Berlioz: Scenes from the Life and Work (review)

In the most recent set of Berlioz-focused essays edited by Peter Bloom, we encounter keen, provocative, and methodologically innovative work. The essays in this collection draw their impetus, in part, from the explosion of activity surrounding Berlioz's bicentennial anniversary in 2003, an event marked by a series of international conferences, performances, exhibitions, and recordings, as well as by the completion of the eight-volume Correspondance génerale (Paris: Flammarion, 1972–2003) and the Dictionnaire Berlioz (Pierre Citron, et al. eds. [Paris: Fayard, 2003]). Since then, several other major projects have been completed, or are advancing rapidly, including the New Berlioz Edition (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1967– ) and the ten-volume Critique musicale (H. Robert Cohen and Yves Gérard, eds. [Paris: Buchet/Chastel, 1996– ]). Small wonder, then, that Bloom's introductory essay has the flavor of triumphant arrival—of a job well done. But it also has the flavor of a challenge: now that the tools and materials are at hand, it is time for a fresh approach to the composer, time to rethink entrenched narratives of his life, consider new facts, and explode what Bloom calls "old inanities" surrounding Berlioz's "flawed technique" (p. 6). Bloom's call for reinvigoration is carried through the first essay by Jacques Barzun, which sets out in more specific terms the challenge that faces the new Berlioz scholarship.

In order to understand and discuss "The Music in the Music of Berlioz" (to borrow the title of his essay), Barzun suggests that we must not only alter the terms of criticism but consider the ways in which standard critical vocabulary has itself marginalized Berlioz. He calls for a new and enriched language capable both of describing Berlioz's sounds and forms and articulating what makes them sensible and beautiful. Reconsidering the old problem of "program music" is an important first step, according to Barzun, who calls for critics to relinquish the idea of Berlioz as a grossly literal composer—a purveyor of musico-visual effects—and to examine in more sophisticated terms what renders his work meaningful. To do this, we require a much-expanded vocabulary for the description of timbre and texture as well as a broader cultural perspective on orchestration in the first half of the nineteenth century. In addition, Barzun points out the need for a more sophisticated approach to Berlioz's melodic language—a set of critical tools capable of interpreting his phraseology and melodic affect. The renovations in terminology that Barzun recommends imply fundamental shifts in methodology and cultural perspective. They require analysts to place Berlioz's music back in its proper contexts—to understand not only the composer's oeuvre at large, but the broader and particularly French musical, poetic, and philosophical milieu that produced it. This is a challenge taken up admirably in the remaining essays, which open up a broad interdisciplinary space in which to read Berlioz, providing new perspectives on musical narrative, on the poetics and politics of instrumentation, the relationship between Berlioz's critical and musical prose, and between the "facts" and "fictions" of his life. As Barzun would put it, they begin to shift the terms of the debate and, perhaps most important, to eradicate the profile of Berlioz as an isolated and incoherent composer.

Among the most intriguing essays are those by Joël-Marie Fauquet and Julian Rush ton, which address the poetics of orchestration in Berlioz's work from two quite different perspectives. Fauquet looks at the role of the orchestra in Berlioz's critical and fictional writing, examining its status not only as a vehicle for musical expression, but as a political metaphor and a site for utopian fantasy. In Berlioz's short story, Euphonia (1844), a futurist orchestra-community represents the ideal social environment for which the composer yearns, but also a space of totalitarian control in which musical punishment is meted out to his enemies. In...