative.
17. Berlioz means that Duprez will be appearing in each of those operas, thus making a new
premiere of each.
44
Royal Academy of Music

Premiere of La Chatte métamor phosée en femme,
Ballet in Three Acts by MM. Charles Duveyrier
and Cor ali, Music by M. Montfort
Like all French composers, Berlioz considered ballet an essential part of opera. He
had even worked on a Faust ballet in 1828, one of his many early efforts to get a foot
in the door at the Opéra. But as a critic he repeatedly derides ballet-pantomime,
about which he expresses the very same reservations that eighteenth-century crit-
ics had expressed about instrumental music. “Sonata, what are you trying to say?”
Fontenelle had challenged. “Pantomime, what are you trying to say?” Berlioz seems
to echo. What really bothers him, in fact, is not so much the obscurity as the inanity
of the plots. To spoof the plot in question here, he uses one of his favorite comic devices,
a simulated dialogue among audience members. The dialogue leaves off with the
appearance on stage of Fanny Elssler, at which point Berlioz once again echoes a
typical response to instrumental music among Classical doubters, finding the plot
irrelevant in the face of a captivating performance. Since dance remained outside his
purview at the Débats, Berlioz wrote relatively little about it, but he left no doubt
of his thoughts when he did. His admiration for Fanny Elssler is plainly unfeigned.1
z October 22, 1837

1. The Cat Turned Woman, created at the Opéra on October 16, 1837, featured the Austrian Fanny
Elssler and her sister Thérèse. In a custom Berlioz deplored, the ballet was preceded by the third
act of Rossini’s Moïse—“a fragment of Moïse deprived of the prior acts which alone, by building
up interest, can give full power to the sublime culmination of the third act” (Rén., April 12, 1835).
44. La Chatte, ballet 271
Writing a ballet script is not in itself so difficult. It is much harder to sum-

marize it, especially when one is unfortunate enough to understand nothing
of the art of pantomime and yet declines to consult the book. That is my
case. Countless experiences have convinced me that the art of pantomime
is for me an indecipherable code and that I could again and again see a right
index finger raised to the forehead and still find it impossible to divine its
meaning. “You see this hat. Well, this hat is a magical hat! When it’s on
your head as it is now on mine, it has no effect on your mental powers. But
if you turn it around, all those powers are at your command; you are their
master; they obey you instantly and uncomplainingly; and if you had the
wild notion of changing an animal—a dog, a cat—into a woman, your wish
would come true in a split second.” Yes, I admit, I wouldn’t know even now
that the simple movement of the finger could mean so much were it not for
the kindness of my colleagues, particularly Monsieur J. J., who charmingly
summarized for me the whole plot of this new play.2 For this ballet is, in
fact, a play, and a really complicated one at that. I assure you that I’ve heard
as much from several persons who are not dimwits, even though they don’t
put their hats on backward.
That devil of a hat, then, which can turn man into dumb beast, must have
worked its magic on the majority of the spectators, for almost all my neighbors
looked as witless as I, understanding nothing of the play or the pantomime.
“Well,” you’ll say, “why not buy the libretto?” Why? Look (I can whisper the
truth), it’s just a matter of self-esteem. I want a clear understanding of bal-
lets; I want to discover what they’re all about, and to do so through the mere
strength of my intelligence, aided only by my own two eyes and sound judg-
ment, with no explanation by the creators or anyone else.3 If Vestris the Great
could say (in his poem on the fleshy part of the leg, I believe), “How much
2. The one in question here elicits scathing remarks from Jules Janin: “La Laitière suisse [The
Swiss Milkmaid] now has a twin. If the new ballet by MM. Coraly and Duveyrier does not
equal that ballet by M. Taglioni in sheer and utter nonsense, it’s probably because such a
thing was impossible. The Cat Turned Woman is one of those original works that amounts
to a little less than nothing; it is made only for minds peculiarly suited to the purpose.” Janin
goes on to tell the story with liberal quotes from the libretto, which easily prove his point
( JD, October 18, 1837).
3. In an earlier ballet review, Berlioz had declared: “The language of signs, even those of the
Elssler sisters, has never been very intelligible to me, and the most expressive of all panto-
mimes has always seemed to me the one by the man who, in the ballet Sleeping Beauty, comes
onstage bearing a large placard on which you can read in enormous letters: ‘She will sleep a
hundred years’ ” (Rén., August 16–17, 1835). He elaborates further in JD, March 31, 1837, when
a benefit concert at the Opéra with dance numbers by Marie Taglioni, the great French bal-
lerina of the age, gives him occasion to speak of ballet.
there is in a minuet!,”4 how much more reasonable to ask what is going on in

a whole ballet!
Until now I could never bring myself to admit that my sense of mime
was so dull that, at the first performance of a work like the one absorbing us
at the moment, I would be incapable of grasping the fundamental idea, the
mother idea, in short, the IDEA. That is why I was insistent on doing without
the book. Vanity! Vanity! All is vanity!5 This time again, despite the closest
possible attention, I could not detect the slightest hint of common sense in
this damned ballet, any more than I could in La Laitière suisse, Les Mohicans,
or Brazilia.6 (Oh, Brazilia! I’ll never forget that one—the little European
tradesman in pink—the native girls in blue—writing one another love notes
on cabbage leaves—playing leapfrog—shooting arrows at one another—the
crowning of an Amazon queen—an Orinoco nymph bathed in tears—Mlle.
Taglioni crowned, etc., etc.)
Let’s get back to La Chatte! The ballet lover seated to my right having
already asked me once, at the start of the action (I’ve had the honor of assuring
you that I was assured that several persons had heard that there was an action,
a fundamental one, moreover)—this gentleman, I say, having asked me, with
respect to the white cat who lives with her kittens (you see, I told you there was
a mother idea) in a white basket on the forestage, why this lovely animal never
left her refuge, “It may well be, sir,” I replied, “that she is sleeping.”
“Ah! she’s sleeping. Of course. Yes, indeed . . . It may be, may well be.”
A few scenes later, the basket still covered, my neighbor’s unease about the
cat’s prolonged sleep led to a further question. “Goodness, she’s been sleeping
a long time! Do you think, sir, that she has enough air in that basket? It may
well be she’s been asphyxiated, don’t you think?”
“No, sir, surely not. It may very well not be. But you compel me to tell
you something unpleasant. I assure you that the cat you care about so much
4. Auguste Vestris (1760–1842), one of a family of dancers, was the lead dancer and chore-
ographer who worked with Gluck; both Marie Taglioni and Fanny Elssler studied with him.
Berlioz liked to refer to his “poem”; see Art of Music, 180 (letter to the Academy of Fine Arts
of the Institute), and 85 for an anecdote about Gluck’s manner of putting in his place this
self-proclaimed “god of the dance.”
5. Ecclesiastes 1:2, King James Version.
6. Nathalie ou La Laitière suisse, two-act ballet by Taglioni, music by Gyrowetz and Carafa
(1832); Les Mohicans, two-act ballet-pantomime by Guerra, music by Adam (July 1837);
Brézilia ou La Tribu des femmes (1835), one-act ballet by Taglioni, music by Gallenberg.
Berlioz relates, or rather ridicules, the plot of this last in Rén., April 12, 1835; it was part of a
benefit program for Taglioni at which the Elssler sisters also danced. Taglioni performed, in
addition to Brézilia, a romanesca with the elderly Vestris.
44. La Chatte, ballet 273
does not exist. It is your fault if you force me to dispel your innocent illusion,
perhaps the only one you have left. I swear to you the basket is empty. Yes, sir,
empty! It no more holds a cat than does the cap on your head!”
“Excuse me, gentlemen,” chimes in another speaker, who has overheard
our philosophical exchange, “but the title of the work clearly spells out that a
cat’s been transformed into a woman. Now, it may well be that, if cats can be
transformed like that over there, a woman may likewise be transformed into
a cat; and since in China (the action takes place in China) fashion demands
that women be deprived of the use of their feet, it obviously follows that the
cat is really trapped in the basket and cannot use its paws to come out. That
conclusion may well be thought obvious.”
“It appears, sir, that you have read Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason; you
reason so very—”
“Oh, my goodness, no, sir! It’s my own thinking. By way of serious, edu-
cational works, I hardly read anything but the novels of M. Paul de Kock.”7
This learned disquisition ended abruptly with Mlle. Elssler’s entrance on
stage. And from that moment until the end of the evening, I admit we paid
no further attention to the basket, to pure reason, to the cat, to the funda-
mental idea, to anything. We no longer needed to understand—or rather,
we understood perfectly that we were overcome, enchanted. We didn’t ask
whether it might well be that Mlle. Fanny Elssler was the foremost mime
and dancer ever known, and we applauded her with all our might. While we
were at it, we also applauded a mass of kaleidoscopic variations full of novelty
and brilliance.8 We applauded wonderful, dazzling costumes, frighteningly
so when you think of all the imagination, all the research, all the money that
M. Duponchel must have invested in them. We applauded several charming
pieces of music in which M. Montfort displayed a smooth, elegant, graceful
talent.9 Elsewhere we cheered scenes dramatically rendered by an orchestra
that was full-bodied but not blaring. My neighbor, the basket man, was just
occasionally disappointed that the composer had not given greater thought
to local color.
7. Paul de Kock (1794–1871), popular writer of the day, whom Berlioz humorously links with
Immanuel Kant.
8. The newly invented kaleidoscope serves Berlioz as a frequent image for cheap thrills, its
patterns changing without rhyme or reason.
9. Alexandre Montfort (1803–1856), Berlioz’s fellow prizewinner in 1830 at the Institute,
which sent them both to Italy. In Mem., chapter 33, Berlioz plays on Montfort’s name in a
colorful description of life at the French Academy in Rome.
“It’s very lovely,” he said, “brisk, lively, and brilliant, but I wish it were a bit
Chinese, since we happen to be in China.”
“Do you know, sir, what distinguishes Chinese music from European?”
“Yes, it’s the use of the triangle and the Chinese bell. With those two
instruments a composer has the power to transport us to Canton or Nanking
or Peking with the greatest of ease. He can show us the remotest corners of
the Celestial Empire, whereas without them he leaves us prosaically in Paris.”
There, Monsieur Montfort, you have heard it now! Add a triangle, two
or three dozen little bells, and a gong to your score, and we’ll be transported
to . . . Cochinchina.10
All of which has not prevented M. Duveyrier from giving at the Gymnnase
Michel Perrin, a little masterpiece of simplicity and gusto, which I had no
trouble understanding; a dark but gripping drama at the Porte Saint-Martin
theater; and a comedy in rehearsal right now at the Théâtre-Français that
sounds very promising.11 This all proves categorically, moreover, that I am
utterly unreceptive to the language of the deaf. Fortunately, my inadequacy
will not long cause me embarrassment: pantomime is a dying art. I give it
another ten years. If, in 1847, there are still ballets, I agree to go see them and
review them.12 More I cannot say.
H. BERLIOZ
10. Cochinchina (southern Vietnam) became a French colony in 1862, but the French pres-
ence in Indochina dated back much farther. Berlioz shows off a knowledge of world geogra-
phy cultivated since childhood, while suggesting that the proposed tools of musical exoticism
may not quite suffice to evoke China itself.
11. Charles Duveyrier (1803–1866), writer and journalist. His libretto for Le Duc d’Albe,
rejected by Halévy and taken up but left incomplete by Donizetti, was ultimately used by
Verdi for Sicilian Vespers (1855).
12. Berlioz obviously does not foresee Giselle (1841), let alone Swan Lake (1875). He evidently
deems ballet-pantomime irredeemably frivolous and destined to fall victim to improvements
in public taste, as he had observed with frivolous fare at the Conservatoire.
Biographical Notes
Some very famous names are omitted; so are names appearing only once, which are
glossed in the notes.
Baillot, Pierre-Marie-François de Sales (1771–1842), one of the most admired violinists

of his time. A professor at the Conservatoire from 1799, he was a founding member
of the Conservatoire orchestra in 1828. At one of the early concerts, he gave the first
performance in France of Beethoven’s violin concerto. It was through his quartet that
Berlioz first discovered Beethoven’s late quartets, then generally regarded as unintel-
ligible (CG 1:244; CM 1:55–58).
Barbier, Auguste (1805–1882), French writer noted for his satires, made famous by
Iambes (1831), to which he added Il Pianto (1833) and Lazare (1837). Berlioz read and
admired them all. The two met around 1834 and remained friends for life. Barbier was
the chief librettist for Cellini, and author of the text of Berlioz’s Hymn to France of 1841.
Berton, Henri-Montan (1767–1844), composer, critic, theorist, and one of the
professors who made Berlioz’s life difficult at the Conversatoire, calling his Orphée
cantata “unplayable,” although he shared Berlioz’s anti-Rossinian stance in the 1820s
and had been a musical revolutionary himself in earlier years.
Blaze, François-Henri-Joseph (1784–1857), known as Castil-Blaze, earned Berlioz’s
anathema for plundering the work of his betters under cover of lax copyright laws.
When, besides arranging Mozart, Weber, or Rossini, he tried winging it on his own, the
results were lame. Berlioz wrote a devastating review of his opera Pigeon-Vole, included in
the first edition of Evenings with the Orchestra (1852). Castil-Blaze was Berlioz’s predeces-
sor at the Journal des débats, where he signed his name as “XXX”; see Berlioz’s youthful
outrage at his criticism of Gluck (#2). Yet he was an important pioneer as music critic,
championing the cause of professional music criticism, and his reviews of Beethoven at
the time of the early Conservatoire concerts were not without insight or sympathy.
Boieldieu, François-Adrien (1775–1834), the “French Mozart,” author of some
forty operas and a great deal of instrumental music, lived a more adventuresome life
than Berlioz leads us to think: after an early success at Favart and appointment as
piano teacher at the Conservatoire, he went to St. Petersburg to direct the French
opera company (1803–12), returning to Paris in 1812 for a series of operatic successes
culminating in La Dame blanche (1825).
276 Biographical Notes
Boulanger (?–?), French tenor, student of Choron, professor at his school (1830),
made a career as voice teacher and salon performer. He sang for Berlioz on several occa-
sions, notably in the ballad “Le Pêcheur” (The Fisher) from Lélio.
Branchu, Caroline-Alexandre Chevalier (1780–1850), dramatic soprano who sang
all the lead roles in Gluck’s operas as well as in Salieri’s Les Danaïdes and, under the
Empire, created those of all Spontini’s operas. She retired from the Opéra in 1826,
after twenty-five years at that theater. Berlioz’s admiration for her was unbounded; she
befriended him during his student years, as he relates in his Memoirs.
Bull, Ole Bornemann (1810–1880), Norwegian violinist and composer, who stud-
ied in Norway with students of Viotti and Baillot. His brilliant career, in which he
became known as the “Paganini of the North,” was punctuated with stays in Paris,
beginning in 1831, and notably in 1839–40 and 1846–48.
Chateaubriand, François-René de (1768–1848), writer, considered by the
Romantics as a founding father because of his interest in the exotic and his travels in
the United States and in the Middle East, his melancholy reveries, his analysis of the
passions (emotions) including the “vague des passions” or state of unspecified longing
that Berlioz cites in the program of his Symphonie fantastique. Such was his prestige
and charisma that Berlioz thought to turn to him for a loan to perform his early Messe
solennelle (Mem., chapter 7, 30–31).
Cherubini, Luigi (1760–1842), director of the Conservatoire from 1822 until his
death. A founding member of the Paris Conservatoire, Cherubini was its irascible direc-
tor during Berlioz’s years there; in Mem. Berlioz tells a colorful story of their first meeting.
Despite their differences, Berlioz held his music in admiration, especially his religious
music. Beethoven considered him the greatest composer among his contemporaries.
Choron, Alexandre-Étienne (1771–1834), pedagogue, theorist, composer, musicol-
ogist, music publisher, and promoter of early music, notably sacred music; one of the
first French music historians. Berlioz honors him in several articles for his wide-ranging
efforts on behalf of vocal music, going on regular trips to Italy to find good voices.
Having inherited some wealth, he devoted it to his musical passions, and died penni-
less after exhausting it all in support of his Institution de musique religieuse, which
lost its government subsidy in the aftermath of 1830.
Crescentini, Girolamo (1762–1846), one of the last great operatic castrati. Nicola
Zingarelli wrote the part of Romeo for him in Giulietta e Romeo (1796); the singer him-
self composed an aria for the opera, “Ombra adorata” (also called “Romeo’s Prayer”),
that he made famous. Napoleon heard his “seraphic” voice in Vienna and, moved to
tears, brought him to Paris, where he sang at the Théâtre de la Cour from 1806 to 1812.
Crosnier, François-Louis (1792–1867), became director of the Opéra-Comique in
May 1834 after two years’ experience at the Théâtre de la Porte-Saint-Martin (1830–32).
He arrived under a new charge to make the theater turn a profit, as had been done in
1831 with the Opéra.
Cuvillon, Jean-Baptiste-Philémon (1809–1900), violinist, noted chamber player,
became concertmaster of the Conservatoire orchestra jointly with the elder Tilmant
in 1830.
Dérivis, Henri-Étienne (1780–1856), bass, the last of the old-school declamatory

singers, and the leading bass at the Opéra until 1825; he retired in 1827. Although the
press attacked him relentlessly, Berlioz greatly admired his powerful dramatic skills.
Devienne, François (1759–1803), flutist, composer, first flute professor at the
Conservatoire. Berlioz frequently mentions his opéra-comique Les Visitandines (1792).
Dorus-Gras, Julie Aimée Josephe, née Van Steenkiste (1805–1896), Belgian
soprano, at the Opéra since 1830, sang the role of Teresa in Berlioz’s Benvenuto Cellini.
Duponchel, Charles Edmond (1794–1868), directed the Opéra between September
1, 1835 and June 1, 1840. As such, he was the one in office during Berlioz’s difficult run
with Cellini. Under the Véron administration, he was in charge of costumes, taking
them to new levels of splendor.
Duprez, Gilbert-Louis (1806–1896), the most famous French tenor of the century,
notably as the first to sing his high notes “from the chest.” Berlioz met him as a student at
Choron’s school (he performed at Berlioz’s very first concert, CG 1:550), then heard him in
Italy, where he had developed his “new” voice (not wholly new, but Duprez made history
with it). He sang in the Italian premieres of William Tell (1831) and of Donizetti’s Lucia
di Lammermoor (1835), whose role of Edgardo was written for him. He played the lead in
Berlioz’s Benvenuto Cellini (1838), but his abandonment of the work after the third perfor-
mance helped dampen Berlioz’s enthusiasm for his voice, already in decline; he continued
to perform for another decade. The Sixth Evening of Berlioz’s Evenings with the Orchestra,
an imaginative story of a singer’s rise and fall, was partly inspired by Duprez.
Elssler, Franziska, known as Fanny (1810–1884), one of the great ballerinas of the
Romantic age, brought to the Opéra in 1834 by Véron as a rival to Marie Taglioni.
Gautier praises her strong, dramatic, sensuous style that contrasts with Taglioni’s ethe-
real delicacy. In 1840 she took a leave to tour the United States and, overstaying the
stipulated leave, lost the right to return to the Opéra. Her sister Thérèse (1808–1878)
often choreographed works in which the two performed together.
Ernst, Heinrich Wilhelm (1814–1865), Czech violinist trained in Vienna, much
influenced by Paganini, lived in Paris from 1832 to 1838, and was a good friend of
Berlioz, who addresses one of his letters from Germany to him (Mem., 304–14).
Comparing him to Chopin, the man of elegant salons and private gatherings, Berlioz
finds Ernst at ease in vast halls and crowded theaters. His Carnival of Venice variations,
which “he had the audacity to compose after Paganini’s, and without imitating them”
(477), serve as an example of music’s power to evoke the past (478).
Falcon, Cornélie (1812–1897), dramatic soprano, a student of Nourrit’s. She
became one of Berlioz’s favorite singers during her brief but spectacular career—her
voice gave out prematurely, and she retired in 1838. A “Falcon soprano” is a voice type
named after her.
Fétis, François-Joseph (1784–1871), Belgian critic, music historian, theorist, com-
poser and virulent critic of Berlioz after the latter spoofed him publicly in his mélo-
logue (Lélio) in 1832. Berlioz liked to mock the title of Fétis’s little handbook for the
layman, La Musique à la portée de tout le monde (Music for All). In fact, Fétis was in
many ways an adventurous pioneer in music and musicology, and Berlioz’s attacks were
278 Biographical Notes
largely unfair. The men reconciled in later years, partly through their common opposi-
tion to Wagner.
Florian, Jean-Pierre Claris de (1755–1794), French author of plays, novels, stories,
and poetry, best known for his fables. He wrote the famous “Plaisir d’amour,” set to
music by Martini. As a boy Berlioz swooned over his idyll Estelle et Némorin, the hero-
ine of which he associated with his first love, Estelle Dubeuf. Imprisoned under the
Revolutionary Terror, Florian died soon after his release.
Fontenelle, Bernard de Bovier de (1657–1757), first of the Enlightenment philos-
ophes, or philosophers, who turned the light of reason on inherited traditions and
structures, preparing the upheavals of the Revolution. In music, the light of reason
does not always foster understanding: Fontenelle is remembered for his quip “Sonate,
que me veux-tu?” (Sonata, what do you want from me—i.e., what are you trying to
say?), an expression of frustration at instrumental music’s lack of definable subject.
Franchomme, Auguste-Joseph (1808–1889), cellist, a founding member of the
Concert Society of the Conservatoire, had a distinguished career as performer, com-
poser, and teacher at the Conservatoire (1846–1884). Among other things, he collabo-
rated with Chopin on piano-cello duos.
Girard, Narcisse (1797–1860), violinist, conductor and composer, a founding
member of the Concert Society of the Conservatoire. Though supportive of Berlioz
as his earliest regular conductor, his limitations incited Berlioz to learn to conduct,
beginning in 1834. In 1849 Girard gave Berlioz one of his few performances by the
Conservatoire orchestra (selections from The Damnation of Faust).
Gluck, Christoph Willibald, Ritter von (1714–1787), German opera composer
brought to Paris by Marie-Antoinette, and known for championing the reform of Italian
opera in the name of dramatic truth. In the 1770s he produced Iphigenia in Tauris and
Alceste at the Opéra, among other so-called reform operas still hanging on in the rep-
ertoire during Berlioz’s early years in Paris. In Mem., Berlioz tells of worshiping Gluck
from the time he read of him in Michaud’s Biographie universelle at the age of twelve. In
the 1860s, Berlioz himself would oversee performances of Gluck at the Opéra. Berlioz
liked to think that Gluck, in Les Troyens, would have recognized him as his son.
Grasset, Jean-Jacques (1769–1839), violinist and conductor at the Théâtre-Italien,
acquaintance of Berlioz.
Grétry, André-Ernest-Modeste (1741?–1813), composer of Belgian origin, cel-
ebrated during his lifetime and continuously popular through the nineteenth century,
known for his opéras-comiques, several of which Berlioz held in great affection. Author
of Mémoires and other writings, he mentored and championed several women compos-
ers during the Revolutionary period, including his daughter Lucile (1772–1790).
Grisi, Giulia (1811–1869), Italian soprano, student of Pasta in Milan, starred at the
Théâtre-Italien from 1832 to the end of the 1840s. Although Berlioz considered her
far beneath Falcon as Donna Anna and felt that her passionate effects were calculated
rather than inspired, her dramatic style was generally much appreciated in the tragic
operas of Rossini, Donizetti, and Bellini.
Habeneck, François-Joseph (1781–1849), French violinist and conductor, chief

conductor at the Opéra from 1821 to 1846, known to posterity for founding the Société
des concerts du Conservatoire in 1828. Though ambivalent toward Berlioz, he con-
ducted the most important premieres of his works until the late 1830s, when Berlioz
took over himself.
Halévy, Fromental (1799–1862), French composer, son of a Jewish cantor and
Talmudic scholar and brother of the writer Léon Halévy (1802–1883), was Cherubini’s
favorite student at the Conservatoire. La Juive led to fame and fortune, including five
more productions at the Opéra, many at the Opéra-Comique, and a professorship at
the Conservatoire. At his death, the rabidly anti-Berliozian Fiorentino deplored the
loss of one of France’s “two composers,” the other being . . . Auber.
Hauman, Théodore (1808–1878), Belgian violinist and composer.
Hérold, Louis-Joseph-Ferdinand (1791–1833), French composer and pianist, had
a distinguished career in Italy and Paris as composer of operatic and piano works.
Zampa and Le Pré aux clercs (1832) were considered his masterpieces.
Hiller, Ferdinand (1811–1885), German pianist, composer, conductor, and critic,
was among Berlioz’s closest friends, and among those from whom Berlioz heard per-
sonal accounts of Goethe and Beethoven. Hiller lived in Paris between 1828 and 1836.
Janin, Jules (1804–1874), called “prince of journalists” in his day, was Berlioz’s col-
league and friend at the Journal des débats. Berlioz learned a thing or two from his
brilliant style and ability to embroider on random topics, as in the feuilleton de silence.
Kreutzer, Rodolphe (1766–1831), French composer and extraordinary violin-
ist, though he declared unplayable Beethoven’s “Kreutzer” Sonata, written for him.
Berlioz admired his opera La Mort d’Abel, but deplored his jealous attitude toward
younger composers.
Labarre: Théodore-François-Joseph Berry (1805–1870), harpist and composer of
opéras-comiques, ballets, and even operas as well as music for the harp. He left an impor-
tant Méthode complète de harpe (1844), became professor of harp at the Conservatoire
(1867) and was starting to be active as music critic at the time of his death.
Lablache, Luigi (1794–1858), Italian bass, famous for his powerful voice, vocal vir-
tuosity, and acting; one of the stars of the Théâtre-Italien from 1830 to 1852.
Lachnith, Ludwig Wenzel (1746–1820), a German-speaking Czech who came to
Paris in 1801 and produced Les Mystères d’Isis, his travesty of Mozart’s Magic Flute, at
the Opéra that same year.
La Fontaine, Jean de (1621–1695), French writer best known for his Fables. Berlioz
knew many of them by heart and adored quoting them. La Fontaine is nearly as much
quoted by the French as Shakespeare by the English.
Lebrun, Louis-Sébastien (1764–1829), French composer, notably of Le Rossignol (1816),
which Berlioz repeatedly mocks for its warbling flute solos, much loved by the public.
Lemoyne, Jean-Baptiste (1751–1796), French composer, would-be disciple of Gluck,
who disavowed any such connection after the failure of Lemoyne’s Electre (1782). His
two-act comédie lyrique Les Prétendus (1789) is a frequent target of Berlioz’s satire.
2 80 Biographical Notes
Lesueur, Jean-François (1760–1837) [also spelled Le Sueur], French composer,

began his career as a church musician, gained renown for his operas beginning with La
Caverne (1793), was honored by Napoleon for the opera Ossian, ou Les Bardes (1804) and
named by him head of the chapel of Notre-Dame. Under the Restoration he became
composer for the Royal Chapel at the Tuileries and conductor at the Opéra; in 1818 he
was named professor of composition at the Conservatoire, an institution he had helped
found. Berlioz was his student, first unofficially from 1823, then at the Conservatoire,
technically until he won the Prix de Rome in 1830, though he pulled away after the dis-
covery of Beethoven in 1828. Urhan (q.v.) was among Lesueur’s students, as were twelve
of the seventeen winners of the Prix de Rome between 1822 and 1839.
Levasseur, Nicholas Prosper (1791–1871), French bass, sang lead bass roles at the
Theâtre-Italien (1822–27) and at the Opéra (1820–40); in Halévy's La Juive, he por-
trayed the cardinal.
Mainzer, Joseph (1801–1851), German critic, theoretician, composer, propagator of
music education, founder of a singing school for workers. When his singers proved
inadequate to perform in Berlioz’s Requiem in December 1837, he turned hostile,
thereafter attacking Berlioz relentlessly in his articles in Le National. For his part, in
RGM, May 6, 1838, Berlioz deplores the lack of progress of Mainzer’s choir and the
mediocrity of his compositions. In a letter of July 30, 1840, he calls Mainzer an “inti-
mate enemy” who has nevertheless praised his latest work, the Funeral and Triumphal
Symphony.
Malibran, Maria Garcia (1808–1836), dramatic soprano, daughter of the great
singer and voice teacher Manuel Garcia and older sister of Pauline Garcia-Viardot.
Malibran replaced Mme. Pasta at the Théâtre-Italien during the late 1820s, where she
was admired by Berlioz as an unforgettable Desdemona in Rossini’s Otello. Her early
marriage to François-Eugène Malibran was annulled in 1835, allowing her to marry
Bériot. After her death in a riding accident, she became a Romantic legend of ephem-
eral beauty and talent.
Mayseder, Joseph (1789–1863), Austrian violinist and popular composer of virtu-
oso works and a great deal of chamber music. Ernst studied with him (among others).
Méhul, Étienne-Nicolas (1763–1817), French composer of the Revolutionary
generation, disciple of Gluck’s, one of the founders of the Conservatoire. His opera
Euphrosine et Coradin, with its famous “rage” duet, Berlioz considered his masterpiece.
See Evenings, second epilogue.
Moke, Marie-Félicité-Denise, called Camille (1811–1875), pianist, engaged to
Berlioz in 1830, married the piano manufacturer Camille Pleyel in 1831, at which
time she changed her name to Marie Pleyel. One of the most admired pianists of the
age, despite Berlioz’s dismissive judgments after her break with him; he was deeply
wounded.
Musard, Philippe (1792–1859), composer, arranger, and conductor, founded a
popular series of promenade concerts in 1833 with an orchestra of over one hundred
players, inaugurating a hall of his own in 1836 in the rue Vivienne. His specialty was
Biographical Notes 2 81
dance music; his costume balls were famous, and he was ultimately put in charge of
those at the Opéra.
Nourrit, Adolphe (1802–1839), the most distinguished and beloved French tenor
of his day. Creator of all the new tenor roles at the Opéra between 1826 and 1836, he
was to feel supplanted by the advent of Duprez in 1836. Known for his hypersensitiv-
ity, Nourrit ended his life in Italy in 1839, despite much success in performance there.
Paisiello, Giovanni (1740–1816), Italian composer, greatly admired by Napoleon,
of over eighty operas besides church and instrumental music. He was Lesueur’s prede-
cessor as imperial chapel master.
Philidor, François-André Danican (1726–1795), French composer who helped cre-
ate the genre of opéra-comique; teacher of the notorious Lachnith, arranger of Mozart’s
Magic Flute; famous chess player mentioned in Diderot’s Le Neveu de Rameau.
Pleyel, Marie, see Moke, Camille.
Ponchard, Louis-Antoine-Eléonore (1787–1866), tenor, made a brilliant career at
the Opéra-Comique (1812–37), where he created the role of George Brown in Boieldieu’s
La Dame blanche (1825); he taught at the Conservatoire until 1857. Berlioz admired him
especially in works by early French opéra-comique composers such as Grétry.
Reber, Napoléon-Henri (1807–1880), French composer, studied harmony and
counterpoint with Reicha and composition with Lesueur at the Paris Conservatoire,
like Berlioz. Although his major works were still to come, Reber entered the prestigious
Institut de France (Académie) in 1853, preceding Berlioz by three years. He became
professor of harmony at the Conservatoire in 1851, then of composition in 1862, posts
Berlioz applied for in vain. Berlioz’s support of him over the years is the more laudable.
Reicha, Antoine (Antonin or Anton) (1770–1836), noted for his wind quintets, was
Berlioz’s professor of counterpoint and fugue at the Conservatoire. Though their musical
aesthetics differed greatly, Berlioz respected his teachings and his openness to new ideas.
Rifaut, Louis-Victor-Étienne (1798–1838), composer and pianist, author of the
one-act La Sentinelle perdue (1834) for the Opéra-Comique, which Berlioz damns
with faint praise (Rén., December 5, 1834). Rifaut was the pianist unable to accom-
pany Berlioz’s cantata for the Prix de Rome of 1827 (Orphée), which was hence declared
“unplayable” and dismissed. At Rifaut’s death, Berlioz vied unsuccessfully for his post
at the Conservatoire (see Mem., chapter 47).
Rubini, Giovanni Battista (1794–1854), star tenor of the Théâtre-Italien, had a
voice that made people swoon. Bellini composed for him the lead role of I Puritani
(1835). Berlioz, like all Paris, found him unsurpassable in Don Ottavio’s “Il mio Tesoro”
in Don Giovanni but criticized the rest of his performance in the part.
Salieri, Antonio (1750–1825), Italian-born, cosmopolitan composer and teacher,
director of Italian opera for the Habsburg court, protégé of Gluck, whose most famous
opera, Les Danaïdes, was the first Berlioz saw after his arrival in Paris. Salieri taught
Beethoven, Schubert, and Liszt.
Schlesinger, (Moritz) Maurice (1798–1871), son of the Berlin music publisher
and editor for whom Berlioz wrote some articles in 1829, came to Paris from Berlin
2 82 Biographical Notes
in 1815 and established himself as a major music publisher and impresario, notably as
champion of German music. He played an important part in Berlioz’s life, both as his
publisher between 1829 and 1846 and as the founder of the GM in 1834, a paper in
which Berlioz assumed a leading role from the start and that served as his single most
important forum.
Scribe, Eugène (1791–1861), the leading librettist of Berlioz’s day, author of over 350
plays, comedies, and libretti, and a powerful “open sesame” to the Opéra. In 1835, still at
his most idealistic, Berlioz disdainfully rejected a libretto from Scribe. After the failure
of Cellini, he collaborated with Scribe on an opera based on Thomas Lewis’s The Monk,
of which he composed only two acts—his heart was not in it. He also approached Scribe
in 1847 for a project—likewise abortive—to turn The Damnation of Faust into an opera.
Smithson, Harriet (1800–1854), Shakespearean actress of Irish origin whom
Berlioz saw and fell in love with at her renowned performances of Ophelia and Juliet
with the Kemble troupe at the Odéon in September 1827. After many misadventures,
including fierce opposition on the part of both families, the two were married on
October 3, 1833, and had a son, Louis (1834–1867).
Spontini, Gaspare Luigi Pacifico (1774–1851), Italian composer who came to Paris in
1803 and enjoyed his greatest successes under the Empire, thanks initially to the protec-
tion of Josephine with La Vestale (1807). That opera, his masterpiece, Fernand Cortez
(1809), and Olympie (1817) were still occasionally performed in Paris during Berlioz’s
early years there. For Berlioz, Spontini was the greatest living composer. Though he spent
the years 1820–41 in Berlin (then returned to Paris in 1842–47), the two men met in 1829
and, despite Spontini’s difficult character, remained friends. “I loved the man,” Berlioz
wrote at his death, “unlovable though he was, from having so much admired him.”
Taglioni, Filippo, known as Philippe (1777–1871), dancer and choreographer, father,
teacher, and dance partner of Marie, for whom he wrote La Sylphide (1832), Brézilia
(1835), and La Fille du Danube (1836), the last two being objects of Berlioz’s satire.
Taglioni, Marie (1804–1884), the great French dancer of the day, whom Fanny
Elssler came to rival in 1834, was noted for the ease of her point work and her ethereal
stage persona. Her career at the Opéra spanned the decade 1827–37.
Tamburini, Antonio (1800–1876), Italian baritone, star of the Théâtre-Italien
in Paris after successes in Italy, Vienna, and London; he made his début in 1832 in
Rossini’s La Cenerentola, and held the title role in Mosè in Egitto. Beloved of the dilet-
tanti, he also earned Berlioz’s admiration, despite occasional lapses in taste (see #6).
Thalberg, Sigismund-Fortuné-François (1812–1871), pianist of Swiss origin, Liszt’s
new rival in 1836; in 1837 the two would perform a famous piano “duel” at the home of
Princess Belgiojoso. Fétis became his champion; Berlioz sided with Liszt. Thalberg was
known for his calm demeanor and his “twenty fingers”; Liszt was flamboyant (but see
#38 on his outdoing Thalberg, when he wishes, in Olympian calm).
Tilmant, Théophile-Alexandre (1799–1878), violinist, second violin in the Bohrer
brothers’ quartet, formed in 1831, and founder, with his brother, of another quartet;
widely influential also as conductor.
Biographical Notes 2 83
Tilmant, Alexandre-Théophile-Joseph (1808–1880), cellist; he and his elder

brother founded their own quartet in 1833.
Urhan, Chrétien (1790–1845), violinist and violist of German origin, fellow stu-
dent of Lesueur’s with Berlioz, an early and close friend, known for his spiritual fervor
and puritanical ways: as a performer in the Opéra orchestra, he was careful to turn his
chair so as to avoid seeing the dancers’ legs. Berlioz characterizes him well in #6. He
was the first viola soloist for Harold in Italy, in 1834, and performed the work often.
Vaccai, Nicola (1790–1848), an Italian singer and composer, became very popular
in Paris during his stay there in 1829–31.
Valentino, Henri-Justin-Armand-Joseph (1785–1865), violinist and conductor, was
second in command to Habeneck at the Opéra before leaving for the Opéra-Comique
(1832–36). He was the conductor for the first performance at Saint-Roch of Berlioz’s
Messe solennelle. In 1837 he founded a concert series in his name, the Concerts Valentino,
which offered the first popular (promenade-style) performances of classical music, where
Beethoven symphonies were performed complete for the first time in Paris outside the
Conservatoire. The venture lasted until 1841; the populace preferred quadrilles.
Véron, Louis (1798–1867) directed the Opéra from 1831 to 1835, shifting it from
a royal appendage to a middle-class money-making operation thanks largely to the
fabulous sets and stagings of Duponchel (q.v.). The great successes of his tenure were
Meyerbeer’s Robert le diable (1831), Auber’s Gustave III (1833), and Halévy’s La Juive
(1835), as well as the first ballet-pantomime starring Marie Taglioni, La Sylphide (1832).
Vigny, Alfred de (1797–1863), poet, playwright, prose writer, a leader of the French
Romantic movement (his translation of Othello performed at the Comédie-Française
helped prepare the advent of Hernani), author of Chatterton, friend of Berlioz. In 1836
he provided counsel on the libretto of Benvenuto Cellini.
Vogel, Johann Christoph (1756–1788), German composer, author of the opera
Démophon, whose overture Berlioz admired.
Weber, Carl Maria von (1786–1826), German composer, whose most famous opera,
Der Freischütz (1821), Berlioz first heard at the Odéon in 1824 via the arrangement
by Castil-Blaze known as Robin des bois. He first heard the original when a German
troupe brought it to Paris in 1829 and 1830. Preciosa, a play with music, was given in
1825–26; but when Euryanthe (1823), Weber’s second opera, was first given in 1831,
Berlioz was in Italy. He knew all the operas from score, to be sure; he knew the piano
works through Schlesinger, who published them in France, including The Invitation
to the Waltz, which Berlioz orchestrated in 1841 for the production of Freischütz he
oversaw at the Opéra.
Abbreviations and Short Bibliography
C on t e m p or a r y Jou r n a l s a n d N e w s pa pe r s
BAMZ Berliner allgemeine musikalische Zeitung
GM Gazette musicale de Paris
JD Journal des débats
Rén. Le Rénovateur
RGM La Revue et gazette musicale de Paris
RM Revue musicale
Be r l io z ’s W r i t i ngs
Grand traité d’ instrumentation et d’orchestration modernes (1843). Ed. Peter Bloom.
New Berlioz Edition, vol. 24. Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2003.
Berlioz’s Orchestration Treatise: A Translation and Commentary. Trans. Hugh
Macdonald. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Les Soirées de l’orchestre (1852). Ed. Léon Guichard. Paris: Gründ, 1968.
Evenings—Hector Berlioz Evenings with the Orchestra. Trans. and ed. Jacques Barzun
[Knopf, 1969]. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1999.
Les Grotesques de la musique (1859). Ed. Léon Guichard. Paris: Gründ, 1969.
The Musical Madhouse (Les Grotesques de la musique). Trans. and ed. Alastair Bruce.
Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2003.
À travers chants (1862). Ed. Léon Guichard. Paris: Gründ, 1971.
Art of Music—Hector Berlioz The Art of Music and Other Essays (À travers chants).
Trans. and ed. Elizabeth Csicsery-Rónay. Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1994.
Les Musiciens et la musique. Ed. André Hallays. Paris [1903].
Hector Berlioz cauchemars et passions. Ed. Gérard Condé. Paris: J.-C. Lattès, 1981.
Mémoires. Ed. Pierre Citron. Paris: Flammarion, 1991.
Mem.—The Memoirs of Hector Berlioz. Trans. and ed. David Cairns. New York: Knopf,
2002 [1969].
2 86 Abbreviations and Short Bibliography
CG—Hector Berlioz Correspondance générale. 8 vols. Ed. Pierre Citron. Paris:

Flammarion, 1972–2003.
Letters—Selected Letters of Berlioz. Ed. Hugh Macdonald. Trans. Roger Nichols.
London: Faber & Faber; New York: Norton, 1995.
CM—Hector Berlioz Critique musicale. 7 (of 10 projected) vols. Ed. H. Robert Cohen,
Yves Gérard, Anne Bongrain and Marie-Hélène Coudroy-Saghaï. Paris: Buchet/
Chastel, 1996–2008 (vols. 1–6); Société française de musicologie, 2013 (vol. 7).
M us ic a l E di t ion s
GSW—Gluck sämtliche Werke. Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1951–.
NBE—New Berlioz Edition. Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1969–2003.
NMA—Neue Mozart-Ausgabe sämtlicher Werke. Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1951–.
G e n e r a l B i b l io g r a ph y
Apel, Willi. Harvard Dictionary of Music. 1944; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1958.
Barzun, Jacques. Berlioz and the Romantic Century. 2 vols. 3rd ed. New York: Columbia
University Press, 1969.
Bloom, Peter, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Berlioz. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2000. [See notably Janet Johnson on musical polemics around
Rossini in the 1820s; Ellis on the criticism; Kolb on the short stories.]
———. The Life of Berlioz. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press,
1998.
———. Music in Paris in the Eighteen-Thirties. Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon Press, 1987.
Cairns, David. Berlioz. 2 vols. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 2000.
Cohen, H. Robert. “Berlioz on the Opera (1829–1849): A Study in Music Criticism.”
Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1973.
Cone, Edward T., ed. Berlioz Fantastic Symphony. New York: Norton, 1971. [Contains
1835 attack by Fétis and critical analysis by Schumann.]
Dictionnaire Berlioz. Ed. Pierre Citron, Cécile Reynaud, Jean-Pierre Bartoli, and Peter
Bloom. Paris: Fayard, 2003.
Dictionnaire de la musique en France au XIXe siècle. Ed. Joël-Marie Fauquet.
Paris: Fayard, 2003.
Ellis, Katharine. Music Criticism in Nineteenth-Century France: “La Revue et gazette
musicale de Paris,” 1834–1880. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Holoman, D. Kern. Berlioz. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989.
Kolb, Katherine Reeve. “Hector Berlioz.” European Writers: The Romantic Century.
New York: Scribners, 1985. Pp. 771–812.
Abbreviations and Short Bibliography 2 87
———. “A Berliozian Spoof.” Introduction, translation, and notes for three anony-
mous Berlioz feuilletons. Berlioz Society Bulletin 103 (Spring 1979): 2–7; 106
(Winter 1979–80): 4–10; 111 ( Spring–Summer 1981): 2–6. (Cf. also Bulletin 158.)
———. “Primal Scenes: Smithson, Pleyel, and Liszt in the Eyes of Berlioz.” 19th-Century
Music 18.3 (Spring 1995): 211-35.
Macdonald, Hugh. Berlioz. London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1982.
Murphy, Kerry. Hector Berlioz and the Development of French Music Criticism. Ann
Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1988.
Reynaud, Cécile, ed. Berlioz: Textes et contextes. Paris: Société française de musicolo-
gie, 2011.
Tayeb, Monir, and Michel Austin. The Hector Berlioz Website (wwwhberlioz.com).
Index
This Index includes all names and titles from the Introduction, chapter texts,
introductory paragraphs, and footnotes, except when the notes repeat text matter
from the same page.
Adam, Adolphe, 176, 272n6 César Birotteau, 12, 137n15,

Giselle, 274n12 159n8, 254n3
Mohicans, Les, 272 Barbereau, Auguste, 242
Agoult, Marie d’, 212, 231 Traité théorique et pratique de
Allegri, Gregorio, 82 composition musicale, 242n15
Ancelin, Claude, 88n4 Barbier, Auguste, 19, 78
Arnaud, Father François, 70, Iambes, 19
99n12, 100n14 Barzun, Jacques, 15
Apel, Willi, 256n6 Berlioz and the Romantic Century, 15
Auber, Daniel-François-Esprit, 8, 97, Baumann, Louis, 76
143, 176 Beaumesnil, Henriette Adélaïde Villards
Court Concert, The (Le Concert à la de, 210
cour), 143 Tibule et Délie ou Les Saturnales, 211
Muette de Portici, La, 173n9 Beer, Frédéric, 255–56
Aubéry du Boulley, Prudent-Louis, Beethoven, Ludwig van, 3, 5–7, 12–13,
252, 256–57 20–25, 34, 37n10, 38, 40, 41–45,
Amants querelleurs, Les, 256n5 52, 54–55, 58n3, 59n12, 61, 66–67,
71, 73–76, 92, 105, 107, 117–24,
Bach, Johann Sebastian, 20, 81–82, 237 127–28, 131–32, 143,145, 147, 150–53,
St. Matthew Passion, 20, 208n6 154–60, 164, 169n2, 182, 191,
Baillot, Pierre-Marie-François de Sales, 195–96, 213–14, 218n10–11, 225–27,
51, 54n7, 119, 143, 154n1, 159–60 235, 241, 254–55
Baldensperger, Fernand, 217n7 Coriolanus overture, 122
Ballanche, Pierre-Simon, 228 Fidelio, 44, 71, 150–51, 164, 227
Orphée, 228n9 Gloria in excelsis, 127, 132
Balzac, Honoré de, 2–3, 12, 25–26, 61, Missa solemnis (Mass in D), 120–21,
78n2, 137n15, 159n8 154n1, 155, 159–60
290 Index
Beethoven, Ludwig van (Cont.) “Ballade (Chanson) du pêcheur”

Romance for violin, 154n1, 159 (from Lélio), 161–63
Piano sonata op. 27 no. 2 in C-sharp “Belle Voyageuse, La,” 99 and n5
minor (“Moonlight”), 162, 167 Benvenuto Cellini, 9–10, 19, 36, 44n7,
Piano sonata op. 106 99, 163n11, 179n8, 203
(“Hammerklavier”), 231, 235 “Captive, La,” 38n15, 99 and n5
String quartet op. 59 no. 3 “Chanson de brigands” (“Brigand’s
(“Razumovsky” or “Eroica”), 150 Song” from Lélio), 5, 162, 165
String quartet op. 131 (C-sharp Cinq Mai, Le (The Fifth of May, Song
minor), 25, 54n7, 119 on the Death of the Emperor), 185
Symphony No. 2 (D Major), 119, 216 Damnation of Faust, The, 8, 11,
Symphony No. 3 (“Eroica”), 44, 186n15
73–75, 117, 119n6, 123–24, 151, 216 Death of Orpheus, The (Prix de Rome
Symphony No. 4 (B-flat major), cantata), 186n15
157, 226 Eight Scenes from Faust, 23, 196n2
Symphony No. 5 (C Minor), 12, Enfance du Christ, L’, 6
22–24, 38, 61–64, 67, 107, 154–59, Episode in the Life of an Artist, see
254n3, 263, 268 Lélio and Symphonie fantastique
Symphony No. 6 (“Pastoral”), 12, 35, “Euphonia,” 202n13
41–45, 60, 92, 145, 151–53 Evenings with the Orchestra (Les
Symphony No. 7 (A Major), 23, 107, Soirées de l’orchestre), 7, 11, 18,
119, 157, 212, 218 39n20, 202n13
Symphony No. 8 (F major), 127, 131 Fantasy on The Tempest (Lélio), 7
Symphony No. 9 (“Choral”), 12, 23, Faust ballet (project), 270
116n16, 255 Francs-Juges, Les, 8
Violin sonata No. 9, op. 47 Grotesques de la musique, Les (The
(“Kreutzer”), 143 Musical Madhouse), 11
Bellini, Vincenzo, 2, 148, 185, 186n11, Harold in Italy, 5, 10, 98–99, 105, 161,
236, 239, 248n9 165, 167, 243n18, 247n5
Capuleti, I, ed i Montecchi, 2, 148 Hymne des Marseillais (arrangement,
Norma, 235n6 “La Marseillaise”), 251
Puritani, I, 185, 235n6, 239n8, 248 Invitation to the Waltz (piano work by
Sonnambula, La, 266 Weber, orchestration), 9
Benedict, Sir Julius (Jules), 44 King Lear overture, 99–100
Béranger, Pierre-Jean de, 185n5, 250 Lélio, ou Le Retour à la vie
Bériot, Charles Auguste de, 62 (Mélologue), 5–7, 16–17, 143n10,
Berlioz, Louis-Joseph (father), 17, 102n5 161, 166, 186n15
Berlioz, Louis-Hector “Letter of an Enthusiast on the
A travers chants (The Art of Music and Present State of Music in Italy,” 16
Other Essays), 11–12, 15, 35n3, 37n11, Letters to the Editor, 4, 10, 16, 19
69n11, 102n2, 131n14, 151n11, 272n4 Mélodies irlandaises (Irish Melodies),
Béatrice et Bénédict, 8 40n21, 106n4, 246n4, 249–50
Index 291
Memoirs, 1, 10–11, 17–18, 31n2, 37n12, Funeral March, 96

47, 69nn8–9, 84n7, 94, 95n4, Voice’s Charm, The (Le Charme de
101, 103nn7–8, 148n5, 216n6, la voix), 57
249n18, 273n9 Bizet, Georges, 8
Messe solennelle (Mass of 1824), 4, Bligny, de, 83n6, 141n1
32n5, 49n4, 86n2, 200n8, 253n1 Boieldieu, François-Adrien, 94–97,
Nuits d’ été, Les, 125 120n7, 236–37, 243, 253
“Observations on Classical Music and Charles de France, (with
Romantic Music,” 4, 15, 22 Hérold), 96n7
“On Imitation,” 22 Dame blanche, La (The White
“On Instrumentation,” 11, 25 Lady), 95
“Reflections on Religious Jean de Paris, 95
Music,” 15, 17 Ma Tante Aurore, 95
Requiem (Grande Messe des morts), Boileau, Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux, 136,
4–5, 19, 112, 81, 85, 181n15, 253n1 162, 191n5
Rob Roy Overture, 36n7 Art poétique, 62, 92n3, 162
Roméo et Juliette symphony, 5, Satires, 162n10
10, 148n6 Bonaparte, Laetitia (mother of
Salutaris, 82n1 Napoleon), 106
“Sara la baigneuse,” 38n15, 99 Bongrain, Anne, 83n5
“Suicide from Enthusiasm,” 39n20, Bordogni, Marco, 29
103n7, 128n2 Bossuet, Jacques-Bénigne, 107
Symphonie fantastique, 4, 6, 21–25, Boulanger, 116, 163–64
34, 47, 50–51, 98–100, 155n2, 161, Brahms, Johannes, 6
164–65nn12-13, 184, 196n2, 246n4 Branchu, Caroline, 27–9, 139n22
Symphonie funèbre et triomphale Brod, Henri, 147
(Funeral and Triumphal Brogni, Jean-François, Cardinal de,
Symphony), 5, 186n14 134n5, 135–36
Treatise on Orchestration, 11, 25, 35n5 Brown, Bruce Alan, 67n1, 71n18
Troyens, Les, 8–9, 33n11, 160n10 Bruni, Antonio Bartolomeo, 210
Voyage musical, 11 Bull, Ole Bornemann, 203, 205, 244–46
Waverly overture, 196n2 Burns, Robert, 36n7
Berlioz, Marguerite-Anne-Louise “Scots, wha hǽ,” 36n7
(known as Nanci), 54n6, Byron, Lord George, 99, 149
106n3, 106n4
Bernard, Claude Wolf, 265 Calzabigi, Ranieri de, 69–70
Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Cambon, Charles-Antoine, 133n1
Jacques-Henri, 108 Carafa, Michele
Paul et Virginie, 108 Nathalie, ou la Laitière suisse
Berry, duc de, 96n7, 169 (music, with Gyrowetz), 272n6
Bertin, Louis, 14, 17 Carême, Marie-Antoine, 190
Berton, Henri, 37–38nn12–13, 97 Carissimi, Giacomo, 82
292 Index
Caruso, Enrico, 2 Chopin, Frédéric, 20, 26, 47–48, 56, 59,

Casimir, Alphonsine, née Dubois, 115 77, 80, 116n15, 164, 217
Castil-Blaze: François-Henri-Joseph Etudes, 48
Blaze, 25, 30, 32–33, 118n1, Mazurkas, 48, 164
148, 230n16 Choron, Alexandre-Etienne, 81–83,
De l’Opéra, 32n10 85–89, 95–96, 140–43, 209n7,
Euriante (arr. Weber, 236–39, 254, 263–65
Euryanthe), 148n4 Corps complet de musique
Robin des bois (arr. Weber, Freischütz), religieuse, 142n6
32, 118, 128n3, 134n2, 148n4, Clapisson, Antoine-Louis, 162, 167
230n16, 265n7 Clari, Giovanni Carlo Maria, 140, 142–3
Catel, Charles-Simon Clementi, Muzio, 31
Treatise on Harmony, 248n10 Coccia, Carlo, 177
Cellini, Benvenuto, 9, 62n1, 161, Collinet fils, 137, 206
163, 179n8 Condé, Gérard, 12
memoirs of, 9 Cone, Edward T., 22, 155n2
Perseus, 163 Cooper, James Fenimore
Cervantes, Miguel de Brave, The, 98n1
Don Quixote, 136, 185 Coralli, Jean, 113n4, 270
Gitanilla, La, 179n7 Chatte métamorphosée en femme, La
Chapelle, Pierre David Augustin, 211 (ballet with Montfort), 270–74
Heureux Dépit, L’, 211 Tempête, La (ballet with
Charles X, 1, 16, 97n8, 169n2 Schneitzhœffer), 113n4
Chasles, Philarète, 31–32 Corneille, Pierre, 60
Chateaubriand, François-René de, 17, Cinna, 60
23–24, 101, 107 Horace, 60
René, 23–24 Coudroy-Saghaï, Marie-Hélène,
Chaudesaigues, Jacques-Germain, 186 83n5, 148n4
Bords de la coupe, Les, 186 Crescentini, Girolamo, 2, 58n9
Chénier, André, 19 Crosnier, François-Louis, 114–15, 134,
Iambes, 19 185, 204
Cherubini, Luigi, 4–5, 18, 27, 37–38n12, Csicery-Rónay, Elizabeth, 15
61, 64, 67n2, 87, 95, 97, 147n3, Cuvillon, Jean-Baptiste-Philémon
168–69, 172–73 de, 55, 80
Abencérages, Les, 64
Deux Journées, Les, 76 Dabadie, Henri-Bernard, 188n1
Médée, 76 Dalayrac, Nicolas, 69n9, 265n6
Messe solennelle (with Credo), 42–43 Nina, 69n9, 103n7
Requiem, 5, 94–97, 168–69, 171–75 Dauvergne, 211
Treatise on counterpoint (Traité du Troqueurs, Les, 211
contrepoint), 37–38n12, 186 Degli Antoni, Clementina, 116
Choiseul, Duc de, 261 Delacroix, Eugène, 3
Index 293
Journal, 7 Eler, Jean-Frédéric, 184

Liberty Leading the People, 4 Habit du chevalier de Grammont, 184
Delécluze, Etienne, 17 Elleviou, Jean, 58
Della Maria, Elssler, Fanny, 113n4, 270, 271n2,
Pierre-Antoine-Dominique, 65 272nn4, 6, 273
De Quincey, Thomas, 24 Elssler, Therese, 270n1, 271n2, 272n6
Dérivis, Henri-Etienne, 29, 143, 188n1 Encyclopédie, L’ (1751-72), 137n14
Deschamps, Antony, 186 Érard, Pierre, 232
Desormery, Léopold Bastien, 210 Ernst, Heinrich, 116, 245n2
Myrtil et Lycoris, 211 Euripides, 69n11
Despléchin,
Edouard-Désiré-Joseph, 133n1 Falcon, Cornélie, 128, 139, 189n1, 192–93
Desvignes, Pierre-Augustin, 171–72 Favart, Charles Simon, 71n18
Devienne, François, Ferdinand VII, King of Spain, 57n3
Visitandines, Les, 57n5, 74n4 Ferrand, Humbert, 8, 14, 17, 38n13
Diéterle, Jules-Pierre-Michel, 133n1 Fétis, François-Joseph, 6, 16, 19–20, 22,
Dlabacž, Godefroid Jean 25, 91n2, 98, 146n1, 156, 157n4,
Statistique de Bohême, 67 218n10, 231
Domenichino: Domenico Zampieri, 237 Méthode des méthodes (for piano, with
Domingo, Placido, 2 Moscheles), 218n10
Donizetti, Gaetano, 62, 274n11 Musique mise à la portée de tout le
Puritani, I, 17, 254 monde, La, 35n4, 146n1
Dorus (Dorus-Gras), Julie Van Revue musicale, La, editor, 6, 16, 22
Steenkiste, 44, 139, 189n1 Feuchère, Léon, 133n1
Dorus, Louis, 116 Fieschi, Giuseppe Marco, 168, 169n2
Dragonetti, Domenico, 233 Filipowicz, Élise, 61, 62n1
Dryden, John, 149 Florian, Jean-Pierre Claris de, 44,
Duflot, Hortense, 130 64n7, 151
Dufresne, 206 Focolo, 177
Dumas, Alexandre, 3, 143n10 Fontenelle, 21, 43n6, 270
Duponchel, Charles-Edmond, 185, Franchomme, Auguste, 55, 80
193–94, 245, 273 Francis, Francis Cornu, 58n8
Duport, Paul, 80 Festin du roi Balthasar, Le (play with
Duprez, Gilbert, 2, 9, 17, 82, 239, Robillard, music by Paris), 58
263–69 Franklin, Benjamin, 261
Durante, Francesco, 237
Duveyrier, Charles, 270, 274 Gabussi, Vincenzo, 109–11
Chatte métamorphosée en femme, La Ernani, 109–11
(ballet libretto), 270–73 Gallenberg, Wenzel Robert von
Duc d’Albe, Le (ballet libretto), Brézilia ou la Tribu des femmes
274n11 (music), 272
Michel Perrin (play), 274 Garcia (García), Manuel Rodriguez, 192
294 Index
Garrick, David, 148–49 Grasset, Jean-Jacques, 241n12, 249n17

Gautier, Théophile, 3, 7 Grétry, André, 74n3, 114–15, 116n13,
Gavaudan, Jean-Baptiste-Sauveur, 58 221n4, 265n6
Ghys, Joseph, 61, 62n1 Caravane du Caire, La, 74, 249
Girard, Narcisse, 83, 88, 100, 162, 167 Zémire et Azor, 114–15
Gluck, Christoph Willibald, 7, 9, Grisi, Giulia, 109, 111, 185, 192, 227
14, 18, 20, 27–33, 38–39, 64, Guerra, Louis Nicholas
66–72, 101–03, 118, 127, 129–30, Mohicans, Les (ballet, with
164, 197–98, 209–10, 219, 232, Adam), 272
265, 272n4 Guizot, François, 2, 251n23, 258
Alceste, 9, 39, 69, 71–72, 102n2, Gutenberg, 185
129–30, 164, 171, 210 Gyrowetz, Adalbert, 103n9, 272n6
Armide, 30–33, 70n14, 72, 159, Pages du duc de Vendôme (opera), 103
164, 249 Nathalie ou la Laitière suisse (ballet),
Caduta dei Giganti, La (The Fall of 271n1, 272
the Giants), 67
Écho et Narcisse, 164, 238 Habeneck, François-Antoine, 3, 13, 20,
Elena e Paride (Hélène et Paris), 69, 41, 44, 48, 51, 55
71, 72nn20–22 Halévy, Fromental, 20, 133–39,
Iphigenia in Aulis (Iphigénie en 245n1, 274n11
Aulide), 28–29, 209 Éclair, L’, 244
Iphigenia in Tauris (Iphigénie en Juive, La, 17, 133–39, 269n16
Tauride), 28, 70n14, 71–72, 92, Hallays, André, 12
101–03, 142 Hallmann, Diana R., 136n11
Orfeo/ Orphée, 9, 69, 71, 102, 164 Handel, Georg Friedrich, 56, 59, 67, 72,
Preface to Alceste, 69–70 81–82, 87, 107, 112, 137, 141–42, 144,
Telemaco, 67, 130 170, 237
Trionfo de Clelia, Il, 71n17 Alexander’s Feast, 141
Gnecco, Francesco, 139 Belshazzar, 116
Prova d’un’ opera seria, La, 139 Messiah, 67n2, 142, 144 (“Hallelujah”
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 24, 66, chorus)
128n6, 162n2, 227 Samson, 107
Faust, 6–7, 24, 43, 64, 128, 157, Hasse, Johann Adolf, 197, 237
216, 227 Hauman, Théodore, 61–62, 203, 205
“Fischer, Der,” 162n2 Haydn, Joseph, 7, 20–22, 67n2, 118,
Werther, 234n5 127–31, 217, 225, 226n2, 227n5,
Gomis, Joseph-Melchior, 57–58 241, 254
Diable à Séville, Le, 57 Creation, The, 127, 129–30
Revenant, Le, 57 Motet, 217
Gossett, Philip, 268n13 Symphony No. 103 in E flat,
Gounet, Thomas, 40n21 128–29, 131
Gounod, Charles, 8, 242n17 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 195
Index 295
Henri IV, King of France, 32 Kalkbrenner, Frédéric (Friedrich

Hérold, Ferdinand, 17, 94, 96n7, 176–82 Wilhelm), 217
Zampa, 17, 176–82 Kant, Immanuel, 273
Hiller, Ferdinand, 47–48, 143, 161, 163 Kaufmann, Jonas, 2
Symphony No. 1, 161, 163 Kean, Edmund, 268
Hippocrates, 129 Kemble, Charles, 39n18
Hoffmann, E. T. A., 6, 20–22, 24–25, Kock, Paul de, 273
128n5, 159n8, 189, 237 Kreutzer, Rodolphe, 95
“Don Juan,” 189n2 Lodoïska, 95
Kreisleriana, 24, 128n5 Mort d’Abel, La, 29, 95
“On Instrumental Music,” 21, 24
“Rat Crespel” (“The Cremona Labarre: Théodore-François-Joseph
Violin”), 237, 265 Berry, 76n9, 113n4, 244, 246–47
Tales of the Fantastic, 6, 159n8 Révolte au sérail, La, 76, 113, 246n3
Homer, 74, 230 Lablache, Frederico, 173, 185, 192, 248n9
Iliad, The, 158n7 Lachnith, Ludwig Wenzel, 29,
Howard, Patricia, 67n1 224, 227–30
Hugo, Victor, 3, 5, 16, 19, 24, 34, 38, 99, Mystères d’Isis, Les, 29, 224, 227–30
101, 108–10, 224, 230, 247 Lafayette, Gilbert du Motier, Marquis
Chants du crépuscule, 230n17 de, 261
Cromwell, Preface, 3 Lafont, Marcelin, 139
Hernani, 3–4, 6, 109–110 La Fontaine, Jean de, 31, 119,
Hunchback of Notre-Dame, The, 134n5, 141n2
5, 230n17 La Harpe, Jean-François de, 70
Odes et Ballades, 247n6 Lamartine, Alphonse de, 3, 105, 201n15
Orientales, Les, 38n15, 99n4, 108, Méditations poétiques, 105n1
177, 197n3 Lambert, Antonia, 162–63
Hummel, Johann Nepomuk, 44n8, 218n11 Lambert, Michel, 162
Hus, Jan, 134n5 Laudi spirituali, 124
Lebrun, Louis-Sébastien, 75n6, 103, 115,
Jacotot, Jean-Joseph, 137 134, 151
Enseignement universel, 137n14 Rossignol, Le, 75, 103, 115, 122, 134, 151
Jadin, Louis, 22 Lefranc de Pompignan,
Janequin, Clément, 144 Jean-Jacques, 250n21
Bataille de Marignan, 144 Lemoyne, Jean-Baptiste, 75n6, 103
Janin, Jules, 17, 25, 176, 263, 271 Prétendus, Les, 75, 103
Jansenne, Louis, 142 Lenz, Wilhelm
Jawureck, Constance, 189n1 Beethoven and his Three Styles, 195n1
Jommelli, Nicolo, 82–84, 87 Loève-Veimars, François-Adolphe,
Josephine, Empress of France, 1, 237n3
38n14, 247n7 Leo, Leonardo, 82, 237
Jourdan, General Jean-Baptiste, 248 Lesueur, Eustache, 126
296 Index
Lesueur, Jean-François, 4, 27, 78n1, 86n1, Marcello, Benedetto, 82, 87

87, 97, 158n6, 173–75, 195, 197–201, Marchand, Leslie A., 149n7
238, 253 Marie-Antoinette, Queen of
Mass in F minor, 174 France, 247n
Noémi (Naomi), 195, 200–01 Marlborough, General John Churchill,
Ossian, ou Les Bardes, 198n6, 238 Duke of, 32n8
Rachel, 195, 200 Marliani, Marco Aurelio, 98
Ruth et Booz, 195, 200 Bravo, Il, 98n1
“Super flumina Babylonis” Marchand forain, Le, 98
(motet), 173 Marmontel, Jean-François, 70
Te Deum, 168, 175 Didon (Piccini), 70n14
Letourneur, Pierre, 75n5 Mars, Mlle.: Anne-Françoise-Hippolyte
Levasseur, Nicolas-Prosper, 138, 139n19, Boutet, 268
173, 188n1 Marschner, Heinrich August, 182
Liszt, Franz, 5–6, 26, 47–48, 62n3, 77, Martelet, 261
80, 116n15, 161–62, 164–67, 173n10, Martin, Nicolas-Jean-Blaise, 57–58
202n16, 209n7, 212, 214n3, 217, Martini, Giovanni Battista, 70nn12–13
218n11, 231–35, 242n17, 246 Masaccio: Tommaso di Ser
Grande fantaisie symphonique Giovanni, 237
(Symphonic Fantasy), 161, 164–67 Massart, Lambert, 162, 167
Réminiscences de La Juive, 235n7 Massart, Louise-Aglaé Masson
Reminicences of Bellini’s Massart, 162n4
Norma, 235n6 Massenet, Jules, 8
Symphonie fantastique, piano Masson de Puineuf (or Puyneuf), 215–16
arrangement, 6, 161 Massy, Marie, 142–43
Lobkowitz, Philipp Hyacinth von, 67 Mattei, Stanislao, 70
Lormier, Paul, 133n1 Mayer, Lorenzina, 62
Louis Ferdinand, Prince of Prussia, 241 Mayseder, Joseph, 116, 121, 162
Louis-Philippe, King of the French, 2, 8, Grande polonaise, 162
168, 169n2 Medici family, 142n8
Louis XIV, King of France, 190n4 Méhul, Etienne-Nicolas, 39, 71, 78n1,
Louis XVI, King of France, 169n2 154n1, 160, 178, 183, 253, 265
Louis XVIII, King of France, 97n8, Ariodant, 78n1, 183
169n2, 173 Euphrosine, 78n1
Jeune Henri, Le, overture, 160
MacPherson, James Mendelssohn, Felix, 20, 69n8, 116n15,
Poems of Ossian, The, 197n4 208n6, 218n10
Mahler, Gustav, 34 Méreaux, Nicolas Jean Le Froid de, 210
Mainzer, Joseph, 252, 257–58, 260–62 Alexandre aux Indes, 211
Maison, Nicholas-Joseph, 255 Mérimée, Prosper, 3
Malherbe, François de, 191n5 Mermoud, 258, 261–62
Malibran, Maria Garcia, 62, 139n22, 158 Metastasio, Pietro, 70
Index 297
Meyerbeer, Giacomo, 9, 97, 113n2, Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 2, 5, 7,

125–26, 133, 137, 179n6, 185, 188, 19–20, 22, 29nn6–7, 32, 39, 50n6,
209–10, 219–23, 245n1, 254, 269 52–54, 67, 75, 83, 113n2, 140,
Gutenberg cantata, 185 170–71, 178, 182, 185n8, 188–89, 191,
Huguenots, Les, 17, 125, 127, 219–23, 197, 210–11, 213, 224–30, 254
244, 269 Clemenza di Tito, La, 229
“Monk, The” (“Le Moine”), 125–26 Don Giovanni (Don Juan), 29, 52–54,
Robert le Diable, 113, 125, 137, 173, 188, 56, 60, 75, 84, 113, 118, 128, 168,
191, 209, 219, 223, 269 170–71, 176,178–79, 185n8, 188–89,
Michelangelo, 67, 151 191, 227, 229, 266
Michaud, Louis-Gabriel, 102n5 Idomeneo, 212, 218
Biographie universelle, 102 Magic Flute, The, 19, 29n6, 117,
Mira: Jean-Joseph Brunet, 56 124, 224–30
Moke, Camille (Pleyel, Marie), 6–7, 102n4 Marriage of Figaro, The, 32, 75
Molière, 60, 73–75, 87n3, 100, 162, 176, Motet, 226
178, 185 Requiem, 84–85, 88–89, 96, 168,
Bourgeois gentilhomme, Le, 75 170–72, 174, 266
Don Juan, 176, 178, 185n8 Müller brothers (string quartet),
Monsieur de Pourceaugnac, 74n2, 56, 58–59
79n5 Musard, Philippe, 137, 206, 215, 253
Précieuses ridicules, Les, 100n6 Musset, Alfred de, 3
Tartuffe, 87n3, 162
Mondonville, Jean-Joseph Cassanéa Naderman, François-Joseph, 154n1
de, 210 Naderman, Jean-Henri, 154n1
Monpou, Hippolyte, 143 Napoleon I, 1–2, 4, 19, 38n14, 41–42,
Juif errant, Le (The Wandering 50n8, 58n9, 60, 106, 117, 140,
Jew), 143 185n5, 200n9
Piquillo, 143n10 Napoleon III, 2, 8
Monsigny, Pierre-Alexandre, 265n6 Naumann, Johann Gottlieb
Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Pellegrini al sepolcro, I (oratorio), 261
Secondat, Baron de, 34 Nerval, Gérard de, 3, 128n6, 216n7
Montfort, Alexandre, 270, 273–74 Newton, Sir Isaac, 55
Chatte métamorphosée en femme, Nodier, Charles
La (music for ballet with Trilby, ou le lutin d’Argail, 48
Coralli), 270–74 Nourrit, Adolphe, 60, 122–23, 133n1, 138,
Montgolfier, Jenny, 73, 76 139n19, 188n1, 192, 261–64
Moore, Thomas, 40, 169, 246, 249–50
Nine Irish Melodies (Mélodies Onslow, Georges, 242
irlandaises, trans. Swanton-Belloc),
40n21, 169n3, 246n4 Pacini, Antonio, 186
“On Music,” 40n21 Pacini, Émilien, 125
Moscheles, Ignaz, 218 Paër, Ferdinando, 97
298 Index
Paganini, Nicolò, 5, 9–10, 122n10, 206, Quinault, Philippe, 32n11

245, 247,
Paisiello, Giovanni, 197–98 Rabelais, François, 191n5
Nina, 69 Racine, Jean, 143, 196
Palestrina, Giovanni Pierluigi da, 81–82, Iphigénie, 143
84, 87–88, 124, 141, 171, 237 Phèdre, 196n2
“Alla riva del Tebro” (motet), 88, Reber, Henri, 77–80
141, 238 Second Piano Trio, op. 12, 80
Panofka, Henri, 99n2, 115–16 Second String Quartet, op. 5, 79–80
Panseron, Auguste, 61, 62n1 Reboul, Jean, 201
Paris, Charles-Joseph, 58n8 Reicha, Antonin, 4, 27, 38n12, 42–43, 97,
Pasta, Giuditta, 66 121n9, 236, 239–43
Pavarotti, Luciano, 2 Art of the Opera Composer, 243
Pelet de la Lozière, Privat Joseph Complete Course in Practical
Claramont, Comte, 251n23 Harmony, 243
Persuis, Louis-Luc-Loiseau de, 103 “Horch! Horch!” (on Schiller
Nina (ballet), 103 ode), 240
Peyronnet, Pierre-Denis, Comte de Nathalie ou la Famille russe, 243
Histoire des Francs, 187n16 Obaldi ou les Français en Égypte, 241
Phidias, 230 Sapho, 243
Philastre, Humanité-René, 133n1 Thirty-six Fugues for Piano, 241
Philidor, François-André-Danican, 71 Treatise on Advanced Composition,
Ernelinde, 71n18, 249 240, 242–43
Farrier, The (Le Maréchal-Ferrant), 71 Treatise on Melody, 243
Princesse de Norvège, La, 249 Reicha, Joseph (uncle of Antonin),
Sorcerer, The (Le Sorcier), 71n18 240
Piccinni, Niccolò, 70, 265 Reynaud, Cécile, 186n15
Dido (Didon), 70 Ries, Ferdinand, 42–43
Iphigénie en Tauride, 70n14 Brigand’s Bride, The (Die
Plantade, Charles-François, 97 Räuberbraut), overture, 42–43
Pleyel, Camille (piano manufacturer), Rifaut, Louis-Victor-Etienne, 111
7, 232n2 Sentinelle perdue, La, 111
Pleyel, Ignaz-Joseph (composer), 102 Robert, Alphonse, 103n8
Pleyel, Marie, see Camille Moke Robillard, Gustave Robillard
Ponchard, Louis-Antoine-Eléonore, 61, d’Avrigny, 58n8
64–65, 96, 115, 116n13 Rossini, Gioachino, 2, 11, 14–16, 19,
Porpora, Nicola, 82 27–28, 36, 90–93, 97, 98n1, 99n2,
Poussin, Nicolas, 44, 151 103–04, 113n2, 114, 118, 127,
Propiac, Catherine-Joseph Ferdinand 179–80, 186n12, 188, 244–45, 254,
Girard de, 210 264n1, 267–69
Fausse Paysanne, La ou L’Heureuse Barber of Seville, 92, 104, 191
Inconséquence, 211 Cenerentola, La (Cinderella), 92n4
Index 299
Gazza ladra, La (The Thieving Schumann, Robert, 6, 20–21,

Magpie), 28, 104 25–26, 95n2
Moïse, 270n1 analysis of Fantastic Symphony, 6, 25
Sémiramide, 127, 130 Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, 20
Siège de Corinthe, Le, 244–45 Schunke, Charles (Carl), 116
William Tell (Guillaume Tell), Scott, Sir Walter, 95n2, 150
2, 14–16, 20, 90–93, 112–14, Lady of the Lake, The, 95n2
173n9, 188, 191, 245, 263, 264n1, Scribe, Eugène, 9, 49n3, 79n4, 107n7,
267–69 114n7, 133
Rouget de Lisle, Claude-Joseph, Séchan, Charles-Polycarpe, 133n1
249n15, 251 Seghers, François, 80
“Marseillaise, La,” 84n7, 249–51 Seuriot, Louis-Auguste, 242
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 21, 23, 34, 103, Shakespeare, William, 3, 6, 39, 41–42,
151, 250n21 50n6, 53, 60–61, 63, 66, 75, 149, 189,
Devin du village, Le (The Village 191n5, 227, 265n6
Soothsayer), 103, 151 Anthony and Cleopatra, 149
Dictionnaire de musique, 35n4 Hamlet, 24, 189n3, 227
Social Contract, The, 35n2 Henry IV, Part I, 75n5
Rubini, Giovanni Battista, 60, 69n9, Othello, 6, 61–63, 155
109, 111, 185, 188n1, 192, 227 Richard III, 267n15
Rushton, Julian, 67n1 Romeo and Juliet, 3, 62, 148
Tempest, The, 7, 149
Sacchini, Antonio Shostakovich, Dmitri, 34
Oedipe, 29 Smart, Sir George Thomas, 59
Salieri, Antonio, 28, 39, 71 Smithson, Harriet, 3, 6–7, 10, 47,
Danaïdes, Les, 28, 29n6 265n6, 268
Tarare, 249 Solié, Jean-Pierre, 204n1
Sammartini, Giovanni, 67 Diable à quatre, Le, 204
Sand, George, 3, 25 Sontag, Henrietta, 193
Santini, Vincenzo Felice, 109 Spohr, Ludwig, 182
Scarlatti, Domenico, 82 Spontini, Gaspare, 38–39, 71, 76, 113–14,
Schiafogatti, 177 118, 209–10, 254
Schiller, Friedrich, 227 Fernand Cortez, 38, 93, 113–14
Don Carlos, 227 Vestale, La, 38–39, 43, 76, 113, 114n5,
Schlesinger, Maurice (Moritz), 19–20, 128, 209
54–55, 58, 125n1 Steinberg, Michael, 34
Schneitzhœffer, Symphony, The: A Listener’s Guide, 34n1
Jean-Madeleine-Marie, 113n4 Stendhal, Henri Beyle, 3, 19, 27, 127n1
Tempête, La, 113 Stoepel, François (Franz), 116
Schoelcher, Victor, 140 Süssmayer (Süssmayr), Franz Xaver,
Schubert, Franz, 26, 117, 122–23, 129 89n7, 170
“Nun, The,” 117, 122–23, 125 Swanton-Belloc, Louise, see Moore
300 Index
Täglichsbeck, Thomas, 216 Vigée-Lebrun, Elisabeth, 69n9

Taglioni, Filippo (Philippe), 70n9, Vigny, Alfred de, 3, 16, 183–86
113n4, 133n1, 246n3, 272n6, 271n1 Chatterton, 184, 231n5
Brézilia ou la Tribu des femmes (ballet Othello (Shakespeare translation), 6
with Gallenberg), 272 Servitude et grandeur militaires, 185
Nathalie ou la Laitière suisse, Virgil, 82, 89, 265n7
271n1, 272 Aeneid, The 89, 123, 171n5, 233n4
Révolte au sérail, La, 76, 113, 246n3 Vogel, Johann Christoph, 39, 71
Taglioni, Marie, 84, 113n4, 190, Démophon, 39, 71
272nn4 and 6 Voltaire, 15, 143
Tamburini, Antonio, 52–53, 109, 111, 185,
192, 248n9 Wagner, Cosima, 231
Thalberg, Sigismond-Fortuné, 167n16, Wagner, Richard, 5, 11, 14–15, 23, 30,
212, 217–18, 231, 244 37n10, 95n2
Thiers, Adolphe, 83n5 Weber, Carl Maria von, 22, 32, 38–44,
Tilmant, Alexandre, 54–55 50n6, 58, 59n12, 67, 71, 76, 95n2,
Tilmant, Théophile (the elder), 54 118–19, 134, 145, 147–50, 178–79,
Troupenas, Eugène, 247 182, 191, 200, 213, 216, 225, 232, 254
Tschaikowsky, Piotr Ilyich Euryanthe, 147–50, 179
Swan Lake, 274n12 Freischütz, Der, 9, 32, 38, 42–44,
56, 58, 118, 125n1, 128, 134n2, 148,
Urhan, Chrétien, 52, 55, 80, 99n2, 149n9, 150, 163, 179, 204, 217n7,
105–08, 121–22, 162, 167, 230n16, 265n6
195, 201–02 Invitation to the Waltz, 9
À elle, Letters for piano, 105–08, 201 Oberon, 42, 149–50, 179, 200
Auditions, 201–02 Preciosa, 179
Rübezahl, Der 42n3
Vaccai, Nicola, 55, 177, 227 Ruler of the Spirits (Der Beherrscher
Valentino, Henri-Justin-Armand-Joseph, der Geister), overture, 42
32, 254n3 William IV, King of England, 56, 59
Vatel, François, 190 Wolff, Pius Alexander, 179n7
Velluti, Giovanni Battista, 2 Wolkonski, Alexander Nikititch,
Verdi, Giuseppe Prince, 99
Ernani, 109
Sicilian Vespers, 274n11 Xavier: Boniface Xavier, 79n4
Véron, Louis-Désiré, 114, 194, 209–10 Ours et le pacha, L’ (The Bear and the
Vestris, Auguste, 271, 272n4 Pacha), 110n4

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Berlioz on Music

Miniature portrait of Berlioz by Pierre-Paul de Pommayrac, oil on ivory, ca. 1839.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

1. Musical Polemic: On “Dilettanti” 27

2. Musical Polemic: On Armide and Gluck 30

3. The Arts: Observations on Classical Music and Romantic Music 34

4. Concert Society of the Conservatoire: First Concert 41

5. Music Review: Concerts 47

8. Music Review: Concerts 61

10. Music Review: Beethoven and the Dilettanti of Bordeaux 73

11. Music Review: Henri Reber Quartets 77

Jealousy vs. solidarity among artists; trials of young

12. Music Review: Funeral Service for Choron (I) 81

13. Music Review: Funeral Service for Choron (II) 85

14. Rossini’s William Tell (Part I) 90

16. Notice to Readers Idle Enough to Read My Articles 98

17. Gluck’s Iphigenia in Tauris (Part I) 101

19. Gabussi’s Ernani at the Théâtre-Italien 109

20. Music Review: Opéra: William Tell; Opéra-Comique: Zémire et

21. Conservatoire Orchestra: First Concert [Eighth Season] 117

22. Critical Review: “Le Moine,” Text by Émilien Pacini, Music by

23. Third Concert at the Conservatoire: Symphonies by Haydn and

24. Music Review: Royal Academy of Music: First Performance of La

25. Music Review: Concert by the Pupils of Choron at the Hôtel de

26. Concert Society of the Conservatoire: Fourth Concert 145

27. Sixth Conservatoire Concert 154

28. Concert by Franz Liszt: Hôtel de Ville (Salle Saint-Jean) 161

29. M. Cherubini’s Requiem at the Invalides and M. Lesueur’s Te

30. On the Score of Hérold’s Zampa 176

31. Music Review 183

32. Mozart’s Don Juan 188

33. Religious Music: M. Lesueur: Rachel, Noëmi, Ruth et Booz,

Three phases of artists’ lives: imitation, independence,

34. Opéra-Comique—Concerts: Virtuosos and Composers 203

35. First Conservatoire Concert of the Season 212

36. Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots: Acts 4 and 5 219

38. Liszt 231

or types; solves “Hammerklavier” riddle of the Sphinx; is

39. Antoine Reicha 236

40. Musical Entertainments: Le Siège de Corinthe at the Opéra; M. Ole

41. The Progress of Musical Education in France: M. Joseph Mainzer

42. Polytechnical Society: Awards Ceremony 260

43. Opéra: William Tell; Debut of Duprez 263

44. Royal Academy of Music: Premiere of La Chatte métamorphosée en

Biographical Notes 275

and rose indignantly to Romeo’s defense: were his consuming passions, he

by six months the events commemorated in Delacroix’s equally provocative

at the Invalides to commemorate a general killed in Algeria, acclaimed by

Artist who, in the passage denouncing liberties taken with masterworks in

music had no sponsor, Louis-Philippe having abolished the Chapelle royale

Under the visionary leadership of Habeneck the symphonies received their

It needs to be mentioned, among these remarks on the time frame of our

Wagnerian, that is to say his most straightforwardly didactic, in certain early

Revolution in the French Musical Press

newspaper to which he contributed a number of articles in 1829 and 1830,

cooperation he relied on to produce his own music. If he felt somewhat freer

(they “became poets,” he conceded, when composing to words), who were

Music Criticism as Revolutionary Practice