The Musical Madhouse: Les Grotesques de la musique (review)

For English-speaking Berliozians, Alastair Bruce's The Musical Madhouse is the last piece in a jigsaw that has for too long lacked Berlioz's most concentrated exploration of the absurd. One reason is simple. The book is nightmarishly complex— more so than any other work in Berlioz's prose output—because of its virtuosity of wordplay, its intertextuality, its aphoristic nature, its desperate laughter, and its breathless pace. Tougher even than its partner volume, Les Soirées de l'orchestre, this is the Berliozian translator's Everest; and Bruce's response to the challenge is simply magnificent.

The Musical Madhouse presents the complete text of Berlioz's Les Grotesques de la musique of 1859, prefaced by a deft introduction from Hugh Macdonald, interspersed with a selection of caricatures and engravings, and followed by explanatory notes based largely on the work of Léon Guichard, whose critical edition came out in Paris in 1969. The text itself, of course, consists mainly of beginnings, endings, and other bleeding chunks from feuilletons dating between 1846 and 1859. It is Berlioz's most extreme exercise in the reorientation of his musical writings for a public reading him via books rather than newspapers. In The Musical Madhouse, an arresting introduction to a perfectly standard journal review becomes the centre of attention; a flippant signing-off appears as a miniature discourse on aesthetics. With fitting irony, this collage of newspaper scraps is, in its new guise, significantly more coherent than it was before its constituent parts were ripped from their original context. Cut loose from the central subject matter of their reviews (these latter often in any case a despairing attempt to say something interesting about the unexceptional; p. 66), Berlioz's bookends and digressions become substance. And they do so without any self-consciously repetitive external framework such as the introductions and codas to the stories of Les Soirées de l'orchestre provide. In terms of truthfulness to Berlioz's vision of music and musical life they are more than adequate to the task.

As Macdonald reminds us in his introduction, Berlioz's Musical Madhouse (1859) is a pendant to the more famous Evenings in the Orchestra (1851-2) in numerous ways. It replaces civilized Germany with barbarous France, and an opera orchestra with the Opéra chorus; and its sole framing device, the 'correspondence' of its Prologue, in any case makes clear that Berlioz intended it as a sequel (p. xv). Yet it does more, replacing ostensible fiction with ostensible reality. Where the fiction of Evenings is frequently autobiographical, the storytelling of the Madhouse is—with due allowance for exaggeration, prejudice, and the odd bit of pure fantasy—'real'. A sense of lived experience permeates everything, from the solidarity of the author with the vicissitudes of opera- chorus life (he had, after all, suffered it too) to the closing comments on French musicians' dwindling self-confidence in Second Empire Paris. The interleaving of substantial travelogues among the aphoristic excerpts serves to strengthen the association. That these travelogues are all concerned with the French regions suggests another contrasted pairing within Berlioz's oeuvre, this time with Voyage musical en Allemagne, et in Italie (1844), which deals exclusively with foreign musical cultures, often in glowing terms.

The Musical Madhouse is thus rooted in the musical life of Second Empire Paris and the provinces. It muses on musical institutions, attitudes, practices, and absurdities in such a way as to leave the reader in no doubt that, for all its embroidery, its improbable ruses, and the unfair use of real-life characters as stooges, it offers a uniquely honest caricature. The regions fare badly in the abstract, but slightly better (spas excepted) when Berlioz actually visits them; enthusiastic but misguided musical amateurs are lampooned; corruption is exposed and outwitted; dance is cut down to size; pushy parents are sent packing. As an intrinsic part...