Form, Program, and Metaphor in the Music of Berlioz (review)

Recent Berlioz research has focused on various nontraditional topics, such as reception history in different countries, and Berlioz's biographical background within diverse interdisciplinary and intertextual contexts. (To name just two: The Musical Voyager: Berlioz in Europe, edited by David Charlton and Katherine Ellis [Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2007], and Berlioz: Scenes from His Life and Work, edited by Peter Bloom [Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2008]). This book by Stephen Rodgers instead refers to a topic considered more traditional: How does the form of Berlioz's works correlate with programmatic, poetic and metaphoric ideas? It is time to reconsider these questions analytically, and Rodgers does exactly that. His analysis is based on recent methodologies of form analysis, and includes a thorough discussion of the meaning of program and metaphor. Thus—while traditional in scope—Rodgers succeeds in presenting new and original insights into the structural design of Berlioz's music.

First of all the book is very consistent and written in precise, straightforward prose. It opens with some well-known statements about Berlioz's music, from which he derives central analytical questions. One of these well-known statements refers to Berlioz's stylistic context: the assumption that his music "often resists explanation with methodologies honed on the (mostly Austro-Germanic) music of contemporaries like Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn and Chopin" (p. 2). Rodgers also addresses the long-standing prejudice that Berlioz's formal designs 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" (p. 2). The resulting question is obvious: how can we understand Berlioz's music with regard to form and program, without sacrificing one aspect to the other? Rodgers offers a solution by referring to strophic variation as a major governing formal design in Berlioz's music. The second chapter elaborates on this idea and discusses terminological issues that help to further differentiate the idea of strophic variation and its relationship to developmental procedures and sonata form. In this context, James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy's concept of "rotational form" plays a major role, along with Robert Morgan's theory of "circular form" (James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy, Elements of Sonata Theory [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006]; Robert Morgan, "Circular Form in the Tristan Prelude," Journal of the American Musicological Society 53, no. 1 [Spring 2000]: 69-104). Rodgers refers to these theories not only as a methodological justification of his own analyses, but adopts them in order to develop an analytical model that he deems to be appropriate for the analysis of Berlioz's various formal schemes. The "Ballet de sylphs" from La damnation de Faust serves as an analytical example that, according to Rodgers, shows circulating formal sections on various levels, thus inspiring him to point out "Faust's spiral into a trance" (p. 27). The main point is its "oscillating" (p. 28) melodic shape that creates similarities between thematic units of the ballet that never occur in exactly the same way.

While this and other analyses in chapter 2 focus on an introductory explanation of "circular" forms, chapter 3 provides a more complex discussion of the relationship between form and program. Generations of scholars and writers have attempted an adequate definition of this relationship, but have never found sufficient and convincing solutions. Rodgers provides a consistent summary of interpretations, starting from Berlioz's own writings about the "pensée poétique," through nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers. It is somewhat challenging to follow this complex discussion of related terms, such as poetic idea, program, imitation, and metaphor, but the reader will appreciate the focused narrative of this chapter, since the author achieves a balance between general assumptions and specific Berliozian concepts of thought. He first clarifies the difference between "poetic thoughts" and "program"; he then tends to the term "metaphor," which will be synthesized with the structural...