Form, Program, and Metaphor in the Music of Berlioz

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Form, Program, and Metaphor in the Music of Berlioz

Few aspects of Berlioz’s style are more idiosyncratic than his handling of musical form. This book, the first devoted solely to the topic, explores how his formal strategies are related to the poetic and dramatic sentiments that were his very reason for being. Rodgers draws upon Berlioz’s ideas about musical representation and on the ideas that would have influenced him, arguing that the relationship between musical and extra-musical narrative in Berlioz’s music is best construed as metaphorical rather than literal – “intimate” but “indirect,” in Berlioz’s words. Focusing on a type of varied-repetitive form that Berlioz used to evoke poetic ideas such as mania, obsession, and meditation, the book shows how, far from disregarding form when pushing the limits of musical evocation, Berlioz harnessed its powers to convey these ideas even more vividly. s t e p h e n r o d ge r s is an Assistant Professor of Music Theory at the University of Oregon. His research focuses on the music of Hector Berlioz, but he has also published articles and given scholarly presentations on such topics as nineteenth-century song, the intersections of musical and literary theories, and film music. He is the recipient of an Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship in Humanistic Studies, a New Faculty Award from the University of Oregon, and a Faculty Research Fellowship from the Oregon Humanities Center, which supported research on a recent article about Berlioz’s songs. This is his first book.

Form, Program, and Metaphor in the Music of Berlioz stephen rodgers

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521884044 © Stephen Rodgers 2009 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published in print format 2009

ISBN-13

978-0-511-50863-9

eBook (NetLibrary)

ISBN-13

978-0-521-88404-4

hardback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents

Music examples [page vi] Figures [viii] Acknowledgments [ix] 1 Introduction [1] 2 Preliminary examples and recent theories [11] 3 Form as metaphor [39] 4 Mixing genres, mixing forms: sonata and song in Le Carnaval romain [63] 5 The vague des passions, monomania, and the first movement of the Symphonie fantastique [85] 6 Love’s emergence and fulfillment: the Sce`ne d’amour from Romeó et Juliette [107] 7 Epilogue [135] Notes [141] Bibliography [173] Index [185]

Music examples

Ex. 2.1 Ex. 2.2 Ex. 2.3

Dies irae from Symphonie fantastique [page 12] Cantabile theme from Roi Lear introduction [13] Ballet des sylphes from La Damnation de Faust, mm. 1–48 [26] Ex. 2.4 Ballet des sylphes, B and A0 melodies compared [28] Ex. 2.5 Main themes from Chœur de gnomes et de sylphes, Voici des roses, and Ballet des sylphes [29] Ex. 2.6 Chœur de gnomes et de sylphes, episode, mm. 61 ff. [31] Ex. 2.7 Marche des pe`lerins, opening phrase of each main section [35] Ex. 4.1 Le Carnaval romain, main themes [64] Ex. 4.2 Le Carnaval romain, piano reduction of both expositions [67] Ex. 4.3 Le Chasseur danois [76] Ex. 4.4 Le Carnaval romain, reduction of mm. 262 ff. [79] Ex. 4.5 Le Carnaval romain, reduction of mm. 366 ff. [80] Ex. 4.6 “Laudamus te” from Messe solennelle [82] Ex. 4.7 Le Carnaval romain, outer voice sketch of the secondary theme [83] Ex. 5.1 Five statements of the ideé fixe [92] Ex. 5.2 Three metrical interpretations of the ideé fixe [97] Ex. 5.3 Form of the ideé fixe [98] Ex. 5.4 The ideé fixe compressed and normalized in mm. 410 ff. [98] Ex. 5.5 Harmonic reduction of introduction, mm. 47 ff. [101] Ex. 5.6 Retransition theme and ideé fixe compared [101] Ex. 5.7 The X sections [103] Ex. 5.8 Schenkerian analysis of the ideé fixe [104] Ex. 6.1a Sce`ne d’amour, section A1 [111] Ex. 6.1b Sce`ne d’amour, section A2 [113] Ex. 6.2 Romeó au tombeau, Juliet’s awakening [116] Ex. 6.3 Sce`ne d’amour, main themes [117] Ex. 6.4 Thematic relationships [118]

Music examples

Ex. Ex. Ex. Ex. Ex. Ex. Ex.

6.5 6.6 6.7 6.8 6.9 6.10 6.11

Falling chromatic motive [122] The love theme [124] The recurring diminished-seventh chord D6 [128] Tags of D3 and D4 [129] D5 [130] D7 [132]

[125]

vii

Figures

Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig.

2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 4.1 4.2 4.3 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 6.1 6.2

Form of Ballet des sylphes [page 26] Form of Chœur de gnomes et de sylphes [30] Form of Marche des pe`lerins [34] Key structure of Marche des pe`lerins [37] Form of Le Carnaval romain [66] Rotational form of Le Carnaval romain [71] Couplets form of Le Carnaval romain [73] Form of Symphonie fantastique, first movement [93] Cone’s diagram of the movement’s form [94] Sonata-form overlay [96] Spiral form [102] Form of mm. 125–81 [110] An overview of the Sce`ne d’amour’s form [119]

Acknowledgments

Writing a book can be a solitary task – your sentences, your piles of notes, your debates about word order, argument, and style, your cluttered workspace. But I am grateful that so many other people have been a part of the making of this book. Many of those people are mentioned in the following pages, Berlioz scholars whose ideas triggered my interest in Berlioz as much as his music itself. Some of them have helped me in ways I would never have imagined when I started on this journey, and I owe them an enormous debt of gratitude: D. Kern Holoman, who took an interest in me and my work early on, read and commented on an early draft, and has continued to push my ideas in new directions; Julian Rushton, who graciously offered advice on my initial book proposal and manuscript; and Francesca Brittan, who I sensed was a like mind from the moment I met her at a conference in Seattle in 2004, who never fails to spark my thinking, and whom I am happy to call my friend. Then there are those who have seen this project in various forms from the very beginning, when I started work on the dissertation on which it is based, and encouraged me to revise it for publication. Patrick McCreless guided me with a gentle hand and urged me to follow my instincts. Kristina Muxfeldt always took the care to consider my ideas with utmost seriousness. And James Hepokoski first fired my interest in form and program music and took the time to explore with me the wonders and peculiarities of Berlioz’s overtures. Without their help, my dissertation would only have been half of what it was and this book would remain a promise, not a reality. Thanks as well to my colleagues at the University of Oregon – especially Marian Smith, Anne McLucas, Steve Larson, Jack Boss, and Tim Pack – and my students, who have listened to me go on about Berlioz longer than they might have wanted me to, inspired me again and again with their own work, and reminded me of the pleasure of talking through ideas, not just writing about them, and of being part of a lively and unselfish scholarly community. I also owe a debt to the University of Oregon for providing me with a New Faculty Award, which supported research on this project, and to the Oregon Humanities Center for providing me with a Faculty Research

x

Acknowledgments

Fellowship in the spring of 2007, which allowed me to complete a related Berlioz project and gave me the time to incorporate some of that research into this book. Victoria Cooper and her staff at Cambridge University Press have been superb in every way: diligent, able, prompt, and kind. And I am grateful for the feedback I received from my two anonymous reviewers. I alone am responsible for any errors or oversights that remain. Finally, to my family, who never fail to remind me what matters most: good conversation, curiosity, playfulness, and an open mind. With them around, whether in person or in spirit, nothing is ever really solitary.

1

Introduction

Already Berlioz’s 2003 bicentenary is well behind us. The conferences, performances, and colloquia surrounding his 200th birthday helped not so much to reignite an interest in his work, since the fires were already burning strong, in large part thanks to the work of the “new Berliozians” of the 1990s,1 but they did bring together these scholars and others, including some newer Berliozians whose contributions rest on this sturdy foundation (and among whom I count myself). They allowed audiences to rediscover many of Berlioz’s fine works and to refine their understanding of this man whose singular music has suffered from such mischaracterization and prejudice. And they provided an opportunity for those who cared deeply about Berlioz to assess what strides had been made and what work was left to be done. The field of Berlioz studies is in good shape.2 The New Berlioz Edition is now complete, as is the Correspondance geńe´rale.3 New volumes have been added to the complete criticism.4 We are blessed with a number of exemplary Berlioz biographies, ranging from Hugh Macdonald’s Berlioz (1982) to D. Kern Holoman’s Berlioz (1989), Peter Bloom’s The Life of Berlioz (1998), and David Cairns’s magisterial two-volume biography, The Making of an Artist (1989) and Servitude and Greatness (1999).5 Outside English-language scholarship we have Gunther Braam and Arnold Jacobshagen’s study of Berlioz’s reception in Germany, Hector Berlioz in Deutschland: Texte und Dokumente zur deutschen Berlioz-Rezeption (1829– 1843) (2002), and the indispensable Dictionnaire Berlioz (2003), edited by Pierre Citron and Cećile Reynaud, to name only a couple of examples.6 We also have many important essay collections, some of which came out of the bicentenary celebrations, including Berlioz: Past, Present, Future (2003) and Berlioz: Scenes from the Life and Work (2008), both edited by Peter Bloom, as well as Berlioz in the Age of French Romanticism (forthcoming), edited by Frank Heidlberger.7 A glance at this list shows that the most impressive recent contributions to Berlioz scholarship have been largely editorial or music-historical. Music-analytical studies of Berlioz’s music have figured less prominently in the overall landscape of Berlioz studies. Julian Rushton’s work is a

2

Introduction

notable exception, as is Macdonald’s Berlioz, the second half of which presents an elegant and insightful overview of Berlioz’s music. Rushton has above all contributed enormously to our understanding of Berlioz’s craft in The Musical Language of Berlioz (1983), the Cambridge handbook Berlioz: Romeó et Juliette (1994), The Music of Berlioz (2001), and numerous articles.8 One reason for the relative scarcity of analytical studies of Berlioz’s music is precisely that his music is so singular. It often resists explanation with methodologies honed on the (mostly Austro-Germanic) music of contemporaries like Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn, and Chopin. It often behaves in unexpected ways, challenging our assumptions about what nineteenth-century music ought to do. Few aspects of Berlioz’s style are more challenging than his treatment of musical form. Thankfully, the days when writers routinely disparaged Berlioz’s “inadequate” understanding of form are well behind us. Virtually no one today would claim, as W. H. Hadow did in 1904, that Berlioz was “imperfectly acquainted” with “all forms of purely musical design.”9 We have come a long way in a century. But a curious fact remains: Berlioz’s forms are still puzzling even after we have gotten to know them well. Looking at his bizarre forms means grappling with questions that extend well beyond his world and arise whenever we encounter difficult music: What do we do with pieces whose shapes seem at once graspable and strange? How do we explain to ourselves, and therefore to others, the impact of works that are as engrossing as they are bewildering? These are the questions that prompted me to write this book, the first devoted solely to the subject of form in Berlioz. They have formed the foundation of my inquiry into Berlioz’s astonishing formal language, and in pursuing them I have come to believe with greater and greater conviction that form was one of Berlioz’s most powerful expressive tools, as much as melody, harmonic progression, and orchestration. It is sometimes mistakenly believed that in his efforts to “tell stories” with music Berlioz subordinated musical design to musical evocation – a claim leveled at many programmatic composers, but no more than at Berlioz. His works, one might then conclude, are less structurally sound, less governed by a concern for balance, proportion, and pacing, because they move not according to inherent musical principles but rather in obeisance to some “extra-musical” plot. A closer examination shows this to be one of the many misconceptions that cling so persistently to Berlioz and that, once questioned and not taken as a given, turn out to be the furthest thing from the truth. Berlioz did not neglect matters of form in favor of the expression of emotion and drama; he conveyed emotion and drama

Form and program

through form. The extensive revisions he made to his scores suggest that he took great care in fashioning his works according to the emotional effect he wanted them to produce, the ideas and images he wanted them to convey, and the techniques he knew he could rely on to do that.

Form and program But how exactly are those effects produced and those ideas and images expressed? The notion that the form of a programmatic piece should somehow reflect its poetic content is hardly new, and emanates from the writings of composers such as Liszt, Wagner, Mahler, and Strauss. But the ways that form and program relate in Berlioz’s music deserve scrutiny. His programmatic symphonies (or at least the aesthetic they seemed to embody) were a touchstone for later composers and the centerpiece in many of the debates about “descriptive” music that began around the midnineteenth century and continued into the next (witness Liszt’s famous 1855 essay “Berlioz and his Harold Symphony”10 and Wagner’s 1857 open letter “On Franz Liszt’s Symphonic Poems,”11 which judges Berlioz’s program music harshly next to Liszt’s achievements). Yet in part for this reason, our understanding of Berlioz’s aesthetic tends to be colored by others’ ideas more than by his own – in particular by ideas about the polarity between program music and “absolute” music, to which Berlioz would not have subscribed.12 Even today, the question of how to relate Berlioz’s music with the stories and events that seem to have inspired it is typically approached from one of two interpretive positions, rooted in these ideas – what Walter Werbeck has called, in the context of Strauss studies, a “heteronomy aesthetic” (which he traces to Liszt) and an “autonomy aesthetic” (which he traces to Hanslick).13 In the first case, it is argued that the program determines the flow of the composition; we need the program, therefore, to understand the music. In the second case, it is argued that music operates (or at least in the hands of an able composer should operate) according to “pure” musical principles and that the program is therefore ancillary; we do not need the program to understand the music because the two are only superficially related and the music should speak well enough for itself. Neither of these positions does justice to the subtle and complex mingling of music with literature, art, drama, and personal experience that is a hallmark of Berlioz’s style. This book offers a more nuanced approach to understanding how form and program interact in Berlioz’s music, one

3

4

Introduction

drawn from Berlioz’s own ideas about musical representation and also from the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century writings that shaped those ideas. Berlioz’s pieces, I argue, are neither literal retellings of their programs, as the heteronomy aesthetic might have it, nor only incidentally related to them, as the autonomy aesthetic would claim. They are metaphors for the poetic and dramatic sentiments expressed in those programs. Berlioz used the term “metaphor” with great care in his critical writings. I place it at the center of this study because it can help us to understand how, more often than not with Berlioz, the shape of a piece reflects the general shape of the emotional experience he means to capture, not the details of a given story or scene. The relationship between music and program is best construed as “intimate” yet “indirect,” to borrow terms from Berlioz’s essay “On Imitation in Music” (De l’Imitation musicale), his most thoroughgoing exploration of the powers and limits of musical expressivity. The precise nature of that intimate yet indirect relationship will be explored in more detail in the coming chapters. For now I need only stress that the driving force behind this manner of inquiry is a belief in the necessity of an approach to Berlioz’s music that is technical but also humanistic, attentive to the formal designs of his pieces but also to the expressive meanings of those designs. Structure and expression are not at odds in Berlioz. One does not fade into the background as the other comes into focus. They are rather like resonant frequencies, powerful on their own but redoubled in strength when working in tandem. Considering how they interact allows us to validate our gut sense that the way a piece moves through time is appropriate to the feelings and ideas that piece expresses. How, this book asks, do Berlioz’s musical forms behave like the characters in his programs? How do they evoke images or feelings like the feelings experienced by those characters, or, for that matter, by us, when we ponder the story that hovers behind the music? How do the forms of his compositions represent the non-musical events suggested by their programs without relating those events in slavish step-by-step fashion? Why do some of Berlioz’s forms feel right for a given programmatic scenario, even if that “rightness” seems to have nothing to do with any direct correspondence between a musical and a programmatic narrative? To ask these questions is of course not to deny that Berlioz’s music can be directly representational – one need only think of the slice of the guillotine in the Marche au supplice from the Symphonie fantastique (1830) and the pizzicato tumbling head that follows. But it is to suggest that for Berlioz, representation is more often broader in scope. The way he presents and

Strophic variation

develops thematic material, the overall dramatic arc of his music, the ebb and flow of his forms – these are just as bound up with his urge toward musical representation and just as central to his music’s evocative power.

Strophic variation In addressing the questions above, I focus on one formal technique that Berlioz turned to again and again in his programmatic music: strophic variation, a process in which a theme or a series of differentiated themes is presented and varied many times over. In recent years this and related formal phenomena have been explored extensively by theorists and musicologists, most notably in James Hepokoski’s and Warren Darcy’s work on “rotational form” and Robert Morgan’s work on “circular form.”14 Their work will be discussed in detail in the next chapter, as well as themeand-variations form, developing variation, and the terms “rotational form” and “circular form” and their relationship to the Formenlehre category of strophic variation. Berliozians have long recognized the centrality of strophic variation to his musical language. Rushton, for example, refers to “strophic elaboration” as “one of Berlioz’s lifelong preoccupations.”15 Berlioz’s preoccupation with this formal technique stems in part from his love of strophic song forms and of incorporating those forms into instrumental music (which is why this book, though it deals primarily with Berlioz’s instrumental music, also touches on his vocal output). But it also grows out of a fascination with poetic ideas (what Berlioz and others called ideés poe´tiques or penseés poe´tiques)16 such as obsession, meditation, and mania – in short, with programs about fixations, which lent themselves to being conveyed in musical forms that return again and again to the same thematic material. The ideé fixe of the Symphonie fantastique, which haunts the symphony’s hero and returns repeatedly throughout the first movement and the entire symphony, comes naturally to mind. But so do the incantations of Mephistopheles’s spirits in La Damnation de Faust (1845–6), the meditative tune sung over and over by marching pilgrims in the slow movement of Harold en Italie (1834), and the repeated professions of love in Berlioz’s instrumental setting of the balcony scene from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, the celebrated Sce`ne d’amour from his symphony Romeó et Juliette (1839). Each of these pieces arouses sensations comparable to the sensations experienced by their “fixated” characters. Each of these forms cycles unremittingly through similar thematic

5

6

Introduction

material just as their characters return unremittingly to similar thoughts – and these are by no means the only pieces by Berlioz to do that. Obviously not every one of Berlioz’s pieces with a program about fixation features techniques of strophic variation; nor does every one of his varied strophic forms conjure up these themes. But that need not deter us from exploring the rich and abundant connections between these forms and the poetic ideas they evoke. I am less interested in correlations that obtain in each and every circumstance than in compelling associations that can help us to understand why this formal convention appealed to Berlioz and how he tapped into its expressive potential. To utter the word “convention” with respect to Berlioz may come as a surprise. Few musicians so instinctively recoiled at the thought of composers who shoehorned their pieces into established, conventional models. And few have matched Berlioz’s enthusiasm for Beethoven’s effort to dispense with standard musical forms, which, for Berlioz, was directly proportional to Beethoven’s desire to extend music’s poetic capabilities. But convention does influence Berlioz’s musical activities. His musical tastes can appear at times almost conservative compared to many of his contemporaries’ (he remained a champion of Gluck his entire life, for example, even as Gluck’s music fell out of favor).17 And his music shows a keen awareness of the styles and techniques of composers who came before him, for all that it is idiosyncratically “Berliozian.” It would of course be a mistake to downplay Berlioz’s innovativeness. Because he believed that the most potent music was the most free, unbridled, and unbeholden to rigid patterns, he did indeed take risks with formal design, seemingly treating every new piece as a new experiment driven by the same question: What musical procedures can I employ to express this sentiment, to capture this scene, this program? But those risks were controlled, not haphazard. However bold and new they seemed, each was founded upon a solid grasp of what experiments had and had not worked in the past and also upon an intimate knowledge of a vast repertoire of expressive music by the likes of Beethoven, Spontini, Weber, Gluck, and others. Daring as Berlioz’s sense of form was, it did not operate in a vacuum, without any models to go by. And much as his forms may confound us, they do so as if by design. Berlioz’s music is often poised between clarity and irrationality, and the most productive way to understand its disarming effect is neither to neaten it up and thereby explain away what makes it seem irrational, nor to argue that it follows only its own rules and dispenses with convention altogether. Shoehorning must be avoided at all costs with Berlioz. But so

Strophic variation

must denying that his pieces interact in any way with the forms with which he was familiar. These two attitudes have guided many discussions of Berlioz’s formal language. Writers applaud Berlioz for shedding the shackles of formalism, arguing that he is at his best when he discards tried-and-true models and lets white-hot inspiration or the dramatic force of a program guide him.18 Or in an effort to demonstrate that his pieces are “unified,” they impose upon them patterns that do not suit them.19 To grasp the peculiar force and drama of Berlioz’s music, we must consider how he worked within formal conventions but bent them, and often combined them, in accordance with his expressive and programmatic ends. What this means, practically speaking, is treating strophic variation more as a way of thinking than as a strict form that a piece is either “in” or “not in.” Much as Berlioz’s varied strophic forms may be driven by an impulse that is simple and fundamental – satisfying a basic human need for repetition and change, renewal and transformation – the forms themselves are often anything but simple. In Berlioz’s longer forms, more complex processes are at work than the mere repetition and variation of a single theme, as in a straightforward strophic song. However, even in these complex forms strophic variation still acts as a kind of guiding principle that can be felt even when other formal conventions are present and even when not every part of a piece can be neatly accommodated to a varied-repetitive formal model. In adopting this flexible approach to form, attentive to conventions being evoked, revoked, and mixed in all manner of ways, I take my lead from Hepokoski, Morgan, and Darcy. In their analyses, rotational form or circular form is not so much a model as a process that often works with and against other formal processes – what Darcy calls, in reference to rotational form, “an overriding structural principle, an Urprinzip” that determines the course of a movement organized according to a more familiar form like sonata form or rondo form – or according to no readily nameable form at all.20 Strophic variation is admittedly only one structural principle among many that Berlioz drew upon, and I certainly do not mean to propose it as the key to understanding how Berlioz’s peculiar forms work. Still, I believe it is more central to his thinking about thematic development and musical representation than many have recognized. For this reason it is an ideal focal point from which to explore how musical forms and programmatic scenarios are woven together. This book is best viewed as a case study, not a survey – an effort to understand how Berlioz’s forms and programs interact by looking at one of the forms that mattered most to him. This specificity allows for the kind of close and detailed analysis that

7

8

Introduction

would be impracticable in a broader overview and that is necessary if we are to appreciate how subtle Berlioz’s sense of form was and move beyond many of the misconceptions of decades past. And my hope is that it will make it possible to say more, not less, about how Berlioz’s advanced sense of musical design and musical expressivity correspond – a topic that could hardly be more important to the appreciation of Berlioz’s music. The time is ripe for an investigation of the relationship between program and form in Berlioz, not only because his forms have received comparatively little scrutiny, but also because the past decade has seen a redoubled interest in form, both large and small scale, and in how form relates to expression, drama, and narrative.21 Berlioz, as is commonly noted, did not spawn a school of followers, and there is hardly agreement about the scope of his legacy and achievement. But the formal techniques outlined in this book potentially had an impact on composers after Berlioz – certainly on Mahler, who admired Berlioz, and whose similarly circular, episodic, and often song-based instrumental music is in many ways strikingly Berliozian in conception.22 Although my aim is not to trace the links between Berlioz’s varied-repetitive formal procedures and those of later composers, my work nonetheless helps to situate him in the context of a broader interest in strophic instrumental forms and in incorporating lyrical structures into symphonic music. Berlioz’s treatment of formal process as a metaphor for dramatic and psychological process also of course connects him with a host of other nineteenth-century composers. Again, to explore how exactly his understanding of the program–form interaction relates to Liszt’s, Wagner’s, Mahler’s, and Strauss’s, not to mention to their ideas about his music, would require another book. These composers are hardly absent from the coming pages, but since my principal aim is to outline an approach to analyzing Berlioz’s program music that is as consistent as possible with his own ideas, those ideas form the core of this book. Nevertheless, I hope that by outlining a concept of musical metaphor – even one drawn primarily from Berlioz’s own writings and tailored to his own music – this book can stimulate a more thorough and careful discussion about how it is that music can be indissociable from the human actions and emotions it conveys, and at times even seem a perfect rendering of them, without sacrificing its own self-sufficient logic. In this sense, Berlioz, singular though he may be, has a lot to teach us about how we hear any music that draws its inspiration from the world of ideas and feelings. And understanding him better can help us to understand those who followed him in

Strophic variation

the quest to expand music’s expressive potential, whether they are truly “followers” or not. The rest of the book is divided into two main parts. The first part (chapters 2–3) is largely methodological. It sets out the types of form and metaphorical interaction that are the backbone of this study, in preparation for the second part (chapters 4–6), which analyzes three of Berlioz’s large-scale forms with these concepts in mind: Le Carnaval romain (1843–4) (chapter 4), the first movement of the Symphonie fantastique (chapter 5), and the Sce`ne d’amour from Romeó et Juliette (chapter 6). That said, chapter 2 – “Preliminary examples and recent theories” – does not shy away from musical analysis in favor of theoretical exposition. This chapter works through a number of straightforward forms by Berlioz, including the Dies irae from the Symphonie fantastique, a theme from the Roi Lear overture (1831), and movements from La Damnation de Faust and Harold en Italie, and uses them to introduce topics that will be taken up more extensively in later chapters. I adopt this approach for many reasons. I think that it is important to look at musical examples as early as possible, and also that some ideas have enough of an intuitive appeal that they can initially be taken on faith and broached even casually in the context of short analyses and later enriched with more thorough discussion. I envision the reading of this book as something akin to surveying a landscape, first spotting from afar the outlines of objects that seem familiar, then zooming in and noting their finer features. The reader should thus bear in mind that any pressing questions arising in the first couple of chapters will be addressed in more detail further on.

9

2

Preliminary examples and recent theories

Simple cycles One of the best-known passages in Berlioz’s output is the Dies irae from the last movement of the Symphonie fantastique. It is a harrowing stretch of measures, as stark and severe as anything in nineteenth-century music (see Ex. 2.1). Funeral bells cut short the witches’ sabbath tune, which has barely even begun, and draw us deeper into the nightmare of the symphony’s protagonist. Then the familiar Dies irae tune enters, ominously and in dotted half notes, punctuated by the bells at irregular intervals. The theme completed, it begins again, twice as fast, in dotted quarter notes, and then once more, feverishly and faster still, in alternating quarters and eighths. (The numbers 1, 2, and 3 in Ex. 2.1 indicate where each statement of the theme begins.) This is a varied strophic form par excellence and only one of the most recognizable among countless in Berlioz’s music. Granted, it is very short – part of a movement, not a movement as a whole. Yet for that reason it makes for a good starting point. It is a miniature example of the type of large-scale form that will be addressed in later chapters. Looking at it can give us a sense of what Berlioz’s varied strophic forms look like and how they are related to the poetic and dramatic sentiments that are his very raison d’eˆtre. Below I focus on theories of circular and rotational form and comments by Berlioz scholars about his penchant for strophic variation. For the moment I am more interested in proceeding empirically toward a general understanding of these concepts. How do we characterize what happens in this passage? In the simplest terms we can say this: Berlioz repeats and varies a clear-cut theme successively. Here is the most basic definition of the formal design that lies at the heart of this book – one in which a thematic unit is stated and then restated many times over with some alteration. In this case the thematic unit is of course a single phrase. But that need not be so. Berlioz’s variedrepetitive forms come in all shapes and sizes; the unit of repetition might be a single phrase, a multi-phrase theme, or even – at the largest level – a complex of different themes. (I define these units by their melodic

12


Ex. 2.1 Dies irae from Symphonie fantastique

content, the main reason being that Berlioz’s forms are largely melodydriven.1 In some cases harmonies and key areas recur in circular fashion – see the analysis of the Marche des pe`lerins from Harold en Italie below for a striking example – but normally these repetitive harmonic structures are wedded to repetitive thematic structures.) The variation to that phrase entails rhythmic compression (first twenty measures, then eleven, then six, with shorter note values each time),2 a thickening of texture (first only a single melodic line, then a series of parallel dyads, then dyads and triads), and an upward shift in register with each repetition. Yet through all this, the notes of the theme itself remain unaltered – no embellishment, no transposition to a different degree of the scale, just an insistent return to the same pitches. Consider another short example, the cantabile theme from the introduction to the Roi Lear overture, also repeated in three strophes. (Ex. 2.2 provides an outer-voice reduction of the passage, mm. 38–67. The three thematic statements are labeled 1, 2, and 3, as in Ex. 2.1.) If in the Dies irae it is the incremental rhythmic acceleration that is most apparent, here it is the changes to tonal structure and also to instrumentation and dynamics. The first statement of the theme begins in C major, played by

Simple cycles

Ex. 2.2 Cantabile theme from Roi Lear introduction

an oboe, and modulates to A minor. The second starts again in C major, now with flute, clarinet, and bassoon, but changes mode to C minor. The third, approached by the same harmonic gambit as the second (vi–V6–5–I in the upcoming key, with ^6 ^7 ^8 in the lower voice and ^5 ^4 ^3 in the upper voice), starts in E-flat major, now sounded by horns and trombones against a shimmering string texture, and leads to a half cadence in the tonic, C major.3 The melody itself does change slightly as it goes – it must, because of the different tonal relationships – and its final statement is extended via a deceptive cadence. But our ear does not register these changes as much as the modulations and the ever-richer orchestration. The overall impression is of a tune repeated in its entirety but bathed in different tonal and instrumental colors, a steady voice whose tone may vary but not its underlying message. The style and character of these two examples could hardly be more different. Yet each is strangely hypnotic and achieves its hypnotic effect

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by similar means: varied repetition. The way these varied strophes move through time reflects the way the characters in these programmatic scenes move through space, or the way thoughts seem to move through their minds. The repetitions of the Dies irae melody are as maddening and addling as the crowd of spirits and monsters that the jeune musicien imagines at his funeral, all the more so because Berlioz does not present the theme in different keys or on different parts of the scale but hammers at the same pitches. And the repetitions grow ever more absurd, in keeping with the “parodie burlesque” mentioned in the program;4 over the course of fewer than forty measures a Latin hymn is transformed into a grotesque dance. The spirits that torment the symphony’s hero, the music implies, do so threateningly but also mockingly – they are like schoolchildren taunting a helpless victim, gathering around him one after another and repeating their jeers with ever more venom as they close in. The repetitions of the Roi Lear theme are, on the contrary, meditative and expansive. Berlioz, it seems, loses himself in the beauty of the theme (as do we), presenting it one more time than expected because he cannot stand to relinquish it too soon. The rising minor-third tonal shifts – particularly the move from C minor to E-flat major at the end of the second phrase – are uplifting in every sense of the word. They suit both the hopefulness of the melody, with its continual upward surges, and its extra-musical context. The theme has been taken by many to represent Lear’s daughter Cordelia,5 and though the attribution cannot be confirmed, it is believable, because the thematic presentation – three unbroken and unperturbed strophes that move nowhere suddenly or rashly – is as secure and constant as her character. It is fitting furthermore that her theme should begin in C major (the key of the overture’s opening recitative-like theme, which is widely believed to represent the king) but quickly deviate from it with a characteristically Berliozian modulation to bIII, since Cordelia likewise deviates from her father’s wishes.

Questions of terminology When I use the terms “strophic variation,” “strophic elaboration,” and “varied repetition” to describe the underlying formal logic of these passages, I am obviously not referring to the genre of theme and variations. Berlioz was not in the habit of writings pieces in this genre. Rather, as Jean-Pierre Bartoli suggests, Berlioz integrated the “principles [of the theme-and-variations genre] into the framework of larger forms.”6 The

Questions of terminology

spacious elaborations of the Cordelia theme sound as though they could be a slice from a set of theme and variations, but they are part of a movement in sonata form. The same is true of the variations to the Dies irae theme; this episode draws upon techniques associated with themeand-variations form, but it is just that: an episode in a movement whose formal processes are far more complex and diverse. I also do not mean “developing variation,” as the term is conventionally understood and has been used by Schoenberg and those building upon his ideas, most notably Walter Frisch.7 The thematic variations addressed in this study certainly “develop” musical material in the general sense of the term, but Berlioz’s method of developing a theme is far different from the thematic development typical of Beethoven and Brahms, to which Schoenberg’s concept most obviously applies, where smaller motives are reused, manipulated, and reinterpreted. Berlioz’s variations generally occur at the level of the theme, not the motive; though motivic development was hardly foreign to him, he preferred to keep a theme more or less intact, repeat it in its entirety, and vary its key or mode, its harmonic underpinning, its tempo or rhythm, or its instrumentation – or, if he did vary the substance of a theme itself, to do so in a way that did not break it apart. (Another favorite technique of his is not to fragment a theme into its various components but to place a seemingly new theme alongside it that borrows many of those components, making it hard to tell what is truly new and what is a varied restatement of something that came before.) Berlioz’s method of thematic elaboration has more in common with the so-called “thematic transformations” normally associated with Liszt. It should be stressed, however, that not all of Berlioz’s strophic elaborations involve transformation (the Cordelia theme, for example, is embellished and enriched more than transformed) and that this study focuses above all on the successive elaboration of thematic units (hence my interest in strophes, rotations, and so on) rather than on the sudden and miraculous transformation of a theme heard much earlier in a movement, as in Liszt’s Piano Sonata in B minor, or even in an entirely different movement, as in Liszt’s Faust-Symphonie8 – though these techniques were of course not foreign to Berlioz (witness the transformations of the ideé fixe across the movements of the Symphonie fantastique). Hepokoski coined the term “rotational form” to describe just this sort of successive presentation and variation of thematic blocks. He has devoted considerable attention to how this formal process underlies the structure of much eighteenth- and nineteenth-century music in a variety of genres and styles. Rotational forms, as he defines them, involve the

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presentation of a “referential statement” of contrasting and differentiated thematic ideas, which subsequent “rotations” rework in various ways. “Portions [of the referential statement] may be omitted, merely alluded to, compressed, or, contrarily, expanded or even ‘stopped’ and reworked ‘developmentally,’” he writes. “New material may be added or generated. Each subsequent rotation may be heard as an intensified, meditative reflection on the material of the referential statement.”9 Hepokoski even mentions Berlioz in this context, citing the “second portion” of the first movement of Harold en Italie and Le Carnaval romain as works that feature “fusions of strophic and sonata principles.”10 (I will return to his ideas about Le Carnaval romain in chapter 4.) Influenced in part by Hepokoski’s ideas, Warren Darcy has discussed similar rotational forms in the music of Mahler, Wagner, and Bruckner and convincingly linked the unfurling of a piece’s rotations with its tonal-hierarchical structure.11 The rhetoric of rotation underlies Hepokoski and Darcy’s Elements of Sonata Theory: Norms, Types, and Deformations in the Late-EighteenthCentury Sonata, and the term is now beginning to enjoy a wide currency among scholars working on a variety of periods and styles of music. Robert Morgan’s 2000 essay on Wagner’s Tristan prelude describes a similar formal phenomenon – what he calls “circular form.” Here he shows how the prelude’s constant repetition of three formal units, which are subjected to only surface variation, can be reconciled with its continuously developmental nature. Morgan’s work, which grew out of research begun decades ago, developed concurrently with Hepokoski’s and Darcy’s. Their terminology and aims may differ, but that their ideas have recently (and separately) come to the fore of music-analytical scholarship attests to the appeal of the notion that a great deal of music from the eighteenth to the twentieth century – Baroque ritornello forms, da capo arias, strophic songs, sonata forms, continuously developmental pieces like the Tristan prelude, and so on – can profitably be viewed against a backdrop of cyclic transformation. My work rests heavily on the work of these three scholars. I aim in fact not to offer my own model of circular or rotational form, but rather to adapt and expand upon existing models. I have couched my discussions initially in terms of the generally recognizable practice of strophic variation for a couple of reasons. First, the term “strophic variation” (as well as “varied repetition”) is well understood and widely used by musicologists and theorists.12 Second, many Berlioz scholars have described this important aspect of his formal language using this term or related terms like “varied restatement” and of course “strophic elaboration,” which are

Questions of terminology

likewise fairly well established in musical discourse. By using these terms, I show my debt to their work and underline that I have not discovered a hitherto unknown aspect of Berlioz’s style but rather put that aspect on the front page. I owe an equal debt, however, to the insights of Hepokoski, Morgan, and Darcy and so will also liberally use the terms “rotational form” and “circular form,” depending on the circumstance and example at hand. The point is not to reject one term for another but if anything to let these terms interact freely, all the while being aware of the connotations and methodologies associated with them. Hepokoski’s, Morgan’s, and Darcy’s methodologies have deepened my understanding of Berlioz’s forms, and my engagement with their ideas should be apparent no matter which term I am using. Hepokoski’s theory of rotational form is particularly powerful for a number of reasons. First, it attempts to relate rotational forms and sonata forms (an essential exercise if we are to make sense of Berlioz’s sonatarotational forms like the first movement of the Symphonie fantastique and Le Carnaval romain).13 Second, it highlights what Hepokoski calls a process of “teleological genesis,” by which a final goal or telos is engendered by a work’s many rotations (a process at work in a movement like the Sce`ne d’amour from Romeó et Juliette).14 Third, it allows for the reordering or even omission of elements in a given rotation. Rotational form, as Hepokoski and Darcy construe it, is anything but a cut-anddried model. That a piece’s themes do not continuously and rigorously follow a strict rotational pattern does not mean we cannot look at that piece through a rotational lens and thereby learn something important about its logic of repetition and elaboration. Morgan’s approach deals most extensively with how tonal structure interacts with circular formal structure and systematically pursues the question of what is retained from one cycle to the next and how we might interpret those retentions in the context of the dynamically unfolding form. In the Tristan prelude, for example, Morgan shows that the reiterative cycles vary only the surface features of the music and maintain the underlying melodic, tonal, and rhythmic structure.15 We have already seen how in the Dies irae rhythmic structure is varied while tonal and melodic structure are retained and in the slow theme from the Lear overture variations to tonal structure are far more pronounced than those to melodic and rhythmic structure. Measuring or even gauging the melodic, tonal, and rhythmic distance of a given cycle from others that surround it can help us to characterize a circular form’s trajectory, speed, and rhetorical effect.

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Berlioz scholars on his penchant for strophic variation As I mentioned in the last chapter, it is no news to Berlioz scholars that he favored the technique of strophic variation in his vocal and instrumental music. D. Kern Holoman writes that Berlioz “is at his most natural in prevailingly strophic procedures, where his fertility of invention can be expressed by means of varied resettings and ongoing transformation of given material,” which he contrasts with “[m]otivic development in the Beethovenian sense.”16 Rushton similarly refers to the “strophic tendencies”17 of Berlioz’s forms. The late Edward T. Cone, though he makes no mention of circular form or rotational form or even strophic form as such, describes the sweeping and episodic character of Berlioz’s large-scale structures, which (and here he echoes Holoman) are “conceived less as the development of one or more motivic or thematic ideas than as a wavelike series of motions toward a succession of proximate goals, each of which in turn initiates a further motion – and so on, until the final goal is reached.”18 And Jean-Pierre Bartoli, perhaps the foremost Berlioz analyst in France and one of the most articulate commentators on his formal language, writes persuasively about Berlioz’s preoccupation with techniques of “re´pe´tition varieé” in vocal and instrumental music.19 Bartoli also mentions the “rondo avec un refrain évolutif ” as one of several formal archetypes Berlioz favored. He notes how Berlioz often combines variationbased structures with other formal structures: Berlioz’s slow introductions, for example, often mix principles of variation with ternary forms.20 And a movement like the first of the Symphonie fantastique is a “hybride” of a rondo-with-evolving-refrain archetype and a sonata-based form.21 Few composers bring as many different resources to their compositional craft: the books they have read, the music that has touched them, the people they have encountered, the riots of the heart that make them want to write music in the first place – and the many different musical shapes they have heard, studied, and admired. Holoman’s and Rushton’s comments about “strophic procedures” and “strophic tendencies” raise the question, Does strophic mean the same thing as rotational or circular? The short answer is no. Strophic properly describes songs in which all stanzas of text are sung to the same music, whereas these other terms need not carry with them a textual connotation. The term “strophic” should thus not be applied carelessly to any instrumental work that employs circular/rotational techniques.22 With Berlioz, however, the designation “strophic” is more often than not apt,

Berlioz’s penchant for strophic variation

and understanding why can help us to appreciate how a number of his circular forms came into being. It is well known that Berlioz frequently reused his own vocal melodies in instrumental works, particularly in the early years of his career, when his habit of self-borrowing was more pronounced. A common example is the translation of a vocally conceived theme into an operatic or concert overture, as happens in the Benvenuto Cellini and Carnaval romain overtures. More remote instances include his taking the opening idea of the Symphonie fantastique from an early song, reusing a melody from the Prix de Rome cantata Herminie as the symphony’s ideé fixe itself, and incorporating an aria melody rejected from Benvenuto Cellini into the Reˆverie et caprice for solo violin and orchestra.23 When Berlioz transfers a naturally “closed” vocal form into an “open” symphonic theme, he often relies on the process of strophic elaboration to develop and expand the thematic material, as though he does not want to fragment and disrupt these self-contained vocal melodies and so instead repeats them wholesale – as with the Dies irae theme and the two main themes in the Ballet des sylphes from La Damnation de Faust (analyzed below), each of which has a vocal origin and also a well-defined, rounded-off shape. (A similar argument could be made for Schubert, also known for incorporating his vocal melodies into instrumental music, often using those melodies as the theme in a set of variations.)24 Even when Berlioz does not use a borrowed melody, he often pens one that might as well be borrowed, since it is so vocal in character and treated in a similarly strophic way. The cantabile melody from the Roi Lear overture is just such an example, as is the main theme of the Marche des pe`lerins, from Harold en Italie (also discussed below). Berlioz’s strophically varied instrumental forms, in other words, are direct outgrowths of his flexible concept of genre. Genre has been one of the hot topics in recent Berlioz scholarship. Thanks to much research, we now have a clearer understanding than ever before of what genre meant to Berlioz and how and why he crossed its boundaries so freely.25 What deserves to be explored further is how Berlioz’s flexible understanding of genre influenced his handling of large-scale form. One of the claims of this book is that when Berlioz blends the idioms of vocal and instrumental music, he also blends their forms. Standard symphonic forms that are nominally non-strophic (sonata form, for example) begin to behave in peculiarly strophic ways when Berlioz allows himself the freedom to mix symphony and song.

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Strophically elaborative sections of a movement are one thing. But entire strophically elaborative movements are something else. What adjustments does Berlioz make to fashion a full movement that plumbs the expressive resources of circularity and also has variety, contrast, direction, surprise, and drama? On one hand, the difference is a matter of degree. Not surprisingly, Berlioz’s larger rotational forms are rife with rotational sections. A piece whose thematic areas are repeated and varied may contain themes whose phrases are also repeated and varied, in the manner of the Dies irae and Roi Lear themes. (Hepokoski refers to these cycles-within-cycles as “subrotations,” as does Darcy. The concept is central to their Sonata Theory and is discussed in detail in Elements of Sonata Theory.)26 On the other hand, analysis shows that Berlioz’s large-scale rotational forms are considerably more complex than his small-scale ones, not just bigger. It was simply not his style to write movements that were thoroughly, mechanically repetitive – something, again, akin to a themeand-variations form, whose technique of varied repetition becomes almost an end in itself.27 The end for Berlioz was the adequate musical expression of ideés poe´tiques, and since those ideas were rich and complicated, they demanded rich and complicated forms. These forms are propelled by the basic formal model outlined above (present a theme or series of themes, then present it again with some variation, and so on), but they also manipulate that model, depart from it, intersperse foreign elements within it, and mix other forms with it. Such is the case with the Chœur de gnomes et de sylphes and Ballet des sylphes from La Damnation de Faust and the Marche des pe`lerins chantant la prie`re du soir from Harold en Italie. These forms are more straightforward than the ones that will be discussed in chapters 4, 5, and 6; the three pieces analyzed there cycle through multi-thematic blocks (roughly schematized as ABCA0 B0 C0 A00 B00 C00 , and so on – or some such configuration), whereas the above movements cycle through a single thematic area (AA0 A00 , and so on). They are midpoints between the simple passages described above and the more complex movements to come. I include them here because they use principles of strophic variation to capture a similar poetic idea, if in the context of different programmatic scenarios – meditation. They also allow me to explore three issues central to Berlioz’s formal thinking and to do so concretely rather than abstractly – that is, with actual, full-length pieces before us: (1) the metaphorical relationship between program and musical design, (2) the mixture of rotational/circular forms with other forms, and (3) the influence of vocal music on the rotational/circular forms of Berlioz’s instrumental pieces. Some of these have already been alluded

Programs

to. All of them will be treated more fully in the coming chapters, and indeed all can be followed like threads through this book. Before these issues can be addressed, however, another must be broached. If the aim is to explore the interaction of program and form in these movements, we need first to define what is meant by “program.”

Programs If we construe the term “program” narrowly, as a preface added to a piece of instrumental music that directs the audience’s hearing of a work, then a surprisingly small amount of Berlioz’s output is properly programmatic. The Symphonie fantastique features a program in this literal sense, a leaflet that audience members could read before, and while, hearing the work.28 Its sequel, called La Retour a` la vie (1831–2) and later Le´lio (when revised in 1854), intersperses spoken monologues of an obviously biographical nature between musical numbers, which function similarly even if they are not read. But beyond that, Berlioz’s music does not have programs in this strict sense. Romeó et Juliette has a written preface, but it is more of an artistic statement than a guide to listening. And its prologue, which narrates aspects of the story, is sung, as are of course the texts to its solo numbers and final chorus. Harold has no program per se, just movement titles. The same goes for the overtures. And La Damnation de Faust is in essence a concert opera; it has a story, but that story is conveyed with even more sung text than in Romeó et Juliette.29 Thereafter Berlioz wrote mainly vocal music. This fact has led some, like Rushton, to claim that program music was only a minor part of his output.30 Still, there is reason to construe the terms “program” and “programmatic” more broadly when dealing with Berlioz. Though few of Berlioz’s works have programs in the sense above, virtually all of them feature some sort of evocative title. As Ge´rard Conde´ puts it in an essay on program music in Dictionnaire Berlioz, “Whereas Chopin, Liszt, or Schumann composed concertos and sonatas, Wagner a symphony, Verdi a quartet, Berlioz was never able to write a work without attaching a dramatic or literary subtitle to it.”31 These “dramatic or literary subtitles,” though different from the written program of the Fantastique, serve a similar function: they indicate the source of inspiration for a work and provide clues about how to interpret Berlioz’s music “poetically.” The uneasiness some may feel about subsuming suggestive titles under the rubric of “program” stems in part from a general misconception that

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Berlioz’s music tells stories in the manner of a written narrative. In the largest sense, this may be true, in that a multi-movement work like the Symphonie fantastique relates the story of an artist’s obsession with a woman and each movement captures an “episode” in that drama. But the case is different with individual movements and shorter works like the overtures that not so much translate the events of a story – like, for example, Shakespeare’s King Lear – as offer a general impression of it. Peter Kivy, in a discussion of the Fantastique in his book Sound and Semblance: Reflections on Musical Representation, makes a similar distinction between “telling” a story and “illuminating” it, between a narrative and the “illustration” of it.32 Tom Wotton uses the same word in the same sense: “Berlioz was less a follower of programmes and more of a musician pure and simple than is generally supposed. He may have found a programme a stimulus to composition, and set out to illustrate it. But if it conflicted with his musical ideas he was always ready to disregard it, or rather, he was always prepared to give a very free rendering of it [my italics].”33 In Berlioz’s Roi Lear overture, for instance, we can allow that the title – Grande Ouverture du Roi Lear – is programmatic even if Berlioz’s work does not “follow” Shakespeare’s play scene by scene and the melody in the introduction cannot be unequivocally linked with the character Cordelia. None of the stories behind Berlioz’s music – whether written leaflets that could be read as narratives or dramas suggested by titles or prologues – were meant to be marched through in such a literal fashion. The words audience members read at a performance of the Symphonie fantastique are thus no more programmatic than the quotation at the head of the Waverley overture, “Dreams of love and lady’s charms/ Give place to honour and to arms” (taken from a poem in chapter 5 of Walter Scott’s novel of the same name), or the title Grande Ouverture des Francs-juges (1825–6), which makes us think of the story of the youthful opera the overture once introduced, or simply the title Un bal, which indicates a setting more than a story. Can sung text, though, be a program, if it likewise provides us with interpretive clues? Barzun claims it can: To cover all cases, it seems necessary to define as programmatic any scheme or idea, general or particular, that helps to determine the course of a composition. It would be hard to deny that the words of a poem are for the composer of songs a program in this sense. The words exert a constraint; they face him with a set form not of his own making and quite different from the set forms of music.34

Programs

Some will no doubt argue, and with good reason, that to take this view is to stretch the definition of program music too far, to make “the idea of programme music as a separate genre . . . entirely illegitimate,” in Roger Scruton’s words.35 Yet in his analysis of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony Berlioz uses Schiller’s text to construct what we might call a “programmatic” reading of the final movement (though he never in fact calls the text a program). An analysis of how the movement’s themes are transformed, according to Berlioz, “presents an interest so much the more powerful as each one of them gives a new and decided tint to the expression of one and the same sentiment – that of joy.” He goes on to specify the source of that joy, basing his comments on an understanding of the text, which he appends to his essay as the “key” to interpreting Beethoven’s music: “This is the song of the hero sure of victory; we can almost see his armor sparkle and hear the sound of his measured step. A fugato theme, in which the original melodic design may still be traced, serves for a while as material for orchestral disportment – this representing the various movements of a crowd, active and full of ardor.”36 His approach to the Ninth is no different from his approach to the Sixth, whose final movement title – Hirtengesang. Frohe, dankbare Gefu¨hle nach dem Sturm – provides him images to go with the movement’s overall mood of “cheerfulness”: “The herdsmen reappear upon the mountains, calling together their scattered flocks; the sky is serene, the rain has almost disappeared and calm returns.”37 For Berlioz the critic, sung text is just as much a hermeneutic tool as a provocative movement title. For Berlioz the composer, the matter is not quite as simple. Berlioz has famously written that he set the balcony and tomb scenes from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet for instruments, not voices, because he “had to give his imagination a latitude that the positive sense of the sung words would not have given him, resorting instead to instrumental language, which is richer, more varied, less precise, and by its very indefiniteness incomparably more powerful in such a case.”38 Sung words do not give him the freedom that instruments do; his imagination can be more free-ranging when the “scheme or idea” that “helps to determine the course of a composition,” to return to Barzun, is not properly speaking a part of the sounding body of a work, for all that it must be considered in tandem with it. Berlioz’s comment in the Symphonie fantastique’s program that the program “should be thought of as if it were the spoken text of an opera”39 may imply an equivalence between heard and read text as they are capable of focusing our attention on the ideas that give life to a work, but he was surely thinking of ope´ra comique, with its interspersed

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spoken dialogue, not of music with sung text. This is not to imply that the forms of Berlioz’s vocal works are tame and uninventive. Chapter 4, an analysis of Le Carnaval romain, shows how Berlioz made strides toward extending the expressive and formal possibilities of mid-nineteenthcentury French song; many of his formal innovations in instrumental music, above all his mingling of strophically elaborative forms with other forms, stem directly from an effort to expand upon strophic models by bringing them into non-vocal contexts. But expand them he did – even emancipate them – and he could give his sense of invention the most “latitude” when writing instrumental music and inspired by a program neither too restrictive nor too general.40 Because I am above all interested in those cases where Berlioz felt most free to treat form imaginatively, in my analyses I will not as a matter of course cast the net of “program music” so wide as to cover Berlioz’s works for voices. His most interesting designs occur in that genre. That said, I am reluctant to consider texted music absolutely off limits when attempting to interpret a piece “programmatically,” particularly when the piece’s text and structure seem so richly connected and that piece is related to other, non-vocal pieces surrounding it. As we shall see below, the text to the Chœur de gnomes et de sylphes arguably provides some basis for Berlioz’s decision to write the movement in a varied-repetitive form, and also for his decision to do likewise with the instrumental Ballet des sylphes, a continuation of the “illustration” of the Damnation scene. The text is a part of the program of the entire scene, and it would make little sense to study the ballet without bearing it and the preceding music in mind. Indeed, I am reluctant to disregard any element in a web of associations around a work in my effort to explain how the work came into being and came to be fashioned in a particular way. Such openness, combined with an awareness of how far interpretation and musical expressivity can be stretched, is not only beneficial because it enriches our analysis. It is also Berliozian. Berlioz brought the same openness, as well as a remarkable sense of the powers and limitations of musical evocation, to every composition and feuilleton he wrote.

Chœur de gnomes et de sylphes and Ballet des sylphes These two movements from La Damnation de Faust are part of a single scene (number 7), including Mephistopheles’s aria Voici des roses, which takes place on the banks of the Elbe and describes how Mephistopheles and his spirits cast a sleeping spell over Faust.41 Voici des roses is an

Programs

introduction to the central Chœur de gnomes et de sylphes, and the ballet amounts to a greatly extended coda that prolongs the chorus’s final tonic. The chorus was in fact written first; it is a revised version of the Concert de sylphes from Berlioz’s Huit Sce`nes de Faust (composed between 1828 and 1829), and all evidence suggests that the opening aria and closing ballet were inspired by Berlioz’s recomposition.42 My analysis will nonetheless begin with the ballet and then move on to the chorus because the ballet is strictly instrumental and brings to fruition several of the strophic formal procedures set forth in the movement that precedes it. Along the way, I will make passing reference to Voici des roses but focus mainly on the last two movements of the scene since they are the most closely related and the most circular.

Ballet des sylphes In the ballet, Mephistopheles’s spirits, their work completed and Faust now fast asleep, dance around Faust as he dreams peacefully. A circular form is naturally appropriate. This is a round dance of sorts and a lullaby; a simple, repetitive form suits both the simple character of the spirits and the soothing, steady movements of their dance. They quite literally encircle Faust – one might imagine them repeating the steps of their dance as they go round and round him. The physical space of the imagined scene is reflected in the movement’s form. Here is the first thread mentioned above – musical circularity as an expression of nonmusical circularity, something we hear acting as a metaphor for something we see. Or half-see: Damnation is a concert opera and was not meant to be staged, so the audience can only envision the sylphs dancing round and round Faust.43 But the metaphorical relationship between music and mental image holds all the same since the music is meant to arouse sensations in us that we recognize as comparable to those associated with witnessing a repetitive dance, and with seeing someone drift into reverie. The varied strophic design of the ballet is, however palpable, not simple. The movement begins with a parallel period (mm. 1–16) that returns with a cadential extension and modified orchestration in m. 69. The melody that falls between these A and A0 sections (mm. 17–48) is not in fact identical to them; nor, for that matter, is the harmonic progression that supports it. To all appearances, this would seem to be a ternary form, ABA0 . Fig. 2.1 provides an overview of the movement’s ternary design and Ex. 2.3 a reduction of mm. 1–48, or sections A and B.44 Despite its

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A

B

1 D

17 D-d-G-g-Bb

retrans. 49 V/D

A' 69 D

Codetta 88 D

Fig. 2.1 Form of Ballet des sylphes

Ex. 2.3 Ballet des sylphes from La Damnation de Faust, mm. 1–48

melodic and harmonic differences, however, B is so intimately connected with A that it virtually loses its identity as a contrasting section. Many ternary forms of course feature B sections that are related to their A sections, but here the interrelationships are so strong that B begins to sound less like a departure from A and more like a varied strophic

Programs

repetition of it, even an improvisatory (or hallucinatory) recasting of it. First, like A and A0 it floats above a tonic pedal, which persists throughout the entire movement, a drone that pulls us and Faust into the dream world of the piece. Second, though B’s melody is not a repetition of A’s, it is a near permutation of it. The D–A–F# falling arpeggiation of the tonic in m. 19 of section B reverses the rising arpeggiation of mm. 1–2 of section A, F#–A–D. Both melodies quickly reach a highpoint of ^8, skip downward to ^6, and then fall stepwise from there – A’s from ^5 down to ^2, B’s from ^5 to ^3 (these middleground motives are indicated in Ex. 2.3 with upward stems and beams). The cadential melodies of mm. 7–8 and 23–4 also echo one another. They are rhythmically identical, save the addition of thirty-second notes in m. 7. Both end with accented nonchord tones that resolve downward by step: the F# appoggiatura on the downbeat of m. 8 and the accented G passing tone on the downbeat of m. 24. Third, the harmonic progressions that begin sections A and B are related, since each features the rather unorthodox chord succession I–ii–I, over a pedal of course (compare mm. 1–4 and 17–21). Finally, the character, orchestration, and rhythm of the accompanying voices are maintained throughout both sections. The form of the ballet is thus best described as both ternary and strophic – at once ABA0 and AA0 A00 . (For the remainder of this analysis, I will refer to the theme in m. 17 as B and that in m. 69 as A0 , if only for the sake of clarity. But it should be assumed that B is as much a new section as a varied repetition of an old one.) Combining ternary form with strophic form – the second thread mentioned above – enables Berlioz to retain the sense of departure and return characteristic of the former but at the same time to lend the music a hypnotic repetitiveness characteristic of the latter. B may contrast enough with A to be differentiated as a separate theme, as we would expect it to be in a ternary form, but it also retraces A’s steps, just as the second strophe of a strophic song would retrace the steps of its first strophe. B also retraces its own steps, such that the circularity of the whole form is echoed in the circularity of its parts. The balanced periodicity of A dissolves in B, as one inconclusive phrase produces another. The circling, in short, intensifies as the music progresses; the form is like a wheel that turns faster and faster, and the effect is dizzying, recreating for the listener Faust’s spiral into a trance. Measure 25 at first sounds like the beginning of a consequent phrase, but it quickly becomes another antecedent, leading to a half cadence in G in m. 32. Thereafter comes still another antecedent, a transposition of mm. 17–24 from D major into G major that

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Ex. 2.4 Ballet des sylphes, B and A0 melodies compared

finally produces the consequent phrase we have been expecting. Still, if this “consequent” phrase forestalls the whirling force of the measures that precede it, the sense of closure is hardly decisive. Measures 47–8 present not so much a cadence as an awkward halt on a melodic pitch. B-flat major assumes the role of quasi-tonic not by virtue of a functional harmonic progression (the passage ends with vi–I) but only because the pitch Bb is repeated and a rest follows it. It is as though these ever-circling antecedents come to an end only by accident. They might have continued endlessly. They do not of course, and after a twenty-measure retransition A returns in slightly varied form in m. 69, most notably with new instrumentation (the violin I melody now accompanied by flutter figures in the harps). But if the B section sounded less like a departure than it might have, because of its close similarities with A, then the A0 section sounds even less like a return, not only because of these thematic similarities but also because when it does return it takes on characteristics of B. It is as if the membranes separating these themes are so permeable that the themes bleed into one another. They are as vague and indistinct as the dream images that waft through Faust’s mind. The second half of the consequent phrase of A0 (mm. 81 ff.) differs in comparison with A’s first statement and is extended four measures via repetition. (Its lower register also makes this section seem drowsier than A.) The beginning of this phrase extension (mm. 81–3) elaborates upon a similar passage in B (mm. 17–19) and transposes it down a seventh (see Ex. 2.4). The oscillation between the pitches E and B in mm. 81–2 of A0 recalls a similar oscillation between the pitches D and A in the first two measures of B, mm. 17–18, now with no intervening passing tones. And the figure in m. 83 of A0 , which projects an E-minor triad in first inversion, adds passing tones to (and also of course transposes) the falling D-major triadic arpeggiation from m. 19 of B. The ballet’s two (already similar) thematic ideas having been fully joined, a brief codetta follows, finally bringing Faust and the movement to rest.

Programs

Chœur de gnomes et de sylphes To appreciate the rationale behind the form of the ballet, we must look as well at the Chœur de gnomes et de sylphes that precedes it. The spellbinding effect of the two movements is cumulative, for the strophically elaborative processes that come to the fore in the ballet are introduced here. The ballet’s A and B melodies also of course come from the chorus, and both appear in Mephistopheles’s opening aria Voici des roses. Ex. 2.5 shows

Ex. 2.5 Main themes from Chœur de gnomes et de sylphes, Voici des roses, and Ballet des sylphes

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Preliminary examples and recent theories Intro. A 1 9 D D

A'

Episode B Episode (A''?) B' Coda Codetta 26 42 52 61 88 95 116 D–f# f#–A A f#–b D D D

Fig. 2.2 Form of Chœur de gnomes et de sylphes

the two referential themes from the chorus, followed by excerpts from Mephistopheles’s aria (the melody of the instrumental introduction, where a version of the B melody is first heard, and the first bars of Mephistopheles’s melody, which present a version of A) and the nowfamiliar A and B melodies of the ballet.45 This is as good an example as any of Berlioz’s fascination with incorporating vocal melodies into instrumental contexts, and “strophicizing” the instrumental form that results – the third thread mentioned above. The chorus begins rather like the ballet, with a parallel period based on the A melody cited above – a choral incantation, in which Mephistopheles’s spirits sing of the “veil of gold and azure” (voile d’or et d’azur) that will soon envelop Faust. Mephistopheles joins for a varied repetition of this period (mm. 26 ff.), urging his minions on and adding to the potency of their spell, and then backs away as Faust himself takes up the A melody in the latter half of the consequent phrase (mm. 38–41), singing “Ah, a veil is already spreading over my eyes” (Ah sur mes yeux de´ja` s’e´tend un voile). But what sets the chorus apart from the ballet, aside from its obviously more extensive vocal and orchestral forces, is its greater sense of contrast and direction. That contrast is most evident in the two episodes that are more frenetic and less lyrical than the A and B sections and in minor rather than major keys (see Fig. 2.2, a formal overview of the chorus). These episodes make the returns of the B theme more forceful. After the stretches of minormode tonality and the shift away from the lyricism of A, the B sections become focal points: reassertions of major-mode tonality (first the dominant and then the tonic) and of melodic clarity. They grab hold of us as Faust’s visions grab hold of him. While the ballet really goes nowhere – with a “contrasting” middle section that sounds like a varied restatement of its opening, a tonal scheme that never definitively establishes a key other than the tonic, and a constant tonic pedal – the chorus projects a clearer teleology in which the B theme becomes the primary focus as the A theme recedes. The B theme undeniably grows out of the A theme, even more than in the ballet. The B and C# passing tones between A and D in the first measure of the A theme (not present when the theme is heard in the ballet) bring this theme into particularly close contact with the

Programs

Ex. 2.6 Chœur de gnomes et de sylphes, episode, mm. 61 ff.

first bars of the B theme, which feature a similar filled-in fourth (refer to Ex. 2.5). But B is decidedly more dramatic here than in the ballet, its melody sounded forte and in unison by no less than flute, oboe, first violin, first soprano, first tenor, and Mephistopheles himself. And once it is established, it comes to take on a life of its own. The A theme, interestingly, returns in the second episode (hence my indication A00 ? in Fig. 2.2). But it is obscured; the orchestra and choir chatter in an Allegro 6/8 while the A melody runs like a tiny, barely audible thread between, played in quivering tremolos and larger Andante measures by the violins (Ex. 2.6). And when the B theme returns in m. 98, it is even more resolute, now back in the tonic D major. This theme, which at first might have sounded like a variant of something we had already heard, has by the end of the movement become a thing of its own, something stronger and more memorable than the A theme, which has disappeared.

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This formal process suits the dramatic action, just as the more static circularity of the ballet suits the scene it describes. In the ballet, Mephistopheles and the sylphs have already cast their spell; their work is done and all that is left is to keep Faust asleep and deepen his reverie. It is in the chorus that the spell is cast and begins to take hold – it is here that the central action takes place. Like the lake that, according to the text of the B section, “spreads its waters around the mountains” (e´tend ses flots a` l’entour des montagnes), Mephistopheles and company must spread their magic around their unsuspecting victim. Berlioz’s form, mixing repetition and transformation, circularity and teleology, unfolds in a manner analogous to the unfolding of this imagined scene. The B theme in m. 52 is like Faust’s vision. It is a discovery (note that it appears both times immediately after Faust has called out Margarita’s name). Yet however new it may seem to him, and however much it may transport him to a different realm, it must be induced by Mephistopheles and his spirits – concocted from the incantations that come before it.

Marche des pe`lerins from Harold en Italie The Marche des pe`lerins resembles the two movements from La Damnation de Faust because its form is strophically varied and similarly meditative, evoking the languor of the pilgrims’ late-day march home as the chorus and ballet evoke the drift of Faust’s thoughts. Although there is no evidence that Berlioz borrowed the march’s main theme from a vocal work, it is also highly vocal. Berlioz in fact labels it “canto” each time it appears in the score and refers to the canto phrases as “strophes” in his memoirs.46 The theme and its reappearances are almost always of fixed length (eight measures) and conclude with a cadence, usually perfect authentic. Considering the above hypothesis about Berlioz’s penchant for strophically elaborating melodies of a vocal flavor or origin, it hardly comes as a surprise that this is the very technique – one might say the only technique – by which he generates a 334-measure movement from this well-defined eight-measure tune. The symphony’s title of course brings to mind Lord Byron’s poem Child Harold’s Pilgrimage, which, like Berlioz’s symphony, depicts the travels of a young wayfarer. Berlioz likely discovered Byron’s poetry in Rome during his fourteen-month Prix de Rome visit to Italy, which began in 1831. There he too did his fair share of wandering. In a passage from his memoirs he describes how on one outing he encountered a group of peasant farmers returning home at the end of the day, “pass[ing] by the

Programs

rows of shrines dotted along the tops of the hills, singing soft litanies to the accompaniment of the sad tinkling of the distant convent bell.”47 The Marche des pe`lerins is a striking analogue for this scene and surely grows out of Berlioz’s memories of it. The symphony and its second movement in particular have traditionally been viewed as autobiographical, and it is difficult to deny that the protagonist of the symphony can and was meant to be equated with Berlioz himself. What has been denied, and vehemently by Donald Francis Tovey, is that the symphony’s Harold is in any way the Harold of Byron’s poem.48 Yet Jeffrey Langford has just as passionately asserted that the complex interrelationships between the poem Berlioz knew and the composition that poem seems to have inspired, too often neglected by analysts, must be taken into consideration.49 My position lies between these two: Berlioz takes from Byron’s poem not particular scenes, not even the main character himself with all his traits and experiences, but the idea of that character as a detached observer who floats in and out of situations without significantly altering them.50 Despite its popularity among the nineteenth-century public, the Marche des pe`lerins has not received as much critical attention as the symphony’s first and fourth movements, Harold aux montagnes and the Orgie de brigands.51 When the movement is discussed, the focus tends to be on the relationship between its program and the events of Berlioz’s Italian sojourn, the interaction of the viola melody and the instrumental canto theme, the overall crescendo-decrescendo form, and Berlioz’s beautifully crafted musical imagery, in which the tolling of the distant monastery bell is suggested by the French horn’s and harp’s dissonant Cs that end many of the march’s phrases.52 Each of these elements is essential to a full understanding of the piece: its origins; its relation, however solid or tenuous, to Byron; its success in capturing the precise mood for the scene Berlioz aims to conjure in our mind’s eye. But what interests me is why Berlioz would have chosen to write a movement that is so repetitive – “repetitive to the point of ennui,” as Holoman puts it (describing the reaction of many contemporary listeners to the movement, not his own).53 It is not just the C bell tones that return again and again but the pilgrims’ chant itself, wending its way through different keys, returning in different guises and different registers but never interrupted by truly contrasting material. What expressive function does that repetitiveness serve? And how might it contribute to Berlioz’s musical evocation of this scene from the Italian countryside – pilgrims marching home and singing against the distant sound of a convent bell as Harold looks on?

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Intro.

A

B

1

16 26 36 46 x1 x2 x3 x4 E—d# E—E E—f# E—E

56 64 x1 x2 B (I-V I-vi

E

A'

C

104 114 124 134 144 154 x1 x2 x3 x4 x5 x6 E—d# E—E E—f# E—g# E—A E—B

169 x1 C

A'' 248 x1 E (bVI-V)

258 x2 E

268 x3

177 x2 d

72 x3 ––I

80 x4 ––I

88 96 x5 x6 o7 ––vii ––I)

187 x3 C

195 x4 e

205 x5 F

D

Codetta

283 291 299 ff. x1 x2 fragmentation e—G C—e

326

215 x6 Bb

223 x7 g

233 x8 f#/c

241 x9 d

E

Fig. 2.3 Form of Marche des pe`lerins

Like the ballet from Faust, the Marche des pe`lerins is a blend of tendencies associated with different formal designs. Fig. 2.3 provides one possible overview of the movement’s large-scale form, and Ex. 2.7 shows the opening phrase of each main section for reference, labeled A, B, C, and D. Each section unfolds in a series of short thematic cycles rather like those in the Dies irae and the Roi Lear overture, denoted x1, x2, x3, and so forth in each section – or, if one chooses, first time, second time, third time, and so forth. Key areas are given with letter names; certain progressions within keys are provided in parentheses. Looking at Fig. 2.3 one might describe this movement as a rondo form; indeed, the A sections return with the regularity and stability characteristic of rondo refrains. Alternatively, because the C section is the most contrasting in terms of texture and key – and, further, because the first three main sections, ABA0 , sound like a self-contained form, projecting a typical I–V–I underlying key scheme – one might call the form compound ternary: ABA0 –C–A00 D, where C is the middle section and D is simply an extension of A00 .54 A ternary reading suits the general impression of the movement as an enormous crescendo-decrescendo and expansion-contraction: in terms of measure duration, dynamics, and denseness of orchestration, the movement builds to the middle of the A0 section, after which it subsides in A00 . This crescendo-decrescendo and expansion-contraction are of course consistent with the movement’s program: Harold observes the pilgrims as they approach him and vanish into the distance.55 To characterize the movement only as a rondo or a ternary structure, however, is to downplay its strophic qualities, which are just as aurally perceptible.56 The movement’s sections, like those in the Damnation ballet, are so interrelated that they practically deserve the same letter designation – and even more to the point, sound so similar that it is easy

Programs

Ex. 2.7 Marche des pe`lerins, opening phrase of each main section

to forget which section one is hearing when. There is a strangely improvisatory quality to the Marche des pe`lerins, an impression that the tunes are being invented on the spot, each a lazy, varied riff upon the others. Consider, for instance, the close relationship between the thematic material in the A and B sections (see Ex. 2.7). Although B begins in a contrasting tonal area (B major), its melody proceeds at the same slow tempo, uses the same note values, and is the same length as A’s (each melody lasts eight measures, though the full phrases in A are properly ten measures long since they end with two measures of the C bell tone). We might say that melodic, rhythmic, and even hypermetrical structure is thus retained from section A to section B, if tonal structure is not. Furthermore, B is composed of the same motivic units as the opening phrase of A, albeit reordered. Ex. 2.7 highlights the two most prominent ones, p and q: p is a filled-in third, q a half-step lower neighbor. (The second half of B’s opening phrase could be segmented in two ways so that it ends with either a q or a p motive, as indicated in Ex. 2.7.) These motivic cells are the building blocks of both sections. Even the C section, though rooted in the contrasting tonal area bVI, resembles A and B in that it moves at the same lugubrious pace and contains the same number of quarter and eighth notes, the quarter-eighth-eighth rhythm of A’s and B’s second measures moved to C’s third measure. Section C also combines the characteristic phrase lengths of sections A and B – ten measures and eight measures, respectively – alternating between the two. Moreover, it resembles section B because it does not contain the recurring bell tone – although the bell tone’s pitch is manifested as a key area, C major. The D section continues this process of amalgamation by combining aspects of each section that precedes it: the rhythmic structure first presented in A, the eight-measure phrase lengths of B, and the instrumental color of C

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(monophonic melody in low strings). This process is distinctly teleological, albeit slow-paced, and it runs against the movement’s arch scheme. Complicating the broad ternary narrative of departing and returning, crescendoing and decrescendoing, expanding and contracting, coming full circle in the largest sense, is another narrative that involves smaller circles – the main sections themselves – each of which collects something from before and moves steadily, if leisurely, onward. The smallest circles can be found within the A and B sections themselves: the varied restatements of the opening eight-measure canto phrase. Tonally, each of the restatements in the A section ambles toward a different key area, only to cadence and then return to the tonic after the C bell tone. (x2 of course does not need to return to the tonic since it does not modulate.) Remarkably, the pitch C always occurs in a different harmonic context.57 A “static element that gives the illusion of motion,” to quote Cone,58 it is a point of reference that indicates to the listener how far the tonality has wandered – and perhaps also indicates to Harold how far the pilgrims have wandered. It is a fixed axis around which different harmonies rotate.59 The circular principle implied by the static bell tone – no matter how far the tonality strays, the bell tone and the tonic return – is reinforced by the movement’s systematic underlying key scheme. The first three phrases of section A begin in the tonic and cadence in D-sharp minor, E major, and F-sharp minor, respectively, yielding an ascending stepwise progression that is repeated and continued in A0 : d#, E, f#, g#, A, B, and, if we include the beginning of section C, C (see the bold-faced key areas indicated in Fig. 2.3).60 The extension of section A in A0 by two cycles is thus more than a matter of proportion; it allows A0 to elongate a path already traversed by A, and put on hold by B, with its exploration of B major. This key structure might be conceptualized as a ladder, where each key area is a rung. But this model ignores the fact that each phrase begins in the tonic before wandering further off. Fig. 2.4 presents a better scheme, which accounts for the small harmonic cycles, each of which has E major as its first element. The seven tonal goals are arranged in a circle and clockwise paths drawn that begin with E major, terminate at one of those goals, and return to E major. This model demonstrates graphically how the several “subrotations” of the flanking A and A0 sections yield one large rotation that touches upon every degree of a harmonic-major scale. This step-by-step underlying key scheme seems only appropriate to depict a pilgrim’s step-by-step homeward march. It is doubly appropriate because, though it is in fact rigidly constructed, it sounds errant; the

Programs

E d# f#

C

g#

A B Fig. 2.4 Key structure of Marche des pe`lerins

movement may depict a march, but it is a casual march home at the end of the day, not a march to battle. Many factors contribute to this apparent aimlessness. The bell tones and the returns to tonic make these keys sound like slippages rather than true goals. And with respect to the harmonic idioms of functional tonality, the rising stepwise key succession is less normative than, say, a circle-of-fifths sequence and thus sounds less contrived. The harmonic pattern is clear only in retrospect. At any given moment, we are not entirely sure where each progression might lead, just as we are not exactly sure if we have entered a “new” thematic area or not. If Cone is right that rhythm, more than any other element, “determines the appropriateness of a musical movement to its extra-musical subject,”61 the peculiar formal “rhythm” of the Marche des pe`lerins suits its extra-musical subject well. At many levels of structure and in many musical domains, Berlioz’s cycles-within-cycles combine pressing onward and coming full circle. Consider, for example, the key structure outlined above in Fig. 2.4. Yes, its step-by-step structure befits the pilgrims’ course. But that it progresses full circle also befits the course Harold himself undergoes. His transformation is one of reconciliation but not assimilation. Importantly, Harold never plays the canto tune and joins the pilgrims; the character represented by the solo viola may be transformed, but paradoxically, despite that transformation, he ends the movement just as he began: detached, still an outsider. Here is the most compelling connection with Byron’s poem – more salient than any verse-measure correspondence – and a key to understanding what Berlioz would call

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the work’s unique “sens intime” (or “inmost meaning”).62 Berlioz’s obsessively repetitive form, which like the story he means to tell is intimately bound up with notions of progress and return, could hardly be more apt. I have chosen these movements because the metaphorical connections between their musical shapes and poetic ideas are particularly compelling. Those connections do not lie within these works like treasures waiting to be excavated, truths waiting to be confirmed. My analytical approach is hermeneutic and as such any analytical reading I offer will be only one among many possible ones. But if I have chosen these works for the metaphorical richness of their forms, so, I believe, has Berlioz chosen these forms for their appropriateness as carriers of meaning, for their ability to reinforce and animate the vivid feelings, passions, and experiences suggested by his programs. To offer support for that claim and to lay the foundation for the more substantial analyses to come, we must consider more specifically what it might have meant to him for a form to be “appropriate” to its program. The following chapter serves that purpose.

3

Form as metaphor

The age-old program problem In his 1971 Norton Critical Score of the Symphonie fantastique Edward T. Cone writes, “The relationship between the program and the music of the Fantastic Symphony has been the source of as much discussion and controversy as the music itself.”1 He goes on to characterize the ways scholars have conceived of that relationship. On one side, he tells us, is someone like Jacques Barzun, who concludes that the program can be “relegated . . . to the role of promotional aid”; on the other is Hugh Macdonald, who writes that “it is a fashionable analytical folly that urges us to consider the work as ‘pure music.’ ”2 Nine years later Barzun himself revisits the question in his article “The Meaning of Meaning in Music: Berlioz Once More.”3 He describes the state of affairs similarly, with those who believe Berlioz’s music is “about something” and so cling tenaciously to its programs on one extreme and those who prefer to regard it as “pure music” untied to feelings and ideas on the other.4 By 1995, little, it seems, has changed, when Jean-Pierre Bartoli has this to say about the contentious issue of the Symphonie fantastique and its program: “for some, it is tempting to justify the work according to its program since, as its author puts it, it ‘motivates the character and the expression’ of the work. For others, convinced that so-called ‘pure’ music is superior to music accompanied by a literary text . . . it is advisable to take a formalist view of the music.”5 These essays are only three among many that treat the program-versusmusic issue. But they are characteristic. If Bartoli, in 1995, paints roughly the same picture that Cone did nearly twenty-five years before, with the formalists and programmaticists, the autonomists and the heteronomists, in their well-fortified bunkers, one wonders if we have made any real advances in that time toward making sense of this age-old Berlioz problem. In fact, we have. Few today, particularly in the Berlioz community, would argue that his music should be considered apart from his programs. Even fewer would accuse him of propping up his music artificially with something “extra-musical” to lend it a compelling coherence it lacks on its own. Those who know Berlioz well know that he would have

40

Form as metaphor

found anathema the idea that his music was “pure” or “absolute” in the sense of being unattached to the world of ideas, images, sentiments, and stories. Still, the debate about how to relate his programs and his music continues to be couched in the same terms and often with the same either/or. Either the program determines the course of the composition or the music possesses a logic all its own, independent of the logic of its accompanying program. A close reading of Berlioz’s 1837 essay “On Imitation in Music” suggests that he saw music and program as distinct – two different languages, as it were, with their own self-sufficient means of conveying meaning – but also deeply connected. Neither “needs” the other to be understood; neither is an “explanation” of the other, such that one element is prior to or more important than the other. But together their independent meanings reinforce one another. Music has its own means of transmitting meaning entirely different from that of language and cannot, or at least should not, follow a program in lockstep fashion. At the same time, music in its highest form is not a cold academic exercise but a carrier of the deepest sentiments – sentiments that we feel when we listen to music without a program but whose source and nature can be clarified and heightened with the aid of a program.6 Berlioz, in short, would likely have found the programmaticist and absolutist viewpoints, as outlined above, equally off-putting. Music, he stresses continually throughout his writings, is not a slave to language and the world of “external” ideas. And it is not “pure,” if we take pure to mean conveying nothing but musical relationships. It is “sufficient unto itself,” as he says in “On Imitation in Music,”7 and also “capable . . . of rendering certain sentiments and poetic ideas [ideés poe´tiques],” to quote a letter to the German critic Ludwig Rellstab.8 A composer does not need a program to make his music expressive. But he can use a program to contextualize what an audience feels when it listens. (This, it seems, is what Liszt recognized in Berlioz: in the best poetic music, such as Berlioz’s, the program merely makes it possible for the composer to define precisely “the thought to which he gives outward form.”9 It helps us to understand what picture the composer had in his mind.) A program enables us to draw an analogy between the emotions the music arouses and comparable emotions aroused by non-musical things: the sight of a forest, the experience of being at a rowdy carnival, the performance of a Shakespeare scene, the dancing of spirits, and so on. By invoking the notion of metaphor we can find a middleground between the polar views delineated by Cone, Barzun, and Bartoli. We can

The age-old program problem

see a work’s program as more than just a take-it-or-leave-it accoutrement and instead as an integral part of our auditory experience. Yet we can also pay heed to the musical craft that was always so important to Berlioz – to the arrangement of musical elements, which needs no extra-musical ideas to be justified; to the heightening of expression not by unnaturally hitching a score to a story but by organizing musical material so that it best communicates, in its own self-sufficient terms, the powerful sentiments that find another form of expression in words. Strophic variation, as the previous analyses have suggested, was one such communicator, a musical technique full of expressive potential, which Berlioz used to stir in his audience sensations suitable to the poetic ideas he wanted to get across. In the interest of space, this chapter will not situate Berlioz within the history of program music, a task that at any rate has been admirably undertaken elsewhere.10 Scholars now generally accept that Berlioz did not single-handedly usher in a new kind of music; his attempts to bring to bear on musical composition everything his imagination had to offer – poetry, drama, personal experience – were, however bold, not unprecedented. In the last chapter I outlined a definition of “program” as the concept relates to Berlioz’s music, but a philosophical discussion of the ontology of program music is beyond the scope of this project. It is something of a fashion in Berlioz scholarship to claim that Berlioz’s brand of program music is neither less serious, nor more diluted, nor really wholly different from a whole range of other music that, whether with a literary program or an evocative title or a written prologue or simply the title Symphony in C, similarly fires our imaginations and strikes us as more than just to¨nend bewegte Formen (sonically moving forms), to quote Hanslick’s famous formulation.11 David Cairns puts it most forcefully: the controversy about the nature and essence of the Fantastic Symphony involves wider issues than critical opinion of one particular work: it is central to the ancient and fallacious doctrine of Berlioz the composer unlike any other and, beyond that, to the whole muddled, contentious question or non-question of Programme Music. The concept – in this exclusive sense of a fundamentally different kind of music – has been so deeply ingrained in the minds of generations of music-historians and amateurs, has set such deep and irresistible torrents of ink flowing, that I suppose it is too late to ask whether after all there is such a thing. But what does it amount to, in any practical and meaningful sense? And what is it based on, except a false distinction: that music which is not programme music is ‘pure’? As Wilfrid Mellers has pointed out, it would be hard to find a more ‘imbecile notion’ than the concept of pure music, ‘for the simple reason that

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Form as metaphor

although in a sense all music must be programme music, since it is concerned with human emotions, in another sense music, in so far as it is music, can never be anything but pure.’12

Barzun makes a similar point when he wonders how so many intelligent people associate music with stories, events, or abstract ideas. The answer – music is expressive in itself: “It is expressive apart from the objects of its imitation and hence can be dramatic apart from the subjects of storytelling.”13 I am inclined to agree with both of them – more perhaps with Cairns than with Barzun since, as I hope this book will show, Berlioz’s music can certainly be expressive apart from the objects of its imitation, but it is all the more expressive when considered in conjunction with those objects. Nevertheless, it is not my aim to show that all music is program music or conversely to define program music as distinct from “absolute” music and thereby enter the thicket of controversy that continues to confound scholars of nineteenth-century music. Since Berlioz is the focus of my study, I am most concerned with how he might have regarded his own music. And since he wrote plenty about the matter, there is more than enough to go on. For this same reason, I rely more upon Berlioz’s own writings in outlining a conception of form as metaphor than on the many theories of metaphor by literary theorists, philosophers, and musicologists. These theories are of course impossible to ignore. The past hundred years alone have seen an explosion of interest in the topic of musical metaphor. I. A. Richards’s seminal book The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1936) inspired a whole range of research into the role of figurative language.14 Then, when metaphor dropped out of fashion in literary criticism briefly in the 1970s, it was picked up by cognitive scientists like George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, who shifted the focus from matters of rhetoric to matters of conceptualization – how we see the world metaphorically.15 Work from the past couple of decades by a number of philosophers and musicologists has built upon these studies and enriched our understanding of how we think and write metaphorically about music.16 I will touch on some of this work in what follows, particularly as it helps us to clarify Berlioz’s own views. But since the aims and terms of many recent theories differ from those of Berlioz and his contemporaries, I believe we can learn as much by considering his ideas in their own historical and intellectual context. This chapter proceeds in four main parts. First, I consider how programs and poetic thoughts interrelate, arguing that the two are not the same and that to understand musical metaphor, as Berlioz conceived it,

Poetic thoughts and programs

we must learn to see a work’s poetic thought as the overriding emotion the work expresses, which is then contextualized by a program. Second, I do a close reading of “On Imitation in Music,” teasing out how Berlioz used the terms “metaphor” and “analogy.” Third, I show what Berlioz’s concept of musical metaphor owes to three French writers who preceded him: the naturalist Bernard Germaine E´tienne de La Ville sur Illon, Comte de Lace´pe`de; Jean-François Le Sueur, Berlioz’s first teacher in Paris; and the aesthetician Michel-Paul Guy de Chabanon. And finally, I offer something of a defense of form in Berlioz, arguing that he did think deeply about large-scale form, all the more so because to think programmatically for Berlioz was to have ultimate license to mold forms according to what they were supposed to express. Programs made him playful, experimental. But he did not play carelessly; he bent his entire mind to the problem of finding the proper form for the program and poetic idea at hand – “that form,” as he puts it in a letter about the composition of Les Troyens, “without which music does not exist.”17

Poetic thoughts and programs The term penseé poe´tique (often translated as “poetic thought”) appears perhaps most famously in Berlioz’s essay in which he outlines his concept of the genre instrumental expressif and the “new world” of passionate and imaginative instrumental music he found in the music of Beethoven and Weber. I quote a large section from the essay because explicating it will help us to understand Berlioz’s position: in former times instrumental music seems to have had no other aim than to please the ear or to engage the intellect, just as modern Italian cantilena evokes a kind of voluptuous sensation in which the heart and imagination have no part; but in Beethoven’s and Weber’s works, one cannot miss the poetic thought [penseé poe´tique], for it is ubiquitous . . . It is music which gives way to itself, needing no words to make its expression specific; its language then becomes quite indefinite, thanks to which it acquires still more power over beings endowed with imagination. Like objects half-perceived in darkness, its images develop, its forms become more unsettled, cloudier; the composer, no longer forcibly restricted to the limited range of the human voices, makes his melodies more active and varied; he can turn the most original, even bizarre, phrases without fear of making them unplayable, a problem one is always up against when writing for voices. From this stem the amazing effects, the curious feelings, the ineffable sensations, produced by the symphonies, quartets, overtures and sonatas of Weber and Beethoven.18

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Berlioz seems to present us with a paradox: a poetic thought can be expressed “specifically,” even if the language used to express it is “indefinite.” For him, though, this would not have been a paradox at all. As Katherine Kolb Reeve has pointed out in her dissertation, “The Poetics of the Orchestra in the Writings of Hector Berlioz,” Berlioz, like most of his contemporaries, was “swept up by the mystique of ‘le vague’ [vagueness]”19 – the notion that this new genre of music was all the more potent because it was untethered to words and strict forms and uninterested in empty displays of virtuosity and pictorial effects that did not serve a larger expressive aim. But “vagueness” did not preclude the expression of “specific” sentiments. It aided it. Berlioz says it himself: when music “gives way to itself,” “its language then becomes quite indefinite, thanks to which it acquires still more power over beings endowed with imagination.”20 The italics are his, and they underline the idea that poetic music is above all that which sheds its shackles and traffics not in cliche´ and hollow artifice but in real feelings, and as a result speaks to our imagination most directly. Berlioz’s abiding interest in the poetic power of music is a constant in his writings, and he is of course not alone. As Reeve notes, when Berlioz wrote to his friend Humbert Ferrand in 1829 about “la musique poe´tique,” the phrase still sounded “unmistakably iconoclastic.”21 But soon the terms penseé poe´tique, ideé poe´tique, and the like would become common currency. Reeve’s dissertation is a virtual compendium of such uses – by French-speaking critics like Joseph d’Ortique, Liszt, and Fe´tis, but also by German-speaking writers like A. B. Marx, whose notion of the Idee underlying instrumental music bears some resemblance to Berlioz’s notion of poetic thought,22 and Schumann, whose Neue Zeitschrift fu¨r Musik proclaimed to fight for the “poetry” of music23 just as the Gazette musicale, founded in the same year as the Neue Zeitschrift, 1834, aimed to uphold the standards of that “poetry of poetries, for which the name music has been exclusively reserved.”24 Reeve writes, “In essence, the ‘poetic’ campaign in music represented an effort to stem the tide of bad music rapidly turned out by the newly mechanized presses of the French capital, and consumed at the same rate by the public.”25 Berlioz was as avid a supporter of this campaign as anyone. Still, the poetic content of his music was often grossly misunderstood – even though he threw himself behind the crusade for poetic music, spoke in roughly the same terms about Beethoven as many of his contemporaries, and saw himself as following Beethoven’s poetic model. Fe´tis wrote a scathing preface to the version of the Symphonie fantastique’s program


published in the Revue musicale only a week before the premiere, in which he accused Berlioz of trying to “paint specific events” and to “express abstractions.”26 Adolphe Jullien, writing some years after Berlioz’s death in 1875, leveled a similar accusation against the tomb scene from Romeó et Juliette: “Berlioz materialized the entire scene; he even wanted to paint somewhere Romeo’s successive gulps and the first attacks of the poison.”27 These are only two among countless critiques that could be cited. In point of fact, however, Berlioz’s penseés poe´tiques were in his mind neither abstractions, incapable of being felt viscerally and expressed naturally, nor events or images so specific that they were impossible to render musically. In this, Reeve asserts, Berlioz was different from many of his critics. To them, a penseé poe´tique or ideé poe´tique “clearly implied a literal, pre-established object for the music to express. To Berlioz himself, these phrases had other, far less literal implications.”28 He spent his life struggling to convince his detractors that he, even more than they, understood the limits of musical expression and never put music to a task beyond its means – and the clarity and terms of his arguments remain remarkably consistent. (Perhaps, in the end, it was the sheer difficulty of his musical style, not of his aesthetic ideas, that made so many of his pleadings fall on deaf ears. Austere critics like Fe´tis, whose barbs against Berlioz were of course tainted with a fair amount of personal prejudice,29 could not imagine how someone could write such “monstrosities”30 if he cared so much about their appropriateness to a poetic thought.) In a footnote to the Symphonie fantastique’s program, added in 1835 and later withdrawn, Berlioz spelled out in even more detail than the avertissement preceding the program what he did and did not mean the music to say; it is as clear a rebuttal to Fe´tis as one could imagine, and it touches on the notion of metaphor that he would develop more fully two years later in his two-part essay on musical imitation: He [the composer] knows very well that music can take the place of neither word nor picture; he has never had the absurd intention of expressing abstractions or moral qualities, but rather passions and feelings. Nor has he had the even stranger idea of painting mountains: he has only wished to reproduce the melodic style and forms that characterize the singing of some of the people who live among them, or the emotion that the sight of these imposing masses arouses, under certain circumstances, in the soul.31

In my music, Berlioz seems to say, I am doing nothing more drastic, questionable, or naive than what Beethoven and Weber have done. The poetic thoughts and ideas that Berlioz heard in their music and tried to

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create in his own are none other than powerfully felt “passions and feelings” and “emotions” (the italics betray a hint of exasperation). In a concert review from 1835, in which he compares Haydn unfavorably to Beethoven because his music does not possess the same “profound emotions” that one senses in Beethoven’s music, he effectively equates penseés poe´tiques with these emotions; a poetic thought, he says, is a “dramatic sentiment”: “the overall effect of this composition [by Haydn] was nothing like the profound emotion, the real transports that Beethoven stimulates. We are no longer content today with music only; in every production of some importance we seek a poetic thought [penseé poe´tique], a more or less dramatic sentiment that the art of music colors, in its way, and whose power it doubles.”32 If poetic thoughts appear to be none other than strong passions and emotions expressed in musical terms, how are they related to programs? Berlioz offers an answer of sorts in the following comment from “On Imitation in Music”: Now music will easily express blissful love, jealousy, carefree anxiety, anxious modesty, violent threats, suffering and fear, but whether these feelings have been caused by the sight of a forest or anything else, music is forever incapable of telling us . . . I shall be told, perhaps, that there exist admirable examples of musical depiction . . . These imitations are not in fact offered us as pictures of objects but only as images or analogues. They help to reawaken comparable sensations by means which music undoubtedly possesses. Yet even so, before the original of these images can be recognized, it is strictly required that the hearer be notified of the composer’s intent by some indirect means, and that the point of the comparison be patent.33

It would be a mistake to define the notions of program and poetic thought in Berlioz too rigidly and to suggest there is never any overlap between the two. But we can benefit from laying bare the assumption that seems to underlie a passage such as this. The emotions and dramatic sentiments that music expresses, Berlioz implies, do not need a program to be strongly and specifically felt; they only need be conveyed in a musical language that is unrestricted, open, and crafted to suit them. These, one imagines, are the penseés poe´tiques that “one cannot miss” in the music of Weber and Beethoven. A program, however, can tell us what causes these emotions; it can refine our understanding of something the music would express on its own. (That programs and poetic thoughts are not identical is underlined by Berlioz’s remark about the “curious feelings” and “ineffable sensations” produced by the “symphonies, quartets,


overtures and sonatas” of Weber and Beethoven, most of which have nothing resembling a program, even as we have broadly defined it.) To regard a program as providing what we might call a real-world context for a poetic idea is to move beyond the notion that when music and program seem to correspond it is because the music has faithfully depicted something in the program, be that an event or an object in nature, etc. Berlioz is at pains to demonstrate that what happens when we recognize a correspondence like this is that music arouses sensations comparable to those we would have while experiencing an event or looking at an object. The following passages from “On Imitation in Music” elaborate upon the point: Painting . . . cannot encroach on the domain of music; but music can by its own means act upon the imagination in such a way as to engender sensations analogous to those produced by graphic art . . . The kind of imitation [called] emotional is designed to arouse in us by means of sound the notion of the several passions of the heart, and to awaken solely through the sense of hearing the impressions that human beings experience only through the other senses.34

Berlioz may be stacking the deck a little, since occasionally his music does seem to depict objects and events. The dropping of the guillotine in the Marche au supplice is the most famous instance. One could of course say that the fortissimo G-minor chord, sounded by the full orchestra, is not a faithful picture of a guillotine’s blade dropping, and the strings’ following pizzicati are not a picture of a head rolling; these instrumental effects awaken sensations in us that we recognize as analogous to the sensation of seeing an execution. But splitting hairs like this is almost beside the point since Berlioz’s music is rarely so literally descriptive as this; to make it so would be to sacrifice music’s self-sufficiency – to subordinate technique to gimmick. “Expression included literal illustration, such as shepherds’ pipes, the flapping wings of giant birds, a snore even, but it was primarily devoted to feeling,” writes Hugh Macdonald. “Yet feeling did not preclude technique, as many of his critics have imagined. Berlioz understood full well the role of technique in an artist’s make-up and laboured to master it.”35 This is an important point. One of the benefits of allowing ourselves to see programs and poetic ideas as two different but related things is that we can appreciate Berlioz as far more of a musical craftsman than he is typically given credit for. We come a long way if we are willing to accept that poetic ideas are transmitted first and foremost in carefully conceived

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musical forms and qualified by the “indirect means” of a program. Programs do not lend coherence to the music; they amplify and enrich its emotive capabilities. Berlioz’s own writings suggest an awareness of this relation between programs and poetic ideas. Consider, for example, his 1837 essay on Beethoven’s Third Symphony. He hears in the “Eroica” a “grave and profound thought”: “grief.”36 The phrase ideé poe´tique in fact appears later in the essay when he writes of the “grave and sombre tint” Beethoven maintains even in the capricious scherzo, adding that the finale “is nothing but a development of the same poetic idea [ideé poe´tique].”37 As is his custom, Berlioz, not content merely to speak abstractly about the work’s overall mood, shows how that mood is created and sustained musically. He finds the rhythm of the first movement particularly striking – “the frequency of syncopation,” “combinations of duple measure,” “accentuation of the weak beat” – and notes how these out-of-sync rhythms produce “rude dissonances” that fill him with a “sensation of fear.”38 He writes eloquently about the “profoundly moving” close to the funeral march, where the theme reappears in fragments, “interspersed by silence, and without any other accompaniment than three notes pizzicato by the double bass,” “shreds of the lugubrious melody . . . alone, bare, broken and effaced.”39 These comments, colorful though they may be, are strictly musical. When, however, he goes further and indulges in more fanciful interpretation – calling those rude dissonances in the first movement “the voice of rage,” hearing in the wind instruments at the end of the funeral march a cry “which is the last adieu of the warriors to their companion in arms” – he bases these remarks on his sense of the work’s program – its provocative inscription, “Heroic Symphony to celebrate the memory of a great man.” The work, according to Berlioz, represents the hero’s “funeral rites.”40 The interpretive process that allows him to make this claim occurs in two steps: first, musical procedures suggest poetic thoughts; second, those poetic thoughts crystallize into vivid visual images when supplemented by a program.

Musical metaphor To recognize that programs and poetic ideas are not the same thing is not yet to explain how exactly they are involved in musical metaphor. When we say that a piece expresses joy, are we saying that that piece is a metaphor

Musical metaphor

for joy? When we say that the Marche des pe`lerins evokes a languorous homeward journey of singing pilgrims, are we saying that the process of the piece is a metaphor for a traveler’s journey across the Italian countryside? If our goal is to consider how varied strophic forms function metaphorically, how should we think about the interaction of those forms with the poetic ideas and programs indelibly linked to them? Berlioz has already offered us a preliminary answer to these questions in his comments about the various emotions music can express, whose source can only be indicated by a program. Here and elsewhere he speaks of “expression” when dealing with the sentiments and feelings of music but reserves the terms me´taphore, analogie, and image for those instances when the music conveys something clearly non-musical. He counters the argument, for example, that Weber “painted moonlight” in the accompaniment to Agatha’s aria in the second act of Der Freischu¨tz. Really all Weber has done is to “express the dreaminess of the lovers . . . whose assistance Agatha then invokes [my italics]” and to “form a faithful metaphor or image of the pale light of the moon [my italics]” with “the calm, veiled, and melancholy coloring of the harmonies and the chiaroscuro of the instrumental timbre.”41 Berlioz’s terminology is key here: music, his comments imply, may easily express “dreaminess,” just as it may express “blissful love, jealousy, carefree anxiety,” and so on; this, we can presume, is the overwhelming poetic thought we glean from Weber’s score. We enter the realm of metaphor, however, when we move beyond the expression of sentiment and into the fashioning of images, whose particularities can only be imagined if we have an extra-musical aid to help us – here the text of the aria. Many recent theorists of metaphor maintain a similar distinction between expression and metaphor. Stephen Davies builds upon an account of metaphor by Malcolm Budd, which questions, in Davies’s words, whether “the ascription of emotion terms to music” is metaphorical.42 Roughly stated, to say “the music is sad” may not in fact be to speak metaphorically because the description is not “eliminable”; because we cannot express the sense of the statement in terms that do not make reference to the music’s emotional character, the music and its emotional character are inseparable from one another. (Davies is well aware that we might be able to explain why the music is sad by referring to its “technical devices” – the properties of the music such as harmony, melody, and rhythm. But, like Budd, he does not believe that the music’s emotional character can be reduced to an account of its devices without losing the “point” of a statement that uses emotive terms.)43 The same is not true,

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however, of referring to the soloists in the first movement of Mozart’s Sinfonia concertante in E-flat major, K. 364, as “homing pigeons”; this comment, Davies argues, is “eliminable” because other descriptions “would be no less informative of the music’s character.”44 The “point” of this comment could be paraphrased in other terms not making reference to homing pigeons; therefore, the comment is metaphorical. We may question, as many have,45 the idea that metaphors have “points” that can be paraphrased, since such an idea maintains a rather rigid line between literal and figurative utterances. But the distinction between what Davies calls “unavoidable” and “eliminable” descriptions of music is useful. The ascription of a “passion” or “feeling” to a work of music, Berlioz’s writings imply, is “unavoidable,” assuming at least that that piece is an example of the genre instrumental expressif. Sensitive listeners, Berlioz would assume, cannot help hearing joy expressed by the final movement of Beethoven’s Ninth, or “dreaminess” by Weber’s aria, even if some may give the emotion a different name or tint: no further elucidation is needed for the sentiment to be perceived. The ascription of a particular scene or “image” to a work is, on the other hand, “eliminable,” insofar as many different scenes and images may apply to the same work, each of which captures a similar sentiment.46 When Berlioz writes that the end of the finale of the Ninth “is the song of the hero sure of victory,” he does more than describe the emotion that underlies the movement; he imagines a character who experiences that joy. He conceives of the music metaphorically, precisely because the image that presents itself to his imagination is only one of many that might have; that this particular one appears to him is a function of his prior awareness of the text. As Berlioz puts it in “On Imitation in Music,” “The truth of the image will appear only if the listener has taken the pains to inform himself ahead of time about the subject treated by the musician.”47 By the same token, Berlioz could have called the slow movement of Harold “Clocks” and we would have had a very different image in our minds, but one that nonetheless fit with the steady, serene mood of the music – and also the recurring bell tone. That makes the title Marche des pe`lerins no less important to our hearing of the work, but it does suggest that the meaning we construe from thinking about the relationship between the music’s form and the scene indicated by the title is not given a priori. It is created; it requires an act of conscious discrimination, in which we imagine a connection between a musical and a non-musical experience – listening to a musical form whose themes and harmonies are cycled through in an easy, continual fashion and witnessing a group of pilgrims journeying leisurely

Musical metaphor

home, chanting the same tune as they go, against the distant tolling of a convent bell. If, for Berlioz, the expression of sentiment does not seem to fully qualify as metaphorical, then the facile imitation of sounds in nature lies even further outside the bounds of musical metaphor. Berlioz rails against composers who imitate natural sounds without considering whether such imitations complement a musical idea or lend something to the dramatic structure of a work. Borrowing terms from an Italian critic Joseph Carpani, Berlioz refers to the imitation of sounds as they appear in nature as “physical” and “direct,” as opposed to the “emotional” and “indirect” imitation involved in musical metaphor.48 Direct imitation should not be considered off limits, as he points out in “On Imitation” and also in the lengthy footnote to the Symphonie fantastique’s program, but it should not be abused since even “its happiest effects always verge on caricature.”49 If used, it should concern something “worthy of holding the listener’s attention,”50 avoid “aping” reality but also be close enough to the thing imitated so as not to confuse an audience, never be used when indirect imitation is called for, and, above all, “never be an end but only a means.”51 Beethoven, for example, errs when, in the duet from Fidelio in which the jailer and Fidelio dig a grave for Florestan, he has the double basses play a strange figure meant to imitate the sound of a rolling stone. This imitation is “in no way necessary either to the drama or to the effectiveness of the music”;52 it is a “sad piece of childishness” (harsh criticism of a composer he holds in such esteem). The storm from the “Pastoral” Symphony, on the other hand, though clearly an instance of direct imitation, passes the test because it is “motivated.”53 It is not used to satisfy the puerile pleasure of hearing an orchestra sound like a storm; it achieves a contrast that Berlioz believes is “required by the scope of the work.”54 For all that Berlioz has been criticized for giving instrumental music too much latitude, the great strength of his argument about musical expressivity lies in the limits it sets on imitation (Barzun reinforces this point when he titles his translation of Berlioz’s essay on imitation “The Limits of Music”). Music cannot imitate just anything; “abstractions” and “moral qualities,” as he has said, are out of bounds. And when a composer does resort to physical imitation, he can only do so successfully if that imitation has a musical function. Given such a limited view of musical imitation – of all types – musical metaphor begins to occupy a very small space indeed. It does not appear to entail only the expression of a feeling or a poetic idea, since these feelings and thoughts are transmitted naturally and in a sense are closer to

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“the music itself ”; there is less of a conceptual gap to bridge, Berlioz implies, when we feel that a piece expresses “dreaminess” than when we manage to “see” in that piece an image of moonlight. Metaphors are metaphors in part because they require more work of us. Musical metaphor also clearly does not entail physical imitation, even when that sort of imitation is used admirably, since here too it does not as thoroughly engage our imaginative faculties; it does not force us to think broadly and synthetically across different domains. I use the word “domain” deliberately, taking it from cognitive theories of metaphor. According to these theories, when we think in metaphors, we transfer the conceptual structure of one domain onto the conceptual structure of another.55 Even non-cognitive theorists stress that to think and write metaphorically is to bring together disparate thoughts.56 Berlioz, though he offers nothing really approaching a theory of metaphor and clearly is more interested in discussing how composers do their work, seems to hold to the same idea. We hear metaphorically, his writings imply, when we are forced to mingle in our minds two different images, one musical and the other programmatic, which do not belong to the same sphere but seem alike enough that we believe we can perceive one in the other.

Precedents in French theories of imitation Berlioz’s struggle to have his ideas about musical imitation understood stems in part from his use of this very word: imitation. In calling his essay “On Imitation in Music,” he was using a term that for many immediately called to mind an ancient doctrine espoused most prominently by Charles Batteux, who in Les beaux-arts re´duits a` un meˆme principe (1746) deemed the imitation of nature the one principle common to the arts (by nature he meant man’s inner nature as well as the natural world).57 Batteux’s ideas went largely unchallenged throughout the rest of the century, but by 1837, when Berlioz wrote his little tract, they had fallen out of favor. The notion that music, like all the arts, relied upon nature came to seem more and more objectionable as those caught up in a pre-Romantic fervor began to place great stock in music’s “vagueness” and independence. Further, as instrumental music gained in popularity, many became exasperated with a theory that included only dramatic music with words. Even Fe´tis, however conservative Berlioz may have made him out to be in his memoirs and elsewhere, was brought under the spell of “le vague” – so

Precedents in French theories of imitation

much so that, as Reeve notes, what drew his ire most were what he viewed as Berlioz’s “regressive” tendencies. In Fe´tis’s eyes, she writes, “[a] program symphony undermined music’s hard-won autonomy: with scholarly arguments to back him up, Fe´tis accused Berlioz of going against not only the nature of music itself, but also the entire current of musical history.”58 But did he go against the current of history? If we read Berlioz in the context of the French aesthetics of the era, he seems less regressive than careful. This is not a word many will easily apply to the composer often lumped together with Wagner and Liszt as a revolutionary. Berlioz was certainly experimental, but his reputation has suffered from the all-toocommon textbook portrait of a wild-eyed maniac who recklessly put music to any and every task imaginable. My hope is that this book will show him to be as cautious and reflective a composer as he was innovative and idiosyncratic. He internalized all the music he knew and admired – its orchestral effects, its expressive character, its vividness, its fine-tuned design – and took from it what suited his ends, but always with a keen sense of what worked and what did not. The same is true of his role as a critic and aesthetician. In titling his 1837 essay conservatively, he was paying respect to the tradition to which his work was indebted, carefully mounting an argument that dwelt upon the powers of musical expressiveness as well as its limitations, as both he and others saw them. It was by setting limits on musical imitation that he believed its capabilities could be best appreciated.

Lace´pe`de Berlioz betrays his familiarity with eighteenth-century musical aesthetics when he cites Lace´pe`de in “On Imitation.” Lace´pe`de wrote an influential book called La poe´tique de la musique, one of the earliest attempts to relate aesthetic theory to practical composition.59 Berlioz quotes Lace´pe`de as having said that “since music has only sounds at its disposal, it can act only through sound. Hence in order to produce the signs of our perceptions these signs must themselves be sounds.” “But how can one express musically things that make no sound whatever,” Berlioz then asks, “such as the denseness of a forest, the coolness of a meadow, the progress of the moon? Lace´pe`de answers, ‘By retracing the feelings these things inspire in us [my italics].’ ”60 Berlioz goes on to question why Carpani would find this type of imitation so entrancing; Carpani’s claim about music’s ability to depict such things, says Berlioz, suffers from a lack of precision since we are not affected in a uniform way by the sight of a forest, a meadow, or

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the moon. Music, again, can express emotions but it cannot convey information about what causes them: to extend music’s reach beyond the realm of the emotions is “wholly untenable.”61 Berlioz may seem to dismiss Lace´pe`de’s comment altogether, even if only to show the shortcomings of Carpani’s views. But actually what he rejects is only the object of music’s imitation as Carpani, via Lace´pe`de, conceives it. Music simply cannot express the denseness of a forest. It can, though, express fear or uncertainty or calm or whatever emotion one might feel while in a dense forest, and the means by which it does this is very much like what Lace´pe`de describes – it “retraces the feelings” that non-musical things inspire in us. This line is strikingly similar to Berlioz’s own lines about “reawaken[ing] comparable sensations,” “reproducing the intonations of the passions and the emotions,” and – as he phrases it in an 1857 article in the Journal des de´bats – “reviving in the soul of the listener impressions analogous to those that one experiences while contemplating the calm beauties of rustic nature.”62 Lace´pe`de does not center his discussion of musical imitation on the idea of analogy, but he does, like Berlioz, stress that the composer’s job is not to mimic nature but to “awaken the idea of the feeling” it arouses in us.63 The way we perceive nature, he suggests, is distinct from the way we perceive music. A particular human cry, for example, will convey a particular emotion; a particular melody can convey a similar emotion, but it must do so in a different way – it must be organized according to the conventions of the system of meaning to which it belongs and “can act only through sound.” If a musician fails to recognize the distinction between these two modes of perception and tries too hard for what Lace´pe`de calls a “literal and faithful portrayal” of nature, he falls into error; he “mar[s] the pleasure that ought to be got from every theatrical representation.”64

Le Sueur Lace´pe`de’s attempts to justify music’s indirect means of imitation must have made a strong impression on Berlioz. So, probably, did the final part of La poe´tique de la musique, which deals with concert music and advises composers to treat a symphony like a drama – as he says, like a “theatrical representation” – with movements as acts and instruments as characters.65 Lace´pe`de’s treatise certainly impressed Le Sueur, Berlioz’s beloved mentor during his early years in Paris, who is believed to have introduced Berlioz to the writings of a wide variety of eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury aestheticians, Lace´pe`de included.66 Le Sueur came under the

Precedents in French theories of imitation

influence of Lace´pe`de’s work between 1785 and 1787, after which he published his four-volume Expose´ d’une musique une, imitative et particulie`re a` chaque solennite´, which betrays its debt to Lace´pe`de’s thinking about musical imitation.67 Unlike Lace´pe`de, Le Sueur never went so far as to even hint that concert music without voices was the equal of music with voices; Le Sueur remained devoted to the Gluckian idea that music was the servant of text and dramatic idea – an idea with which Berlioz disagreed. Berlioz therefore cannot be seen as a fulfilled Le Sueur, as David Cairns rightly notes; his belief in the supreme dramatic powers of the orchestra in and of itself owes more to Beethoven than to his early teacher.68 But it was Le Sueur who, it seems, first showed Berlioz what an orchestra can do – even with voices: how, in Le Sueur’s words, an orchestra “can imitate all the tones and all the inflections [a word reminiscent of Berlioz’s own ‘intonations’] of nature,” how “the human heart is the living book that the composer must study unceasingly.”69 (It is hard not to hear strains of Berlioz here, particularly in the comment about the human heart being a “living book”; in 1830, Berlioz would write to his friend Humbert Ferrand about the Symphonie fantastique, “this is how I have woven my novel, or rather my history, whose hero you will have no difficulty in recognizing.”70 For more on Berlioz’s letter to Ferrand, see the beginning of chapter 5.) And it was Le Sueur and Lace´pe`de both who helped to pave the way for Berlioz’s own justifications for orchestral drama, primarily in their theoretical justification for the independence of vocal and instrumental lines and their placing of as much emphasis on the dramatic function of an accompaniment as on that of a sung melody.71

Chabanon The concept of musical metaphor that was implicit in the writings of Lace´pe`de is laid out literally in the writings of Chabanon, whose groundbreaking Observations sur la musique et principalement sur la me´taphysique de l’art (1779) – and its expanded version, Musique conside´reé en ellemeˆme, et dans ses rapports avec la parole, les langues, la poe´sie, et le theáˆtre (1785) – goes against decades of French aesthetics in claiming that music does not imitate nature but is a language unto itself. Music can be expressive, according to Chabanon, but it does so only by analogy (a word he uses extensively).72 The sensations we experience while listening to music are aesthetic, not affective. The former are of a different order from the latter, such that when, for example, we call a melody “tender” it is not

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Form as metaphor

because it arouses in us the same “tender” feeling we would have for a lover, a parent, or a friend; it is because “between these two conditions, the one actual, the other musical . . . the analogy is such, that the mind agrees to take the one for the other.”73 Chabanon strenuously rebelled against the fashionable theories of imitation that had been prevalent since Batteux declared imitation to be the fundamental principle of the arts. (He was of course not alone: in the same year that Musique conside´reé en elle-meˆme appeared, Boye´ published a pamphlet called L’expression musicale mise au rang des chime`res, whose title was often quoted far into the next century.) Music was not the handmaiden of language or of nature. It did not rely upon text, the inarticulate cry of the passions as carried in a vocal line, objects in the natural world, or really even human emotion to be expressive. It provided pleasure and interest purely by dint of its material nature, “through the sensations it inspires and by imperfect analogy rather than through rigorous imitation.”74 Hence, for Chabanon, instrumental music – which so many French aestheticians had dismissed and even Lace´pe`de had only rather reluctantly allowed into his theory – finally took precedence over vocal music. Unfortunately, unlike with Lace´pe`de, we cannot know for sure how well Berlioz knew Chabanon’s work. But we can assume he would have been familiar with it in some sense, most probably through Le Sueur’s teachings, and also perhaps from having read it, or criticism of it, himself: Chabanon’s work was widely known in France, as well as in England and Germany, and Berlioz was well read.75 Regardless of whether a direct influence can be shown, Chabanon’s writings are important because they represent a clear precedent to Berlioz’s ideas about musical analogy. Just as Berlioz is not Le Sueur fulfilled, so his ideas are not of course identical to Chabanon’s. Chabanon uses the word “analogy” even to refer to the ascription of affective qualities to music, whereas Berlioz reserves it for the ascription of a particular story or human event to music that naturally possesses affective qualities. And Chabanon is stricter than Berlioz about excluding imitation from music’s sphere, emphatically titling chapter 4 of his treatise “Music pleases independently of all imitation.”76 Still, it must be remembered that at the time Chabanon was writing, the word “imitation” called to mind the (as he saw them) restrictive dictates of mideighteenth-century aesthetics, and the word “expression” was something new – hence his aversion to the former term. By 1837, Berlioz may have assumed, “imitation” had acquired varied meanings that went well beyond its mid century connotations, extending to more recent theories like

Form and metaphor

Lace´pe`de’s and Chabanon’s; there were different types of imitation, in his mind, some more literal than others, some also more acceptable. In this he may have been too optimistic. What he seems to have meant by “indirect imitation” and “emotional imitation” was in fact “expression,” as Chabanon, Boye´, and others had defined it. But the term “imitation” was simply too loaded for many to realize that. Wrapped up with a doctrine that many, including Berlioz himself, had come to see as outdated, the word “imitation” was destined to be set upon by the sharp-tongued critics of the Parisian press, and Berlioz’s efforts were doomed to be misread as hopelessly backward.

Form and metaphor We may now have a clearer sense of how Berlioz conceived of musical metaphor and analogy, but other questions persist: what did he mean by form, and what evidence is there that he would have regarded form as something involved in a metaphorical relation between music and program? In his essay on musical imitation, he does not in fact tend to discuss musical form as we think of it today – that is, a piece’s large-scale thematic and harmonic structure. He is more interested in details of harmony, melody, rhythm, and orchestration: the imitations of birdsongs in Beethoven’s Sixth; the rinforzando accents in Rossini’s Guillaume Tell, which suggest the rhythmic straining of men rowing (thanks, of course, to the opera’s text, which tells us of the arrival of the oarsmen); the “coloring” of the harmonies and the “chiaroscuro” of the instrumentation in Agatha’s moonlight aria from Der Freischu¨tz. Even outside this essay, Berlioz does not have a lot to say about large-scale structure – when discussing either his own works or the works of other composers. His music criticism is virtually silent on the subject, favoring evocative accounts of the dramatic character of a piece as a whole or of specific moments that enrapture him. Form is also not one of the “prevalent modes of action in musical art” that he enumerates in his 1837 article “The Art of Music,” although melody, harmony, rhythm, expression, modulation, and instrumentation are.77 Even when he does use the word “form,” it is not always clear whether he is referring to the large-scale thematic/harmonic design of a piece itself or the smaller-scale structure of particulars such as melody, harmony, and rhythm.78 We should however be wary of drawing the conclusion that Berlioz was indifferent to large-scale structural matters. Berlioz’s meticulous revisions

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Form as metaphor

of his scores show us someone deeply concerned with the subtleties of form. Those revisions, though often cosmetic, dealing with aspects of instrumentation or voicing, were frequently structural in nature.79 Bartoli has argued persuasively that form was of the utmost importance to Berlioz and that his relative silence on the subject of formal analysis in his writings is more a sign of the times than a sign of his compositional predilections. Formal analysis, he claims – along with “all that relates to the technique of musical composition” – “only appeared very rarely at the beginning of the nineteenth century in a text with a non-didactic aim. It was not the habit of the era.”80 Schumann’s essay on the Symphonie fantastique may be counted as something of an exception to this rule, with its detailed formal analysis of the first movement in particular.81 But on the whole Bartoli is right: for a critic early in the century to delve too far into “technical” analysis was to disenfranchise those music-loving readers he hoped to reach. Which is not to say that Berlioz never writes about form. His criticism evinces, in flashes, a keen sense of formal design. His essay on Beethoven’s Fidelio, for example, mentions that the second Leonora overture retains the “general disposition of all the subjects . . . joining them by different modulations.”82 And his analysis of the overture to Rossini’s Guillaume Tell (in a separate essay from “On Imitation in Music”) betrays an understanding of overture form when it notes how Rossini deviates from the customary two-part overture model (that is, introduction followed by sonata proper) by writing a four-part work: Rossini, Berlioz writes, “expanded the form in such a way that the overture has become, so to speak, a symphony in four well-defined sections, instead of a piece in two sections with which we ordinarily content ourselves.”83 A comment about the innovative designs characteristic of Beethoven’s late style, from Berlioz’s 1829 essay “Biographie e´trange`re: Beethoven,” is even more telling because it appears to link a work’s caracte`re – a term commonly used to denote dramatic import – with its forme: the works of the late period, he writes, manifest “a character of sober exaltation, vague reverie, and despair, rather pronounced, with forms so distant from all musical conventions that they form a genre unto themselves in the elevated regions of the art.”84 Then there is the breathtaking letter Berlioz writes to Princess SaynWittgenstein about Les Troyens on August 12, 1856, a portion of which was cited at the beginning of this chapter. In it he describes the endless struggle to be novel and expressive without losing sight of the musical principles that matter to him:

Form and metaphor

The immense difficulty . . . is to find the musical form, that form without which music does not exist, or is no more than a humble slave of the word . . . I am in favor of music that you yourself call free. Yes, free and proud and sovereign and conquering, I want it to take everything, to assimilate everything . . . To find new means of being expressive, true, without ceasing to be a musician, and on the other hand to give the music new qualities – that is the problem.

Here, outside the margins of the feuilleton, he is of course freer to express his feelings about how he composes, what he thinks as he composes. No other paragraph, by Berlioz or his critics, captures so well the dichotomy at the center of his art – the fierce will to throw off the shackles that have held music back, to fill music with everything that inspiration makes available, to make it new and richly evocative and shocking and affecting and all the while to remain faithful to music itself, even as one wrings from it theatricality and emotion – in short, “to be a musician.” These two seemingly opposite impulses not only keep each other in check; they also reinforce one another. Berlioz does not disregard formal concerns when testing the limits of musical expressivity; in these cases he in fact works ever harder to find the form proper to what he wants to express, even if that means going against convention. Expression did not preclude care for formal design; if anything, it heightened it. Throughout his writings Berlioz relates form and the expression of a poetic idea by suggesting that the most poetic music is that music whose form evolves to suit the idea that animates it. The interface between poetry and music in Beethoven’s music, for Berlioz, is strongest in his later works, and one sign of this is that his forms seem to take on a life of their own, moving in accordance the powerful sentiments with which they are infused. The first movement of Beethoven’s Ninth, for example, with its “imprint of sombre majesty,” features “designs of the most original kind as well as features of the most expressive order.” All the parts of the work and the multitude of orchestral voices within it “seem to unite in forming a single voice, so great is the force of the sentiment by which they are animated.”85 Each of these statements, the last of them in particular, implies that our apprehension of a work’s expressive content, and by extension our sense of the relationship between a work and the program (if there is one) that contextualizes that content, is influenced by our perception of its form. If a chiaroscuro instrumental timbre can present us with an “image” of moonlight, then so can an entire form present us with an “image” of the entire scene or story specified in a program. To say this is in a way to

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extend slightly Berlioz’s notion of metaphor, as he outlines it in “On Imitation in Music,” so that it encompasses more than just musical moments or even sections of pieces (though it should be noted that his discussion of the depiction of the storm in Beethoven’s “Pastoral” Symphony – and its musical justification – deals of course with an entire symphonic movement, even if it does not focus on the form of that movement). But that extension is warranted since elsewhere Berlioz places great stress on how an entire piece may be suffused with a particular idea86 and how the greater the force of sentiment behind a work, the more a composer must accommodate his forms to suit it. To view large-scale form metaphorically, as I believe Berlioz would have, is to deal less with images, frozen pictures of an Italian countryside or a Roman carnival or a lovers’ tryst, than with moving images that tell us something about the quality of those scenes without translating them verbatim – translation of course being a procedure that Berlioz would have found pointless, if not impossible. The phrase “moving images” immediately makes one think of film, a model that Peter Kivy has drawn upon to explain how musical representation works, in Berlioz and in general. According to Kivy, just as we can look at silent films as “narrative texts with moving illustrations,” so can we look at a piece like the first of Johann Kuhnau’s Biblical Sonatas (“The Battle Between David and Goliath”) not as a snapshot of David and Goliath at the moment they challenge one another but as a “moving picture” of their battle.87 Kivy’s silent-film model is alluring and certainly a welcome reconsideration of a translation model of musical representation, but its shortcoming (at least with respect to explaining how Berlioz’s music and programs relate) is that however free a musical illustration may be, it is still seen as illustrating “crucial events” of a non-musical narrative.88 Kivy still draws a correspondence between a particular moment in a story – David’s slinging of the stone, Goliath’s collapse – and a particular moment in the musical narration of it. As we have seen, Berlioz’s music does not typically feature this sort of correspondence (the thud of the guillotine, the outburst of King Lear, etc. are exceptions, not norms). We run the risk of disregarding the equipoise between musical process and dramatic process when we try to string together these musical and programmatic “events” and gauge how they match.89 A more profitable model of the program–music interaction in Berlioz might be interpretive dance. A dancer’s rendering of the battle between David and Goliath might not contain a single event that corresponds to the slinging of the stone. The “crucial events” of the story might not be represented at all, or they might be represented many times

Form and metaphor

over, or in non-chronological order. But the dance still might manage to give us an impression of the story – the attitude of its characters toward one another, the emotions they experience, the thrust and significance of the drama if not what happens in it. The dance can take on a life of its own, exhibit a coherence independent of the story that inspired it, and perhaps even give us just as vivid an impression of another story, if we are primed by a different title or a different program note to see the dance a different way. This is not to imply that the dance and the story – or the music and its program – are only accidentally connected. But the connection is not given, however essential it might seem to us; it is made by us, when we forge complex ties in our minds between the structures of two different conceptual systems. Armed now with a keener understanding of musical metaphor, and with a sense of how form may play a role in it, we can better appreciate the appeal of strophic variation to Berlioz. It is the circularity of the procedure that seems to trigger his imaginative faculties most. A circle can be a powerful representation of a great number of physical, mental, and also musical processes. The round dance suggested by the Ballet des sylphes from La Damnation de Faust of course involves actual, physical motion through a circle and so can easily be conceived of in these terms. Even when a process is not physical, we can conceptualize it as motion through a circle. We can imagine Faust’s descent into a trance as conceptually similar to movement round and round a circle – where visions swirl in his head, where his mind is spinning. We can do the same with the obsessive paranoia experienced by the artist-hero of the Fantastique. To be addled and lured by the returning image of a woman is also akin to moving around a circle many times over, coming back to her image again and again. What is mental we envision as physical/spatial.90 And so also with what is musical: when we draw a circular analytical model of a piece of music that returns to a thematic block over and over, we are making a spatial representation of a temporal process. It is when these two circular representations – one of a mental or physical process implied by a program, the other of a musical process – intersect and interact that we begin to see each in the other. It is then that, perhaps out of necessity and instinct, we start to tease out the metaphorical relationship between the conceptual structures of music and program. The next three chapters do just this with three of Berlioz’s most famous, and most circular, programmatic pieces.

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4

Mixing genres, mixing forms: sonata and song in Le Carnaval romain

Le Carnaval romain is one of Berlioz’s most beloved pieces, and with good reason. Its taut construction and irresistible energy have made it a favorite in the concert repertoire. Berlioz thought highly of it and programmed it more than any of his other overtures.1 If one knows any work of his other than the Symphonie fantastique, one probably knows this overture and probably likes it – a generalization not so easily made about the Fantastique, which listeners to this day tend to find either intoxicating or infuriating and not much in between. Despite its popularity, Le Carnaval romain has been discussed little in the analytical literature, particularly compared with Berlioz’s other popular works: the Fantastique, Harold en Italie, Romeó et Juliette, La Damnation de Faust, and a work finally achieving the acclaim and attention it deserves, Les Troyens (1856–8). These are of course bigger pieces and thus demand more extended treatment (no one would expect a book-length study of Le Carnaval romain). Yet if one compares the number of articles and chapters devoted to their individual movements with the number devoted to Berlioz’s most admired overture, the disparity is striking.2 Even Berlioz’s less canonical overtures like Waverley (1827–8), the overture to Benvenuto Cellini (1836–8), and Roi Lear have fared better.3 Especially today, with Berlioz’s bicentenary celebrations just past, it is surprising that Le Carnaval romain is still so untouched. One reason for the relative neglect is that the piece and the issues it raises do not seem controversial. Though clearly programmatic, the overture is less of a testing ground (or a battleground) for hypotheses about the relationship between music and program than the Symphonie fantastique. “Programmaticists” and “absolutists” alike generally accept it to be of high quality; thus there is little cause to defend it or criticize it. Nevertheless, Le Carnaval romain raises questions that bear strongly on Berlioz’s approach to instrumental form. This chapter delves further into an issue introduced in chapter 2 – that just as Berlioz mixes genres with ease, so does he mix musical forms. Form is of course a component of genre. The title of this chapter doesn’t imply that genre and form are two separate things, but quite the contrary argues for thinking of them together – for

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Sonata and song in Le Carnaval romain

Ex. 4.1. Le Carnaval romain, main themes

considering how two of the most distinctive features of Berlioz’s style interact: his idiosyncratic formal language and his penchant for mixing the idioms of vocal and instrumental music. Le Carnaval romain is a prime target for such an investigation. It has a highly unorthodox form: it is a sonata of sorts, with a repeated exposition (exceedingly rare in an overture) and no primary theme in the recapitulation (not unheard of, but also not the norm for Berlioz). And it uses vocal melodies in an instrumental context: the English horn tune from the introduction comes from the love duet of Benvenuto Cellini, and a phrase from it originates many years before Benvenuto in Berlioz’s 1829 cantata Cleópaˆtre; nearly two hundred bars of the overture are transcribed, virtually note for note, from the finale of the carnival chorus scene in the Second Tableau of Benvenuto; and the carnival scene’s saltarello (the overture’s secondary theme) is derived from the “Laudamus te” of Berlioz’s 1824 Messe solennelle.4 Ex. 4.1 reproduces the first phrases of the overture’s introductory, primary, and secondary themes for reference, as well as the borrowed portion of the Messe. The work’s formal oddity and vocal–instrumental blending are peculiarly related, for sonata form is distorted in such a way as to call to mind another form: French strophic song.5 These song-like themes, in other words, are contained within a song-like form. The overture presents an innovative and typically Berliozian solution to the problem of integrating lyricism – not just lyrical styles but also lyrical structures – into nineteenthcentury symphonic music. And its design, a roiling concoction of sonata and song, instrumentalism and vocalism, suits Berlioz’s program about a carnival and the motley crowd that takes part in it.

Sonata form?

This chapter first assesses whether the work can be considered a sonata form at all and suggests that inasmuch as it undercuts sonata conventions, it also draws upon the conventions of a type of strophic song form Berlioz knew intimately. It then surveys contemporary French song forms, looking in detail at a couple of Berlioz’s songs whose shapes are similar to the overture’s. And finally, it considers how the interaction of sonataform conventions and strophic-form conventions is as charged as the carnival atmosphere the overture evokes.

Sonata form? If the work is a sonata form, what kind of sonata form is it? On the surface, it would seem to be a sonata form with a recapitulation that includes only the secondary theme – or a “binary” sonata, what Hepokoski and Darcy have called a “Type 2” sonata, which features, in their words, a “tonal resolution” (the return of the secondary theme in the tonic) rather than a more normative recapitulation (the return of both the primary and secondary themes in the tonic).6 Fig. 4.1 provides a broad overview of this “binary” scheme. P, TR, and S, the labels popularized by Sonata Theory, refer to the overture’s primary theme, transition, and secondary theme, respectively, and will be used throughout this book, especially in this chapter and the next.7 Wotton, Holoman, and Rushton all see the overture as sonata-based, though none suggests that it is a binary sonata form.8 (Other commentators on the overture do not so much reject a sonata-form interpretation as say nothing about the matter.) Several features support a sonata-form interpretation. The overture follows several sonata conventions found in Berlioz’s own sonata-form pieces and in those of his contemporaries. First, it is clearly structured around two themes whose tonal relationships follow sonata norms: the exposition presents P in the tonic A major and S in the dominant E major; the “tonal resolution” emphatically brings S back into the orbit of the tonic (these key areas are bold-faced in Fig. 4.1). All of Berlioz’s major-mode sonata forms exhibit just such a tonicdominant relationship. Second, a short development falls between the exposition and the tonal resolution. Third, the overture begins with a preview of an expositional theme (S)9 and incorporates introductory material into a later section (the fugato in the development, mm. 300 ff., is based on the andante sostenuto theme in the introduction, excerpted in

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Sonata and song in Le Carnaval romain Introduction S preview Andante sostenuto 1 I

21 bIII

I:HC

Exposition P TR

S

78 I

128 V

102 I:PAC

Exposition repeated P TR

S

168 I

225 V

192 V:PAC

trans. back to P 160

trans. to Dev. proper 257

Development Andante sost. melody 300 bVI

retrans. ca. 336 I:HC

Tonal resolution S interruption (//) 344 I

356

Coda? Andante sost./hints of P 367 bV

TR

S

387 I

413 I

Fig. 4.1 Form of Le Carnaval romain

Fig. 4.1, as is a portion of the coda, mm. 372 ff.).10 Both are typical features of Berlioz’s sonata forms. Still, there are discrepancies with both Berlioz’s sonata practice and the sonata practices of his day. The most important of these is that the exposition is repeated. The repetitive structure is taken wholesale from the Benvenuto carnival scene, but that makes it no less striking in the context of a sonata-form overture. None of Berlioz’s other overtures has a repeated exposition. Nor does more than a tiny handful of eighteenthand nineteenth-century overtures in general.11 This feature of the form is truly anomalous, would likely have been noticed as such by audiences of Berlioz’s day, and thus demands interpretation. This anomaly obviously makes the overture’s form more reiterative than the standard sonata-form overture, since it passes not once but twice through the thematic cycle P–TR–S. But even more significant is that the second exposition is a written-out varied repetition of the first (see Ex. 4.2, a piano reduction of both expositions, for reference, here and following). The music does not merely move backward in conceptual time and

Sonata form? (a)

Ex. 4.2 Le Carnaval romain, piano reduction of both expositions

faithfully retrace steps already covered, as would be the case with an exact repeat of a sonata form’s exposition; it moves forward in conceptual time as well as in real time, elaborating and expanding more than retracing. The orchestration of P, for example, changes considerably when P is repeated. Its first appearance features a fairly straightforward dialogue between strings and woodwinds, with the strings playing the first four bars of a

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Sonata and song in Le Carnaval romain (b)

Ex. 4.2 (cont.)

phrase and the woodwinds playing the last four bars. The second time around, however, the shift between strings and woodwinds occurs every two measures, and then every measure. In addition, the tonal plan of the transition is altered. A chromatic move to bIII in the first transition (an echo of the C major of the andante sostenuto) is diatonicized – we might even say corrected – in the second transition, where C-sharp minor replaces

Sonata form? (c)

Ex. 4.2 (cont.)

C major. And the second transition is extended by seven measures (eight if we count the first measure of S, which is elided with the end of TR). In another correction of sorts, the second transition modulates to V and leads to a perfect authentic cadence (PAC) in E major, whereas the first transition, unable to escape the clutches of the tonic, ends with a PAC in A major. The first appearance of S is thus even more of an event than the second. The theme explodes from the first transition, asserting dominant

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tonality with brute force, like a group of revelers hollering out a tune without thought for what is going on around them. S, notably, does not change at all the second time we hear it. Its integrity, in these two expositions at least, is never challenged, and it emerges as the strongest theme of the overture, over and above the primary theme (Berlioz in fact called it the “main theme”).12 The theme appears with fuller orchestration, it is repeated not just three times (like P) but four, and it has a strong downbeat attack that P lacks – an attack doubly emphasized by blasts from the brass and percussion. This is the tune we hum to ourselves as we leave the concert hall. Now, numerous sonata forms have secondary themes that are stronger or more memorable than their primary themes, including two of Berlioz’s own (namely Corsaire [1844] and Les Francsjuges), which throw their weight onto the second half of the exposition rather than the first. This feature is thus hardly the anomaly that the repeated exposition is. Still, it is not customary in Berlioz’s sonata forms. And all of these features together – the end-accented quality of the exposition, the repetition of the exposition, and the fact that S is repeated exactly while P and TR change – shift the balance even more toward this famous saltarello tune plucked from Benvenuto. The first appearance of this “main theme” may burst forth with particular vigor from the tonic-ended transition that comes before it, but even this eruption pales in comparison with the final, triumphant statement of the secondary theme in m. 344 (now with added trombones), set up by a long dissonant tonic pedal, an accumulation of orchestral sound, and a surging crescendo. The entire overture, not just its expositions, is end-accented; all of the previous measures lead to this climactic moment.13 The forces that gather energy toward the attainment of this goal are, as we have seen, varied-repetitive, and they involve not just the two expositional rotations through the thematic areas P, TR, and S but also a third rotation, spanning the overture’s development and tonal resolution (see Fig. 4.2, which highlights the three thematic rotations underlying the overture’s binary sonata form). In this third rotation the introductory English horn tune effectively substitutes for P thematic material – though P is notably not entirely absent, since its rhythm is maintained in the accompaniment to the tune. The material of the transition is replaced by the retransition to the tonal resolution.14 The shift away from the exposition’s P and TR blocks in the third rotation makes the return of S all the more dramatic. It also obviously provides the overture with a sense of departure and return characteristic of sonata forms of many types: the tonal resolution restores tonic harmony

Precedents in French strophic song Introduction Rotation 1 Rotation 2

Rotation 3

Exposition P

TR

S

(trans.)

Exposition repeated P

TR

S

(trans.)

Development intro. theme (substitutes for P)

retrans. (substitutes for TR?)

Tonal Resolution S

//

Coda? (vaguely rotational)

Fig. 4.2 Rotational form of Le Carnaval romain

and the clearly articulated grouping structure of the exposition, both of which are jettisoned by the development with its modulation to F major and its looser, overlapping phrases. But this symmetry is something of a guise, disturbed by other, cyclical forces initially set in motion by the varied expositional repeat and continued in the largest cycle, encompassing development plus tonal resolution. A conventional sonata narrative is belied from within by the overture’s inherent varied-repetitive drive and the successively more extensive transformations of the overture’s initial cycle in subsequent cycles. Recent research has suggested that Berlioz’s idea of sonata form owes something to Reicha’s grande coupe binaire – particularly the idea that reprises are not so much literal returns to material previously heard as further developments of them (Reicha in fact uses neither the word “reprise” nor “recapitulation” but instead “transposition with modification”).15 The idea is tantalizing since in his sonata forms Berlioz does in fact tend to avoid wholesale restatement in favor of continuous development, as he does here, more than his French and Austro-Germanic contemporaries. Le Carnaval romain is an extreme example of this tendency, a sonata rife with circularity, a work that operates according to two different, and competing, impulses – and not just two impulses, but two forms.

Precedents in French strophic song The overture’s uncommonly strophically elaborative shape – with three end-accented rotations, the last of which features more variation than the others – bears striking similarities to a type of French strophic song form with verse and refrain, often referred to in Berlioz’s day by one of two names: romance and couplets. The conventions of sonata form and

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verse–refrain song form are like two circles in a Venn diagram, with Berlioz’s overture lying at their intersection. The connotations of the terms romance and couplets are complex and sometimes inconsistent. For our purposes, it will suffice to say that songs entitled couplets seem to have been characterized by the presence of musical and textual refrains, but that what we might call the form of couplets appears in songs with other designations based on character more than form: romance in particular, but also me´lodie, ballade, chanson, se´reńade, and so forth. Fe´tis, for example, claims that couplets have a gay character and romances a melancholic one.16 In poetic terminology couplets is often used as a synonym for stanzas, sometimes referring in particular to stanzas that contain refrains.17 Likewise, in Berlioz’s day (and still today) couplets frequently denoted the strophes of a song in general or more specifically those strophes that end with refrains.18 Consider Hepokoski’s account of the typical features of couplets, from an essay on Verdi’s operatic forms: [T]he term couplets may be defined as a light, picturesque or sharply characterised song in two or three stanzas, written in the French manner. The most important features of this ‘French manner’ are a simple, naive or colloquially ‘natural’ style and – most notably – a sub-division of each stanza into two parts: a preparatory first part, often beginning with repeated phrases, that ends with a connecting link . . . whose task is to set up the more emphatic, concluding ‘punch-line’ refrain. Of the two parts of each stanza, the first is the less ‘stable’ and may be subject to recomposition in subsequent stanzas (especially in the third stanza of a threestanza song).19

The passage reads practically like lecture notes outlining the overture’s form: (1) its “colloquially ‘natural’ style,” evidenced by its 6/8 meter, sprightly swung rhythms, and the regularity of its eight-measure phrases; (2) the “sub-division of each stanza [or rotation] into two parts”: the “preparatory” verse (or P) and the more “emphatic, concluding ‘punchline’ refrain” (or S); (3) the “link” that connects these two parts (i.e., TR); and (4) the extensive recomposition of the stanza’s first element, especially in its third and final iteration (i.e., the substitution of introductory material for P at the beginning of the third rotation). The alterations to P in the second rotation are also important. The orchestration might be said to take the place of sung text, in that P’s varied orchestration corresponds to a couplets form’s varied verse text, while S’s unchanging orchestration corresponds to a repeated refrain text.20 Fig. 4.3, a relabeling of Fig. 4.2, makes these relationships clear.

Precedents in French strophic song Introduction Rotation 1 =Stanza 1

“Exposition” P=Verse 1

TR=link

S=Refrain 1

(trans.)

Rotation 2 =Stanza 2

“Exposition repeated” P=Verse 2 TR=link

S=Refrain 2

(trans.)

Rotation 3 =Stanza 3

“Development” intro. theme (substitutes for P)

retrans. (substitutes for TR?)

=Verse 3

=link

“Tonal Resolution” S=Refrain 3

(greatly recomposed)

Fig. 4.3 Couplets form of Le Carnaval romain

Another departure from sonata norms bears mentioning, since it brings the overture even closer in line with strophic song form: the cadences that conclude the expositional appearances of S are weak, all the more so because what follows them is not in fact a closing theme but more S material in the link sections between the first and second exposition and between the second exposition and the development. The S theme, in short, lacks its characteristically strong punctuation mark and instead bleeds relatively seamlessly into the sections that follow it. On its own this fact need not encourage us to link the overture’s design with anything song-based (though these less-than-resolute cadences are somewhat peculiar, even in the context of a normative sonata form). But when we consider that the transitions between one stanza and another in verserefrain songs often continue with refrain material, this tiny deviation from sonata-form convention comes to seem like yet another element in a network of deviations that create a larger strophic-form picture. The triple verse–refrain form seems to fit well, but what are the odds that Berlioz was thinking along these lines? It is hard to say for sure. One might argue that in taking his melodies from a vocal work, he was that much more inclined to do the same with his form – that the vocalness of the overture’s themes seeps into its structure. Interestingly, each of these borrowed melodies (as it appears in the overture) is itself subjected to strophic elaboration, much like the overture’s larger unit P–TR–S (or verse–link–refrain). Circularity, in other words, impacts the overture at many levels of structure – both small- and large-scale. P consists of a single eight-bar phrase sounded three times and gradually varied harmonically and melodically. And S (in rotations 1 and 2) is an eight-bar phrase sounded four times in succession and elaborated even more extensively

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than P, spinning itself into a tangle of chromatics. (S’s structure will be analyzed in more detail below.) Even the transition, though not so far as we know borrowed from an earlier work, is built around the repetition of short segments. In the first exposition, it is a sentence whose basic idea (itself composed of a repeated motive) is repeated, transposed up a minor third, and then followed by a continuation and cadence. (The terms “basic idea” and “continuation” are taken from Caplin’s Classical Form.) In the second exposition, the basic idea is sounded three times – the second time up a third (only now in the context of C-sharp minor, not C major), the third time up another. Finally, the English horn melody of the introduction, borrowed from Cleópaˆtre, unfolds in three long statements identical melodically but in different keys (C major, E major, and A major) and with ever more elaborate orchestration. (The echoes of the Roi Lear “Cordelia” theme are strong; both are expansive three-strophe presentations that prominently feature a chromatic mediant.) We may never know whether Berlioz’s incorporation of strophic song form was calculated or unconscious. Yet this much at least is clear: the couplets type of verse–refrain form is one Berlioz knew well and used often, in a variety of contexts, and it would have been well within his character to transport it into an instrumental setting. Strophic songs with refrains were a hallmark of French ope´ra comique21 and can be found in Berlioz’s comic opera22 Benvenuto Cellini (for example, the two-strophe romance sung by Cellini, La Gloire était ma seule idole).23 Even in French grand opera simple strophic songs composed in the French manner often stood shoulder to shoulder with more elaborate Italianate arias, helping to differentiate between the dramatic weight of one character and another.24 Consider the Chanson d’Hylas from Act V of Les Troyens, in which a young sailor, confined to shore, longs for the “ocean eternal.” All is believably sentimental, and the simple two-strophe couplets form (with only minimal variation at the end) perfectly captures the yearning Hylas feels. Finally, strophic verse–refrain songs made their home in the salon as well as on the stage, migrating freely from one to the other. (Annegret Fauser regards this “promiscuity of genre” as a central aspect of the romance and something that Berlioz would have understood and exploited.)25 Berlioz’s fifty or so non-operatic songs, a rich but much-neglected part of his output, are overwhelmingly strophic, often strophically elaborative, and a great many feature clearly articulated refrains. Yes, some are “lighter fare” that seem to surrender themselves uncritically to bourgeois taste. Criticism has been leveled at Berlioz’s earliest songs on these grounds.26 But they are worth studying for a fuller understanding of the

Precedents in French strophic song

contribution of nineteenth-century French songwriting tradition27 to Berlioz’s unique style, in his instrumental as well as his vocal compositions.28 Although Berlioz largely neglects his songs in his memoirs in favor of the massive instrumental works he hoped would cement his reputation and seems most at home when working on a monumental scale, the breath of solo song can be felt in even his large-scale works. Le Carnaval romain is suffused with it. The couplets form appears as early as Le Maure jaloux (1822), which, like Le Carnaval romain, features three verses and refrains. The tone of Le Maure jaloux is sentimental, even pathetic (this explains its designation romance), the style simple, even simplistic, and the musical strophes nearly identical (even here, though, Berlioz adds a touch of originality, slightly altering the link between verse 2 and refrain 2 to match the text).29 Berlioz’s predilection for embellishing the strophes of a song is most pronounced in later songs like La Belle Isabeau (1843) and Le Chasseur danois (1844), both in a couplets form with extensive variation in the final strophe and both written around the same time as Le Carnaval romain (Le Chasseur danois was in fact programmed with the overture in many concerts). La Belle Isabeau is a narrative romance, a “song in a storm” that rivals Schubert’s Die junge Nonne in its musical evocation of the tempests of the heart. Strophic elaboration here is successive, but more radical than in earlier songs. The third and final verse practically obliterates what preceded it (mm. 72 ff.), changing from minor to major mode and featuring a new melody (only its first measure derived from the prior verse tune). All of this is presumably motivated by the shift in this stanza from the voice of the narrator to that of Isabeau and the knight who whisks her away.30 Le Chasseur danois’s resemblance to Le Carnaval romain is even stronger: its final verse is also extensively altered, and its style – rollicking, 6/8 – is similar. The song’s structure is by no means an exact replica of the overture’s, just as La Belle Isabeau’s is not, but this is the type of form I think Berlioz had in mind. (See Ex. 4.3, a score of the first and last strophes of Le Chasseur danois.) The second and third strophes restate the first exactly (except for the new words in verses 2 and 3), but the fourth verse changes suddenly. The forte, 6/8 gallop of the preceding strophes halts to a pianissimo common-time dirge, the lively verse tune is augmented drastically, and the link between verse and refrain disappears. A change in voice explains the alteration here, too. A narrator breaks in and informs us that the Danish hunter, whose son had been urging him to the fields in the first three stanzas, has died. “Ainsi disait dans la chaumie`re

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Sonata and song in Le Carnaval romain (a)

Ex. 4.3 Le Chasseur danois

un jeune enfant” (Thus in the cottage spoke a young child), the narrator informs us. “Voeux superflus! Le vieux chasseur, son pauvre pe`re, he´las! ne re´pe´tera plus . . .” (Vain wish! The old huntsman, his poor father, alas will never say again . . .) – and then the refrain, “En chasse!” (Tally ho!). Although in this song the final verse melody is not actually replaced by

Precedents in French strophic song (b)

Ex. 4.3 (cont.)

another, as in Le Carnaval romain, in other verse–refrain songs by Berlioz (like La Belle Isabeau) it is.31 In sum, strophic verse–refrain songs were, to put it simply, in Berlioz’s ears, an integral component of the sound worlds of comic opera, grand opera, and song. Considering that Berlioz mixed genres with ease, even abandon,32 it is not surprising that he would allow the form of strophic song to influence his compositional choices in a non-vocal genre. Rushton has written, “The textures and forms of song and aria are at the root of Berlioz’s whole style – harmonic, polyphonic, and structural.”33 Other composers of Berlioz’s generation were also striving to incorporate lyric structures into their symphonic music, Mendelssohn, Schubert, and

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Schumann among them. Berlioz therefore does not stand alone. But he does stand out, in the depth and persistence of his interest in navigating the (as he saw them) fluid boundaries between vocal and instrumental genres. Le Carnaval romain is of course not the only work of Berlioz’s that takes this course. Yet if it is not an isolated phenomenon, it is a remarkable one because the forms of song and aria infiltrate it at the highest and lowest levels of structure.

Convention and carnival The overture’s combination of sonata and song conventions creates a sense of disorder akin to the disorder implied by the scene Berlioz means to evoke – the raucous carnival he witnessed while traveling in Rome, which provided inspiration for the Benvenuto chorus number and the overture it eventually became.34 The interaction of sonata and strophicsong idioms – that peculiar admixture of different formal designs and the different, even contradictory, tendencies associated with them – is a metaphor for the interaction of characters in the scene. These formal designs, we must remember, not only are tied to characteristic structural models and stylistic features but also carry with them expressive connotations. Sonata form, the purview of the concert hall, can be said to have been generally a vehicle for serious instrumental music that was traditionally complex, abstract in nature, ambitious, and geared toward an educated, higher-class audience. Strophic song form, on the other hand, the purview mainly of the comic opera stage and the salon, can be said to have been associated with traditionally less ambitious types of music: sentimental love songs, songs and choruses of soldiers, sailors, or hunters, written in a popular style and aimed at the middle class. To bring the form of strophic song into a space reserved for the form of the sonata is to unsettle hierarchies. Its presence points up the artificiality of the form we “ought” to hear – the form sanctioned by tradition. Regrettably, Berlioz has little to say about sonata form per se. We can thus only speculate about what his conception of it was. But we can assume that he recognized it as the orthodox form for a concert overture, if only because eight of his ten overtures are in sonata form.35 For Berlioz to construct an overture, then, that invokes sonata form – with its broad tonic-dominant harmonic structure, its bi-thematic layout, and its long introduction – but whose strophic qualities bring to mind a form rather incongruous with it is for him to put pressure on the orthodox. To do so

Convention and carnival

Ex. 4.4 Le Carnaval romain, reduction of mm. 262 ff.

in an overture with a program about dispensing with decorum is to call the orthodox into question. Sonata form is not the only orthodoxy the overture calls into question. The work’s anarchic spirit also arises from Berlioz’s audacious treatment of tonal conventions. I have focused mainly on how Berlioz mixes sonata and song form because I am most interested in how the overture uses techniques of strophic variation. But its formal unconventionality goes hand in hand with its tonal unconventionality. If its strophic tendencies destabilize some of the conventions of sonata form, its harmonic audacity also rattles some of the harmonic conventions coupled with that form. Of particular note is how Berlioz nominally satisfies the tonal demands of a major-mode sonata form (putting S first in the dominant and ultimately resolving it to the tonic) but at the same time weakens or de-emphasizes dominant harmony throughout by preventing it from resolving convincingly, or from resolving at all, and by substituting other harmonies for it. Consider the common-tone modulation that leads from the opening S-theme flourish into the andante sostenuto section, where V (E major) gives way unexpectedly to bIII (C major), as if a character had suddenly entered the scene and begun singing his own tune, impetuously if beautifully, in a key, tempo, and meter all his own. Consider also mm. 262 ff., in the transition to the development, where an E-major chord, functioning as a local tonic, dissolves no sooner than it has been sounded, a passage that is actually less arbitrary than it sounds. Ex. 4.4 shows each sonority in treble clef with the common-tone E’s in the uppermost voice and shows how the progression consists of three mini-harmonic cycles, the first two identical (each beginning with the same diminished-seventh chord and ending on A minor), the last altering a single pitch of that diminished-seventh chord so that it becomes a dominant seventh of F major (C# becomes C natural; A# is enharmonically respelled as Bb). In mm. 367 ff. E major is not just dissolved but replaced by E-flat major (Ex. 4.5). The overture wends its way through a passage comparable to mm. 262 ff. and achieves its strongest structural tonic cadence only when a dominant finally acts as it ought to. Finally, there is the overture’s famous final cadence, one last whiff of harmonic daring, where an apparent vi6

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Ex. 4.5 Le Carnaval romain, reduction of mm. 366 ff.

leads to I precisely where one would expect a bold and conclusive V–I gesture. The tone of this final gesture is important. The penultimate chord usurps dominant harmony not in the manner that, say, the augmentedsixth chords around the tonic in Schubert’s Doppelga¨nger assume a similar dominant status. There functional harmony is grimly revoked, opening up a poetic and musical world where nothing is what it seems to be nor can ever be what it once was. Here – and indeed throughout the overture – dominant harmony is playfully tossed aside, as if to say that a vi6 can serve just as well. The overture applies some strain to sonata form’s global tonic-dominant stability, but for all the strain, the structural pillars of tonic and dominant, like the paradigm of sonata form itself, remain – stretched but not broken. These harmonic and formal structures may be undermined, but they are undermined not with a sense of gravity and irrevocability, but with a sense of glee, even a sense of parody.

The carnivalesque To understand how such a parody might work, we may turn briefly to Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the carnivalesque. For Bakhtin, a Russian philosopher and literary critic, “carnivalesque” referred not just to a historical practice – the popular medieval carnival – but also to a type of writing, a “carnivalized” discourse that embodied the transgressive and liberating spirit of the carnival. To suggest that a work about a carnival is carnivalized may seem all too easy, and one might argue that Bakhtin is not needed for us to address the relationship between the structure of Berlioz’s overture and its title. Is it not possible, after all, to describe how the overture “sounds like a carnival” (which, given the title and the fact that Berlioz borrowed nearly two hundred measures of its music from the carnival scene of Benvenuto Cellini, we can only assume he intended it to) without necessarily showing how it embodies features of the Bakhtinian carnivalesque?36 This is a seductive line of reasoning. Certain aspects of the overture can be adduced as evidence that it successfully creates a general carnival atmosphere rather than anything more specific. Yet Bakhtin’s


theoretical framework can help us to appreciate the complexity of the relationship between music and program: how the carnival spirit of this overture arises principally from a dialogue among various modes of discourse whose import is determined by their associations with different genres, how that dialogue creates a complex system of meaning that is at once unhierarchized and articulate, and how the sonata–song mixture lies at the heart of that system. Pinning down a single proper definition of “carnivalesque” is virtually impossible and at any rate unnecessary for our purposes. What runs as a thread through all of Bakhtin’s writing on the carnival is the idea that it is both a place and a spirit of exchange characteristic of that place.37 Bakhtin proposes that vital elements of popular consciousness that found full expression in the medieval carnival, or marketplace festival, migrated into high literary forms: a celebration of disorder, a spirit of openness, a suspension of rank and hierarchy, a thumb-the-nose attitude toward all that is “closed” and authoritarian. Only at carnival time did people of different backgrounds and different social classes come together to cast aside temporarily their “belief in a static unchanging world order.”38 The free form of dialogue that Bakhtin finds in the carnival can be found in Berlioz’s Carnaval as well. The Bakhtinian mood of the carnival scene from Benvenuto – with its “harlequins, physicians, jokers, clowns, kings, and beggars,” who mingle in “love and drunkenness,” to quote from the opera’s text – can be felt in the different types of musical utterance Berlioz brings to bear on this piece and also in his attitude toward them. Sonata and song and all their attendant conventions, often divided by the strictures of taste and tradition, interact freely here. So do opera, mass, and cantata, not to mention fugato in the development. Freely but not harmlessly – consider this pair of “low” and “high” utterances: the jaunty secondary theme and the “Laudamus te” from which it springs. (See Ex. 4.6, the first two phrases of the “Laudamus te,” and Ex. 4.7, an outer-voice sketch of S, as it appears in the expositions.) Just as the overture parodies sonata form by simultaneously evoking it and undermining it, so does its secondary theme parody the religious setting that hovers behind it. S transforms the square, cut-time “Laudamus” into a sprung 6/8 dance. S springs all the more because its pace is much faster.39 Berlioz’s “Laudamus te” is itself an atypical setting of the words “We praise thee, we bless thee, we worship thee, we glorify thee, we give thanks to thee for thy great glory, O Lord God, heavenly King, God the Father Almighty”; the tenor and bass parts beneath the descant melody sound a little like laughter, more giddy than joyous. Yet it is not, I think,

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Ex. 4.6 “Laudamus te” from Messe solennelle

intended to be comical. The comedy is to be found in S, whose first two phrases alone, sped up and electrified, turn the “Laudamus” melody into something even more laughable. The last two phrases turn it into something altogether absurd. The melody of S’s first phrase, repeated intact in phrase two, veers off course thereafter. Phrases three and four begin securely enough, with falling fourths (first A–E and then B–F#, echoes of the E–B fourths that open the first two phrases), leading us to expect wholesale transpositions of the first eight measures. And they end with the same fourths filled in stepwise. But between these frames, the melody is disfigured with chromaticism: in the third phrase with two pitches non-diatonic with respect to E major, B# and E#; in the fourth phrase with three pitches non-diatonic, E#, D, and Fx (circled in Ex. 4.7). The contour also changes radically in comparison with the referential melody of phrases one and two. The melody is turned on its head in a way, since the low points of phrases three and four correspond to the highpoints of phrases one and two. And the octave span implied by the initial statements of S (the upper beams) is only


Ex. 4.7 Le Carnaval romain, outer voice sketch of the secondary theme

roughly maintained in phrases three and four: once fully diatonic, it is chromaticized so that it contains an augmented 2nd (or, in phrase three, a diminished 7th – see the jagged beams).40 Furthermore, the directed harmonic progressions in the first two phrases are replaced in the final two phrases by sheer Klang: not a logical path through a space, just reverberating space itself, with the pedal tones and the sustained 6/4 chords. S, in short, sends a shock through the “Laudamus te.” It grows ever more hysterical with every elaborated strophe. Like the sacred parodies littered throughout Medieval literature and central among the speech patterns of the Bakhtinian carnival, like the over-exaggerated and perverted Gospel readings (mentioned by Bakhtin) that are hollered into the crowd, this bawdy “reading” of the “Laudamus te” brings it down to earth.41 The parodies heard at the carnival are not merely destructive, though. They paradoxically perform a dual function: to challenge norms but also to renew them. Linda Hutcheon offers one of the most eloquent accounts of the role of parody in Bakhtin’s work. According to Hutcheon, one of the underlying principles of the parodic discourse so central to the

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carnival is that while it debunks norms posited by authority, it cannot completely divorce itself from them; it depends upon them for its very existence. Parody, she writes, acknowledges “recognizable, stable forms and conventions” even as it subverts them. These forms and conventions function as norms or as rules which can – and therefore, of course, shall – be broken. The parodic text is granted a special license to transgress the limits of convention, but, as in the carnival, it can only do so temporarily and only within the controlled confines authorized by the text parodied – that is, quite simply, within the confines dictated by ‘recognizability.’42

The same argument could be applied to the central “text” parodied by Berlioz’s overture: sonata form itself and all that it connotes. The overture can only critique sonata form insofar as its resemblance to sonata form is “recognizable” to us – which means that the thematic and harmonic structure of this form perhaps cannot be dispensed with. The playful, hybrid form that Berlioz creates is all the more trenchant because it unmasks convention by working within it. The same, I would wager, is true of most of Berlioz’s musical experiments, formal and otherwise. Here again we return to the idea that a work can be confounding – even confrontational – and coherent all at once. Berlioz was no madman who jettisoned all convention and followed only the whims of his imagination or the dictates of his programs. He worked with the models he knew, applying to them the entire force of his imagination, transforming them in accordance with his expressive ends, but always within limits. His overture may thematize disorder, by it can only do so (and we can only recognize that it does so) by keeping an unshaken idea or order within view. The next chapter, which focuses on the first movement of the Symphonie fantastique, addresses another form of disorder – not the mayhem of a spirited carnival but the torments of a troubled mind. As with Le Carnaval romain, sonata form is in large measure the subject of Berlioz’s experiment. Again he presents us with a sonata form whose circularity is heightened, whose structure is complicated and pulled apart by forces seemingly alien to it. The shape that results is even more complex and harder to reconcile with identifiable, formal processes. For that reason it makes a good conclusion to our exploration of Berlioz’s handling of sonata form and a useful stepping-stone to the final large-scale work this book will address, his most flexible rotational form of them all.

5

The vague des passions, monomania, and the first movement of the Symphonie fantastique

The maladies of the Symphonie fantastique On April 16, 1830, Berlioz sketched out the program to the Symphonie fantastique in a letter to his friend Humbert Ferrand and then added these lines: Now, my friend, this is how I have woven my novel, or rather my history, whose hero you will have no difficulty in recognizing . . . I conceive of an artist, gifted with a lively imagination, who, in that state of the soul which Chateaubriand so admirably depicted in Rene´, sees for the first time a woman who realizes the ideal of beauty and fascination that his heart has so long invoked. By a strange quirk, the image of the loved one never appears before the mind’s eye without its corresponding musical idea, in which he finds a quality of grace and nobility similar to that which he attributes to the beloved object. This double obsession [ideé fixe] pursues him unceasingly. That is the reason for the constant appearance, in every movement of the symphony, of the main melody of the first allegro.1

The first draft of the program found in this letter is strikingly similar to the subsequent versions that would appear with the symphony’s score, particularly in its characterization of the malady that afflicts the symphony’s protagonist. Further on in the Ferrand letter Berlioz writes about the first movement’s “intimations of passion; aimless daydreams; frenzied passion with all its bursts of tenderness, jealousy, rage, alarm, etc., etc.,” which in the 1845 version printed with the first corrected edition of the full score has become “a state of dreamy melancholy, interrupted by several fits of aimless joy . . . delirious passion, with its impulses of rage and jealousy, its returning moments of tenderness, its tears, and its religious solace.”2 Moreover, the language Berlioz uses in all versions of the program to describe his hero’s mental and physical condition strongly resembles the language he uses to describe his own condition when he conceived and composed the symphony. Thunderstruck by Harriet Smithson’s 1827 performances at the Odeón and condemned to pine for her from a distance, Berlioz seems to suffer from the same symptoms as the character he has created. Consider the following three passages. The first, from Berlioz’s

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The first movement of the Symphonie fantastique

memoirs, recounts his devastation on seeing Harriet leave Paris for London in 1830, three years after he first saw her onstage but still two years before they would meet. The second comes from another letter to Ferrand dated February 6, 1830, and the third from a letter to Berlioz’s father on February 19, 1830; both describe the anguish of his infatuation with her: It is difficult to put into words what I have suffered – the longing that was tearing my heart out by the roots, the dreadful loneliness, this empty world . . . I had stopped composing; my mind seemed to become feebler as my feelings grew more intense. I did nothing. One power was left me – to suffer.3 I have just plunged back into the anguish of an endless, uncontrollable passion without motive, without subject. She is still in London, and yet I feel her about me; all my memories awake and combine to rend me. I listen to the beating of my heart, its pulsations shake me like the pounding pistons of a steam engine . . . I was on the point of beginning my big symphony (Episode in the life of an artist), in which the course of my infernal passion is to be depicted; I have the whole thing in my head, but I can write nothing.4 Often I experience the most extraordinary impressions, of which nothing can give an idea; nervous exaltation is no doubt the cause, but the effect is like that of opium . . . Well, this imaginary world [ce monde fantastique] is still part of me, and has grown by the addition of all the new impressions that I experience as my life goes on; it’s become a real malady [c’est devenue une ve´ritable maladie]. Sometimes I can scarcely endure this mental or physical pain (I can’t separate the two).5

The writer’s block did not last long. In early March, at the height of an emotional crescendo whose beginnings can be traced back as far as 1827, racked with pain over love for a woman he barely knew, Berlioz sat down and began to write. He finished the symphony in six weeks. The result, his “Episode in the life of an artist,” is plainly inspired by his infatuation with Harriet Smithson. Peter Bloom is right that Berlioz’s symphony is not some sort of “transparent, court-room confession,”6 a mere retelling of his real-life troubles. It refracts those troubles – those “infernal passions” and the “real malady” they spawned – through the prism of art. Scouring Berlioz’s memoirs and letters, one finds many passages like those cited above, rife with descriptions of that alluring and tormenting “monde fantastique” that consumed Berlioz from the first moment he saw Harriet, making it hard not to conclude that he channeled his physical and mental malady into the work and its program, transforming his “history” into his “novel.” But in fashioning his self-styled

The maladies of the Symphonie fantastique

protagonist Berlioz seems also to have been inspired by other sources, drawing not only on his own experience but also on other maladies that resonated with his own. One of these sources is of course François-Rene´ de Chateaubriand, whose vague des passions – that quintessentially Romantic form of melancholy in which an imagination feeds on its own desires – Berlioz alludes to in his April letter to Ferrand. Berlioz makes the reference to the vague des passions explicit when, a few weeks after writing Ferrand, he revises the symphony’s program in its first published version so that it now speaks of “a young musician affected by the mental illness [maladie morale] that a famous writer has called le vague des passions.”7 Now, too, the passage refers specifically to the symphony’s first movement, which Berlioz has given a name befitting its poetic inspiration: Reˆveries, Passions. Chateaubriand’s own alter-ego, Rene´ – from his story of the same name – struck a chord with the French Romantics, and no more than with Berlioz. That he saw Chateaubriand as a kindred spirit is evidenced above all by the fact that he seems to have modeled his memoirs upon Chateaubriand’s Me´moires d’outre tombe (roughly, Memoirs from the Grave). Berlioz began his memoirs in March 1848, by which time Me´moires d’outre tombe had achieved some notoriety since it was known they were to be published immediately after Chateaubriand’s death. (Chateaubriand died on July 4, 1848, and his memoirs began to appear in October; Berlioz also wanted his memoirs to be published after he died.)8 Reading Berlioz’s letters from the time, it is hard not to conclude that Berlioz also modeled himself after Chateaubriand. The similarity between Berlioz’s and Chateaubriand’s diction seems more than coincidental: the phrases “state of the soul” (e´tat de l’aˆme) from his April letter to Ferrand, “this empty world” (ce monde vide) from his memoirs, and “without motive, without subject” (sans motif, sans sujet) from the later letter to Ferrand (all cited above) echo lines from Chateaubriand’s definition of the vague des passions: a “state of the soul [e´tat de l’aˆme] . . . when our faculties, young, active, fully formed but confined, are exercised only on themselves, without goal and without object [sans but et sans objet] . . . One inhabits, with a full heart, an empty world [un monde vide].”9 Berlioz may also have modeled his protagonist’s malady on a popular mental disorder of the day, as Francesca Brittan has recently suggested in her article, “Berlioz and the Pathological Fantastic: Melancholy, Monomania, and Romantic Autobiography.”10 Drawing upon a wealth of literary, musical, journalistic, and medical works written at and around the time Berlioz composed his symphony, she argues that the malady of

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Berlioz’s jeune musicien was “far from new” – not a spontaneous invention of Berlioz’s but an amorous obsession that “resonates with a host of earlier fictional fetishes.” Berlioz’s symphony, she claims, “participated in an existing tradition of literary ‘fixations’ – obsessions that reached well beyond general romantic attachment into the realm of clinical disorder.”11 Such disorders, she writes, were defined with a new level of precision in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century France and referred to extensively in medical and legal literature as well as in popular culture. Central among the doctor-psychiatrists identifying such disorders was E´tienne Esquirol, who theorized a new malady called “monomania,” first identified around 1810 and later defined and classified in an 1819 paper published in the Dictionnaire des sciences me´dicales.12 Monomaniacs were, in Brittan’s words, “consumed by one thought, idea, or plan of action, a state of mental fixation producing an ‘energetic’ effect while also causing ‘nervous exaltation,’ ‘illusions,’ feverish thought patterns, and – in advanced cases – hallucinations, convulsions, and disturbing dreams. Sufferers might also experience melancholic symptoms, the frustration of their desires leading to depression, despair, and sorrowful withdrawal.”13 One form of monomania – and Esquirol enumerated many, including theomania and monomania from drunkenness – was what he called “erotic monomania.”14 Erotomaniacs were overtaken by monomaniacal passion for mythical characters, imaginary creatures, or – important for our purposes – women they had never met but nonetheless idealized. The afflicted were, according to Esquirol, “pursued both night and day by the same thoughts and affections,”15 drawn toward an unattainable and largely imagined ideé fixe. “While contemplating its often imaginary perfections,” he writes (in what could just as well be a diagnosis of Berlioz’s state), “they are thrown into ecstasies. Despairing in its absence, the look of this class of patients is dejected; their complexion becomes pale; their features change, sleep and appetite are lost. They are restless, thoughtful, greatly depressed in mind, agitated, irritable and passionate.”16 Esquirol’s writings were influential in medical circles. By 1826, monomania was the most common diagnosis assigned to patients entering the mental hospital Charenton.17 The malady he identified also captured the public’s imagination. Mental illness and psychiatric theory were fashionable topics of conversation in Parisian salons, and in time references to monomaniacal fixation began to appear widely in journalism, fiction, and art. Brittan’s conclusion – which, however bold, seems unassailable – is that when Berlioz gave to his jeune musicien the symptoms of monomania “he was not describing a vague or imaginary nervous disorder, but a

Writing delirium into music

maladie morale [mental illness] that would have been easily identifiable by many of those in the concert-going public . . . Indeed, it could well be that Berlioz was constructing his own erotic disorder and that of his ‘fantastic’ protagonist according to the detailed descriptions of manic fixation saturating scientific and journalistic writing of the period.”18 Now, the vague des passions and monomania are of course not identical afflictions. One, in fact, would seem to precede the other – the vague des passions being the condition one experiences before his desires have found an object and monomania the mental state associated with the attachment of those vague longings to someone or something that, as Berlioz puts it, “realizes the ideal of beauty and fascination that his heart has so long invoked.” Yet the symptoms of these maladies are remarkably similar, suggesting that when Berlioz invented the artist-hero of his symphony, he (wittingly or not) drew upon a wide range of influences – his own experience, his identification with Chateaubriand’s Rene´, and his familiarity with contemporary manic fixations. All of these fed into the symphony’s colorful program. How then did they feed into the symphony’s music? Virtually all who have written about the Fantastique have noted the influence of Berlioz’s biography and Chateaubriand’s vague des passions on the symphony’s program.19 Thanks to Brittan, we can now also appreciate how obsessive illness – more than just vague Romantic melancholy – is “reconfigur[ed] in the program of the Fantastique.”20 But these influences run deeper, extending beyond the work’s program to its musical structure and meaning. If the program is such an integral part of the work – not just a guide to listening or an indication of what inspired it – it stands to reason that what Berlioz brought to bear on the program should be felt as well in the music he wrote. How, this chapter asks, does the movement convey the torments of a mind gripped by an all-encompassing obsession? What might a musical evocation of mental illness sound like? And can we make better sense of this famously idiosyncratic movement if we accept that its very idiosyncrasy – even its unexpectedness and occasional inelegance – is deliberate, a musical image of mental disturbance?

Writing delirium into music Answering these questions requires moving beyond the notion that Berlioz’s music depicts the events of the program. It is easy enough to speculate about what passage in the movement might correspond to, say,

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the artist’s “fits of aimless joy” or his “returning moments of tenderness,” and it even seems plausible that the slow introduction could suggest the “intimations of passions” he experiences before he has seen his beloved. A more productive approach to understanding how the movement’s program and music relate, however, is again to think in terms of metaphor, i.e., in terms of the musical processes that might be metaphorical to the mental processes of the symphony’s beleaguered protagonist. One way of pursuing this idea is to consider the most obvious symptoms shared by monomania and the vague des passions and then gauge the extent to which they find echoes in the movement’s musical design. Three symptoms present themselves quite clearly: (1) an obsession with an unattainable object of desire – “being pursued both night and day by the same thoughts and affections,” as Esquirol puts it; searching for “some unknown good whose intuition pursues me relentlessly” (un bien inconnu, dont l’instinct me poursuit),21 in Chateaubriand’s words; or being haunted by a “double obsession [which] pursues him unceasingly” (Cette double ideé fixe [qui] le poursuit sans cesse), as Berlioz writes in his April letter to Ferrand (note again the similarity between Chateaubriand’s and Berlioz’s language); (2) a tendency to vacillate from a state of joy to one of despair, depending upon whether the sufferer believes the object of his desire is within reach or not – recall Berlioz’s sudden grief upon seeing Harriet leave for London; a mere glance in his direction, meaningless to her but all the world to him, could just as quickly send him into a fit of ecstasy; and (3) a lavishing of devotion on a character that is largely self-created – Harriet Smithson, though of course a real woman, is in Berlioz’s mind his Ophelia, more fictional than actual, as are the fixations of Esquirol’s monomaniacs and of Chateaubriand’s Rene´, who lives in that “empty world,” born out of an “exaggerated love of solitude,” where a man is abandoned to his dreams.22 These are of course not the only symptoms of these maladies, and I do not mean to suggest that Berlioz sat down with the intention of translating these three (or any three) into musical terms. My method is admittedly partly heuristic; it is meant neither to mimic Berlioz’s method of composition, nor to reveal what he was thinking while he was writing the score. What Berlioz was thinking we can only surmise, but what impact this movement has on us and what that impact has to do with the movement’s powerful evocation of mania – this can be explored via analysis and interpretation. I delineate these symptoms and trace their musical

Obsession

images because doing so is a useful way to speculate about how the movement represents not so much the events of the protagonist’s love story as the quality of his affliction. The Fantastique’s program does not specify how the musical events of the movement will unfold; it specifies what Jean-Pierre Bartoli aptly calls the symphony’s “expressive nature,” which exceeds the programmatic text and is created in a manner all its own.23 However, I take issue with Bartoli when he writes that “nothing justifies the architectural organization [of the symphony’s first movement] except the very general principle of subtle contrasts and very opposing psychological climaxes.”24 The music may need no justification, but we should not so quickly discount the possibility that its program and its structure interact very closely – intimately but indirectly. The movement’s “expressive nature,” I will argue, has everything to do with its complex, bizarre, and obsessively reiterative form. In the next part of this chapter, “Obsession,” I take a broad view of that form, exploring how it combines rotational and sonata principles as well as how the ideé fixe changes over the course of the movement. The persistence of the protagonist’s obsession and the delirium it gradually induces are reflected musically, I suggest, in the obsessive repetition of the ideé fixe and its gradually diminishing lyricism. Then, in “Vacillation,” I show how the movement’s many thematic cycles are bounded by sections vastly different in style and argue that these contrasts suggest the emotional extremes between which the jeune musicien swings. Finally, in “Self-creation,” I show how these sections, however different they may seem, are generated from similar musical materials, much as the delight and anguish of his relationship with his beloved are the products of the same delusional imagination.

Obsession All who study the first movement of the Symphonie fantastique – and probably all who hear it performed – will note that it is driven by the repetition of an ideé fixe. What is perhaps less immediately apparent, and what has not been discussed by many analysts, is that the first statement of the theme initiates a wave of multiple themes, which itself is repeated and varied as the movement progresses. The ideé fixe is the impulse that sets these waves in motion. (The idea of a wave is particularly apt considering Chateaubriand’s pun on the vagueness of passion [“le vague des passions”] and the wave of passion [“la vague des passions”].) The theme appears

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Ex. 5.1 Five statements of the ideé fixe

five times prominently throughout the movement, as the first element in a series of thematic cycles. Ex. 5.1 shows the first several measures of the ideé fixe melody from the beginnings of these five cycles. Fig. 5.1 presents an overview of the movement’s form that takes into account how the movement’s initial three-theme pattern changes, sometimes considerably, over the course of the movement.25 The details of this diagram will be discussed in more detail in what follows. At the moment, it is most important to note the many repetitions of the ideé fixe – here labeled P – and the variations to the thematic pattern it initiates (P–TR–S). Those variations sometimes involve the omission of one or more sections (TR or S) and sometimes the addition of a new section (X). The added X sections, more harmonically than thematically distinctive, are the famous passages based on parallel first-inversion triads. The third X section (mm. 358 ff.) is overlaid with fragments of the ideé fixe, a later addition to the

Obsession Introduction

Rotation 1

Rotation 2

Rotation 3

Rotation 4

Rotation 5

P

TR

S

72 I

111

150 V

P

S

X

166 V

191 I

198

P

TR

S

232 V

291 V

311 358 iii––I

P

X interruption P

X int.

410 I

439

461

X/P

451

P 503 I

Fig. 5.1 Form of Symphonie fantastique, first movement

score by Berlioz – hence X/P in Fig. 5.1.26 One will of course recognize the sonata-form labels popularized by Hepokoski and Darcy. I will address the movement’s sonata features in a moment, but for now I focus only on the rotational presentation of its themes. It is easy to imagine why a rotational or circular model would lend itself well to the evocation of monomaniacal fixation and suit Berlioz’s programmatic ends. The repeated thematic waves that are triggered by the ideé fixe capture something of the relentlessness of the artist’s passion for his beloved; he returns again and again to her image, just as the movement returns again and again to the ideé fixe. The variation to those waves over time – and particularly to their initial element, the ideé fixe – suggests the progress of that passion; her image changes as his obsession grows more intense, just as the thematic cycles change as they are repeated. Why then does Berlioz reference the conventions of sonata form? And how does he distort its conventions to heighten the form’s circularity? Debates about whether the movement is a sonata form at all persist to the present day, and with good reason. Rushton writes, “If Berlioz’s first movement, read as sonata form, appears inadequate, it could be the result of a wrong reading rather than any flaw in music which possesses convictions even in its composed hesitations.”27 In fact, sonata form does seem a rather inadequate model. The movement can only very uncomfortably be squeezed into a normative sonata mold. But a great deal can be

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The first movement of the Symphonie fantastique P Theme A

X

TR

Episode…………Transition

S

P S

S

Theme B:|| [Dev. of………………………………………Dev. and Th. A-Th. B] Recap. of Th. B

TR

X/P

Transition with Cadential Phrase……………………………………………………………..Recap. and Dev. [Dev. of of Cad. Phr. Th. A]

P

PXPX

||:Theme A…………………………………………………………………………………………………………Recap. of Th. A

P Introduction…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..Coda

m. 72 111

150

166

C minor C major I I-V of V - V(-III-V) V

191 -

I

198

232

I-V of II V

278

311

329

V-VI

III-VI-I I-V of II

358

410 475

- II - V - I

I

Fig. 5.2 Cone’s diagram of the movement’s form

learned by recognizing how Berlioz invokes sonata form without necessarily embracing it. Berlioz would of course have recognized sonata form as the expected form of a symphonic first movement, and there is every reason to believe he would therefore proceed with some sort of sonata model in mind. But Rushton has it right: Berlioz composes hesitation into this music, and conventional sonata form appears to be one of the objects of that hesitation. The music does follow certain sonata-form conventions, which should be taken into account. The exposition is repeated – a later revision by Berlioz but nonetheless evidence of sonata-like thinking28 – and it is in two parts, with a caesura before the secondary theme. A long introduction precedes the allegro, the standard for Berlioz’s sonata forms. And the key structure moves from the tonic to the dominant before the repeat of the exposition, into more distant realms thereafter, and back to the tonic by the end. The movement also shows signs of the symmetry noted first by Robert Schumann and developed by Edward T. Cone. Both see the piece as an “arched sonata form” with the primary and secondary themes reversed in the recapitulation.29 A version of Cone’s diagram appears in Fig 5.2 with my thematic labels overlaid.30 The arch form can be heard in performance as much as it can be gleaned off the page: in the clamorous return of the ideé fixe in C major in m. 410 (Cone’s recapitulation) that makes another statement of the secondary theme impossible or at least unnecessary; in the vast stretch of G major in the middle of the form (mm. 232 ff.) that counterbalances the C-major sections on either side of it (mm. 72 and 410);

Obsession

and even in the concluding section (Cone’s coda) that matches the introduction in mood if not in length with its lyricism and quietness.31 But, in truth, this piece is too idiosyncratic to fit neatly into either a standard sonata-form model or a symmetrical scheme like Cone’s. It is perhaps best viewed as a sonata contorted in such a way as to become maddeningly reiterative and also to suggest a degree of long-range symmetry. Berlioz has written a tangled, hybrid form with competing impulses, which vividly evokes the riots of a mind “pursued both night and day by the same thoughts and affections,” to quote Esquirol again.32 The formal deformations create a musical “image” that excites sensations comparable to the physical and mental sensations symptomatic of monomania: confusion, restlessness, internal conflict, and escalating obsession. The movement’s uncommon repetitiveness is brought into relief by its most deformational feature with respect to sonata form, the presence of a long G-major section in the middle of the form (m. 232), a curious circuscarousel variant of the ideé fixe that hollows out the form and calls into question conventional notions of development and recapitulation. The G-major section begins too weakly to be called a recapitulation; plus, it is in the “wrong” key.33 Yet it does send strong signals of return. It is plainly no mere developmental diversion, either. Berlioz was not averse to hollowing out his development sections with long and even static themes,34 and he does not seem to have subscribed to the idea that there ought to be a strong opposition between development and recapitulation. That said, nowhere else does he fill apparently developmental space with a full statement of a movement’s main theme. Nowhere else does a development sound so much like a rebeginning. If the G-major section seems too much like a varied restatement of the ´ idee fixe to be called properly “developmental,” the tonic statement of the ideé fixe in m. 410 seems too much like a further varied restatement to be called properly “recapitulatory.” C major is of course stated as boldly as can be – but almost too boldly. Nineteenth-century symphonists were no strangers to the climactic, clamorous recapitulation, yet Berlioz’s sounds out of character – too hectic, feverish, unstable in its over-resolution. Moreover, unlike the previous full statements of the ideé fixe in C major and G major, it does not reach its end. It is interrupted twice by the X section and cannot muster the strength to produce an authentic cadence. A flurry of figuration and a I–iii–V–I cadential progression (rather formulaic – and also Berliozian, considering his affinity for mediants) rush in to finish the job the ideé fixe could not (m. 483).

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The first movement of the Symphonie fantastique Introduction

Rotation 1

Exposition P TR S 72 I

Rotation 2

198

291 V

311 358 iii––I

Recapitulation? /Coda? P X interruption P X int. 410 I

Rotation 5

191 I

Development cont.? / Recapitulation? P TR S X/P 232 V

Rotation 4

150 V

Development P S X 166 V

Rotation 3

111

439

451

461

Coda? P 503 I

Fig. 5.3 Sonata-form overlay

What we call these sections is less important than how we regard their functions. If we must give them names, the G-major section could be called a development-cum-recapitulation, the C-major return a recapitulation-cum-coda, particularly considering what has come before it (see Fig. 5.3, which places over Fig. 5.1 the sonata-form labels Exposition, Development, Recapitulation, and Coda). The rhetoric of sonata form is called up, but mixed with it is a rhetoric of strophic elaboration. That elaboration occurs in three broad arcs: a first (rotations 1 and 2) that passes through a section that behaves very much like a typical development; a second (rotation 3) that is if not a full-fledged recapitulation a full-scale return; and a third (rotations 4 and 5) that reiterates the theme again, bombastically, followed by a “religious” reflection upon it. The variation to the movement’s rotations is signaled most obviously by the variation to the ideé fixe itself. Because that theme is unequivocally connected with the object of the jeune musicien’s infatuation, its transformation can by extension be linked with the evolution of his passion for his beloved. What happens to the ideé fixe as a musical idea reflects what happens to it as a mental idea. The theme is progressively constrained and its lyricism sapped; its aspect changes, from what we might call alluring

Obsession

Ex. 5.2 Three metrical interpretations of the ideé fixe

to addling, in accordance with the intensification of the jeune musicien’s malady and of his pursuit of the woman he cannot have.35 The theme’s transformation is most apparent if we look at its three equally weighted appearances, at the beginning of rotations 1, 3, and 4. In the exposition, the ideé fixe is a strain of pure melody without accompaniment and seemingly without meter, or at least with an ambiguous meter. Ex. 5.2 indicates how the meter and downbeats of the opening measures can be heard in various ways – the first staff shows the ideé fixe as written, the second shows it in the same meter but with the notes of the long descending line falling on downbeats rather than half measures, and the third re-imagines the theme in a triple meter. Without harmonic or rhythmic support it is difficult on a first pass to hear the measure lines as they are written – or to hear that there are measure lines at all – as one’s interpretation will depend upon the perceived length of the opening whole note. A clear metric context only comes later, and with it a slight restriction of the theme’s freedom; only as the theme’s upperneighbor motive is repeated a third and then a fourth time do we begin to grasp how the measures group into phrases and the phrases into a larger structure. (See Ex. 5.3, a formal outline of the theme. The slurs demarcate the phrases of the theme, and the bold-faced “7 mm.” and “5 mm.” indicate where odd-number phrase lengths occur, a topic I will return to below.) Later the ideé fixe is more rigidly defined. At the beginning of rotation 3 (m. 232), the melody is identical to that of rotation 1 (if anything, it is sweeter, marked “dolce” and played now by woodwinds). Its setting, however, is not. A steady eighth-note accompaniment and heavy tonic pedal restrict the theme’s movement from the outset, and whereas in rotation 1 the theme sprang forth easily from the dominant that preceded it (m. 71), now it struggles to regenerate itself. It needs a steady rhythm to get going and does so with some difficulty, growing only tentatively from the second violins’ A–D fourths, which must first be corrected to D–G. By

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Ex. 5.3 Form of the ideé fixe

Ex. 5.4 The ideé fixe compressed and normalized in mm. 410 ff.

m. 410 the ideé fixe is completely hemmed in, and its lyricism has vanished. It is played twice as fast and double forte, amidst the first tutti in the whole movement. Its phrase structure is also normalized and compressed, the five- and seven-measure phrases of mm. 72 ff. becoming four-measure phrases in mm. 410 ff.36 Compare Ex. 5.3 with Ex. 5.4, the ideé fixe’s compressed and normalized form in mm. 410 ff., and note again the bold-faced measure indications. (Incidentally, the theme’s harmonic underpinning, as Cone notes, is also normalized. The haziness of what he calls the “disturbing” “apparent tonic” in m. 84,37which stands for a cadential 6/4 despite the fact that two measures later the same chord functions as tonic, is finally dissipated in rotation 4; mm. 418–19 unequivocally read cadential 6/4–V7–I.) Such normalization comes at a cost. The ideé fixe can no longer sing and unfurl on its own to reach its own end. The process by which the theme metamorphoses, indeed rigidifies, is analogous to the process by which the beloved’s image does the same. The jeune musicien’s descent into madness implied by the movement’s program – in which he is ever

Obsession

more disabled by the mania that afflicts him, his elation turns to “insane anxiety,” and a tantalizing, free-floating image is transformed into something more unbending and threatening – is reflected in the progressive restriction and normalization of the theme that represents the woman he loves. This process, however, involves more than just the ideé fixe. S, which in a generic sense we would expect to be the site of utmost lyricism, diminishes in importance with each cycle just as P’s lyricism does. It is really more a thematic area than a distinctive theme, as most commentators on the movement have noted. “The second theme,” writes Schumann, “seems to stem directly from the first; they are so closely intergrafted that it is hardly possible to discern their dividing point until finally the new idea breaks free [in m. 158].”38 Cone agrees.39 The tilt toward monothematicism is justifiable from a programmatic point of view. If the ideé fixe is the artist’s single fixation, then no other theme should draw attention from it. The interruption of the ideé fixe’s incipit by the “new idea” – three times over, in mm. 152, 156, and 162 – is also understandable. The music’s and the artist’s tempers have been so stirred that a luxurious moment of song is not possible here. A soaring secondary theme would stall the headlong rush of the exposition, which, as it is, is drastically foreshortened – a mere 18 measures compared to 40 measures of P and 39 measures of TR. Christian Berger, among others,40 recognizes that the exposition is truncated and offers a compelling account of the S-that-might-have-been, which, however problematic in its thematic labeling, gets to the heart of the matter. Measure 133, he explains, is where we would expect an S, and m. 150 is the closing theme.41 The problem with this interpretation is twofold: there is no caesura before m. 133 to create the expectation of a secondary theme, and there is one before m. 150, which would not normally precede a closing theme. But he is right that Berlioz never gives us a satisfactory secondary theme and that its absence has consequences for the rest of the movement. Measures 150–1 – a dolce restatement, or reworking, of the ideé fixe – leads us to expect a fully lyrical secondary theme based on the ideé fixe. But the double-forte interruption in mm. 151–3 thwarts that expectation; a “true” secondary theme never materializes, despite three efforts to get going. In rotation 2, the lyrical beginning of S is absent; only the forceful cadential gesture returns, boldly and in the tonic (mm. 193–200). In rotation 3, the same section returns but in E minor and in a weakened and fragmented form (mm. 313 ff.). And by rotation 4, all remnants of S are gone.

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Vacillation The shift between pleasure and pain alluded to by Esquirol, Chateaubriand, and Berlioz finds its musical counterpart in the progression from stable to unstable formal areas (namely P and X, respectively) over the course of several of the movement’s rotations. The melodious ideé fixe sections and the chaotic, athematic X sections that frame these rotations are seemingly opposites. The P sections are harmonically grounded and closed: every one of them, save the beginning of rotations 2 and 4, ends with some sort of cadence; they are sounded in stable key areas, normally the tonic and the dominant; and they are generally songful, no matter how much their songfulness diminishes over time. The X sections, on the contrary, are as unhinged as anything Berlioz or any other mid-nineteenthcentury composer ever wrote: devoid of melody and harmonic functionality, they are musical depictions of delirium. Take the famous passage of chromatic parallel first-inversion chords in m. 198 which begins with a C-major triad and ends with a D dominant seventh. No amount of analytical wrangling can fit this section into a larger linear-harmonic framework. These are not the only unhinged passages in the movement. The long static passage toward the end of the introduction, a series of aimlessly wandering triads over an Ab pedal, is another (mm. 47 ff. – see Ex. 5.5 for a chord-by-chord reduction of this passage, which maintains the smoothest possible voice leading). As in mm. 198–228, Berlioz jettisons directed functional tonality in favor of a coloristic chord succession. The beginning and ending points are clear enough – an A-flat major triad in m. 47 (the deceptive VI in C minor) and an A-minor triad in m. 60 (vi in C major, the return to functionality and the start of a forward-moving cadential progression). But the path from one point to another betrays no sign of logic or inevitability. Time stops, reason vanishes, and we are cast adrift on a wave of harmonies with no direction – a vague des passions in both senses.42 It hardly seems accidental that these unstable passages precede stable statements of the ideé fixe. Out of confusion and frenzy emerges – suddenly, miraculously – the beloved’s image, an anchor for the listener and the young artist. But, as we have seen, that image itself changes. So, interestingly, does the ideé fixe’s relationship to the disordered sections that come before it: its connection to these sections grows stronger as the movement unfolds.43 At first, the distance between the unstable and the stable is great. The Ab pedal passage leads to two authentic cadences (in mm. 63 and 64) and then to an entirely new eight-measure allegro agitato section that sets up the first statement of the ideé fixe. The X section at the

Vacillation

Ex. 5.5 Harmonic reduction of introduction, mm. 47 ff.

Ex. 5.6 Retransition theme and ideé fixe compared

end of rotation 2 and the ideé fixe at the start of rotation 3 are separated not by a section of different music but by a three-measure grand pause (mm. 231–3) – a smaller gap but a gap nonetheless. Thereafter, however, the gap gives way. At the end of rotation 3 (mm. 358 ff.), the ideé fixe is sounded amidst the X section’s sliding first-inversion chords. The presence of the ideé fixe – meandering, gathering energy, worming its way toward its own recapitulation – prepares us for its tutti statement in m. 410. So does the other theme in this retransition section, which bears a strong resemblance to the ideé fixe itself (see Ex. 5.6, which notes some motivic similarities).44 In rotation 4, P and X effectively become one, as the X section twice interrupts P (in mm. 439 and 461) and its strangeness infiltrates P’s structure, leading it astray and preventing it from reaching completion; prior to both interruptions, the P section veers off course, dissolves, and heads circuitously from C major to B major. The form of the movement is thus as much spiral as circular. If the musical distance each cycle travels is imagined as an arc, then as P and X move closer together musically, that distance gets progressively shorter – as does, of course, the distance between each cycle. In Fig. 5.4, a spatial

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The first movement of the Symphonie fantastique TR

P

S

X

Fig. 5.4 Spiral form

representation of the movement’s form, the upper arcs represent the course of each cycle and the lower arcs the passage from one cycle to another.45 Tracing the spiral clockwise from the left, each dot represents a pass through the stations marked along the outside of the circle – P, TR, S, and X. Where there is no dot – as for example at the end of the first cycle at point X – that station is not passed through. This spatial representation is only one of many that might be proposed, but it is a fitting image for the whirlwind of emotions that engulfs the symphony’s protagonist, and Berlioz himself. These wild oscillations are central to the vague des passions, monomania, and the programmatic narrative of the first movement, with its “delirious passion, with its impulses of rage and jealousy, its returning moments of tenderness, its tears, and its religious solace.” Berlioz’s pursuit of Harriet Smithson is likewise a tale of extreme highs and lows. His letters show us a man whose hopes are fueled and crushed by the smallest turn of events: by the news given him by Harriet’s agent that if Berlioz loves her he can wait a few months to see her, which Berlioz interprets as a sign of interest; by the fact that he receives no replies to the many letters he sends her, which puts him in ruins; by the prospect of having his Waverley overture performed at a concert that also features her in a staging of the love scene from Romeo and Juliet, which thrills him to no end; by the sight of her rehearsing the tomb scene before the concert, which makes him flee the theater with a cry. (Rene´, too, swings from calm to turbulence, particularly in his dealings with his sister, who, like Berlioz’s Harriet, becomes as much a goddess as a human, so that when he believes she has spurned him, his world falls apart.)46 On its own, Berlioz’s spiral form – oscillating between two contrasting musical ideas, ever faster – could suggest any number of things, but in this context it cannot but call to mind the jeune musicien’s oscillations between joy and despair.

Self-creation

Self-creation If the spiral were to continue, it would presumably bring P and X so near each other that they would be practically indistinguishable. The ecstasy and grief of love, the hope of possessing what one desires and the torture of not being able to, the thing one covets and the intoxicating need to covet it – however the emotional extremes typical of this lovesickness are characterized, each would join fully with the other. For those in the grip of these mental maladies, however, the ideal of beauty and the passions it inspires are inventions of a troubled mind. Everything – object and subject, pleasure and pain, hope and dejection – stems from the same source. Berlioz’s tempestuous relationship with Harriet, as he perceives it while he is writing his symphony, is a fiction, as is indeed the entire “monde fantastique” that he has created for himself. As Peter Raby puts it in his excellent biography of Harriet Smithson, Berlioz, in his mad quest for Harriet’s heart, “was playing all the parts in this imaginary scenario.”47 Berlioz translates the self-creative aspect of these afflictions into something musical and richly metaphorical by building the ideé fixe and its polar opposite, the jarring X section, from the same raw material. From the outset, the two sections are joined even before they begin to spiral together. Ex. 5.7 presents a reduction of each X section, highlighting the parallel first-inversion triads that underlie them: although the third X section properly begins in m. 358, at the retransition to the “recapitulation”

Ex. 5.7 The X sections

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Ex. 5.8 Schenkerian analysis of the ideé fixe

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Self-creation

in C major, the passage of chromatically rising first-inversion triads does not begin until m. 369. The slurs in this example simply indicate the extent of each upward or downward slide. Ex. 5.8 presents a Schenkerian analysis of the ideé fixe as it appears in the exposition. The defining elements of the X sections – sixths and chromatic lines – are evident in the ideé fixe as well, albeit in a more tonally grounded and lyrical context. The theme is structured around a sixth span (E–C) filled in chromatically. That sixth is in fact the same sixth that we hear at the beginning of the first X section in m. 198. To be fair, the long ascending sixth that stretches across the ideé fixe does not contain every chromatic pitch between E and C; Ab and Bb are properly neighbors, not members of the line itself that receive strong harmonic support. But a chromatic rise is apparent nonetheless, particularly because Ab and Bb are metrically and rhythmically accented. The relationship between P and X hardly seems coincidental, and it is aurally perceptible, not just analytically demonstrable. Yet it has only been alluded to in print.48 What it suggests is that P and X are not as opposite as they first appear. The madness induced by the image of the beloved contains something of that image, and the image, however pure it may seem at first, already contains the madness it spawns. The two are inextricably linked before the drama even begins – as they ought to be. Nicholas Cook has argued that Berlioz’s symphony portrays “an individual’s moods and fantasies [my italics]”;49 the drama of the movement is the product of one man’s mind, so it only makes sense that the elements in that drama would be built from the same raw material. At base, all of the movement’s sections are related. The ideé fixe finds its image not only in X but also in the secondary theme and in Cone’s lyrical “cadential phrase”50 – the glimmer of a fully lyrical secondary theme that the truncated exposition never really gives us – as well as in the theme that is intertwined with the fragments of the ideé fixe in the long X section leading up to m. 410. Each one of these musical ideas is the same self-generated phantom in a different shape, an illusion of a tortured mind. If the artist-hero of the Fantastique transforms everything he sees into “this vision of his imagination,” the heroes of the piece looked at in the next chapter have no less power over their surroundings. Their visions, however, are of each other; in the Sce`ne d’amour, with its two “starcrossed” protagonists, the love that blossoms between them is bigger than anything either one could have expressed singly. The circular formal process of the movement brilliantly mirrors this transformation in that

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over the course of about three hundred measures a theme emerges that is greater than the sum of its parts. How Berlioz does that, though, is not by melding together two contrasting musical ideas, like the ideé fixe and the brazen X sections in the Fantastique. In the Sce`ne d’amour his procedure is far less dialectical, since it involves the subtle evolution of one musical idea into another, and then into another, and so on, so that the ecstatic theme that results is both new and familiar; we sense that it has been produced from recognizable parts but cannot quite pinpoint those parts in the product. The same goes for the movement’s form itself, not just the theme it generates. Unlike Le Carnaval romain and the first movement of the Symphonie fantastique, the Sce`ne does not so much mix circular form with other recognizable forms – again, in a dialectical fashion – as treat the overriding circular processes so deftly and fluidly that at any given moment something more seems to be going on than just the repetition and elaboration of thematic material, even if we cannot classify that “something” according to established techniques. In this sense, this work is perhaps the most subtle, advanced, and unclassifiable of any discussed in this book. It exemplifies what Bartoli has called, with respect to Berlioz’s discursive forms, an “analogy” – the word choice is fortuitous – “between musical development and the temporal flow of a natural language.”51 Here, as we shall see, the analogy is not just with the flow of any language, but with the flow of Shakespeare’s text.

6

Love’s emergence and fulfillment: the Sce`ne d’amour from Romeó et Juliette

Looking for Shakespeare in Berlioz I return to the preface to Romeó et Juliette, cited in chapter 2, in which Berlioz explains why he set the dialogue of Shakespeare’s garden and cemetery scenes for instruments rather than for voices. Since plenty of vocal “duets of love and despair” had already been written, he thought it wise as well as unusual to attempt another means of expression. It is also because the very sublimity of this love made its depiction so dangerous for the musician that he had to give his imagination a latitude that the positive sense of the sung words would not have given him, resorting instead to instrumental language, which is richer, more varied, less precise, and by its very indefiniteness incomparably more powerful in such a case.1

This passage has been quoted often in the Berlioz literature. It stands as nothing short of a credo that sums up Berlioz’s convictions about the expressive capabilities of instrumental music – a credo that we have seen expressed in similar ways in a variety of places. Yet for all its force and clarity, it has made it no easier to disentangle the threads that bind the movements alluded to above, the Sce`ne d’amour and Romeó au tombeau des Capulets, to the dramatic scenes that inspired them. From the premiere of the work in 1839 to the present day, listeners have wrestled with the question of where to look for Shakespeare in Berlioz’s score, if at all.2 The Sce`ne d’amour, in particular, has continued to interest analysts in this regard because the correspondences between its score and the balcony scene are so tantalizing. It is difficult to deny the gut sense that there must be a connection between the two, likely a strong one, and to quell the urge to seek it out. But the music throws up roadblocks, continually resisting any reductionist reading that sees it as a reduplication of Shakespeare’s dialogue. The general problem of relating Berlioz’s programs and musical forms has, as I argued in the early chapters of this book, preoccupied Berlioz’s critics perhaps more than any other, and there seem to be as many approaches to the issue as there are pieces that raise it. A look at the

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The Sce`ne d’amour from Romeó et Juliette

analytical approaches to the Sce`ne d’amour provides a useful snapshot of the variety of solutions proposed. Ian Kemp attempts to match up measures from the Sce`ne d’amour with lines from Shakespeare’s balcony scene.3 At such-and-such a moment in the score, in other words, Juliet can be imagined to say, “O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou, Romeo?”; several measures later, we imagine Romeo’s response, “Shall I hear more, or shall I speak at this?”; and so on. Vera Micznik sees the relation between score and scene as more “topical” than “representational,” in which case the music for the balcony scene can be seen as at once programmatic – dependent upon the “verbal associations” with the play – and absolute – outlining a “musical plot of passion understandable in its own terms.”4 Certain passages can be linked with certain speeches, but priority should be given, she believes, to the more imprecise musical meanings of those passages, which draw upon a rich repertoire of musical topics that can be decoded without placing Shakespeare’s scene and Berlioz’s score side by side. Finally, one of the work’s earliest reviewers, Stephen Heller, questions even more than Micznik the value of explaining aspects of the music with Shakespeare. Nothing is more profoundly felt than this Adagio . . . [T]o me it hardly matters that it is ‘about’ the love of Romeo and Juliet rather than some other passion. What have we to do with Juliet confiding her love to the night, as the prologue tells us, with Romeo suddenly revealing himself to her, and with their happiness or anxiety? This is mere fiction, while the music is incontrovertibly real.5

Heller’s concern is understandable, especially since it is partly a reaction to critics who accused Berlioz of artificially propping up his symphony with a program, a chorus, solo voices, and a prologue, rather than letting the music speak for itself. But Berlioz’s music can speak for itself and still be a careful and personal response to a poet he loved and a scene he knew intimately.6 Kemp’s literalist reading misconstrues that response.7 Berlioz’s music does not mimic Shakespeare’s text; to do so would restrain the music in a manner he is expressly trying to avoid. But it also does not simply project abstract emotion, unrelated to Shakespeare’s scene, as Heller implies. Berlioz’s explicit reference to Shakespeare is meant to direct our listening experience, to encourage us to free-associate and draw connections between the music we hear and the drama we know. Heller’s reluctance to reduce Berlioz’s music to a mere parroting of Shakespeare, however justifiable, should not deter us from looking closely at how the music and the text relate. Berlioz’s music does not retell the balcony scene; it uses musical means to suggest what it feels like to see it staged. Rushton

Circularity as metaphor

implies as much when he writes, “If the music of the Sce`ne d’amour strikes us as dramatic, it is through a metaphor.”8 He goes on to mention such factors as Berlioz’s shift between high and low melodies and lyrical and declamatory styles, the movement of his harmonies, as well as differences in texture, tempo, and harmonic rhythm. These factors do not duplicate the “development of Shakespeare’s scene.” They are “analogous” to it. So is the Sce`ne’s form. This chapter demonstrates, first, that its form is circular and that its basic impetus is one of strophic variation.9 Themes are repeated over and over, only to spawn new themes that, however different, sound like variations on what preceded them. Second, it explores the interaction between the circular musical structure of the Sce`ne d’amour and the dramatic structure of Shakespeare’s balcony scene and suggests that we can talk in detail about that musical structure, as it relates to the drama, without either referring only casually to the play or, conversely, looking for one-to-one correspondences. I take the Sce`ne’s form as my starting point in part because one of the few topics critics agree upon, no matter what their stance on the program–form relation, is that the form of the Sce`ne d’amour is bizarre. “Few of [Berlioz’s] movements are so remote from traditional archetypes,” writes Rushton, and he is right.10 How, one wonders, can a work have such an impact on its audience if its form is so seemingly unintelligible? Unless we are content to claim that our understanding of the Sce`ne d’amour – and our sense, even if intuitive, of the music’s suitability to its program – is divorced from our experience of its form, we must allow that the form is doing something, shaping our experience in some way. The Sce`ne d’amour’s form, I will argue, is finely calibrated so that it conveys the dramatic sweep of Shakespeare’s scene – not the utterances of Romeo and Juliet or even their actions and not, pace Heller and Micznik, just the torrents of love in the most abstract sense or the various emotions associated with it, but something as indefinite as it is rich, powerful, and Shakespearian: their love’s emergence out of darkness and ambiguity and its confirmation.

Circularity as metaphor: the nocturnal music of the Sce`ne’s opening A look at the first fifty-odd bars of the piece will show how Berlioz uses circular techniques to suggest the nocturnal background against which this emergence and confirmation will take place.11 A lot of ink has been

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A1 125 A

trans. 144 c#

B1

A2

146 c#

155 A

trans. 168

B2 172 C

Fig. 6.1 Form of mm. 125–81

spilled debating whether the violins’ opening neighbor figures are meant to sound like nighttime bird calls, and if so which kind.12 Birdlike they may be, and perhaps were even intended to be, but the mood of the opening is established by more sophisticated means than “direct” imitation. Just as the two lovers can barely make out each other’s faces and voices in the blackness of night, so it is difficult to make out the harmonic and melodic structures of the music. The music’s impressionistic quality is an analogue for the impressionistic quality of the scene. It arises from the elision of phrases and sections, where endings are indistinguishable from beginnings, where seams cannot be found, where circles are traced, only to be retraced as soon as they are completed.13 The larger structure of mm. 125–81 is fairly clear, and also, notably, rotational – A1–trans.–B1 followed by A2–trans.–B2. The second rotation compresses A1, introduces new transitional material, and amplifies B1, recomposing it in C major. Fig. 6.1 provides a formal diagram of these measures. Exs. 6.1a and 6.1b show an annotated score of the string parts (in A1 and A2, respectively), which carry all of the thematic material, as well as a melody played by the clarinet and English horn, to which I will return below. This example can be used as a reference for the following analytical remarks. The form of the sections themselves, though, is less clear, as are the boundaries between them. The sections circle into one another; each is elided with the next. B1, for example, bleeds into A2 in mm. 154–5, with an evaded PAC that merges smoothly with the return of A material. The overlap is all the more apparent because A2 seems to begin in the middle of a phrase. Whereas in A1 the first measure of the phrase was repeated, here it is as if we begin with the repetition – as if the first measure of A2 lay hidden behind the last measure of B1 (m. 154), as if, indeed, the luxurious nighttime music of A1 were there all along, a backdrop to the passionate outburst of B1. (In the Allegretto introduction to the Sce`ne d’amour, the strings are quite literally a continuous, serene backdrop to the distant singing of the “jeunes Capulets”; here the backdrop is more implicit, but the effect is similar.) Berlioz elides not only sections but also phrases within them, frustrating any attempt to discern clear phrase structures. Take A1, for example,


Ex. 6.1a Sce`ne d’amour, section A1

mm. 125–44. A lyric binary form (a–b) is implied, with b beginning in m. 135, signaled by the move away from the tonic and a more directed and chromatic harmonic progression that leads to the first PAC of the movement, in C-sharp minor (m. 144). But the boundary between a and b is blurred. The melodic closure attained in m. 134 is undermined, first by the persistence of the tonic pedal, which negates what might have been a PAC, and second by the continuation of the melody in m. 134. The phrase continues and ends at the same time, as the entire section seems to begin again: the C# octave leap in m. 134 echoes the same leap from the

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Ex. 6.1a (cont.)

first measure of the section; tail and head become one as another cycle begins. This seamlessness of phrases and sections, each merging with the next, is matched by undulating melodic lines, built from similar and ever“circulating” motives that reappear again and again but always in a slightly different form. Measure 125 (and the first beat of m. 126) presents two such motives, characterized as much by their contour as by their rhythm: in pitch terms, (1) a falling arpeggiation spanning a sixth and an upward octave leap, followed by (2) a descending filled-in third; in rhythmic


Ex. 6.1b Sce`ne d’amour, section A2

terms, (1) eighth, eighth, eighth, dotted eighth, followed by (2) three sixteenths and an eighth (the latter of course elided with the repeat of motive 1 in m. 125). (These motives are boxed and labeled with a 1 and 2 in Ex. 6.1a.) The rhythmic pattern expressed by these two motives is maintained throughout both A1 and A2. This particular pitch-rhythmic combination, however, is never once repeated in A1, yet no fewer than five times is it referenced, always as a nearly imperceptible transformation of what we have heard before. Nor does it return in A2 (m. 155, with its

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Ex. 6.1b (cont.)

repeat of motive 1, comes closest), though again Berlioz four times alludes to it. These repeating, shape-shifting motives, more than the birds, are the nocturnal creatures that in the dark of night look roughly the same, though they are not. These vaguely delineated phrases are the musical objects whose outlines, like the outlines of the objects in Shakespeare’s scene, cannot quite be discerned. Berlioz need not resort to direct musical imitation to establish this nocturnal setting. He lets the musical mechanisms of these measures do the work for him.14

Musical labels and large-scale form

Musical labels and large-scale form Thus far I have not linked Berlioz’s themes with Shakespeare’s characters – which is not because I think this is a fruitless endeavor. There is every reason to believe that in writing these themes Berlioz had in mind the characters from the play, or at least the passions they experience. One is inclined to agree with Tovey that “nothing is easier or safer than to identify the cantabile of the cellos and other tenor instruments with Romeo, and that of the soprano instruments with Juliet.”15 Still, our analysis should not stop with these easy identifications. A case can be made, for example, that the A theme represents Juliet musing upon her love for Romeo,16 an idea strengthened by the fact that the English horn and clarinet’s extended melodic line in the A sections (mm. 127–44) matches at pitch the clarinet’s line in mm. 74–89 of Romeó au tombeau, a passage that corresponds to Juliet’s waking up after Romeo has taken his vial of poison. (Compare the clarinet melody in Ex. 6.2, the relevant measures of Romeó au tombeau, with the clarinet and English horn melody of Ex. 6.1a. The rhythm of each passage differs slightly, and the Sce`ne d’amour melody begins E–F#–E rather than E–F–E and ends E–D#–C# rather than E–D–C# – with the C# falling on the downbeat of the measure after the excerpted measures. Otherwise the quotation is exact.) More important, though, is how the “intonations” of Juliet’s passions (to borrow a word from Berlioz)17 and the setting in which she feels them are suggested, not replicated, by the music. The English horn and clarinet line, drawn out and full of gaps, is as hesitant as her questions. The emergence of a true melody in m. 139, when the gaps finally disappear, is like the emergence of her voice – first uttering a single line, then four, then more: juliet. romeo. juliet.

romeo. juliet.

Ay me! She speaks! O, speak again, bright angel . . . O Romeo, Romeo – wherefore art thou Romeo? Deny thy father, and refuse thy name; Or if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love, And I’ll no longer be a Capulet. Shall I hear more, or shall I speak at this? ’Tis but thy name that is my enemy . . . What’s in a name? That which we call a rose By any other word would smell as sweet; So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call’d,

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Retain that dear perfection which he owes Without that title. Romeo, doff thy name, And for thy name, which is no part of thee, Take all myself.18

Ex. 6.2 Romeó au tombeau, Juliet’s awakening

Not everyone, of course, agrees with Tovey. The character labels applied to passages in the score vary wildly.19 Even more interesting is that the musical labels do as well – even when those labels are strictly analytical and have nothing to do with Shakespeare’s play.20 Analysts disagree about which themes are which. We can learn a lot about how the music is structured by attending to the source of these disagreements. The problem stems from the fact that the movement’s main themes are different enough to be distinguishable from one another but similar

Musical labels and large-scale form

Ex. 6.3 Sce`ne d’amour, main themes

enough to seem like variations of one another. No matter how we view the relationship between the structure of the movement and its program, no matter whether we hear Romeo or Juliet or the nurse21 or nightingales here or there, the music thwarts our efforts to label its sections. The same indistinctness that made it difficult to parse the A section into clear-cut phrases and motives makes it difficult for us to parse the larger form into differentiated thematic blocks. Something new always seems to be happening, but it always grows out of something that came before. The thematic interconnections are easy enough to see and hear. What is commonly noted is that the famous A-major theme, often called the “love theme,”22 combines elements of the two themes that precede it: the B theme from above (often associated with Romeo) and the F-sharp minor melody that begins in m. 246 (often associated with Juliet). (See Ex. 6.3, which presents these three main themes, here labeled B, C, and D.) The love theme (D) takes over the tag from B and the opening contour and rhythm of C, expanding its rising third into a fourth (see the brackets in Ex. 6.3), a combination generally taken to represent the union of Romeo and Juliet. This is, however, a combination unlike any other in Berlioz – not the superimposition of two opposing ideas, as one finds in the Songe d’une nuit du sabbat from the Symphonie fantastique or in Romeó seul, not a dialectic synthesis of opposing elements, but the gradual melding of two similar ideas into one another, or, really, the metamorphosis of a first idea into a second, and then a first and second into a third. B and C, after all, are as related to each other as they are to D (see Ex. 6.4).23 The rising-third motive in the second measure of C1, for instance, is first heard in the

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Ex. 6.4 Thematic relationships

second measure of B1 and B2. The B sections also present a lower-neighbor figure, which returns in sections C and D (interestingly, only in D1 does the motive return without the upper-neighbor grace-note embellishment; in D2 the grace notes are back, thus reinforcing the connection with earlier material). And as Charles Rosen has pointed out, sections B and D project similar middleground motives (see the bottom staff of Ex. 6.4): mm. 274–6 of D1 (and of course the corresponding measures of D2) elaborate upon the same motivic substructure heard in mm. 150–2 of B1.24 It is as though these themes, no matter their outward differences, share the same underlying DNA. What bearing does this thematic indistinctness have on the circularity of the overall form? For one, it makes summarizing the form’s thematic contents difficult. Do we attend to the themes’ differences or their similarities when labeling them? Labels are of course only markers, placeholders,

Musical labels and large-scale form A1 A1 125 A

D1 B5 274 A

trans. trans. 144 c#

B1 B1

A2 A2

146 c#

155 A

trans. (B-based) trans. (B-based) 280 A

D5 (head) D5 (tag) B9 (head) B9 (tag)

trans. 181

286 A

evasion

evasion 358 Eb –––

350 A

evasion

D7 (tag only) B11 (tag only) 375 A

trans.

D2 B6

341 A

evasion 372 –––

B2

trans. B2 168 172 C

trans.

“dev.” “dev.” 300 E

C1 B3

C2 B4

246 f#

256 A

D3 B7

D4 B8

322 A

332 A

trans. trans. 338 V/A

D6 (head, B-based) D6 (tag, B-based) B10 (head) B10 (tag) 362

367 E

Codetta Codetta 382 A

Fig. 6.2 An overview of the Sce`ne d’amour’s form

but they are useful if we are to talk about what happens to these themes; and the difficulty in deciding what to call them should not be downplayed, for it goes to the heart of the movement’s dynamic of repetition and gradual transformation. Fig. 6.2, a broad overview of the form that the following pages will help to elucidate, attempts to have it both ways. The upper thematic labels are applied bearing in mind the differences among these three themes, the lower bearing in mind their similarities – which is to say that we can choose to hear the love theme (D1) as the theme that is followed by a set of six strophic variations (D2, D3, D4, D5, D6, and D7) and preceded by a group of different themes (A, B, and C).25 Or we can see it as the continuation of a process of strophic elaboration that began as far back as B – in which case the first full-fledged lyrical theme (B1), which grew out of A, is repeated and transformed ten times throughout the rest of the movement. This is neither a cop-out nor analytical trickery; Berlioz’s piece demands that we hear both ways at once, continually gauging what has changed about these themes and what has stayed the same. For the sake of clarity, I will adopt the upper thematic labels for the remainder of my analysis – using A and B, as well as C and D, to refer to the themes in the movement – though C and D should be thought of less as new themes than as newly formed versions of older ones. The gradual materialization of the love theme and its extended repetition and elaboration are the central actions of the movement. The

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former I call its emergence, the latter its fulfillment. In what follows, I examine each of these processes in detail. First, I show how the love theme grows from all that comes before it, surfacing slowly just as Romeo’s and Juliet’s affections for one another do. Second, I examine the long course from the love theme’s emergence to its conclusion. By the time it appears in m. 274, the movement is only half done. Even in the Sce`ne’s final, revised version, with portions cut out, the D sections seem to be repeated more often than they should. But this is no fault on Berlioz’s part. It is a musical device that models the reluctant separation of the lovers and the gradual confirmation of their love for one another.26 Throughout, I will suggest that this unique form does not so much “follow” Shakespeare’s scene or portray its characters as translate its dramatic arc into a language that is musical, logical, and novel.

The emergence of the love theme The combination of “Romeo’s” and “Juliet’s” themes in the love theme, as I mentioned above, has been well noted. Most studies of the movement, however, focus on the thematic relationships that bind together these sections. These are important, to be sure, and will be discussed in turn. But just as important are harmonic, tonal, formal, and deeper motivic relationships. Also important is A’s role in the gradual metamorphosis. My analysis, since it proceeds from left to right, will begin with A.

A into B and C Just as the voices and images of Romeo and Juliet seem to emerge from the warm Verona night in which their scene plays, so do the first two main themes of the adagio – B and C – emerge from the nocturnal backdrop of the A section. Daniel Albright has called this opening a “quarry of motives for the construction of this immense song,”27 and he could not be more right. The opening suggests ideas not yet fully realized and images not yet clear, and what grows from this quarry of motives is not just any melody but a song without words that expresses not so much what Romeo and Juliet say as the sentiment behind it. Already the first three notes of this immense song – a filled-in falling major sixth, A–E–C# – present a version of perhaps the most memorable gesture of B’s famous tag, what Charles Rosen has called “an invariant, stable element” in the movement:28 the falling arpeggiation D–B–F before

The emergence of the love theme

the end of the theme. In A the span is the same, only the division of it is different. And the keys first associated with the B and C sections (C-sharp minor and F-sharp minor, both a third away from the tonic A major) are foreshadowed as prominently tonicized chords in A. C-sharp minor comes to the fore in m. 136, preceded by its own dominant ninth, the first move away from the tonic pedal of the opening ten measures;29 F-sharp minor is the highpoint of both A1 and A2 (in mm. 142 and 166), a largescale iv chord tonicized by its own cadential progression in mm. 139–42 (see Ex. 6.1a). These chords notably occur in the order that their representative keys will. The two lovers, we might say, are present, though shrouded, in the shadows of the A section (if we are willing to accept that B might represent Romeo and C Juliet). In any case, the keys of these themes, no matter what we call them, come gradually into view, just as the characters do. Section C is preceded by a transitional section (mm. 181–242) that puts fragments of the B theme in dialogue with fluttering neighbor figures in the high winds. Again, we might choose to correlate this passage with lines in the play, perhaps the exchange between Romeo and Juliet, after he reveals himself to her and before her long speech “Thou know’st the mask of night is on my face . . .”30 juliet. romeo.

What man art thou that thus bescreen’d in night So stumblest on my counsel? By a name I know not how to tell thee who I am. My name, dear saint, is hateful to myself, Because it is an enemy to thee; Had I written it, I would tear the word . . .31

But we might also prefer (following Micznik’s topical reading of the movement) to hear it as a musical representation of dialogue itself, no matter what words that dialogue may contain.32 Just as interesting is that “Romeo’s” recitative articulates a segment of a chromatic motive, charged with significance, which Berlioz threads through the entire movement: E–D#–D–C#. The motive appears, for instance, in mm. 128–9 of A1, as a surface-level falling chromatic line in the viola, and, somewhat more disguised, in mm. 258–60 of C2 (Ex. 6.5 shows the motive’s appearances in these two instances and in the transition between B2 and C1). It also occurs at the beginning of A1, in the midst of the long, halting clarinet and English horn melody that resurfaces in the Invocation (see Ex. 6.1a above). As we shall see below, it also rears its head in D and again as late as the codetta.

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Ex. 6.5 Falling chromatic motive

But what does this motive do expressively? Berlioz threads it through not just the movement but the entire symphony, so it must, one imagines, carry some sort of meaning, other than just as a “unifying” device. Jacques Chailley calls this falling chromatic motive a “the`me cyclique” and notes how it first appears (as A–G#–G–F#) in the unaccompanied contralto solo in the Prologue (mm. 24–7) over the words “Le jeune Romeó, plaignant sa destineé, Vient tristement errer a` l’entour du palais” (The young Romeo, bemoaning his destiny, in sadness comes wandering around the palace) then as a part of the main theme from the introduction to Romeó seul (F–E–Eb–D), and also at the end of the Convoi fune`bre (mm. 123 ff., again as A–G#–G–F#).33 (He does not, however, mention the recurrences of this “the`me” within the Sce`ne d’amour itself.) It is tempting to link the falling chromatic line in this movement with Romeo, particularly since it is so clearly linked with him in the Prologue (note: “wandering around the palace,” right before the balcony scene) and in Romeó seul, and to say that his motive is embedded within the A theme just as he is shrouded in the darkness of the “nuit sereine.” But since it appears in so many contexts in the Sce`ne, not all of which can be shown to be depictions of Romeo, we could just as easily argue that with its plaintive character and its associations in other movements with sadness, loneliness, and, ultimately, death, it is in the Sce`ne a harbinger of the tragedy to come, a subtle indication that as fast as this love is set ablaze, so must it be extinguished.

B into C The most audible connections between the B and C sections are the stepwise, rising-third motive and the embellished lower neighbor marked in Ex. 6.4. The rising third, sounded three times at the beginning of C


before it continues, palpably links the two sections since at first one is not certain whether these tentative repetitions might spawn a varied restatement of B.34 But there are other interrelationships as well, which go beyond the level of motive. B1 and C1 each modulate to A major, as if seeking the tonic established in the A section. And sections B and C – like A and D – are presented in paired strophes (granted, with a section separating B’s strophes), the second of which restates the melody of the first a minor third higher (B1 begins on E and B2 on G; C1 begins on F# and C2 on A). Both sections, in other words, strive upward (toward higher registers and more heightened emotions) and outward (toward the tonic and the stability it represents) – C even more than B, reaching the highest register thus far and coming closer than ever before to securing a tonic PAC. B1 could not do so; m. 155 is an evaded cadence, a moment of melodic closure undermined by a bass line that slips downward through V 4/2 to I6. C2 does better. It reaches a PAC in m. 264 – but in name only; any sense of stability is undone by the restless music that follows and the repetitions of C’s cadential gesture. The last of these repetitions leads to yet another PAC in m. 274, but one that is at best attenuated and at worst failed, since the melody never in fact resolves to the tonic.

A, B, and C into D At that moment, of course, follows the first statement of the love theme, the composite of the two passionately lyrical themes that preceded it and the culmination of the repetitive and transformative process that began 150 measures earlier (Ex. 6.6). D’s direct outgrowth of C is particularly striking because the two sections are elided. D, therefore – because it begins with the same rhythm (dotted quarter, eighth, eighth, eighth), albeit starting on a downbeat, and with the same pitch material, albeit transposed – sounds at first like an intensified restatement of C, one that promises to secure the PAC that C could not. To ears unfamiliar with what is to come, even to ears simply not concentrating on the subtle development of the previous themes, this could sound like a third iteration of the C theme: first, starting on F# (mm. 248 ff.), then on A (when its opening phrase is ratcheted up a third in mm. 256 ff.), and finally on E (mm. 274 ff.). Only with the return of the tag from B do we realize that we are at once somewhere new (no longer really C) and familiar (once again B). This sense of familiarity is most palpable here because so much of D is derived from material heard previously – more so, in fact, than others acknowledge. The motive E–D#–D–C# returns, for example, prominently

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Ex. 6.6 The love theme

displayed as a counterpoint to the love theme (mm. 274–6; see the falling “alto line” in Ex. 6.6). So does the A pedal, which was first heard in A1 and A2, underlining yet again the importance of these sections in the emergence of the love theme. The diminished-seventh chord beneath the D# of the falling chromatic motive (D#–F#–A–C, here in second inversion) also recalls material already heard (Ex. 6.7). Moving backward toward the beginning of the movement: the same diminished-seventh chord (enharmonically respelled with a B#, and with the same bass pitch as in m. 275, A) appears as a pizzicato string chord in m. 207, during the transition between B2 and C1 (see the asterisked chord in Ex. 6.7a). The chord emerges in m. 150 of B1, functioning as a viio 6/5 in the context of Csharp minor (Ex. 6.7b). It is contained within the dominant-ninth of iii


Ex. 6.7 The recurring diminished-seventh chord

in m. 135 (G#–B#–D#–F#–A), mentioned above in the discussion about the keys of sections B and C first appearing as chords in A (Ex. 6.7c); this chord is the first chromatic harmony of the movement proper and the first escape from the tonic pedal of the opening period. Finally, the diminished-seventh chord in m. 275 of D appears at the very beginning of the introduction to the Sce`ne d’amour in the same inversion (with an A in the bass), with the same instrumentation (strings), and in a strikingly similar setting (Ex. 6.7d). In both cases, the chord sounds wistful, drooping from the tonic and then evaporating. (In m. 275 it is a common-tone diminished-seventh chord; in m. 3 it is enharmonically reinterpreted and resolves shockingly to a cadential 6/4 in E-flat major.) Remarkably, the falling chromatic motive E–D#–D–C# hovers like a ghost behind the first eighteen measures of the introduction. Though not

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all four pitches are sounded by the same instrument – the first violins’ D in m. 4 leads to the violas’ enharmonically equivalent Eb in m. 5, and that Eb is transferred to the second violins’ D in m. 11 – they are sounded in the same register and projected by the underlying voice leading: a mere suggestion of what is to come, a dimly lit image of the movement’s most characteristic motive, sounding in conjunction with one of its most characteristic sonorities. So, one might say, the various sections of the movement are interrelated. But what does that mean? What about this interrelationship is Shakespearian, dramatic, metaphorical? Musically, what we see is that the love theme flowers not just from portions of “Romeo’s” and “Juliet’s” themes but from the vast, dark, and rich world of all the music that precedes it, and that this flowering involves not only the combination of thematic segments but also the subtler reuse and reinterpretation of hidden motives and particular harmonic colors. The union of ideas achieved in D, in short, comes about not so much from fusing disparate elements as from casting new light on elements always, already there. It takes no great stretch of the imagination to see how this musical process is analogous to the dramatic process of the scene itself. For in the balcony scene what is always, already there are the lovers themselves and their longing for one another. They have, we should remember, already met that very evening; their situations, like their feelings, are alike. Over the course of the scene, their passion for each other is not so much born, or even discovered, as it is materialized – made real from what was there but needed to be articulated and combined into a whole greater than the sum of its parts. Berlioz’s thematic metamorphosis captures in musical terms that movement from the latent to the actual.

The fulfillment of the love theme But we are not finished yet. What follows the actual is the transcendent – the growth of that passion through repetition. The Sce`ne d’amour could have ended in m. 280. But we are only a little over halfway done, 150 measures into a 265-measure movement. Over the next 115 measures, Berlioz turns what seems like a closing theme into the main stuff of the movement. In m. 280, just as the PAC has been attained, a fragment of the B theme intrudes (see Ex. 6.6 above). The passage is as declamatory as the cellos’ recitative-like pleas in the transitional passage that precedes the C theme

Finishing an ending

(mm. 205 ff.) and just as suggestive of speech. Again, it is easy to hear a bit of Romeo here, perhaps his equally expressive line, “Lady, by yonder blessed moon I vow,” which falls directly on the heels of Juliet’s “Thou know’st . . .” speech, or his “O wilt thou leave me so unsatisfied?,” which refuses to accept Juliet’s “Good night, good night” from two lines earlier, just as the musical interruption refuses to accept the cadential closure of m. 280. One might even hear in the lush, intensified strophic repetition of the love theme in m. 286 (right after “Romeo’s” interruption) a musical representation of Juliet’s line about withdrawing her “faithful vow” to Romeo, only so that she may “give it thee again.”35 But we should not let these tantalizing measure-to-line correspondences blind us to the musical rationale behind the expressive interruption of the love theme and its elaborated restatement. The restatement amplifies the theme, just as Romeo’s and Juliet’s emotions are amplified. It grounds it even more securely in the tonic, since here for the first time are two strophic presentations of a theme that remain in the tonic throughout and end with strong cadences. (B and C sought a secure A major tonic but never quite found it; D, having found it, clings to it.) And it brings together even more of the material heard previously. The undulating arpeggios in the second violins and violas come directly from the accompaniment to the C melody. The added grace-note upper neighbor in the second bar of D2’s melody (not present in D1) links this section even more obviously with the B section, where the complete neighbor first appeared. And – most strikingly – the melody in D2 is played by the tenor-register instruments associated with B and the soprano-register instruments associated with C. The lovers’ voices are united. What they say is not so much the point as how they say it – and how these two tonally grounded strophes, the coalescence of all that precedes them, are clearer and more certain than anything before, as clear and certain as Romeo’s and Juliet’s feelings for one another.

Finishing an ending But here too Berlioz has more to say. The closing material becomes the subject of a series of strophic elaborations; tail and head are joined again in a conceptual elision whereby what might have ended the movement instead initiates a long stretch of music that explores the nature of ending itself. Remarkably, the PAC in m. 292 is the last we will hear for ninety measures; the next and final one comes in m. 382, where the short codetta

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Ex. 6.8 D6

begins. From m. 292 onward, the music continually evades closure, and with every evasion spawns a new strophe of the love theme.36 The culmination of this strophic repetition is the final, full-blooded statement of the love theme tag in m. 367 at the end of D6 (see Ex. 6.8a; for reasons of space I have included only the melody). It hearkens back to B by presenting its cadential material in full and forges the closest connection yet with the character of Romeo by recapitulating (in the correct key, E major) the passage from the Prologue which accompanies the text “[Romeo] Se dećouvre a` Juliette, Et de son cœur les feux ećlatent a` leur tour” (Romeo reveals himself to Juliet, and from his heart a fire leaps out in its turn) (Ex. 6.8b). Moreover, it represents the highpoint of a process by which the tag of the love theme becomes successively more important than its beginning. These two processes – the deferral of closure until m. 382 and the growing significance of the tag, leading ultimately to its unequivocal “Romeo” version – respond to the rhythm and sense of Shakespeare’s text better than any faithful resetting of his words. The first process is nothing less than a metaphor for the sentiment that “parting is such sweet sorrow.” Cadences are nearly confirmed only to be evaded and reapproached, just as Juliet’s goodbyes are uttered and then uttered again. (She bids Romeo farewell, and exits, a total of three times, first with “dear love, adieu,” then with “a thousand times good night,” and finally with “Then I shall say good night ’till it be morrow.” Yet each time she “come[s] again,” each time she “call[s] thee back,” each time the lovers repeat their affections with even more passion and urgency. We

Finishing an ending

Ex. 6.9 Tags of D3 and D4

need not look for three cadences but can simply allow that listening to a piece which continually defers closure is analogous to watching a play in which characters are reluctant to say good night.) The second process is a musical manifestation of the full emergence of Romeo’s love for Juliet. The full unfurling of “his” cadential gesture, finally unmistakably linked by its reference to the Prologue with his character, is like the full, passionate expression of his love for Juliet – his tag does not represent his utterance, per se; its course, in musical terms, is like the course of his actions, in dramatic terms. If the scene is about confirming a vow that is offered early on37 but must be said ever more fervently and sealed with an agreement before it can be fully believed, then the movement is likewise about confirming a cadential gesture that materializes early on but can only be fulfilled with repetition. The Sce`ne d’amour and the balcony scene are, in short, about finishing an ending. D2 (mm. 286 ff., the intensified repetition of D1), of course, ends with a tonic PAC in m. 292, but that PAC spawns a cadential extension which modulates to the dominant and then leads to an extended “developmental” section (mm. 300 ff.), which heads toward C major (mm. 311–14). We are not gone from the tonic for long – it returns and is rearticulated with an authentic cadence in m. 317 – but this episode drives home the point that the movement is far from over in m. 292. The return to A major brings with it a return of the love theme, which, as before, occurs in a paired fashion, with D4 intensifying D3. But unlike D1 and D2, neither of these strophes is fully closed (Ex. 6.9). In D3 the last four notes of the tag surge upward (the expected melodic line B–G#–E–A becomes B–C#–D–E in mm. 328–9) as the bass sinks downward to C# and a I6.38 In D4 the tag ends properly, but its ending is

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Ex. 6.10 D5

supported by a bizarre chromatic bass line, A–G#–G–G#–A in mm. 326–8, an obvious reference to the same bass line in mm. 106 ff. of the choral introduction to the Sce`ne, and also a possible reference to the E–D#–D–C# motive heard throughout the movement. The musical reference is coupled with a textual one. In the introduction, the motive appears while the chorus sings, “au revoir, quelle nuit festin . . . la belle feˆte,” and it is difficult not to hear echoes of these thoughts of leave-taking in the motive’s return. The tag to D5 also fails to reach its end, this time with an even more extensive melodic and harmonic alteration (see Ex. 6.10, mm. 350 ff.). The melody surges upward even sooner than it did in D4, eliminating the signature falling sixth D–B–F altogether and, in mm. 352 ff., repeating a fragment of the theme (D–E–F#–C#–E) with a modally inflected F natural. The modal inflection is matched by a sudden flat-side plunge into E-flat major. Here again, though, we expect a PAC (any PAC will do at this point, no matter whether in I or bV) and are left wanting: a jarring

“Romeo’s” theme becomes Romeo’s theme

diminished-seventh chord pulls the rug out in m. 358. Just as striking as the chromaticism and the evaded cadence, however, is the fragmentation of the love theme’s opening. In m. 341, a seemingly new melody emerges, but one which clearly enough embellishes the first three notes of D’s head motive, E–F#–G#, now in E major. It is not much of a melody, though: it cannot get going and ends up caught in a loop (as the tag does in mm. 352 ff.), circling until the sudden halt in m. 348. Accompanying it are equally disjointed fragments in the cello: falling sixths that refer to the characteristic sixths of the tag (also perhaps to those from the A section). Programmatically, one might venture that the back-and-forth play between the cellos’ falling sixths and the violins’ embellished rising fourth suggests a dialogue between Romeo and Juliet. Equally important, though, is that the head of the love theme – fragmented, combined with something foreign to it – loses some of its identity.

“Romeo’s” theme becomes Romeo’s theme That process continues in the next and climactic strophe, D6 (mm. 362 ff.) (see Ex. 6.8a above). Here, the lyrical love theme opening is virtually gone. In its place come cycling fragments of “Romeo’s” theme, the B theme; a rising fourth, to be sure, is still present, but more recognizable is the grace-note figure from B, which spins itself into a frenzy and leads to the passionate restatement of the tag figure as it appeared in B and in the Prologue. The resemblance of these measures to those in B begs the question: Why call this D6 rather than B3? In truth, neither label suffices. To be sure, Berlioz builds a certain symmetry into this movement, just as he does in similarly circular movements like Reˆveries, Passions from the Symphonie fantastique and the Marche des pe`lerins from Harold en Italie. In dealing with any of these movements, it would be a mistake not to recognize as much. But in the Sce`ne d’amour, arguably even more than in the other two movements, the sense that we have resolved a tension by returning to previous material, as in a sonata form’s recapitulation or a ternary form’s A0 section, is less strong than the sense that we have discovered the full extent of a potentiality that was already present. “Romeo’s” theme is not so much returned to as fully realized (“Romeo’s” theme, we might say, becomes Romeo’s theme). A tension is not resolved; a tendency is reified (namely, the tendency of this gesture to “signify” Romeo and all that his vow implies). In fact, the moment is meaningful

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Ex. 6.11 D7

more for its referential force and its sheer massiveness than for its largescale structural importance. Romeo’s cadential melody in m. 367 is really no more intact or conclusive than in mm. 150 and 176. If anything, it is less so. It may be sounded in a key more closely related to the tonic than C-sharp minor and C major, but it plainly does not achieve large-scale tonal closure by rearticulating the tonic – and unlike its appearance in B1 and B2, it does not achieve tonal closure on the smallest of scales by producing a strong cadence: another PAC is evaded in mm. 371–2, with the drop to V4/2 in m. 371 and the crash upon a diminished-seventh chord in m. 372, analogous to the end of D5. The deńouement comes in D7, m. 375ff., and with it the resolution that can now (only now) occur after the climactic and confirmatory outpouring of D6, which has been prepared by all that comes before it (Ex. 6.11). Only the tag appears this final time, in the tonic; it haltingly works its way toward the PAC the music has been seeking for over one hundred bars, a marvelous expression of the reluctance with which Romeo and Juliet say their final goodbye and one of the most rewarding cadences in Berlioz’s œuvre. The subsequent codetta (mm. 382) – need it be said, elided with the end of D7 – whispers to the very end, but not without a last, faint reminiscence of the movement’s Ur-motive, E–D#–D–C# in mm. 385–6, that spirit of the night which, it seems, has never left us.

Thematic illumination

Thematic illumination The density of the analysis above should not be taken as evidence that the Sce`ne d’amour is overly complex. In fact, its logic is quite simple: generate the main theme of a movement not by combining discrete elements of other themes but by allowing each theme to metamorphose imperceptibly into the next. Do not display the main theme suddenly; reveal it gradually, so that its true identity is only recognizable in retrospect. And then, once the theme has emerged, repeat it until it can be repeated no longer. One might imagine Berlioz as a sculptor, who makes several different models of a figure he has in mind, out of the same-sized hunks of clay, until he has it – and then he makes copy after copy until he has no more room to put them. Walking into his studio, we might not be able to notice on first glance a difference between the objects he has made. And so is it with listening to the Sce`ne d’amour. It requires energy to discern which theme is which, shuttling back and forth in our mind between what we just heard and what we are now hearing, assessing what has changed and what has stayed the same. But, whether we expend that energy or not, by the end we are spellbound, and we know we have transcended the point where we began, entered a different, ecstatic realm, even though everything we have heard seemed to evolve naturally (not burst forth miraculously) from familiar materials. The process is particularly un-Beethovenian, indeed un-Germanic – less the result of thematic manipulation than of thematic illumination. It is what prompted Wagner to complain, in his 1857 letter on Liszt’s symphonic poems, that when he heard the Sce`ne, he lost its “musical thread.” In his eyes, the music lacked the “logical and perceptible alternation of distinct motives”; it was too beholden to Shakespeare’s scene, and thus its form proved largely unintelligible to a listener who had no written program to guide him.39 Wagner is correct up to a point. The music does lack a perceptible alteration of distinct motives. It is difficult on a first pass to tell which theme is which. Its continually evolving, sometimes disorienting form does strain our powers of perception. These features, though, are not shortcomings but devices carefully chosen to capture the essence of Shakespeare’s scene. We might even go so far as to say that Berlioz has in fact done what Wagner expected of him – and what Wagner so praised in Liszt: distilled from a specific textual narrative a more generalized poetic Formmotiv – here, the emergence of an idea and then its fulfillment – and then allowed it to influence the musical form, or, in Dahlhaus’s words, to “‘motivate’ the music and its reason for being.”40

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Thomas Schacher, in an exemplary study of the movement, aptly characterizes the metaphorical relationship between the character of the lovers’ dialogue and the music’s form: In this thematic metamorphosis one can see an analogy with the scene it suggests. In this lovers’ dialogue, everything new that is said represents basically a variation of what has already been said and, conversely, the same feelings clothed in evernew words.41

Schacher’s underlying conviction resonates with my own: there ought to be a way to measure carefully how Berlioz responds to Shakespeare’s text – or indeed to any program, be it a leaflet handed out at performance or a suggestive title – without wedding himself to it. We ought to be able to show how musical techniques have similar effects as poetic ones, all the while recognizing that the two are not (and cannot ever be) wholly compatible.

7

Epilogue

Berlioz and eccentricity In the introduction to his translation of Berlioz’s memoirs, David Cairns writes, “Today . . . the characteristics that once made [Berlioz’s music] bizarrely unconventional . . . are once again quite natural; his originality, without having lost its vividness, no longer seems eccentric.”1 I have aimed in part to demystify some of Berlioz’s music and to debunk some of the misconceptions about it: that it is formless, slapdash, so strange as to elude comprehension, resistant to analysis. My discussion of convention in the introduction to this study implied that we can look at Berlioz as having worked with the models he knew, for all he transformed them; and my hope is that the analyses in the preceding pages have made him out to be above all a craftsman, if often a heady and exuberant one – not “bizarrely unconventional” but mindfully experimental. I also hope, however, to have shown that Berlioz’s originality does in many respects still seem eccentric, and that, in fact, the more we delve into Berlioz’s art, the more its eccentricities reveal themselves to us and the better we are able to appreciate them rather than wish them away. This is not to say that his music lacks logic. I would not have taken up this project if I did not believe that Berlioz’s music was coherent and compelling. (Otherwise, there would be no point in analyzing it.) I would not have lost myself in the Roi Lear overture (the first piece that got me thinking about Berlioz’s peculiar sense of form) if I had not thought it possible to explain what Berlioz is doing and why he is doing it. Yet “what Berlioz is doing,” so often, is testing the limits of coherence, challenging us to think about new forms of logic, finding new ways to express himself by combining musical elements – including musical forms – in such a way that the result cannot be explained so easily. In this sense, his music is important not just for its place in the history of program music, for its innovations, formal and otherwise, which continue to astonish, and for its representing a particularly French approach to symphonic music. It is also important because it challenges us to think again about how and why we do analysis in general and how we understand

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Epilogue

form in particular, no matter the era in question. Trying to make sense of Berlioz’s forms points up the limitations of any analytical methodology that regards form as a container into which a piece’s materials fit. Berlioz’s forms are not containers; they are vehicles for expressing ideas, for shaping the imaginative experience of listening to music. And they are often irreducibly complex, as troubled, fractured, distorted, peculiar, unbounded – in a word, eccentric – as the worlds of thought and feeling they help to convey. Getting to know these forms ought to mean plumbing their eccentricities, not inuring ourselves to them, and relinquishing the expectation that they can be summed up with a single formal scheme or accommodated to one idea of order. In focusing on how and why Berlioz incorporates techniques of strophic variation into his program music, I have tried to follow my own advice: to resist any urge to “solve” these strange pieces or to show that, in spite of their peculiarities, they can (“in fact”) be reduced to rotational/ circular formal models. The reader will be the best judge of whether I have succeeded or not, but the gist of my underlying thesis is worth reiterating: strophic variation provides a way into these pieces, not a way out of them – a means of cracking into their musical and poetic wonders and setting the hermeneutic circle in motion, not of “figuring them out” and then setting them aside. The varied-repetitive principle I have revealed in the first movement of the Symphonie fantastique and the Carnaval romain, for example, does not replace a sonata principle, or worse invalidate it. It complicates it. My analyses attempt to keep both principles in play, resonating – sometimes sympathetically, sometimes not – with each other, and opt as much as possible for plurality over singularity, expansion of analytical possibilities rather than the reduction of them. And my hope is that these analyses and the others in this book will therefore generate as many questions as they answer. In closing, then, I would like briefly to pose a few of those questions and to suggest where the discussion might be taken from here.

Beyond strophic variation One question has to do with other structural archetypes besides strophic variation. If, as I suggested in the last chapter, strophic variation can be construed as a kind of Wagnerian Formmotiv (despite Wagner’s dismissal of the Sce`ne d’amour) through which Berlioz expresses in musical terms the essence of a poetic idea, what other archetypes offered similar possibilities?

Beyond strophic variation

Berlioz’s formal innovations obviously go far beyond his experiments with rotational/circular form. There is much more to say, for example, about his unique handling of sonata form. I have touched on that topic already, most directly in my chapters on the sonata-rotational forms of the Carnaval romain overture and the first movement of the Symphonie fantastique, but the “problem of sonata form” in Berlioz demands further study. It would have to address what, structurally speaking, he learned not just from Beethoven but from Gluck, Spontini, Weber, Reicha, and even Cherubini. And it would have to assess the possible poetic rationale for his idiosyncratic retakes on the sonata-form model he inherited from his predecessors. For all that Berlioz adhered to typical tonic-dominant (or tonic-mediant) tonal schemes and the model of the two-themed exposition, it is here where his adherence to a standard, textbook sonata form ends. His development sections are peculiarly non-developmental, often in fact static; his introductions are long and often include themes (like the slow theme from Le Carnaval romain or Le Corsaire) that return in the context of the sonata proper, sometimes shifting emphasis away from the primary theme (as in both of these overtures); though his primary and secondary themes are almost always in the “right” keys, the tonal drama of many of his pieces centers not around the polarity between the tonic and the dominant but around the tonic and rogue key areas (often chromatic mediants) that usurp the strength of the dominant; and like many other nineteenth-century symphonists, Berlioz often throws the weight of his sonata forms on their codas, not their recapitulations.2 Why? Which of these techniques might be poetically or programmatically motivated? Is Berlioz’s seeming dissatisfaction with normative sonata form fueled by his desire to press it into the service of expressing newer and more vivid images and ideas? What would a thoroughgoing study of Berlioz’s (idiosyncratic, expressive, dramatically driven) “sonata language” reveal? Then there are Berlioz’s song forms – not as they manifest themselves in his instrumental music, but as he uses them in vocal music. He is no less inventive in this context. Simple strophic forms abound (as they do in many French songs of the time), but above all one finds varied strophic forms, Berliozian efforts to push beyond the conventions of the romance genre. Berlioz’s through-composed songs (such as many in Les Nuits d’e´te´) are justifiably famous, watershed moments in nineteenth-century French song. But his powers of innovation are no less evident in his pliable strophic elaborations: in the first song of Les Nuits d’e´te´, La Vilanelle, with three strophes that grow ever more complex, dense, chromatic, and tangled – as overgrown and full of life as the springtime scene the song

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describes; in the stunning song La Mort d’Ophe´lie (1842), whose four strophes grow more rhythmically active, more chromatic, and more closely connected as the song progresses – a poignant musical metaphor for the swirling current and the madness that pull Ophelia under.3 Here, too, even in the context of song, Berlioz seems to recognize and exploit the images that strophic elaboration can suggest. A closer study of these and other songs would show how Berlioz thought no less imaginatively about form even when working in miniature and – considering how many of his large-scale orchestral pieces were stimulated by small-scale vocal works – further make the case that song was at the heart of his entire idiom, not at the margins.

Beyond form Continued research into Berlioz’s evocation of extreme states (mania, madness, hallucination, chaos, etc.) would have to consider how he harnessed the powers not only of musical form but also of other musical parameters. As with Berlioz’s forms, this is not always easy, because it is sometimes hard to tell what seemingly peculiar feature of a Berlioz piece is motivated (an expressive choice, something striking enough to demand interpretation) and what is merely a part of what we might call Berlioz’s idiolect – his natural musical habits. Take harmony, for example. There may be no reason to attach much significance to an improperly resolving diminished-seventh chord in a Berlioz piece, or even a string of them, as noteworthy as such an event might seem, because Berlioz uses them so often that they practically become the norm. But what of other harmonic moves? Certain of Berlioz’s modulatory schemes, when read in the context of his overall style and the particular piece in which they occur, do seem motivated. For example, the song Sur les lagunes from Les Nuits d’e´te´ and the Me´ditation from Berlioz’s cantata Cleópaˆtre (his 1829 Prix de Rome submission, whose harmonic indiscretions horrified his examiners) foreground a particular chromatic-mediant relationship – not the “uncanny” hexatonic poles recently characterized by Richard Cohn,4 but a move from a minor triad to a minor triad whose root lies a major third above, which is every bit as disorienting and defamiliarizing as the harmonic progressions Cohn describes. The opening phrase of Sur les lagunes modulates from G minor to B minor, the opening of the Me´ditation from C-sharp minor to F minor. How might these unorthodox progressions evoke the onslaught of grief experienced by the poetic personae? Is it more

Beyond form

than coincidental that both characters muse on death and entering the grave – the singer in Sur les lagunes crying for his dead “belle amie” who he believes will take to the grave his soul and all his love, Cleopatra singing about entering the pyramids of her ancestors? Might Berlioz have chosen these distant, almost otherworldly modulations because they suggest the distance between this world and the next?5 And what other harmonic procedures might he have been drawn to for their similarly disorienting effects? Consider also rhythm, a musical parameter that Berlioz believed was under-exploited in his day and that he treated more imaginatively than anyone in his generation. I did not focus on the rhythmic/metric aspects of the Carnaval romain overture in chapter 4, but it is clear that the overture’s metric irregularities and dissonances, particularly toward the end of the piece, suggest the chaotic roar of a noisy crowd as much as its carnivalesque form does. Another obvious example is the grotesque “Ride to the Abyss” from La Damnation de Faust, where Faust is driven to hell on crazed horses: it is a tour de force in rhythmic invention, a musical representation of terror that hurtles to the edge of disorder. We need only recall Cone’s comment (cited at the end of chapter 2) that “more than any other factor, it is rhythm that determines the appropriateness of a musical movement to its extra-musical subject”6 to sense the need for a study that systematically addresses this defining feature of Berlioz’s style and the expressive ends it serves. In an essay in a recent Berlioz collection Jacques Barzun assesses the state of Berlioz scholarship and concludes that what is missing is an examination of Berlioz’s “overall aesthetic.”7 Such a project – certainly a massive undertaking but not beyond conception, considering how far our understanding of Berlioz has come in the past half century – would be welcome indeed. But, it seems to me, we could also start smaller, bringing together different musical parameters (like form, harmony, and rhythm), different genres, and different intellectual contexts into an exploration of what we might call Berlioz’s “aesthetic of eccentricity” or “aesthetic of extremity.” Scholars are now examining with ever-greater precision and subtlety the musical, literary, artistic, cultural, and intellectual currents that fueled Berlioz’s fascination with the fantastic, the grotesque, the melancholic, the manic. This opens the door for a more broad-ranging study of the musical byproducts of that fascination. My hope is that this book, in touching on some of them, has stimulated some ideas about how we might move in that direction.

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1 Introduction 1. New Berliozians include such scholars as Peter Bloom, David Cairns, Hugh Macdonald, Ian Kemp, Julian Rushton, Katherine Kolb Reeve, and D. Kern Holoman, many of whom contributed essays to Berlioz Studies, ed. Peter Bloom (Cambridge University Press, 1992), a collection that helped to usher in a new era of Berlioz scholarship. 2. For an illuminating look at the field from a few years back, on the eve of the bicentenary festivities, see D. Kern Holoman, “Berlioz, Lately,” 19th-Century Music 25/2–3 (Fall–Spring 2001–2), 337–46. 3. Hector Berlioz, New Edition of the Complete Works, 26 vols., gen. ed. Hugh Macdonald (Kassel: Ba¨renreiter, 1969–2006) (hereafter NBEI, NBEII, etc.); Correspondance geńe´rale, 8 vols., gen. ed. Pierre Citron (Paris: Flammarion, 1972–2003) (hereafter CGI, CGII, etc.). 4. Hector Berlioz, Critique musicale, 10 vols. projected, gen. ed. Yves Ge´rard (Paris: Buchet/Chastel, 1996–) (hereafter CMI, CMII, etc.). The latest addition is vol. V: 1842–4, ed. Anne Bongrain and Marie-He´le`ne Coudroy-Saghaı¨ (2004). 5. Hugh Macdonald, Berlioz (Oxford University Press, 2000; orig. pub. J. M. Dent and Sons Ltd., 1982); D. Kern Holoman, Berlioz (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989); Peter Bloom, The Life of Berlioz (Cambridge University Press, 1998); David Cairns, Berlioz 1803–1832: The Making of an Artist (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999; orig. pub. A. Deutsch, 1989), Berlioz 1832–1869: Servitude and Greatness (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000; orig. pub. Penguin, 1999). 6. Gunther Braam and Arnold Jacobshagen, eds., Hector Berlioz in Deutschland: Texte und Dokumente zur deutschen Berlioz-Rezeption (1829–1843) (Go¨ttingen: Heinholz, 2002); Pierre Citron and Cećile Reynaud, eds., Dictionnaire Berlioz (Paris: Fayard, 2003). 7. Peter Bloom, ed., Berlioz: Past, Present, Future: Bicentenary Essays (Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 2003) and Berlioz: Scenes from the Life and Work (Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 2008); Frank Heidlberger, ed., Berlioz in the Age of French Romanticism (Denton, Texas: University of North Texas Press, forthcoming). 8. Julian Rushton, The Musical Language of Berlioz (Cambridge University Press, 1983), Berlioz: Romeó et Juliette (Cambridge University Press, 1994), The Music

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9.

10.

11.

12.

13. 14.

of Berlioz (Oxford University Press, 2001). See also his articles “Berlioz’s Swan-Song: Toward a Criticism of Beátrice et Beńe´dict,” Proceedings of the Royal Music Association 59 (1982–3), 105–18, “The Overture to Les Troyens,” Music Analysis 4/1–2 (March–July 1986), 119–44, “Les Nuits d’e´te´: Cycle or Collection?” in Berlioz Studies, pp. 112–35, and “Berlioz and Irlande: From Romance to Me´lodie,” Irish Musical Studies 5 (1996), 224–40. From his “Berlioz” entry in Sir George Grove, ed., Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd edition, ed. J. A. Fuller Maitland, 5 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1927, orig. pub. 1904), vol. I, p. 313. Elsewhere Hadow remarks that the first movement of the Symphonie fantastique “simply breaks with the fundamental rules of the art, and that not with the iconoclasm of a reformer, but with the awkwardness of a tyro” (said at a Berlioz conference in December 1928; quoted in Tom Wotton, Hector Berlioz [Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1970, orig. pub. 1935], p. 152, and also mentioned in Wotton’s Studies in Modern Music I: Berlioz, Schumann, Wagner [New York: Macmillan, 1893], p. 140). Franz Liszt, “Berlioz und seine Haroldsymphonie,” in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. IV, ed. Lina Ramann (1882) (Wiesbaden, 1978), pp. 1–102. Orig. pub. in Neue Zeitschrift fu¨r Musik 43 (July–August 1855). Portions translated in Oliver Strunk, Source Readings in Music History, rev. ed., ed. Leo Treitler (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Co., 1998), pp. 115–74. Subsequent citations come from Strunk. ¨ ber Franz Liszts symphonische Dichtungen,” in Sa¨mRichard Wagner, “U tliche Schriften und Dichtungen, vol. V, ed. Richard Sternfeld (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Ha¨rtel/C. F. W. Siegel), pp. 1911–16. For a fascinating look at the dichotomy between program music and absolute music that emerged in the latter half of the nineteenth century, and the inapplicability of that dichotomy to repertory and aesthetics of the early nineteenth century, see Mark Evan Bonds, “Idealism and the Aesthetics of Instrumental Music at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 50/2–3 (Summer–Autumn 1997), 387–420. Walter Werbeck, Die Tondichtungen von Richard Strauss, Dokumente und Studien zu Richard Strauss 2 (Tutzing: Hans Schneider, 1996), p. 15. Hepokoski’s and Darcy’s comments on rotational form may be found in the following: Hepokoski, Sibelius: Symphony No. 5 (Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 23–6, 58–84; Darcy, “The Metaphysics of Annihilation: Wagner, Schopenhauer, and the Ending of the Ring,” Music Theory Spectrum 16 (1994), 1–40 (see especially pp. 10 ff.); Hepokoski, “The Essence of Sibelius: Creation Myths and Rotational Cycles in Luonnotar,” in Glenda Dawn Ross, ed., The Sibelius Companion (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1996), pp. 121– 46; Darcy, “Bruckner’s Sonata Deformations,” in Timothy L. Jackson and Paul Hawkshaw, eds., Bruckner Studies (Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 256–77; Hepokoski, “Rotations, Sketches, and [Sibelius’s] Sixth


15. 16.

17.

18.

19.

20. 21.

Symphony,” in Timothy L. Jackson and Veijo Murtoma¨ki, eds., Sibelius Studies (Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 322–51; Darcy, “Rotational Form, Teleological Genesis, and Fantasy-Projection in the Slow Movement of Mahler’s Sixth Symphony,” 19th-Century Music 25/1 (Summer 2001), 49–74; Hepokoski, “Beethoven Reception: The Symphonic Tradition,” in Jim Samson, ed., The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Music (Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 424–59; Hepokoski, “Structure, Implication, and the End of Suor Angelica,” Studi pucciniani 3 (2004), 241–64; and Hepokoski and Darcy, Elements of Sonata Theory: Norms, Types, and Deformations in the LateEighteenth-Century Sonata (Oxford University Press, 2006), Appendix 2 (“Terminology: Rotation and Deformation”), pp. 611–14. For Morgan’s discussion of “circular form,” see “Circular Form in the Tristan Prelude,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 53/1 (Spring 2000), 69–104. Julian Rushton, “Genre in Berlioz,” in Peter Bloom, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Berlioz (Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 47. The concept of the ideé poe´tique (and its equivalent, the penseé poe´tique), which is central to Berlioz’s and others’ discussions of expressive instrumental music, will be explored in chapter 3. Certain aspects of his musical style, for that matter, can also seem conservative. While Wagner and his followers coaxed harmony out of its comfortable diatonic frame, calling into question standard notions of key and harmonic function, Berlioz remained for the most part wedded to the triad and to the basic syntax of functional tonality. For an illuminating look at Berlioz’s chordal vocabulary, see Rushton’s chapter “Concerning Pitch (1): Chord and Progression” in The Musical Language of Berlioz, pp. 23–37. Donald Francis Tovey, for example, asserts that Berlioz’s “genius for composition is independent of any external shapes” (Essays in Musical Analysis, 6 vols. [London: Oxford University Press, 1965, orig. pub. 1937], vol. IV, p. 76), and Hugh Macdonald, though he recognizes, in Berlioz, that his music “has its overwhelming demands on tonality and architecture which no nineteenthcentury composer could gainsay” (198), argues elsewhere that he “paid only lip service to such inherited patterns as sonata form. Intuition and expression were allowed to dominate expectation and rule” (“Berlioz,” in L. Macy, ed., Grove Music Online, www.grovemusic.com [accessed August 16, 2007]. G. T. Sanford, in “The Overtures of Hector Berlioz,” Ph.D. diss., University of Southern California, 1964, falls into this trap, forcing many of Berlioz’s overtures into sonata-form patterns that are inappropriate to them. Darcy, “Rotational Form, Teleological Genesis,” 52. Hepokoski’s, Darcy’s, and Morgan’s recent work obviously qualifies (see n. 14 above), but so does William E. Caplin’s thoroughgoing study of classical form (see especially his Classical Form: A Theory of Formal Functions for the Instrumental Music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven [Oxford University Press, 1997]).

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22. Darcy has examined the rotational structure of the scherzo from Mahler’s Second Symphony, a movement that recycles material from his song Des Antonius von Padua Fischpredigt (“Sie bleiben wie Allen: Rotational Form and the Thematization of Failure in Mahler’s Fish Sermon,” paper presented at Music Theory Midwest, Minneapolis, Minn., May 17, 2002). Raymond Knapp discusses the same song-into-symphony transformation as well as other “song-based re-cyclings” in Mahler’s output in Symphonic Metamorphoses: Subjectivity and Alienation in Mahler’s Re-Cycled Songs (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2003) (chapter 2: “Representing Alienation: ‘Absolute Music’ as a Topic, ‘Des Antonius von Padua Fischpredigt’ and the Second Symphony,” pp. 71–120). These two studies alone indicate how much Berlioz and Mahler are kindred spirits in their intense interest in mixing the idioms of vocal and instrumental music.

2 Preliminary examples and recent theories 1. Rushton puts it this way: “Melody, for Berlioz, is the most vital agent of musical expression and the primary building block of musical form” (The Musical Language of Berlioz, p. 167). 2. The same is of course true of the following section, which presents a contrasting though similar thematic idea also in successive diminution: first thirteen measures of dotted half notes, then seven measures of dotted quarter notes, then four measures of quarters and eighths. 3. There are numerous other straightforward examples in which Berlioz repeats and varies a theme in this fashion. The opening measures of the overture Waverley, for instance, feature four meandering phrases, each one a more noticeable variation of the one that precedes it: the second phrase of Waverley is virtually identical to the first, only its melody does not descend as far; the third shifts the melody to a different scale degree and truncates the phrase by three measures; the fourth presents the opening motive in inversion. Romeó seul from Romeó et Juliette opens similarly, with three unaccompanied phrases for first violin, each circuitous and meditative like Romeo’s thoughts and each related, but none exactly like what comes before it. Thereafter (mm. 22 ff.) come four repetitions of the motive F–A–A–G, but here it is not the melody that is varied but the harmonies that support it, as if Romeo were examining the same idea from many angles, continually reinterpreting it. 4. The line comes from the first corrected edition of the printed full score (1845). Nicholas Temperley regards this text as the most authoritative since it is the latest revision of a version Berlioz used, with minor changes, for twenty-five years (1830–55). 5. Deborah Adelson, A. E. F. Dickinson, and Dale Cockrell all view the cantabile theme as a representation of Cordelia (see Adelson, “Interpreting Berlioz’s Overture to King Lear, Opus 4: Problems and Solutions,” Current Musicology


6. 7. 8.

9. 10. 11.

12.

35 [1983], 49; Dickinson, The Music of Berlioz [London: Faber and Faber, 1972], p. 163; and Cockrell, “Berlioz and le syste`me Shakespearien” [Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois, 1978], p. 20). But theirs is not the only word on the matter. Tovey and Jacques Barzun dismiss any fundamental relationship between Berlioz’s overture and Shakespeare’s play (see Tovey, Essays in Musical Analysis, vol. IV, p. 83, and Barzun, Berlioz and the Romantic Century, 2 vols. [New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1969; orig. pub. Little, Brown, and Co., 1950], vol. I, p. 177). We may grant that the cantabile theme might suggest Cordelia’s reply to the king’s query, but we need not look to Shakespeare to explain why Berlioz repeats the melody three times. From a musical point of view, the repetitions give weight to the theme and allow it to counterbalance the jagged recitative-like theme of the introduction, as well as the agitated primary theme and clumsy (if outwardly more lyrical) secondary theme. Nothing is clumsy in the cantabile theme. Cordelia or not, it offers a lyrical sanctuary from the rest of the overture, all the more so because we are given time to luxuriate in it. Jean-Pierre Bartoli, “Variation,” in Dictionnaire Berlioz, pp. 570–1. See especially Frisch’s Brahms and the Principle of Developing Variation (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984). Walter Frisch makes a useful distinction between thematic development and thematic transformation. In the former, associated with developing variation, “the smallest elements of a theme – its intervals and rhythms – are continuously modified.” In the latter, which he describes as most characteristic of Liszt and his school, “a transformed theme retains its original melodic outline but may change its mode, harmony, tempo, rhythm, or meter” (Brahms and the Principle of Developing Variation, p. 36). Hepokoski, Sibelius: Symphony No. 5, p. 25. Ibid., p. 7. Rotational form, as Darcy explains in “The Metaphysics of Annihilation,” is practically identical to what he calls “cyclical structure” in Wagner’s “Das Rheingold” (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), pp. 101–10. He ultimately chooses “rotational form” because it does not “call up unwanted associations with intermovement thematic recurrence” (“Metaphysics of Annihilation,” p. 11, n. 27). It also does not have vastly different connotations when used in different contexts, like the terms “rotational” and “cyclic.” “Rotational” has a different meaning in the context of twelve-tone music analysis (though today it is beginning to find its most standard usage in studies of large-scale form), and “cyclic” brings to mind ideas of intermovement cross-references more than intramovement thematic repetition. Hepokoski and Darcy, for what it is worth, also occasionally use the terms “varied repetition” and “varied restatement” but prefer the term “rotational form” because these other terms – “when used apart from the rotational concept as the guiding backdrop – seem bland, unimaginatively divorced from the implied circularity of the

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13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21.

22.

23.

procedure” (Elements of Sonata Theory, p. 614). Their theory does indeed foreground the circularity of this formal process (in Elements of Sonata Theory they speak of a “temporal ‘return to the origin,’ a cyclical renewal and rebeginning” [611]), and this is one of its greatest strengths. But such circularity is still present, I believe, in conventional notions of strophic variation and varied repetition, particularly as employed by Berlioz scholars, even if these terms do not highlight it to such a degree. See, for example, his analysis of Sibelius’s Luonnotar (“The Essence of Sibelius”), in which he claims that the piece engages in a “secondary dialogue with the principle of sonata deformation” – secondary “because the piece’s primary structural principle is that of rotation/teleological genesis, which does not necessitate such a dialogue with the sonata” (130). See Hepokoski, Sibelius: Symphony No. 5, p. 26. Morgan, “Circular Form,” p. 76. D. Kern Holoman, “Berlioz,” in Holoman, ed., The Nineteenth-Century Symphony (New York: Schirmer, 1997), p. 115. Rushton, The Music of Berlioz, p. 346. Edward T. Cone, “Inside the Saint’s Head: The Music of Berlioz,” in Robert P. Morgan, ed., Music: A View From Delft (University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 223; orig. pub. in Musical Newsletter, USA 1/3 (July 1971), 3–13, 1/4 (October 1971), 16–21, and 2/1 (January 1972), 19–22. Jean-Pierre Bartoli, “Variation,” in Dictionnaire Berlioz, pp. 570–1. Ibid., p. 571. Jean-Pierre Bartoli, “Forme symphonique,” in Dictionnaire Berlioz, p. 200. Bartoli’s other principal studies of Berlioz’s formal language include “Forme narrative et principes du de´veloppement musical dans la Symphonie fantastique de Berlioz,” Musurgia: Analyse et pratique musicales 2/1 (1995), 25–50, and L’Oeuvre symphonique de Berlioz: Forme et principes de de´veloppement, The`se, Universite´ de Paris IV (Paris-Sorbonne), 1991. See also “Les Ouvertures de Berlioz et la dramatisation du style symphonique,” in Les Cahiers de l’Herne 77 (2003), 96–104, and “Berlioz, Reicha et la ‘Formenlehre,’” in Sieghard Do¨hring, Arnold Jacobshagen, and Gunther Braam, eds., Berlioz, Wagner und die Deutschen (Cologne: Dohr, 2003), pp. 227–38. Hepokoski and Darcy also recognize the limitations of the term “strophic form” as applied to rotationally constructed instrumental music, arguing that the term “carries poetic-textural connotations not appropriate [in an instrumental context]” (Elements of Sonata Theory, p. 611). See Hugh Macdonald’s important article “Berlioz’s Self-Borrowings,” in Proceedings of the Royal Music Association 92 (1965–6), 27–44, for an extensive discussion of Berlioz’s borrowings of all kinds, including the incorporation of instrumental melodies (or even entire movements) into later instrumental works. (Think for example of the Marche au supplice in the Symphonie fantastique, which comes directly from the Marche des gardes in


24.

25.

26.

27.

28.

the early, unfinished opera Les Francs-juges, or of Harold en Italie’s main theme, which comes from the Rob-Roy overture.) For a discussion of Schubert’s and others’ adaptations of Lied melodies in instrumental music, see Christopher H. Gibbs, “Beyond Song: Instrumental Transformations and Adaptations of the Lied from Schubert to Mahler,” in James Parsons, ed., The Cambridge Companion to the Lied (Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 223–42. For some recent examinations of genre in Berlioz, see Daniel Albright, Berlioz’s Semi-Operas (Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 2001), pp. 39–71 and 110–32; Rushton, Romeó et Juliette, pp. 80–6, and “Genre in Berlioz”; and Jennifer Hambrick, “Berlioz’s ‘Dramatic Symphony’: Genre and Genre Mixture in Romeó et Juliette,” Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2002. For discussions of “subrotation,” see Hepokoski, “The Essence of Sibelius,” p. 133; Darcy, “The Metaphysics of Annihilation,” p. 13; and, in particular, Appendix 2 of Elements of Sonata Theory (“Terminology: Rotation and Deformation”): “within any individual rotation an internal, smaller-pattern cycling can give the impression of a local subrotation. These include such things as thematic-block restatements, the altered recurrences of larger sequential blocks or zones, and the like” (611–12). I do not mean to suggest that theme-and-variations forms are empty academic exercises. But Berlioz would likely have thought them so, considering his supreme annoyance with many academic forms, including those fugues “whose only object is to display the composer’s vain erudition” (qtd. in Octave Fouque, Les re´volutionnaires de la musique: Lesueur, Berlioz, Beethoven, Richard Wagner, La musique russe [Paris, 1882], p. 178; trans. in Hector Berlioz, The Memoirs of Hector Berlioz, trans. and ed. David Cairns [New York and Toronto: Knopf, 2002], p. 597). Berlioz’s ideas about whether the program was absolutely necessary to a proper hearing of the work seem to have changed over time. In the earliest editions of the full score, he writes, “At concerts in which this symphony is played, the distribution of this program to the audience is indispensable to the full understanding of the dramatic plan of the work” (see NBEXVI, ed. Temperley [1972] p. x). Yet after the Weimar performances of 1855, the program was changed, and Berlioz recommended its use only when the symphony was being performed with Le´lio; when the Symphonie fantastique is being performed alone, Berlioz says, “the distribution of the program may, if absolutely necessary, be dispensed with, the titles of the movements only being preserved; the symphony offers (or so the composer hopes) enough musical interest in itself quite apart from all dramatic intention.” This has led many (including Barzun and Peter Kivy) to downplay the importance of the symphony’s program (Barzun, Berlioz and the Romantic Century, vol. I, p. 158; Peter Kivy, Sound and Semblance: Reflections on Musical Representation [Princeton

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29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

36.

37. 38.

39. 40.

41.

University Press, 1984], p. 174). Rushton, however, offers a more probable interpretation. The droll line about “enough musical interest in itself ” he takes to mean “that unless it was too expensive, his preference was for having it available for the listener[,] who may have chosen to read it or not” (The Music of Berlioz, p. 160). Berlioz initially referred to the work as an ope´ra de concert but eventually opted for the rather more generic (and befuddling) term le´gende dramatique. Rushton, The Music of Berlioz, p. 161. Ge´rard Conde´, “Programme, musique a`,” in Dictionnaire Berlioz, p. 441. Kivy, Sound and Semblance, p. 168. Wotton, Hector Berlioz, p. 83. Jacques Barzun, in “The Meaning of Meaning in Music: Berlioz Once More,” The Musical Quarterly 66/1 (January 1980), 3. Scruton, “Programme Music,” in L. Macy, ed., Grove Music Online, www. grovemusic.com (accessed February 10, 2007). Scruton writes, “Programme music must further be distinguished from the ‘representational’ music that accompanies words, whether in lieder, in oratorio or on the stage. While all these share devices with programme music and have influenced it continuously throughout the history of music, it is still necessary to distinguish music that purports to carry its narrative meaning within itself from music that is attached to a narrative arising independently, whether through the words of a song or through the action of a dramatic work.” Berlioz, A Critical Study of Beethoven’s Nine Symphonies, trans. Edwin Evans, introduction by D. Kern Holoman (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000), p. 113. The original French version appeared in the Revue et Gazette musicale, March 4, 1838. Ibid., p. 76. From Berlioz’s preface to Romeó et Juliette (originally printed in the libretto available at the 1839 performances, reprinted in the first vocal score, 1858). Trans. D. Kern Holoman in NBEXVIII, ed. Holoman (1990), p. 383. See NBEXVI, p. 218. Conde´ goes so far as to distinguish between pieces whose programs “simply indicate the source of [the piece’s] inspiration” and those that, “aided by their subject matter, disrupt expected structures” (“Programme, musique a`” p. 441). The works of Berlioz, Liszt, and their imitators, he says, belong to the second category. Although these movements have been recorded often (the ballet in particular), neither has been analyzed in much detail. Though the scene is recognized as one of the most compelling in Faust, and the Ballet des sylphes in particular, discussions of it are usually very brief, no more than a paragraph or two consisting of either a musical description or an account of its compositional history. The most informative discussions of the latter can be found in Rushton’s notes to NBEVIIIb, ed. Rushton (1986), and in his article “The


42.

43.

44. 45.

46.

47. 48.

49. 50.

51.

Genesis of Berlioz’s ‘La Damnation de Faust,’” Music and Letters 56 (1975), 129–46. The Concert itself was completed in 1828. Berlioz transformed it into the Chœur de gnomes et de sylphes while traveling in Vienna in 1846. The principal alterations included changing the key scheme so that the second episode (mm. 61 ff.) is in F-sharp minor rather than F major, adding parts for Faust and Mephistopheles, making two cuts, and writing a new introduction that establishes the setting on the banks of the Elbe. The work has in fact been staged, by Raoul Gunsbourg in Monte Carlo in 1893, and by Sir Thomas Beecham in London in 1933. And after completing it, Berlioz considered turning it into an opera, for performance in London, with the help of the opera librettist Euge`ne Scribe, but the project never materialized. For Berlioz’s letters to Scribe, from August to December 1847, see CGIII, ed. Pierre Citron (1972), pp. 445–85. James Haar rightly notes that “Berlioz thought of turning it into an opera not because he had conceived it thus but because only staged works had any chance of success with the Parisian public at the time” (“The Operas and the Dramatic Legend,” in The Cambridge Companion to Berlioz, pp. 89–90). Note that I have numbered the measures of the ballet separately from the other movements in the scene. Note that the chorus’s B section is in A major, while the ballet’s is in D major, and also that B’s first statement, in Mephistopheles’s aria, combines aspects of the chorus’s and ballet’s versions of the melody: mm. 5–8 of Voici des roses begin like the comparable measures in the ballet (see mm. 21–2 of Ex. 2.5 above) and end like the comparable measures of the chorus. Berlioz comments in chapter 51 on “the C and B which recur at the end of each strophe, like the slow tolling of bells” (Memoirs, p. 251). Cairns translates Berlioz’s “strophes” as “stanzas”; I have retained the English cognate. Ibid., p. 147. Tovey writes: “There are excellent reasons to read Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. But among them I cannot find any that concern Berlioz and this symphony” (Essays in Musical Analysis, vol. IV, p. 74). Jeffrey Langford, “The Byronic Berlioz: Harold en Italie and Beyond,” Journal of Musicological Research 16 (1997), 199–221. Berlioz’s comments about the composition of Harold en Italie suggest as much: “I conceived the idea of writing a series of scenes for the orchestra, in which the viola should find itself mixed up, like a person more or less in action, always preserving his own individuality. The background I formed from my recollections wandering in the Abruzzi, introducing the viola as a sort of melancholy dreamer in the style of Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage” (Memoirs, p. 202). For a thorough analysis of Harold’s first movement, see Rushton, The Musical Language of Berlioz, pp. 196–200. For a provocative analysis of the Orgie de

149

150


52.

53. 54.

55.

56. 57.

58. 59.

60.

61. 62.

brigands and its relationship to the finale of Beethoven’s Ninth, see Mark Evan Bonds, “Sinfonia Anti-Eroica: Berlioz’s Harold en Italie and the Anxiety of Beethoven’s Influence,” Journal of Musicology 10/4 (1992), 417–63, republished as “Sinfonia Anti-Eroica: Berlioz’s Harold en Italie,” in After Beethoven: Imperatives of Originality in the Symphony (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), pp. 73–108. See, for example, Rushton, The Musical Language of Berlioz, pp. 111 and 186, and The Music of Berlioz, pp. 36 and 267; Macdonald, Berlioz, p. 102; Holoman, Berlioz, p. 246; Cone, “Saint’s Head,” pp. 239–41; and Wolfgang ¨ ber einige Aspekte der Do¨mling, “ ‘En songeant au temps . . . a` l’espace . . . ’: U Musik Hector Berlioz,’” Archiv fu¨r Musikwissenschaft 33/4 (1976), 250–4. Holoman, Berlioz, p. 247. Wolfgang Do¨mling describes the movement’s form as ternary – ABA0 – although he hastens to add that the schema is less “architectonic” than “dramatic” (“En songeant au temps,” p. 250). Many have commented on the crescendo-diminuendo form of the Marche des pe`lerins. See, for example, Do¨mling, “En songeant au temps,” p. 250; Holoman, Berlioz, p. 247 (“the great crescendo and diminuendo of the passing parade”); Rushton, The Musical Language of Berlioz, p. 186; and Bonds, “Sinfonia Anti-Eroica,” p. 435. Rushton, it should be noted, also describes the movement as strophic. See The Music of Berlioz, p. 36. Berlioz was quite right to dispute Fe´tis’s claim that the C’s are all non-chordal (see Berlioz, Memoirs, p. 251); as Cone notes, this is only the case with the cadence in B major at the end of A0 x6 (mm. 154 ff.) (“Saint’s Head,” p. 240). Cone, “Saint’s Head,” p. 240. Berlioz was fond of such rotational axes. The song Sur les lagunes from Les Nuits d’e´te´ (1840–1) features a similar tolling bell, the motive D–Eb–D, which likewise recurs unchanging in a variety of harmonic contexts. Most remarkable is the stunning modulation over the first sixteen bars from G minor, where D–E#–D is of course ^5 ^6 ^5, to B minor, where the motive functions as ^3b^3 ^3. Incidentally, the same relationship holds in the Marche des pe`lerins between A0 x2, which ends in E major (where C–B is ^b6 ^5), and A0 x4, which ends in G-sharp minor (where C–B is in effect #^3 ^3). Rushton (The Music of Berlioz, p. 36), Cone (“Saint’s Head,” p. 240), and Brian Primmer (The Berlioz Style [Oxford University Press, 1973], p. 73) comment on the movement’s peculiar stepwise key structure, but none notes how the C-major tonality of section C brings that structure full circle. Cone, “Saint’s Head,” p. 220. “Inmost meaning” is Cone’s translation of Berlioz’s “sens intime,” a phrase that appears in the 1858 letter in which he describes the characteristics of his style (see “Saint’s Head,” p. 218).


3 Form as metaphor 1. Edward T. Cone, ed., Berlioz: Fantastic Symphony (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Co., 1971), p. 18. 2. Barzun, Berlioz and the Romantic Century, vol. I, p. 162; Hugh Macdonald, liner notes for Berlioz, Symphonie fantastique, Ernest Ansermet and the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, London Records Inc., CSA 2101. Both passages are quoted in Cone, ed., Fantastic Symphony, p. 18. 3. Jacques Barzun, “The Meaning of Meaning in Music,” 1–20. 4. Despite what Cone’s remarks may imply, Barzun is anything but a purist; in this essay he argues not that Berlioz’s music is “absolute,” but that it is not drastically different from all music, which, because it cannot help but conjure up ideas and images beyond itself, is always “about something,” whether it has a program or not. He also somewhat grudgingly withdraws “promotional” aid and substitutes “educational.” 5. Bartoli, “Forme narrative,” p. 25. 6. That Berlioz believed music capable of actually arousing these sentiments in well-disposed listeners (as opposed to only expressing them) is clear from his descriptions of the fits that overwhelmed audience members when listening to the “masterpieces of our great composers”: “how many times have we seen members of the audience convulsed by fierce spasms, laughing and crying at the same time, and . . . all the symptoms of delirium and fever,” he asks in another essay, “The Art of Music,” going on to explain how a young Provençal musician, believing he had reached the peak of happiness after hearing Spontini’s Vestale two times, “blew out his brains at the door of the Ope´ra” (The Art of Music and Other Essays, trans. and ed. Elizabeth Csicsery-Rońay [Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994], p. 3). For ` the original French see Revue et Gazette musicale, September 10, 1837, and A

7.

8. 9. 10.

11.

travers chants: e´tudes musicales, adorations, boutades, et critiques (Paris: Michel Le´vy, 1862), p. 5, where the essay was subsequently printed. Berlioz, “On Imitation in Music,” trans. Jacques Barzun with restorations by Edward T. Cone, in Cone, ed., Fantastic Symphony, p. 37. Orig. pub. in Revue et Gazette musicale, January 1 and 8, 1837. The letter is from 31 March 1838. See Berlioz, CGII, ed. Fre´de´ric Robert (1975), p. 433. Liszt, “Berlioz and his Harold Symphony,” in Strunk, ed., Source Readings in Music History, p. 126. For an excellent look at this very topic see Rainer Schmusch, Der Tod des Orpheus: Entstehungsgeschichte der Programmmusik (Freiburg: Rombach Verlag, 1998). Eduard Hanslick, Vom Musikalisch-Scho¨nen: ein Beitrag zur Revision der ¨ sthetik der Tonkunst (Leipzig, 1854/R, 2/1858, 3/1865, 4/1874, 9/1896, 16/ A 1966; Eng. trans., G. Payzant, 1986).

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12. Cairns, The Making of an Artist, p. 362. Mellers’s remark originally appeared in Scrutiny (March 1939), 480. 13. Barzun, Berlioz and the Romantic Century, vol. I, p. 178. 14. I. A. Richards, The Philosophy of Rhetoric (Oxford University Press, 1964; orig. pub. 1936). 15. For a useful overview of approaches to metaphor in literary studies see M. H. Abrams’s “Theories of Metaphor,” in A Glossary of Literary Terms, 7th edition (Fort Worth, etc.: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1999), pp. 154–8. 16. Musical metaphor is a topic of growing interest to musicologists, and much has been done recently to refine our understanding of how music is written, heard, and written about in metaphorical terms. I have found the following studies particularly helpful (the list is by no means exhaustive, but it gives a sense of the variety of work done in the past couple of decades): Naomi Cumming, “Metaphor in Roger Scruton’s Aesthetics of Music,” in Anthony Pople, ed., Theory, Analysis and Meaning in Music (Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 3–28; Marion Guck, “Two Types of Metaphoric Transfer,” in Jamie C. Kassler, ed., Metaphor: A Musical Dimension (Sydney: Currency Press, 1991), pp. 1–12, and “Analytical Fictions,” Music Theory Spectrum 16/2 (Fall 1994), 21–30; Robert Hatten, “Metaphor in Music,” in Eero Tarasti, ed., Musical Signification: Essays in the Semiotic Theory and Analysis of Music (Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1995), pp. 373–91, and Musical Meaning in Beethoven: Markedness, Correlation, and Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), pp. 162–72; Steve Larson, “‘Something in the Way She Moves’: Metaphors of Musical Motion,” Metaphor and Symbol 18/2 (2003), 63–84; David Lidov, “Mind and Body in Music,” Semiotica 66/1–3 (1987), 69–97; Janna Saslaw, “Forces, Containers, and Paths: The Role of Body-Derived Image Schemas in the Conceptualization of Music,” Journal of Music Theory 40/2 (1996), 217–43; Robert Snarrenberg, “Competing Myths: The American Abandonment of Schenker’s Organicism,” in Theory, Analysis and Meaning in Music, pp. 30–58, and Schenker’s Interpretive Practice (Cambridge University Press, 1997); Michael Spitzer, Metaphor and Musical Thought (University of Chicago Press, 2004); and Lawrence Zbikowski, Conceptualizing Music: Cognitive Structure, Theory, and Analysis (Oxford University Press, 2002). 17. From a letter to Princess Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgenstein of 12 August 1856. See CGV, ed. Hugh Macdonald and François Lesure (1989), p. 352. 18. Berlioz, “Aperçu sur la musique classique et la musique romantique,” Le Correspondant, October 22, 1830. The translation is Rushton’s; see Romeó et Juliette, p. 90. For the original French see CGII, ed. H. Robert Cohen and Yves Ge´rard (1996), pp. 63–8. 19. Katherine Kolb Reeve, “The Poetics of the Orchestra in the Writings of Hector Berlioz,” Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1978, p. 19. 20. One is reminded of Mendelssohn’s comment “What the music I love expresses to me is thoughts not too unclear for words, but rather too clear” –


21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28. 29.

30.

31. 32. 33.

a sentiment quite opposite from Berlioz’s. From a letter to Marc-Andre´ Souchay of November 15, 1842. The autograph for this letter is in private possession; a contemporary copy can be found in the Bodleian Library, Oxford (MS M. Deneke Mendelssohn, c. 32 fol. 56–7). Reeve, “The Poetics,” p. 1. The letter is from February 2. See CGI, ed. Pierre Citron (1975), p. 233. Marx’s Idee is of course not identical to Berlioz’s penseé poe´tique and ideé poe´tique, insofar as each can even really be defined. I will not attempt here to tease out how their ideas do and do not relate. One might note, though, even cursorily, that Marx comes out of a different tradition than Berlioz (German idealist aesthetics) and in his writings tends to treat form both in more detail than Berlioz and also more like a narrative. That said, his interest in what Scott Burnham describes as the “structural similarities music shares with other aspects of human experience” is very much in tune with Berlioz’s similar concerns (Burnham, “Aesthetics, Theory and History in the Works of Adolph Bernhard Marx,” Ph.D. diss., Brandeis University, 1988, p. 221). Berlioz knew of Marx’s reputation; he calls him “the well-known Berlin theorist and critic” in his memoirs and relates how Marx sent him a friendly letter after seeing a copy of the Huit Sce`nes de Faust; Berlioz had contributed a review of Auber’s La fianceé to Marx’s Berliner Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung shortly before Huit Sce`nes was published. See Berlioz, Memoirs, pp. 103 and 641. See Leon B. Plantinga, Schumann as Critic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), pp. 3–4. Quoted in Reeve, “The Poetics,” p. 7. Gazette musicale 1/27 (1834), 213. Quoted in Reeve, “The Poetics,” p. 6. Reeve, “The Poetics,” p. 6. Revue musicale, November 27, 1830, pp. 89–90. Revue et Gazette musicale, December 5, 1875, p. 389. Quoted and translated in Katharine Ellis, Music Criticism in Nineteenth-Century France: La Revue et Gazette musicale de Paris, 1834–80 (Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 228. For an extensive discussion of the Revue et Gazette musicale’s charges that Berlioz resorted to “materialism,” see pp. 225 ff. of Ellis’s book. Reeve, “The Poetics,” p. 44. For a discussion of Berlioz’s often contentious relationship with Fe´tis, see Peter Bloom, “Berlioz and the Critic: La Damnation de Fe´tis,” in John Walter Hill, ed., Studies in Musicology in Honor of Otto E. Albrecht (Kassel, Basel, and London: Ba¨renreiter, 1980), pp. 240–65. Fe´tis uses the word in his February 1, 1835 review of the Symphonie fantastique, published in the Revue musicale and based on the piano transcription by Liszt. He refers to the “tissue of harmonic horrors” that Berlioz brought before an examining jury at the Conservatory, which Berlioz “believed to be double-counterpoint.” See Cone, ed., Fantastic Symphony, p. 216. The translation is Cone’s. See Cone, ed., Fantastic Symphony, p. 28. Gazette musicale, February 22, 1835, p. 66. Berlioz, “On Imitation,” p. 44.

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34. Ibid., p. 37. 35. Macdonald, Berlioz, p. 203. 36. Berlioz, A Critical Study, p. 41. The “Eroica” essay originally appeared in the Revue et Gazette musicale, April 9, 1837. 37. Berlioz, A Critical Study, p. 45. 38. Ibid., p. 42. 39. Ibid., p. 44. 40. Ibid., p. 41. 41. Berlioz, “On Imitation,” p. 45. 42. Stephen Davies, Musical Meaning and Expression (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994), pp. 146–54. See Malcolm Budd, “Understanding Music,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supp. Vol. LIX, 233–48, and “Music and the Communication of Emotion,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 47, 129–38. 43. Davies, Musical Meaning, p. 154. 44. Ibid., p. 150. 45. Donald Davidson, in an essay “What Metaphors Mean,” challenges the standard assumption that there is a metaphorical meaning distinct from literal meaning (Critical Inquiry 5 [1978], 31–47). Those who view metaphor cognitively, as something that cannot help but structure the way we think, also question the distinction. See in particular George Lakoff and Mark Turner, More Than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor (University of Chicago Press, 1989) and George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (University of Chicago Press, 1980). Scruton, interestingly, espouses an empiricist view of metaphor in language but denies that the same holds for metaphor in music (see The Aesthetic Understanding: Essays in the Philosophy of Art and Culture [London: Methuen, 1983] and The Aesthetics of Music [Oxford University Press, 1999]). He has been taken to task on both accounts by Naomi Cumming in her “Metaphor in Roger Scruton’s Aesthetics of Music.” 46. In this light, it is interesting that Berlioz says nothing of Napoleon in his 1838 article on the “Eroica,” instead making allusions to Virgil’s Iliad, but in an earlier essay on the work from 1829, he provides the typical story identifying the work with Napoleon (“Biographie e´trange`re: Beethoven,” Le Correspondant, August 4 and 11, and October 8, 1829, pp. 179–80, 187, and 251–2). Some may argue that if Berlioz believes music can express specific emotions and, with the aid of a program, create complex vistas in the mind, he undercuts that very assertion by envisioning different things in one and the same stretch of music, or even by using the same passages in different programmatic contexts – common practice for him. But by allowing that one and the same poetic idea – in both essays Berlioz hears the work as an elegy – can suit different programmatic readings, Berlioz in fact demonstrates that music’s expressive powers are greater than many imagine; music exceeds words, speaks volumes beyond them, but only with their help can truly


47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

52. 53. 54. 55.

56.

57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63.

64. 65.

productive analogies between the world of sentiment and the world of human action and drama be made. Berlioz, “On Imitation,” p. 45. Ibid., p. 41. Ibid., p. 29. Ibid., p. 38. Ibid. This comment echoes an earlier comment about the imitation of natural sounds from the footnote to the Symphonie fantastique’s program: Berlioz writes that he “has never considered this branch of the art as an end, but as a means” (“On Imitation,” p. 29). Berlioz, “On Imitation,” p. 39. Ibid., p. 38. Ibid. Zbikowski refers to this as “cross-domain mapping” (Conceptualizing Music, passim), Spitzer as “metaphorical mapping” (Metaphor and Musical Thought, p. 3), Cumming as “metaphorical transfer” (“Metaphor in Roger Scruton’s Aesthetics of Music,” p. 11) and Scruton as “transference of concepts from sphere to sphere” (The Aesthetic Understanding, p. 88). The terms for these disparate thoughts vary widely, as do accounts of how we relate them in our minds – whether comparing them or mapping one onto the other, etc. I. A. Richards introduced the terms “vehicle” and “tenor” for the metaphorical word and the subject to which it is applied, respectively (The Philosophy of Rhetoric); Max Black calls them “subsidiary” and “primary” subjects (Models and Metaphors: Studies in Language and Philosophy [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1962]); George Lakoff and Mark Turner call them “source domain” and “target domain” (More Than Cool Reason). Different, even contradictory, as these theories may be, many of them see the separation of the two elements of a metaphor as essential. Charles Batteux, Les beaux-arts re´duits a` un meˆme principe (Paris: Durand, 1746). Reeve, “The Poetics,” p. 17. Bernard Germaine E´tienne de La Ville sur Illon, Comte de Lace´pe`de, La poe´tique de la musique, 2 vols. (Paris, 1785). Berlioz, “On Imitation,” p. 43. Ibid., p. 44. Journal des de´bats, June 12, 1857. Quoted in Reeve, “The Poetics,” p. 90. Peter Le Huray and James Day, eds., Music and Aesthetics in the Eighteenth and Early-Nineteenth Centuries (Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 182. From Lace´pe`de, La poe´tique de la musique, vol. I, book I. Le Huray and Day, eds., Music and Aesthetics, p. 183. Some see Lace´pe`de’s inclusion of concert music into his treatise as anything but forward looking. To Jean Mongre´dien, for example, Lace´pe`de saw a symphony as something lacking voices, not as something whose expressive capabilities were as extensive, or even more so, that music with voices (French

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66. 67.

68. 69. 70. 71. 72.

73. 74. 75.

76.

77. 78.

Music from the Enlightenment to Romanticism, trans. Sylvain Fre´maux [Portland: Amadeus Press, 1996], p. 264). But as Reeve reads it, despite the brevity and tone of Lace´pe`de’s account of music without voices, it would have appealed to Berlioz in its advice about treating the orchestra dramatically (Reeve, “The Poetics,” pp. 32–3). See Mongre´dien, French Music from the Enlightenment to Romanticism, p. 264, where this claim is made. Jean-François Le Sueur, Expose´ d’une musique une, imitative et particulie`re a` chaque solennite´, 4 vols. (Paris: Veuve He´rissant, 1787). See Mongre´dien’s Catalogue the´matique de l’œuvre comple`te du compositeur Jean-François Le Sueur (1760–1837) (New York: Pendragon, 1980) for a complete listing of the titles and publication dates of Le Sueur’s four volumes. Berlioz, Memoirs, p. 605. Le Sueur, Expose´ d’une musique une, p. 10. Berlioz, CGI, pp. 318–20. Quoted and translated in Cairns, The Making of an Artist, p. 359. See Ora F. Saloman, “La Ce´pe`de’s La poe´tique de la musique and Le Sueur,” Acta Musicologica 47 (1975), 145, where this very point is discussed. Michel Paul Gui de Chabanon, Observations sur la musique et principalement sur la me´taphysique de l’art (Paris, 1779) and Musique conside´reé en ellemeˆme, et dans ses rapports avec la parole, les langues, la poe´sie, et le theáˆtre (Paris, 1785). The former is available in a reprint (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1969). The latter has been translated by Harry Robert Lyall (“A French Music Aesthetic of the Eighteenth Century: A Translation and Commentary on Michel Paul Gui de Chabanon’s Musique conside´reé en elle-meˆme et dans ses rapports avec la parole, les langues, la poe´sie, et le theáˆtre,” Ph.D. diss., North Texas State University, 1975). Chabanon, Observations sur la musique, p. 69. Saloman, “La Ce´pe`de’s La poe´tique de la musique,” p. 145. See Lyall, “A French Music Aesthetic,” pp. 44 ff. for a discussion of how Chabanon’s works, Musique conside´reé en elle-meˆme in particular, were received by his contemporaries. Because he seems to take such a hard line against imitation, Chabanon was seen by some as prefiguring the theories of Hanslick. See Mathis Lussy, “Chabanon, prećurseur de Hanslick,” Gazette musicale de la Suisse Romande, May 7, 1896, 95–8, and also Lyall, “A French Music Aesthetic,” pp. 77–8. Berlioz, The Art of Music and Other Essays, pp. 4–6. For the original French ` travers chants, pp. 7–10. see A A remark from his 1838 essay about Beethoven’s Fifth uses the term in the latter sense: “the melodic, harmonic, rhythmic and orchestral forms are there delineated with an essential novelty and individuality, endowing them also with considerable power and nobleness” (Berlioz, A Critical Study, p. 62). For


79. 80. 81.

82. 83.

84. 85. 86.

87. 88. 89.

` the original French see Revue et Gazette musicale, January 28, 1838, and A travers chants, pp. 30–1. See chapter 5 for a discussion of the significant revisions to the first movement of the Symphonie fantastique. Bartoli, “Forme narrative,” p. 7. Robert Schumann, “A Symphony by Berlioz,” trans. Edward T. Cone, in Fantastic Symphony, pp. 230–48. Originally published in Neue Zeitschrift fu¨r Musik, July 3 and 31, August 7, 11, and 14, 1835. Reprinted in Schumann, Gesammelte Schriften (Leipzig: Georg Wigands Verlag, 1854), pp. 118–51. Berlioz, A Critical Study, p. 133. For the original French see Journal des de´bats, ` travers chants, p. 67. May 19 and 22, 1860, and A Berlioz, “Guillaume Tell de Rossini,” in CMI, ed. H. Robert Cohen and Yves Ge´rard (1996), p. 402. Originally published in the Gazette musicale de Paris, October 12, 1834. Much as one might wish that Berlioz’s “morceau a` deux mouvements” were an implicit reference to Reicha’s “coupe binaire,” this does not seem to be the case. Berlioz, “Biographie e´trange`re: Beethoven.” Cited in Reeve, “The Poetics,” pp. 72–3. Berlioz, A Critical Study, p. 106. As an example, he writes that the finale of the “Eroica” is “nothing but the development of the same poetic idea” that has fueled the entire work – a “profound sadness” (A Critical Study, p. 45). Kivy, Sound and Semblance, p. 167. Ibid. I borrow the word “equipoise” from a discussion by Guido Pannain about Strauss’s program music. Pannain writes: ‘Programme music,’ in its original shape, never loses its essentially musical basis of thought, and it reacts only to needs which are at the bottom those of all romantic imagery. Imagination – the concept of exterior things – becomes so vivid that it permeates the mind of the composer with the reality of its conception, and this permeates his music. Thus the music becomes to some extent a function of the imaginative faculty, but it never loses its natural rhythm . . . Musical and dramatic imagery must retain an equipoise – as in Berlioz, and more than in Liszt (Modern Composers, trans. Michael R. Bonavia [London, 1932], p. 245; quoted in Wotton, Hector Berlioz, p. 83). Pannain may not have been a Berlioz scholar, but his comment is as apt as that made by any Berliozian about the “program problem” in Berlioz. The contention that program music uses two levels of imagery – one musical and the other dramatic – and, when it works best, holds them in balance is one to which Berlioz would have wholeheartedly subscribed. The significance of Pannain’s quote can be attested to by the fact that Barzun uses its last

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sentence as an epigraph in the famous chapter, “Program Music and the Unicorn,” from his Berlioz and the Romantic Century, vol. I, p. 172. 90. Cognitive scientists call these visual representations “image schemas.” In Mark Johnson’s words, an image schema is “a recurring, dynamic pattern of our perceptual interactions and motor programs that gives coherence and structure to our experience” (The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason [University of Chicago Press, 1987], p. xiv). Image schemas allow us to categorize what we perceive and to imagine the world in terms that are embodied. According to Johnson and others, we cannot help but look at the world this way. The image schema that most closely corresponds with the circular representations I am interested in is what some have called a “circular source-path-goal” schema. See Saslaw, “Forces, Containers, and Paths,” pp. 222–3.

4 Mixing genres, mixing forms 1. Diana Bickley’s introduction to vol. X of the New Berlioz Edition (the overtures) indicates that after Le Carnaval romain’s successful premiere performance on February 3, 1844, it was performed four more times in Paris in the next three months, and Berlioz conducted it twenty-five times in the next four years in various cities (NBEX, ed. Bickley [2000], pp. xii–xiii). For a list of performances in Berlioz’s lifetime see D. Kern Holoman, Catalogue of the Works of Hector Berlioz, NBEXXV (1987), p. 256. 2. To date no articles or chapters have been devoted to the Le Carnaval romain. The most extended commentaries, which constitute parts of articles or of chapters, will be cited as they are discussed. 3. Rushton analyzes the Waverley overture at some length in his essay “Genre in Berlioz,” pp. 42–7. See also his analysis of the overture to Benvenuto Cellini in The Musical Language of Berlioz, pp. 202–27. Deborah Adelson looks closely at Roi Lear in her essay “Interpreting Berlioz’s Overture to King Lear.” 4. See Hugh Macdonald, “Berlioz’s Messe solennelle,” 19th-Century Music 16/3 (Spring 1993), 278–9, for extensive remarks about the discovery of the Messe and Berlioz’s recycling of its materials in later compositions. 5. I am indebted to James Hepokoski for pointing out the overture’s connection to strophic song form. 6. The more normative sonata with a full, two-themed recapitulation they call a “Type 3” sonata. The most extensive discussion of Hepokoski and Darcy’s theory and terminology appears in Elements of Sonata Theory, pp. 353–87. See also Hepokoski’s recent articles, “Beyond the Sonata Principle,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 55/1 (Spring 2002), 91–154, and “Back and Forth from Egmont: Beethoven, Mozart, and the Nonresolving Recapitulation,” 19th-Century Music 25/2–3 (2002), 127–54.


7. The status of mm. 367 ff. is not entirely clear. As indicated in the diagram, this section could be viewed as a tacked-on coda since it is at this point that the tonal resolution’s S theme stops and a new section begins, based loosely on thematic material heard previously. And yet one might also regard the long passage from m. 356 to m. 412 as something inserted into the tonal resolution, preventing it momentarily from achieving the full articulation of the S theme in the tonic, a task that is resumed with the reappearance of S material in m. 413. The function of this section is less debatable than its proper label: it brashly interrupts the S theme, veers into foreign tonal territory, and ultimately gathers even more momentum for the overture’s riotous conclusion. 8. Each refers specifically to a repeat of the exposition. See Wotton, Hector Berlioz, p. 88; Holoman, Berlioz, p. 370; and Rushton, The Musical Language of Berlioz, p. 189 and The Music of Berlioz, p. 279. 9. Similar opening previews can be found in the Corsaire and the overtures to Benvenuto Cellini and Beátrice et Beńe´dict (1860–2), each of primary thematic material. 10. Similar integrations of slow material into the sonata proper appear in Roi Lear, the Corsaire, and the overtures to Benvenuto Cellini and Les Francs-juges. 11. Mozart’s overture to Apollo et Hyacinthus, K. 38, is one of very few exceptional overtures which, like Le Carnaval romain, contains a repeated exposition. 12. Berlioz, Memoirs, p. 236. 13. Hepokoski would call this climactic moment the work’s “telos,” the highpoint that has been steadily generated by the various forces that preceded it. Berlioz was fond of this sort of culmination. 14. Convention dictates that the most standard sonata procedure is to begin the development with P material. It follows then that the introductory material sounds against that conceptual backdrop; because the overture engages sonata norms, a listener familiar with those norms will recognize that the introductory theme in some sense takes the place of what he expects to hear at the beginning of the development: P material. Hepokoski and Darcy would refer to this as “writing over” (see Elements of Sonata Theory, p. 613). The substitution of this melody for P is deviational, to be sure, and it should be treated as such. But it does not render a triple-rotational model irrelevant. The coda, interestingly enough, makes a speedier pass through the overture’s main thematic elements: andante sost./P, TR, and S, as indicated in Fig. 4.1. In this sense it is reminiscent of the more extended cycles that precede it. Still, to my mind the overture is best described as triple rotational (rather than quadruple) because this final mini-cycle, whether an appendage or an insertion, is shorter, less structurally important, and less aurally recognizable as a cycle than the others. The main action is the broad unfurling of the three main rotations contained in the “body” of the sonata.

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15. See Jean-Pierre Bartoli’s exemplary essay on the topic, “Berlioz, Reicha et la ‘Formenlehre,’” in Do¨hring, Jacobshagen, and Braam, eds., Berlioz, Wagner und die Deutschen, pp. 227–38. 16. François-Joseph Fe´tis, La musique mise a` la porteé de tout le monde (Paris: Brandus et Cie, 1847; orig. pub. A. Mesnier, 1830), p. 210. 17. See, for example, Alex Preminger, ed., Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (Princeton University Press, 1974), p. 156 (“In French the term couplet is sometimes used with the meaning of stanza, as in the couplet carre´ [square couplet], a stanza composed of eight lines of octosyllabic verse”), and the Petit Larousse (Paris: Librairie Larousse, 1967), p. 263 (“Chaque strophe faisant partie d’une chanson et termineé par un refrain”). 18. See William Ashbrook, Donizetti and His Operas (Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 688, n. 13 (“Couplets are a French aria form consisting of two strophes that end in an identical refrain”), Encyclope´die de la musique (Paris, 1958), vol. I, p. 606 (“strophe d’une chanson”), and Hans Engel, “Couplet,” in Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart (Kassel: Ba¨renreiter, 1949–1986), vol. II, pp. 1737–43 (“Couplets bedeutet Strophen. So heisst das knappe, kurze Lied in der Ope´ra Comique”). 19. James Hepokoski, “Genre and Content in Mid-Century Verdi: ‘Addio, del passato’ (La traviata, Act III),” Cambridge Opera Journal 1/3 (November 1989), 264, fn. 33. 20. In the carnival scene from Benvenuto, the repeat of the analogous P–TR–S block features essentially the same text – except for the superimposition of the basses’ “Allons, allons, bourgeois de Rome, Allons entendre du nouveau! ” (mm. 233–6) over the tenors’ original “Venez, venez, peuple de Rome” at the opening of “P” and the addition of the lines “Venez, arlequins, accourez, pasquins, venez, accourez, accourez, venez, tous applaudir notre ope´ra nouveau” (mm. 289–90; see NBEIb, ed. Hugh Macdonald [1994], pp. 585–94). Likewise, the orchestration of the repeat is also basically the same. The saltarello theme’s music and text do not change. 21. To choose only one example: Henrique’s song Vivent la pluie et les voyages from Auber’s Les Diamants de la couronne (1841) is a couplets form par excellence from the hand of one of the century’s most prolific composers of ope´ra comique. A robust song of youthful Wanderlust, it unfolds in three verse–refrain strophes. As is the custom, the refrains are identical, musically and textually. But the verses and the links that follow them are not. The second verse adds a touch of ornament, and the link breaks off momentarily into recitative. Recitative intrudes more forcefully in the third strophe, this time erasing any trace of the original verse and link and stammering its way to the final, fully intact refrain. The correspondences with Le Carnaval romain’s form are clear: the triple-strophic structure with verse, link, and refrain; the alteration of the link in the second strophe; and the overlay of new material on top of the verse in the third strophe.


22. The opera is in fact called an ope´ra semi-seria, but Berlioz initially (and unsuccessfully) attempted to get his scenario accepted as an ope´ra comique. 23. The song stands apart from Cellini’s other numbers, both reflective arias. Written in a couplets form with double verse–refrain and no variation in the second strophe, La Gloire strikes a tone of insincerity, or at least overinflated exuberance. Cellini muses on the powers of his art and the new love for Teresa that has inspired him, but considering that he is a rogue, a swashbuckler, and a man of disguises (who later in the opera attempts to abduct Teresa dressed as a friar), one is left to wonder if his enraptured serenade is an act. Berlioz makes the mask all the more apparent by giving Cellini a stock romance rife with connotations of naivete´, simplicity, and candor. 24. See Dennis Libbey, “Opera,” in Stanley Sadie, ed., The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, vol. XIII (London and New York: Macmillan Publishers Ltd., 1980), p. 581. 25. Annegret Fauser, “The Songs,” in Peter Bloom, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Berlioz (Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 111. 26. A. E. F. Dickinson, in his two chapters on Berlioz’s songs in The Music of Berlioz (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1973), dismisses Berlioz’s earliest songs as “an utterly preliminary group of trial and recognized error,” characterizing them variously as “stilted,” “negligible,” and “nugatory” (117–18). 27. See Fauser, “The Songs,” pp. 108–24, for a provocative and sensitive look at Berlioz’s contributions to the romance genre. 28. For a look at several of Berlioz’s songs written in the 1840s – and at their intersections with Berlioz’s biography and their relationship to his large-scale works – see my unpublished article, “Berlioz and the Nineteenth-Century French Romance: Convention, Ingenuity, and Autobiography in his Songs (1842–50).” 29. The fortissimo sixteenth-note tremolos that accompany “il connaıˆt la fureur” in m. 26 become pianissimo eighth-note sigh figures in m. 61, tracing an embellished version of the corresponding melodic line of verse 1 and reflecting the new text, “et douce comme toi.” 30. As in the Carnaval overture, Berlioz also varies the final refrain considerably (mm. 108 ff.), lifting it into a higher register and engulfing it with torrents of chromaticism. The effect, if not the tone, is similar: both pieces accumulate tremendous energy and hurtle toward an explosive conclusion. 31. Many other examples of verse–refrain songs by Berlioz could be enumerated, featuring varying degrees of strophic elaboration and providing evidence that this technique came as naturally to Berlioz as any. They include Amitie´, reprends ton empire (1823) (two strophes with choral refrains), Adieu, Bessy (1829, rev. 1849) (four strophes with refrains), Les Champs (1834, rev. 1850) (seven strophes with refrains in its original version and four extensively varied strophes in its final version), Je crois en vous (1834) (six strophes with refrains – later used as the slow theme of the overture to Benvenuto Cellini),

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32.

33. 34. 35.

36.

and La Villanelle from Les Nuits d’e´te´ (1840–1), whose three strophes end with a refrain, albeit one set to different text each time. Adieu, Bessy is particularly interesting because though it was initially written in simple strophic form, Berlioz revised it radically in 1849, adding much more strophic elaboration. Although the refrains of the 1849 version do not change (in keeping with the couplets form of the song), the verses and the concluding sections in each of the first three strophes do. Embellishments are added to the vocal line, accompanimental patterns change, and melodic lines are reharmonized (a typically Berliozian technique). All of this prepares us for the vastly recomposed fourth and final verse, in which the poet speaks of his “cœur brise´.” The verse is itself “brise´”: the opening melodic figure heard in each of the previous verses is omitted, a long rising line in the connecting phrase between verse and refrain is staggered metrically, and the chromaticism is more jolting. A. B. Marx claims as much: “Beethoven’s Choral Fantasy and Ninth Symphony crossed the dividing line [separating instrumental music and song] with the most profound artistic warrant, whereas Mendelssohn and Berlioz leapt over it with cheerful abandon” (Musical Form in the Age of Beethoven, ed. and trans. Scott Burnham [Cambridge University Press, 1997], p. 57). Rushton, The Musical Language of Berlioz, p. 147. See Berlioz, Memoirs, pp. 150–1. The ten being the six strictly concert overtures – Waverley, Ouverture de La Tempeˆte (1830), Roi Lear, Intrata di Rob-Roy Macgregor (1831), Le Carnaval romain, Le Corsaire – the operatic overtures to Les Francs-juges, Benvenuto Cellini, Beátrice et Beńe´dict, and the prelude to Les Troyens. Six of Berlioz’s overtures – Waverley, Roi Lear, Rob-Roy, Le Corsaire, and the overtures to Les Francs-juges and Beátrice et Beńe´dict – are sonata forms with full expositions and recapitulations. The overture to Benvenuto Cellini and Le Carnaval romain share features common to the Type 2 (or “binary”) sonata. Berlioz’s remaining two overtures, the prelude to Les Troyens and the Ouverture de La Tempeˆte, are non-sonata structures, the first ternary, the second a peculiar four-part structure virtually without compare. One might also object that to invoke Bakhtin is only to add to an evergrowing body of scholarship that has exported Bakhtin’s concepts to works – indeed, to entire disciplines – far removed from his own concerns with novels by writers like Rabelais and Dostoyevsky. Michael Holquist, one of the preeminent Bakhtin scholars, refers to these exporters as “extrinsic Bakhtinians,” those who unlike the “intrinsic Bakhtinians” (often Russianists focused on the figure of Bakhtin himself) are less interested in Bakhtin per se than in “exploiting” concepts like dialogism, heteroglossia, and carnival as handy tools for their own scholarly efforts (Dialogism: Bakhtin and his World, 2nd edition [London and New York: Routledge, 2002], p. 185). The present analysis can be nothing but “extrinsic.” But it strives not to exploit. I hope to


37.

38. 39.

40. 41.

42.

forge a close connection between Bakhtin’s way of thinking about “carnival” and Berlioz’s way of composing a piece about a carnival – and in the process to demonstrate not only the efficacy but also the necessity of bringing the two together. What differs often, depending upon which work one consults, is what we might call the pitch of that dialogue and Bakhtin’s conception of what larger aim it serves, if any. Bakhtin’s concept of the “carnivalesque” did not appear, suddenly and fully formed, in the work that has made it most famous, Rabelais and his World (1965, trans. H. Iswolsky [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984]). The carnival idea, if not the term itself, is present as early as an essay from the late 1930s that ponders the liberating potential of laughter (“From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, ed. Michael Holquist [Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981]). And it developed, with changing connotations and emphases, in the decades separating this early work from Rabelais and his World. For a perceptive and extensive commentary on the development of the carnival idea throughout Bakhtin’s work, see Gary Saul Morson’s chapter, “Laughter and the Carnivalesque,” in Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics (Stanford: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 433–70. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, p. 275. It has been estimated that the “Laudamus te” would have been performed at 84 half notes to the minute, compared to the 156 dotted quarter notes per minute in Le Carnaval romain (Macdonald, “Berlioz’s Messe solennelle,” p. 279). Not all the tones of these spans are supported harmonically, of course. They are thus properly not structural eight-lines in a strict Schenkerian sense. For a more detailed discussion of some of the various forms of parody, sacred and otherwise, found in carnivals and “carnivalized” literature, see Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, pp. 202–3 and pp. 212–17. Linda Hutcheon, “Modern Parody and Bakhtin,” in Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, eds., Rethinking Bakhtin: Extensions and Challenges (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1989), p. 100.

5 The vague des passions, monomania, and the first movement of the Symphonie fantastique 1. Cairns, The Making of an Artist, p. 359. For the original French see CGI, pp. 318–20. 2. See NBEXVI, p. 218. 3. Berlioz, Memoirs, p. 99. For the original French see Me´moires, ed. Pierre Citron (Paris: Flammarion, 1991), p. 143. 4. Cairns, The Making of an Artist, pp. 356–7. For the original French see CGI, p. 306.

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5. 6. 7. 8.

9.

10.

11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24.

Ibid., pp. 357–8. For the original French see CGI, pp. 309–13. Peter Bloom, The Life of Berlioz, p. 53. See NBEXVI, pp. 167–70. See Pierre Citron’s short entry on Chateaubriand in Dictionnaire Berlioz, p. 103. He emphasizes Chateaubriand’s influence on Berlioz in his essay “The Me´moires,” in The Cambridge Companion to Berlioz, pp. 127–45. “On the model of the writer whose work dominated French romantic literature,” writes Citron, “the composer whose work dominated French romantic music might also have determined to leave a portrait of himself and a narrative of his life” (128). Regarding the posthumous publication of Berlioz’s memoirs: in fact he had 1,200 copies of the work printed in 1865, which were stored at the Conservatoire. He gave copies to Estelle Fornier and to a few of his close friends, but the rest were sold only after his death. Cairns, The Making of an Artist, pp. 58–9. For the original French see François-Rene´ de Chateaubriand, Geńie du Christianisme, vol. I (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1966), p. 309. Francesca Brittan, “Berlioz and the Pathological Fantastic: Melancholy, Monomania, and Romantic Autobiography,” 19th-Century Music 29/3 (Spring 2006), 211–36. Ibid., p. 214. E´tienne Esquirol, “Monomania,” in Dictionnaire des sciences me´dicales 34 (1819), pp. 117–22. Brittan, “Berlioz and the Pathological Fantastic,” p. 221. These categories appear in his early writings but are most clearly defined in his 1838 treatise, Des maladies mentales: conside´reés sous les rapports me´dical, hygieńique et me´dico-le´gal, 2 vols. (Paris: Ballie`re, 1838). Esquirol, Des maladies mentales, p. 341, trans. Brittan. Ibid. Charenton was founded in 1645 by the Fre`res de la Charite´ in CharentonSaint-Maurice, France. Today the hospital is called Esquirol hospital, after E´tienne Esquirol, who directed it in the nineteenth century. Brittan, “Berlioz and the Pathological Fantastic,” pp. 222–3. Nicholas Temperley goes so far as to reproduce a portion of Rene´ in the New Berlioz Edition score of the symphony. See NBEXVI, p. 191. Brittan, “Berlioz and the Pathological Fantastic,” p. 219. François-Rene´ de Chateaubriand, Atala, Rene´, trans. Irving Putter (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967), p. 96. For the original French see Chateaubriand, Atala, Rene´, ed. Phyllis Crump (Manchester University Press, 1951), p. 94. Chateaubriand, “La De´fense du Geńie du Christianisme,” in Atala, Rene´, ed. Phyllis Crump, p. xxxvii. Bartoli, “Forme narrative,” p. 31. Ibid.


25. In my analysis of the movement I number the measures according to the New Berlioz Edition. These numbers do not correspond to those in Edward T. Cone’s Norton Critical Score. Cone counts the two measures of the exposition’s first ending; the New Berlioz Edition does not. 26. I regard each restatement of the ideé fixe as the onset of a new rotation, so long as a substantial and clearly delineated section of new material separates it from a previous statement. The first “X interruption” section in rotation 4 is so brief that when P returns in m. 451 it sounds less like a new rotation than the continuation of an old one; hence P–X–P–X in rotation 4. Measures 491 ff. I call a new rotation since the most important tonic PAC in the movement separates them from the music of the previous rotation. 27. Rushton, The Music of Berlioz, p. 258. 28. See NBEXVI, p. 201. 29. The term “arched sonata form” is actually used only by Cone (Fantastic Symphony, p. 251). Schumann describes the allegro as a “wide-arching whole” (“A Symphony by Berlioz,” p. 230) – but he means the same thing. 30. I have also amended Cone’s measure numbers so that they correspond to those in the New Berlioz Edition. 31. I am not entirely sure why Cone places the coda in m. 475, rather than later. A tonic PAC does occur in m. 475, but the chromaticism so present in the section leading up to it continues past the cadence, and a more conclusive PAC occurs in m. 491, after which follows a short transitional passage and then a restatement of the ideé fixe (m. 503), which I hear as the beginning of the coda proper. 32. Esquirol, Des maladies mentales, p. 341, trans. Brittan. Bartoli notes as well that the first movement of the Fantastique is a “hybride” of sonata form and varied-repetition form (what he calls a “rondo avec un refrain e´volutif ”) (“Forme symphonique,” in Dictionnaire Berlioz, p. 200). 33. This was not originally the case. Berlioz made several changes to the autograph score between 1830 and 1833, by which time it seems to have assumed essentially the same shape as in the published full score of 1845. Among these was the substitution of mm. 185–234 for a longer passage of ninety-three measures. Much of the original music is lost, but we know it ended with a V6/5 of G major rather than a V6/5 of D – in other words, one notch too far away from the tonic C major, rather than two. See NBEXVI, pp. 202–3. 34. The F-minor overture to Les Francs-juges is an example, with its static development that contains a near wholesale appearance of S in E-flat major. 35. Paul Banks has argued that over the course of the entire symphony the “role of the ideé fixe is successively reduced in significance” (“Coherence and Diversity in the Symphonie fantastique,” 19th-Century Music 8/1 [Summer 1984], 39). I make a similar argument about its main occurrences in this movement alone – not so much that the theme’s significance is reduced but that its songfulness is.

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36. Nicholas Cook notes this as well, commenting that the C-major version of the ideé fixe is now “integrated into a fully symphonic texture, with its characteristic irregularities of metre and tempo all ironed out” (A Guide to Musical Analysis [London and Melbourne: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1987], p. 286). 37. Cone, ed., Fantastic Symphony, p. 254. 38. Schumann, “A Symphony by Berlioz,” p. 238. Considering S’s similarity to P, some analysts prefer not to call it a separate theme at all; Cook, for example, calls the cadential theme in m. 119 and S x and y, respectively – not new themes in their own right but melodic materials that recur throughout the movement and are derived from the ideé fixe (pp. 280 and 292). Still another possibility presents itself: Is S more properly a closing theme? Plenty of closing themes recapitulate primary thematic material, after all, and plenty of expositions without secondary themes can be found in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century music (Haydn’s music is full of them). The boisterous cadences of this theme certainly sound like what we might expect from a closing theme. I am inclined nonetheless to call mm. 150 ff. secondary for two reasons. First, all of Berlioz’s fourteen-odd sonata-based pieces feature secondary themes. And second, I hear the theme in mm. 150 ff. as being preceded by a half cadence in the dominant, albeit with a V7 rather than a V, not elided with a contrapuntal cadence, V4/2–I6. Secondary themes, as Hepokoski and Darcy’s Sonata Theory makes clear, are typically signaled and prepared by a cadence, most often by a half cadence in the key of the dominant (in a major-mode sonata); they call this cadence the “medial caesura” (see their article “The Medial Caesura and its Role in the EighteenthCentury Sonata Exposition,” Music Theory Spectrum 19/2 [Fall 1997], 115– 54). Closing themes, on the other hand, are usually signaled by a PAC in the key of the dominant. The exposition of Reˆveries, Passions admittedly poses something of a problem since the cadence at the end of TR is rather atypical, no matter whether we hear it as pausing on V or resolving to I (in G major). But the aural sense of having reached a pause before the theme begins is some justification for not calling mm. 150 ff. a closing theme. 39. Cone, ed., Fantastic Symphony, p. 257. 40. See, for example, Cook, A Guide to Musical Analysis, p. 280. 41. Christian Berger, Phantastik als Konstruktion: Hector Berlioz’ “Symphonie fantastique,” Kieler Schriften zur Musikwissenschaft, xxvii, p. 5 (Kassel: Ba¨renreiter, 1983). 42. Strange as this passage may be, it is not entirely unrelated to other parts of the movement – and even to the ideé fixe that follows it. The underlying bass motion – Ab enharmonically reinterpreted as a G#, which moves to A – presents a motive that returns in the ideé fixe. The same upward shift – Ab–A natural – becomes a melodic component of the theme, with its b^6 and then natural ^6 upper neighbors to G.


43. My discussion of the coalescence of the movement’s stable and unstable passages – in particular how Berlioz brings the end of the X sections and the beginning of the P sections into progressively closer contact – owes a great deal to Christian Berger’s excellent analysis of the movement. Berger devotes a considerable portion of his commentary to the “zwei Arten der Satzgestaltung ”: “Thema” and “Entwicklung.” These two modes are best exemplified by P and X. See Berger, Phantastik als Konstruktion, pp. 51–2. 44. These two themes meld into one another just as this X section melds into the P section that follows it. The half cadence in m. 406, however functional, is born fully out of the X material before it and not tacked on like the cadences at the end of the introduction. And it leads seamlessly to the C-major return: the instrumentation is uniform across the boundary separating rotations 3 and 4, and the harmonic gap between V and I is shortened by the move to V6 in m. 409. Even more important, the agitation of the end of X is maintained through the ideé fixe’s return. 45. I have made the bottom arcs roughly as long as the upper ones, even though of course the number of measures within a given cycle is naturally larger than the number of measures between cycles, because, again, I am interested more in the musical distance traveled, not the temporal distance. 46. Rene´’s sister is the only one who understands him: “she was the only person in the world I had ever loved, and all my feelings converged in her with the sweetness of my childhood memories . . . When, instead of finding myself alone in the morning, I heard my sister’s voice, I felt a thrill of joy and contentment” (Atala, Rene´, trans. Irving Putter, p. 100). This sense of peace, however, disappears when she decides to enter the convent and refuses to respond to his impassioned letters. Interestingly, Rene´, like Berlioz, also witnesses a performance of sorts, his sister’s “profession,” or ceremonious entry, into the convent. He reacts just as violently: “the horrible truth suddenly grew clear, and I lost control of my senses. Falling across the death sheet I pressed my sister in my arms and cried out . . . The priest interrupted himself, the sisters shut the grille, the crowd pushed forward toward the altar, and I was carried away unconscious” (ibid., p. 108). 47. Peter Raby, Fair Ophelia: A Life of Harriet Smithson (Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 104. Brittan also elaborates upon this point: “His passion is directed toward a fictional, and therefore unattainable, character” (“Berlioz and the Pathological Fantastic,” 224). 48. Nicholas Cook notes that the ideé fixe is linked to other sections of the movement in that it “outlines a stepped ascent with intermediate falls” (A Guide to Musical Analysis, p. 292, fn. 1). 49. Ibid., p. 292. 50. Cone, ed., Fantastic Symphony, pp. 251–2. 51. Bartoli, “Forme narrative,” p. 28.

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6 Love’s emergence and fulfillment 1. See NBEXVIII, p. 383. 2. See Rushton’s Romeó et Juliette, pp. 70–9, for a thorough review of the critical debates surrounding the symphony from 1839 to today. 3. Ian Kemp, “Romeo and Juliet and Romeó et Juliette,” in Peter Bloom, ed., Berlioz Studies (Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 64–8. 4. Vera Micznik, “Of Ways of Telling: Intertextuality and Historical Evidence in Berlioz’s Romeó et Juliette,” 19th-Century Music 24/1 (Summer 2000), 22–3, 39–40. 5. Heller’s review appeared in the Revue et Gazette musicale in December 1839 and in the Neue Zeitschrift fu¨r Musik, Leipzig, between January and February 1840. The translation is Rushton’s (see Romeó et Juliette, pp. 60–9). 6. Berlioz had in fact studied Shakespeare’s text before he began writing the symphony, or at least the version by David Garrick (1717–79), which is faithful to Shakespeare’s version of the balcony scene, despite other alterations. Berlioz also knew the French translation by Letourneur, which retains salient features of Garrick’s version. For a comparison of these versions, including the socalled “Kemble verision” used in the 1827 performances at the Odeón, see Kemp, “Romeo and Juliet,” pp. 42–4. 7. Kemp writes, “It may be objected that [my analysis] presents a crassly literal and cold-blooded account of music that seems to behave spontaneously. Yet how else can its contents be explained?” (ibid., 67). “Crassly literal and coldblooded” is too harsh, indeed; the impulse to seek out connections between Shakespeare’s lines, as I have already noted, is strong, and Kemp is not the only one to have heeded it. Even Tovey admits to having “often carefully compared the music with the sequence of speeches and ideas in the balcony-scene,” though he concludes – reasonably – that Berlioz did not try to make the music “follow” the text, except in that, like the lovers, it “contrives to return and say more after it had seemed to close” (“‘Sce`ne d’amour’ from ‘Romeó et Juliette,’” in Essays in Musical Analysis, vol. IV, pp. 87–8). A parallel music-text reading does yield some insights into the way Berlioz’s music seems at times to behave like dramatic dialogue, but it is generally unconvincing, not only because it is out of sync with Berlioz’s aesthetic stance but also because, as Rushton points out, it is forced to correlate Shakespeare’s text with the surviving version of the Sce`ne, rather than with the first version, which is lost (see Rushton, Romeó et Juliette, p. 113, n. 14). There are, in short, other ways to explain the contents of the Sce`ne d’amour – and the reason why it seems both dramatic and appropriate to Shakespeare. 8. Rushton, Romeó et Juliette, p. 83. 9. The closest readings of the Sce`ne d’amour are Rushton, Romeó et Juliette, pp. 37–46; Vera Micznik, “Of Ways of Telling,” pp. 33–45; Thomas Schacher, Hector Berlioz: Romeó et Juliette (Munich: Fink, 1998), pp. 55–69; Kemp,


10. 11.

12. 13.

14.

15.

16. 17. 18. 19.

“Romeo and Juliet,” pp. 64–8; Michael Collins, “Refining the Knowledge of Revisions in Berlioz’s Romeó et Juliette,” paper presented at the Berlioz Bicentennial Conference, Hector Berlioz in the Age of French Romanticism, Denton, Texas, November 12, 2003; Thomas Grey, “Richard Wagner and the Aesthetics of Musical Form in the mid-19th Century (1840–1860),” Ph.D. diss., University of California Berkeley, 1988, pp. 366–70; and Charles Rosen, The Romantic Generation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), pp. 556–68, each of which will be addressed in some fashion below. For an analysis of the Sce`ne’s form and its relation to the Adagio from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony – which appeared as this book was going to print – see Bartoli, “Beethoven, Shakespeare, and Berlioz’s Sce`ne d’amour,” in Bloom, ed., Berlioz: Scenes from the Life and Work, pp. 138–60. Rushton, Romeó et Juliette, p. 39. Bartoli describes the movement similarly, as involving anticipation and resolution – though for him it ends in frustration, not confirmation, and its structure “exists independently of the verbal discourse,” even if that discourse acts as a “pretext” (143). See, for example, Daniel Albright, Berlioz’s Semi-Operas, pp. 62–6. Rosen notes that the opening section resists “all sense of definition”: “the key of A major is established almost as pure atmosphere. The different rhythms float in and out of each other; they are not opposed but blend together like the various pulsations of the night” (563). In “On Imitation in Music,” one will recall, Berlioz notes that in Guillaume Tell Rossini does not in fact depict the movement of men rowing, as many claimed. If the rinforzando in the orchestra in Rossini’s work is an image of something non-musical, which requires some indirect notification to be apparent, then the phrase-structural ambiguity in the opening sections of the Sce`ne d’amour is also such an image, which we hear as “nocturnal” because of the heading in the score, “Nuit sereine – Le Jardin de Capulet, silencieux et de´sert” – not to mention because of the symphony’s text and preface. Tovey, “‘Sce`ne d’amour,’” p. 87. Tovey’s assertion gains some weight because the transition that leads into B1, the cello and English horn melody, features the same rhythm as a passage in the symphony’s Prologue that refers specifically to Romeo – the chorus sings, “Romeó palpitant d’une joie inquie`te” (see mm. 89–90 of the Prologue). Rushton says as much (Romeó et Juliette, p. 37). Berlioz, “On Imitation,” p. 42. William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, in The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1974), p. 1068. Consider, for example, that Rushton links the B sections with Romeo, who responds to Juliet’s soliloquy (A), whereas Schacher argues that B does not yet represent Romeo (that only happens later, in mm. 367 ff.) but rather Juliet, “die sich nach Romeo sehnt” (Hector Berlioz, p. 62). Likewise, Tovey hears in

169

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20.

21.

22.

23.

24. 25.

the A-major theme (m. 274) Juliet’s “Thou know’st” speech (88), whereas Rushton says that we may associate this speech with the F-sharp minor theme (m. 246), though he also submits that we can “relish this development for its own beauty, and as a musical contrast” (Romeó et Juliette, p. 39). To take two writers as an example: Vera Micznik hears the F-sharp minor melody as a variant of the B melody and labels it as such (she calls the F-sharp minor section B3 [36, 42]). Michael Collins, on the other hand, hears the Fsharp minor melody as something new and gives it a new letter label (my A sections he calls X, my B sections A, and the F-sharp section B [Fig. 1, a formal diagram of the Sce`ne d’amour, from “Refining the Knowledge”]). Micznik describes the following A-major theme (mm. 274 ff.) as a return of the “tag” that ended B1 and B2 (mm. 277–80 do in fact replicate B1’s cadential gesture in mm. 152–8, and transpose B2’s in mm. 178–81 from C major to A major). Yet Collins labels it too as new thematic material (he calls it C). These are not the only disagreements. Both Micznik and Collins (among others) label the climactic section in m. 367 B, since unlike the theme in m. 274 it recapitulates a full six measures of B’s tag. Ian Kemp, however, hears it differently; he regards it as another statement of the A-major theme, albeit one that is “transformed” so that it strongly resembles B (65). This in reference to Tovey’s and Barzun’s remarks about the percussive string figures in mm. 332 ff. Tovey, though he quite emphatically opposes the idea that the music corresponds to speeches in the play, writes that this “curious rough interjection of the violins . . . is undoubtedly intended for the ‘noise within’ made by the Nurse” (“‘Sce`ne d’amour’ from ‘Romeó et Juliette,’” p. 87). Barzun retorts: “At no point is there any reason to suppose that Berlioz was . . . depicting the nurse’s knock on Juliet’s door” (Berlioz and the Romantic Century, vol. I, p. 332), adding in a footnote: “Where will critics find the nurse’s husband’s bawdy joke?” (p. 332, n. 46). See Eddie Covington Bass, “Thematic Procedures in the Symphonies of Berlioz,” Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina, 1964, p. 205. Some scholars describe the love theme not so much as the A-major theme in its entirety as its famous tag. See, for example, Micznik, “Of Ways of Telling,” pp. 38–9. For the rest of this analysis, I will dub the entire theme the “love theme.” Schacher, interestingly, calls mm. 146–55 (B) the “Liebesthema,” presumably because it is here that the tag is introduced (56). This example is inspired by a similar figure presented by Bass, “Thematic Procedures,” p. 206. His account of the thematic transformation that produces the love theme is the most complex and compelling (see pp. 205–8). Rosen, The Romantic Generation, pp. 560–1. Some writers have dubbed this section of the movement (mm. 274 ff.) a rondo (Cairns, Servitude and Greatness, p. 181; Kemp, “Romeo and Juliet,” pp. 65–6, Rushton, Romeó et Juliette, p. 40 [“rondo-like refrain”]). It is that, in a way, since the D themes are five times interrupted by transitional or


26.

27. 28. 29.

30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

35. 36.

37.

38.

developmental material (mm. 280, 300, 338, 358, and 372). But since those sections are often short, transitional, and athematic, I prefer to think of them as links between strophes, rather than as new thematic areas between refrains of a rondo. The one exception is the section in mm. 300 ff., which is far too long to be considered merely transitional. Interestingly, Grey’s thematic labels are the only ones that correspond to my own: he likewise labels the main sections A, B, C, and D (see his Table 1, pp. 366–7). His analysis, however, finds fewer recurrences of the D theme, making nothing of its full appearance in m. 286 (D2) or of the return of its head material in m. 362 (D6). Grey makes a similar point in a condensed analysis of the Sce`ne d’amour in his book Wagner’s Musical Prose, when he notes that “the repetitions and elaborations of the final D phrase (mm. 274–389) correspond to the protracted leave-taking of Shakespeare’s two lovers” (Wagner’s Musical Prose: Texts and Contexts [Cambridge University Press, 1995], p. 331). Albright, Berlioz’s Semi-Operas, p. 66. Rosen, The Romantic Generation, p. 559. Interestingly, iii does not return in A2; though its pre-dominant and dominant are sounded in mm. 159–60 (iiø7V7), Berlioz pulls the rug out by sliding to V6 at the end of m. 160, and then to V7 in the following measure, leading us easily back to the tonic and leaving the ghost of iii hanging in the air. Kemp does as much (65). Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, p. 1068. Micznik, “Of Ways of Telling,” p. 40. Jacques Chailley, “Romeó et Juliette,” Revue de musicologie 63/1–2, Colloque Hector Berlioz (1977), 118. Eddie Bass notes, aptly, how this repetition of the rising-third motive “further strengthens the link” between themes B and C (207). In this sense, Micznik is right to label this section a “transformation” of B materials (41). Kemp hears m. 280 as Romeo’s lines beginning with “By yonder blessed moon” and what follows as Romeo and Juliet’s dialogue (66). Bartoli describes a similar process in which the fundamental structure of the movement’s principal theme (a Schenkerian fifth-descent with arpeggiation of the bass, strongly stated in mm. 274 ff.) is “thwarted” with successive reappearances of the theme: interrupted (mm. 322–8), “perturbed by interventions from the strings” (mm. 332–8), stated in the dominant and interrupted again (mm. 367 ff.), and finally hidden in an inner voice (mm. 375 ff.) (“Beethoven, Shakespeare, and Berlioz,” pp. 153–5). Not long into the scene Romeo vows “by yonder blessed moon” (line 107). Juliet responds that he should respond not by “the inconstant moon,” but by “thy gracious self, / Which is the god of my idolatry.” This cadential evasion, with its striking slide down to I6, resembles the “one more time” technique described in a famous article by Janet Schmalfeldt (“Cadential Processes: The Evaded Cadence and the ‘One More Time’

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Technique,” Journal of Musicological Research 1–2 [1992], 1–52). It is an example of a “backing up” process that involves the repetition of not just a cadential gesture but a cadential phrase (6). ¨ ber Franz Liszts symphonische Dichtungen,” pp. 193–4. Trans. by 39. Wagner, “U Grey, Appendix 2, pp. 427–8. 40. Carl Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music, trans. J. Bradford Robinson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), p. 237. 41. Schacher, Hector Berlioz, p. 69.

7 Epilogue 1. Berlioz, Memoirs, p. xi. 2. Wagner is a good example. Thomas Grey has shown how he experimented with the recapitulatory function of the coda in his sonata forms to shift the resolution of musical conflicts (and thus also the dramatic conflicts they represented) to the end of a movement. See his analysis of Wagner’s Der fliegende Holla¨nder and Tannhau¨ser overtures in “Wagner, the Overture, and the Aesthetics of Musical Form,” 19th-Century Music 9/1 (Summer 1988), 11–17. 3. See my article “The Miniatures of a Monumentalist” for an extended discussion of La Mort d’Ophe´lie. 4. Richard Cohn, “Uncanny Resemblances: Tonal Signification in the Freudian Age,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 57/2 (Summer 2004), 285–324. 5. When Berlioz reused the music of the Me´ditation in the Chœur d’ombres from Le´lio, he set it to different words, but the scene – in which the ghost appears to Hamlet – is no less otherworldly that in Cleópaˆtre. 6. Cone, “Saint’s Head,” p. 220. 7. Jacques Barzun, “Fourteen Points about Berlioz and the Public, or Why There Is Still a Berlioz Problem,” in Bloom, ed., Berlioz: Past, Present, Future.

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183

Index

Abrams, Meyer Howard 152 absolute music 3, 42, 151n.4, 158, 171 Adelson, Deborah 144n.5, 158n.3 Albright, Daniel 120, 147n.25 Ashbrook, William 160n.18 Auber, Daniel-François-Esprit Diamants de la couronne, Les 160n.21 Bakhtin, Mikhail carnivalesque 80–4, 162–163n.36, 163n.37 Banks, Paul 165n.35 Bartoli, Jean-Pierre 14, 18, 39, 44, 91, 106, 160n.15, 169n.9, 169n.11, 171n.36 Barzun, Jacques 22, 39, 42, 51, 139, 145n.5, 147n.28, 151n.4, 157n.89, 170 Bass, Eddie Covington 170n.22, 170n.23, 171n.34 Batteux, Charles 52, 56 Beethoven, Ludwig van 6, 15, 18, 43, 44, 45–6, 46–7, 58, 133, 137 Fidelio 51, 58 Symphony no. 3 in E-flat major (“Eroica”) 48, 154–5, 157n.86 Symphony no. 5 in C minor 156n.78 Symphony no. 6 in F major (“Pastoral”) 23, 51, 57, 60 Symphony no. 9 in D minor 23, 50, 59 Berger, Christian 99, 167n.43 Berlioz, Hector convention and originality in his works 6–7, 46–53, 135–6, 143n.17 form, general approach to, see form genre/formal mixture 16, 19, 24, 27, 34–6, 64–5, 71–8, 81–3, 93–6, 106, 136 harmonic innovations 36–7, 79–80, 100, 137, 138 influence on later composers 8–9 musical imitation, notion of see imitation program music, views on see program research, current state of 1–2 rhythmic innovations 139

self-borrowing 19, 25, 64, 146–7, 149n.42, 160n.20 strophic variation, penchant for, see strophic variation musical works Adieu Bessy 161n.31, 162n.31 Amitie´, reprends ton empire 161n.31 Beátrice et Beńe´dict overture 159n.9, 162n.35 Belle Isabeau, La 75 Benvenuto Cellini 19 carnival scene 66, 78, 81 Cellini’s aria La Gloire e´tait ma seule idole 74, 161n.23 love duet 64 overture 19, 63, 158n.3, 159n.9, 159n.10, 161n.31, 162, 162n.35 Carnaval romain, Le analytical discussions of 63 as carnivalesque parody of sonata form 81–4 audacious treatment of tonality and harmony 79–80 couplets form of 71–8 genre/formal mixture in 16, 24, 64–5, 71–8, 106, 136 rhythmic innovations in 139 rotational form of 17, 66–74, 136, 159n.14 self-borrowing in 19, 64, 160n.20 sonata form of 65–71, 73, 136, 137, 159n.7, 162n.35 Champs, Les 161n.31 Chasseur danois, Le 75–7 Cleópaˆtre 64, 74, 138–9 Corsaire, Le 70, 137, 159n.9, 159n.10, 162, 162n.35 Damnation de Faust, La 5, 21, 63 Ballet des sylphes 19, 20, 24–8, 32, 61, 149n.45 Chœur de gnomes et de sylphes 20, 24, 29–32, 149n.42, 149n.45 Course a` l’abıˆme, La 139 Voici des roses 24, 29, 149n.45

186

Index

Berlioz, Hector (cont.) Francs-juges, Les Marche des gardes 146n.23 overture 22, 70, 159n.10, 162, 162n.35, 165n.34 Harold en Italie 21, 32, 63, 147n.23, 149n.50 first movement (Harold aux montagnes) 16, 33 fourth movement (Orgie de brigands) 33 second movement (Marche des pe`lerins) 5, 19, 20, 32–8, 49, 50–1, 131, 150n.59 Herminie 19 Huit Sce`nes de Faust Concert de sylphes 25, 149n.42, 153n.22 Je crois en vous 161n.31 Le´lio 21, 147n.28 Chœur d’ombres 172n. 5 Ouverture de La Tempeˆte 162n.35 Maure jaloux, Le 75 Messe solennelle 64 “Laudamus te” 81–3 Mort d’Ophe´lie, La 138 Nuits d’e´te´, Les Sur les lagunes 139, 150n.59 Villanelle, La 137, 162n.31 Retour a` la vie, Le, see Le´lio Reˆverie et caprice 19 Rob-Roy MacGregor, Intrata di 147n.23, 162n.35 Roi Lear, Grande Ouverture du 17, 19, 20, 22, 34, 63, 74, 144–145n.5, 158n.3, 159n.10, 162n.35 Romeó et Juliette 19, 21, 63 Convoi fune`bre 122 Prologue 21, 122, 128, 129, 131, 169n.15 Romeó au tombeau des Capulets 23, 45, 107, 115 Romeó seul 117, 122, 144n.3 Sce`ne d’amour 5, 23, 136 analytical approaches to 107 emergence of love theme 120–6 fulfillment of love theme 126–32 metaphorical relation between Shakespeare’s scene and Berlioz’s form 105–6, 107, 126, 128–9, 133–4 “nocturnal” opening of 109–14 relation between musical themes and Shakespeare’s characters 115–16

rotational/circular form of 17, 105–6, 110, 119 strophic variation in 119, 126–32 thematic interconnections in 116–19 Symphonie fantastique 58, 63 fifth movement (Songe d’une nuit du sabbat) 117 Dies irae 11–14, 15, 17, 19, 20, 34 first movement (Reˆveries, Passions) 18, 87, 142 ideé fixe, transformation of 96–9, 165n.35 metaphorical relation between form and program 89–91 revisions to 165n.33 rotational form of 15, 61, 91–3, 96–9, 131, 136 self-borrowing in 19 sonata-form conventions in 93–6, 136, 166n.38 spiral form of 101–2 symptoms of vague des passions and monomania in 89–105 fourth movement (Marche au supplice) 4, 47, 146n.23 ideé fixe in entire work 5, 15, 85, 165n.35 program to 21–2, 23–4, 39, 41, 44–6, 51, 55, 85–9, 147–148n.28, 155n.51, see first movement second movement (Un bal ) 22 Tempeˆte, Ouverture de La, see Le´lio Troyens a` Carthage, Les 43, 58, 63 Chanson d’Hylas 74 Prelude 162n.35 Waverley, Grande Ouverture de 22, 63, 102, 144n.3, 158n.3, 162n.35 Bickley, Diana 158n.1 Black, Max 155n.56 Bloom, Peter 1, 86, 153n.29 Bonds, Mark Evan 142n.12, 150n.51, 150n.55 Boye´, Michel 56, 57 Braam, Gunther 1 Brahms, Johannes 15 Brittan, Francesca 87–9 Bruckner, Anton 16 Budd, Malcolm 49 Burnham, Scott 153n.22 Byron, Lord Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage 32, 37 Cairns, David 1, 41, 55, 135, 170n.25 Caplin, William E. 74, 143n.21

Index

Carpani, Joseph 51, 53 Chabanon, Michel Paul Gui de 55–7 Chailley, Jacques 122 Chateaubriand, François-Rene´ de 87, 100, 164n.8 Me´moires d’outre tombe 87 Rene´ 85, 87, 90, 102, 164n.19, 167n.47 vague des passions 87, 89, 90, 91, 100, 102 see also Berlioz, musical works; Symphonie fantastique; first movement Chopin, Fre´de´ric 2, 21 circular form, see Morgan, Robert Citron, Pierre 1, 164n.8 Cockrell, Dale 144n.5 Cohn, Richard 138 Collins, Michael 169n.9, 170n.20 Conde´, Ge´rard 21 Cone, Edward T. 18, 36, 37, 39, 94–5, 98, 99, 102n.29, 105, 139, 150n.52, 150n.60, 165n.31 Cook, Nicholas 105, 166n.36, 166n.38, 167n.49 couplets form 71–8, 160n.21, 161n.23 Cumming, Naomi 152n.16, 154n.45, 155n.55 Dahlhaus, Carl 133 Darcy, Warren 7, 144n.22 see also rotational form; Sonata Theory Davidson, Donald 154n.45 Davies, Stephen 49–51 developing variation 15, 145n.8 Dickinson, Alan Edgar Frederic 144n.5, 161n.26 Do¨mling, Wolfgang 150n.52, 150n.54, 150n.55 D’Ortique, Joseph-Louis 44 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor 162n.36 Ellis, Katharine 153n.27 Engel, Hans 160n.18 Esquirol, E´tienne 95, 100, 164n.17 monomania 88–9, 90, 102 Fauser, Annegret 74, 161n.27 Ferrand, Humbert 44, 55, 85 Fe´tis, François-Joseph 44–6, 52–3, 72, 150n.57, 153n.30 form Berlioz’s general treatment of 2–3, 57–61 Berlioz’s writings on 58–60 program, metaphorical relation to 3–5, 25, 32, 57–61, 78, 89–91, 93, 98–9, 100–2, 105–6, 107, 126, 128–9, 133–4

typical approaches to Berlioz’s forms 6–7 Frisch, Walter 15, 145n.8 Garrick, David 168n.6 Gibbs, Christopher 147n.24 Gluck, Christoph Willibald 6, 55, 137 Grey, Thomas 169n.9, 171n.25, 171n.26, 172n.2 Guck, Marion 152 Haar, James 149n.43 Hadow, William Henry 2 Hambrick, Jennifer 147n.25 Hanslick, Eduard 3, 41 Hatten, Robert 152n.16 Haydn, Franz Joseph 46–8, 166n.38 Heidlberger, Frank 1 Heller, Stephen 108, 109 Hepokoski, James 15–16, 17, 72, 146n.13, 158n.5, 159n.13 see also rotational form; Sonata Theory Holoman, D. Kern 1, 18, 33, 65, 150n.52, 150n.55 Holquist, Michael 162n.36 Hutcheon, Linda 83–4 imitation, Berlioz’s notion of 46, 47, 51–2 see also Chabanon; Lace´pe`de; Le Sueur Jacobshagen, Arnold 1 Johnson, Mark 42, 154n.45, 158n.90 Jullien, Adolphe 45 Kemp, Ian 108, 168n.7, 170n.20, 170n.25, 171n.35 Kivy, Peter 22, 60–1, 147n.28 Knapp, Raymond 144n.22 Kuhnau, Johann Biblical Sonatas 60–1 Lace´pe`de, Bernard Germaine E´tienne de la Ville, Comte de 53–5 Lakoff, George 42, 154n.45, 155n.56 Langford, Jeffrey 33 Larson, Steve 152n.16 Le Sueur, Jean-François 54–5 Libbey, Dennis 161 Lidov, David 152n.16 Liszt, Franz 3, 21, 40, 44, 133, 157n.89 “Berlioz and his Harold Symphony” 3 see also thematic transformation

187

188

Index

Lussy, Mathis 156n.76 Lyall, Harry Robert 156n.72 Macdonald, Hugh 1, 2, 39, 47, 143n.18, 146n.23, 150n.52, 158n.4 Mahler, Gustav 3, 8, 16 Symphony no. 2, third movement 144n.22 Marx, Adolph Bernhard 44, 153n.22, 162n.32 Mellers, Wilfrid 40–1 Mendelssohn, Felix 2, 77, 152n.20, 162n.32 metaphor and form 3–5, 21, 25, 32, 37–8, 57–61, 78, 89–91, 93, 98–9, 100–2, 105–6, 107, 126, 128–9, 133–4 Berlioz’s notion of 48–52 recent theories of 42, 49–51, 52, 152, 158n.90 Micznik, Vera 108, 109, 121, 170, 170n.22, 171n.34, 171n.36 Mongre´dien, Jean 155n.65 Morgan, Robert on circular form 5, 7, 16, 17 Morson, Gary Saul 163n.37 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus Apollo et Hyacinthus, overture, K. 159n.11 Sinfonia concertante in E-flat major, K. 50 musical imitation, see imitation musical metaphor, see metaphor Pannain, Guido 157–158n.89 Plantinga, Leon 153n.23 poetic ideas Berlioz’s views on 40, 43–6 programs, relation to 46–8, 154–5 strophic variation, relation to 5–6, 20 Primmer, Brian 150n.60 program and texted music 22–4 Berlioz’s general views on 40–1 controversies surrounding 3, 39–41 definition of 21–4 form, metaphorical relation to 3–5, 25, 32, 57–61, 78, 89–91, 93, 98–9, 100–2, 105–6, 107, 126, 128–9, 133–4 poetic ideas, relation to 46–8, 154–5 program music, see program Rabelais, François 162n.36 Raby, Peter 103 Reeve, Katherine Kolb 44, 53, 156n.65 Reicha, Antoine 71, 137, 157n.83

Reynaud, Cećile 1 Richards, Ivor Armstrong 42, 155n.56 Rosen, Charles 118, 120, 169n.13 Rossini, Giacomo Guillaume Tell 57, 58, 169n.14 rotational form 5, 7, 15–16, 17, 20–1, 61, 66–74, 91–3, 96–9, 142–143n.14, 145–146n.12, 146n.13, 146n.22 Rushton, Julian 1–2, 5, 18, 21, 77, 143n.17, 144n.1, 148n.41, 158n.3 on Harold en Italie 149n.51, 150n.52, 150n.55, 150n.56, 150n.60 on Le Carnaval romain 65 on Romeó et Juliette 108, 109, 168n.2, 168n.7, 169n.19, 170n.25 on Symphonie fantastique 93–4, 148 Saloman, Ora F. 156n.71 Sanford, G. T. 143 Saslaw, Janna 152n.16, 158n.90 Sayn-Wittgenstein, Princess Carolyne 58 Schacher, Thomas 133–4, 169n.19, 170n.22 Schmalfeldt, Janet 171n.38 Schmusch, Rainer 151 Schoenberg, Arnold, see developing variation Schubert, Franz 2, 19, 77 Doppelga¨nger, Der 80 Junge Nonne, Die 75 Schumann, Robert 2, 21, 77 essay on Symphonie fantastique 58, 94, 99, 102 Scott, Walter 22 Scruton, Roger 23, 148n.35, 154n.45, 155n.55 Shakespeare, William King Lear 22, 144–145n.5 Romeo and Juliet 5, 23, 102, see Berlioz, musical works, Romeó et Juliette, Sce`ne d’amour Sibelius, Jean Luonnotar 146n.13 Smithson, Harriet 85–7, 90, 102, 103 Snarrenberg, Robert 152n.16 sonata form as vehicle for serious instrumental music 78–9 Berlioz’s general approach to 65–6 in Le Carnaval romain 65–71, 73, 137 in Symphonie fantastique, first movement 93–6 Sonata Theory 16, 20, 65, 93, 158n.6, 159n.14, 166n.38 Spitzer, Michael 152n.16, 155n.55

Index

Spontini, Gaspare 6, 135–6 Vestale 151n.6 Strauss, Richard 3, 157n.89 strophic variation as metaphor 61, 93 as outgrowth of genre mixture 19 Berlioz’s penchant for 5–6, 7–8, 18–21 combined with other formal techniques 24, 27, 34–6, 71–8, 93–6, 119, 136 definition of 11–14 in Ballet des sylphes 24–8 in Berlioz’s songs 74–7, 137–8, 161–2 in Le Carnaval romain 66–74 in Sce`ne d’amour 119, 126–32 in Symphonie fantastique, first movement 96–9 large-scale 20–1 other formal phenomena, relation to 14–17, 18–19, 145–146n.12

Wagner, Richard 3, 16, 21, 143n.17, 172n.2 Berlioz’s program music, judgment of 3, 133, 136 prelude to Tristan und Isolde 16, 17 Weber, Carl Maria von 6, 43, 45–6, 46–7, 137 Freischu¨tz, Der 49, 50, 57 Werbeck, Walter 3 Wotton, Tom 22, 65

Temperley, Nicholas 144n.4, 164n.19

Zbikowski, Lawrence 152n.16, 155n.55

thematic transformation 15, 145n.8 theme and variation form 14–15, 147n.27 Tovey, Donald Francis 33, 115, 116, 143n.18, 145n.5, 168n.7, 169n.19, 170n.21 Turner, Mark 154n.45, 155n.56 Verdi, Guiseppe 21, 72

189

Form, Program, and Metaphor in the Music of Berlioz

Berlioz: Romeo et Juliette (Cambridge Music Handbooks)

Berlioz: Past, Present, Future (Eastman Studies in Music)

Berlioz Studies

Metaphor and Meaning in Psychotherapy

Metaphor and Meaning in Psychotherapy

Metaphor

The Transformative Power of Metaphor in Therapy

Metaphor

Metaphor in Context

Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures

Vico, Metaphor, and the Origin of Language

The Cambridge Handbook of Metaphor and Thought

Structure and Form in the Babylonian Talmud

Metaphor in Context

The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor

The Semeiosis of Poetic Metaphor

Music of the Spheres\music

Masks of the Spirit: Image and Metaphor in Mesoamerica

Pictorial Metaphor in Advertising

The Music of Toru Takemitsu (Music in the Twentieth Century)

Derivation and Explanation in the Minimalist Program

Geometry: The Language of Space and Form

Metaphor and Discourse

Nietzsche, Biology and Metaphor

Metaphor and Thought

Classical Form: A Theory of Formal Functions for the Instrumental Music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven

Contexts of Metaphor

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Researching and Applying Metaphor

Form, Program, and Metaphor in the Music of Berlioz

Berlioz: Romeo et Juliette (Cambridge Music Handbooks)

Berlioz: Past, Present, Future (Eastman Studies in Music)

Berlioz Studies

Metaphor and Meaning in Psychotherapy

Metaphor and Meaning in Psychotherapy

Metaphor

The Transformative Power of Metaphor in Therapy

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Metaphor in Context

Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures

Vico, Metaphor, and the Origin of Language

The Cambridge Handbook of Metaphor and Thought

Structure and Form in the Babylonian Talmud

Metaphor in Context

The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor

The Semeiosis of Poetic Metaphor

Music of the Spheres\music

Masks of the Spirit: Image and Metaphor in Mesoamerica

Pictorial Metaphor in Advertising

The Music of Toru Takemitsu (Music in the Twentieth Century)

Derivation and Explanation in the Minimalist Program

Geometry: The Language of Space and Form

Metaphor and Discourse

Nietzsche, Biology and Metaphor

Metaphor and Thought

Classical Form: A Theory of Formal Functions for the Instrumental Music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven

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