Berlioz: Past, Present, Future. Bicentenary Essays (review)

The canonization of Berlioz continues. Those who assumed that this lengthy process, which began in his own century, had culminated years ago have apparently miscalculated, for the wranglings over his historical place have not abated. The bicentenary celebrations of his birth stimulated a new round of debates, partly in anticipation of the placing of his remains in the Panthéon, joining those of Voltaire, Rousseau, Hugo, and Zola. With this 'Panthéonization' would come an important laurel in the posthumous honouring of Berlioz's genius and a belated gesture of French cultural validation. Leading up to the bicentenary and the awaited 'Panthéonization', one group of eminent scholars met at Smith College to take a fresh look at the composer and his changing status for the international conference 'Berlioz: Past, Present, Future' (31 Mar. 31–2 Apr. 2000). Yet shortly after the conference presentations had been revised, edited, and sent to press, the grand Panthéonic gesture was delayed, or revoked, by President Jacques Chirac. Such a political development adds new tension and contradictions to present-day considerations of Berlioz, since it seems to revalidate the image of the misunderstood and unsung hero forged by his champions—and by Berlioz himself—and to underline the timeliness of this fine collection of essays.

From varied perspectives, some of them new and many of them intriguing, the essays address the composer's autobiographical, biographical, and political images, his aesthetic ideals and biases, and his reputation and reception. Embedded in the discussions, as the editor, Peter Bloom, suggests, is the desire 'to unravel one of the central mysteries of Berlioz's career, which is the modesty of his success despite friends in high places and high artistic gifts' (p. xii). No one doubts the importance of this endeavour on behalf of so fascinating a composer and writer, and to understand him is to illumine many facets of French, and European, musical life and aesthetics during much of the nineteenth century. But in the arguments over canonical standing both past and present, historiographical questions and red flags accumulate around the persistent notions of canon and the 'great man'; the creation of myths and musical museums; and the omissions, distortions, and anachronisms that seem inevitable when the pedestal is the primary goal.

Following a thoughtful preface by the distinguished Berlioz scholar Peter Bloom, the essays begin colourfully with Peter Gay's 'Berlioz's Berlioz', a sketch of the composer's 'self-definition' and undying self-fascination that enumerates familiar interpretative themes and clarifies their origins in his own writings. As Gay writes, a central facet is 'his awareness of himself as a rebel, . . . a violator, even, of taboos' (p. 5), who felt compelled, as he wrote in his Memoirs, 'to act in life and the Academy against the grain' (p. 6). This perpetual mode of defiance, as Gay recognizes, stemmed in part from his fights against parental obstructions to his musical career, and one might surely imagine how his railings against bourgeois mediocrity resounded with familial experiences. Berlioz would cast himself as iconoclastic hero in his 'Thirty Years' War against the routineers, the professors, and the deaf' (p. 8), bombastically choosing a reference that put his efforts on a par with those of a nation and illustrating them with militaristic terminology. Gay insists that he was never 'a rebel without a cause', and, despite his thoughts of revenge, 'rarely acted on these vengeful impulses' (loc. cit.). Later Gay seems to qualify this statement, remarking that '[e]ven if he sometimes dwelled on the joys of revenge, that was not his primary moving force', which was always, Gay optimistically believes, his 'service to music' (p. 13).

In 'Plots and Politics: Berlioz's Tales of Sound and Fury', a fascinating essay that offers a more political and feminist reading, Katherine Kolb again turns to Berlioz's 'life story of constant battling against the current', demonstrating how certain 'allegories' and 'literary tropes' in his Memoirs as well as...