The Dramatic Symphony: Issues and Explorations from Berlioz to Liszt by Robert Tallant Laudon (review)

This is a curious book. It aims to discuss as a generic category works marked more by their difference from conventional genres than by similarities to each other. The term ‘dramatic symphony’, taken from Berlioz’s Roméo et Juliette, is embraced for works with different subtitles and very different forms and intentions. If the Berlioz (the ‘first’ dramatic symphony and the only one Laudon calls a masterpiece) is taken as a model, it defines ‘dramatic symphony’ as a multi-movement work involving voices, but centred on orchestral music, its form running in parallel to an independent dramatic source. Other major works that show some of the same preoccupations, such as Liszt’s Faust Symphony, are patterned quite differently. In a period of genre experiment, this is not surprising; but it makes it less surprising if, as Laudon claims, the genre has been neglected in the critical literature.

The author starts badly by calling Roméo et Juliette ‘properly a symphony with choruses because choruses permeate the whole drama and do not appear solely in a culminating finale’ (p. 3). That might exclude another work discussed in the first chapter, Mendelssohn’s Lobgesang, in which choruses are confined to the cantata finale. But in Roméo the chorus has little to do in four of the central five movements (none at all in three of them); this is hardly permeation. It does not help that Laudon (p. 20) uses subdivisions of Roméo et Juliette that do not stem from Berlioz. The following chapters begin with lists of premieres. The first (p. 17) is already troubling: after the Berlioz comes Schubert’s ‘Great’ C major, included as a possible answer to Schumann’s question ‘what should a post-Beethoven symphony be’ (p. 36), with no suggestion that it has dramatic aims comparable to Berlioz’s. Two symphonies by Reber are listed, although they are no more ‘dramatic’ in any relevant sense than the symphonies of the ‘Viennese School’ or Méhul. No doubt they merit an occasional outing, but for the reader of this book it would have helped if the music examples (pp. 26–7) had had a tempo mark, unfortunately not the only instance of presentational sloppiness.

Laudon is admirably willing to dig around among minor composers to exemplify his view of the genre, but his discussion is too often cursory. He makes use of contemporary criticism, and thus happens upon Émile Douay’s concerts of 1843 and 1846; but (like me) he has failed to locate copies of Création and other ambitious scores, leaving press reports as our sole source. The somewhat dismissive discussion of Douay’s Trio in F (p. 60) is hardly pertinent, and could damp down enthusiasm to resume the search (his quartets, clearly influenced by late Beethoven, might make a more interesting study). Laudon proceeds to Félicien David, to reach in chapter 8 ‘The Apogee: Toward New Paths, 1847–1851’. The ‘new paths’ are not Schumann’s view of Brahms so much as the path taken by Liszt. And rather than an apogee, the chapter deals with the decline of the genre; Laudon tells us (p. 116) that ‘various dramatic symphonies continued to be written and in many cases to be performed … reaching an apogee of sorts before the genre was abandoned with the exception of a few stragglers such as Bizet’s Vasco da Gama’. Bizet used David’s subtitle ‘Ode-Symphonie’; Laudon might have added Franck’s Psyché, a ‘symphonic poem with chorus’ closer to Berlioz’s idea, with an orchestral love-scene (given his generous inclusiveness, Laudon might have looked still further ahead to Gurrelieder; Gade’s treatment of this story is mentioned: pp. 60–2).

Besides the need for more careful editing, the book suffers problems both musical and musicological. To say ‘Roméo was unified’ (p. 29) is tendentious, with no more support than...