Nouvelles lettres de Berlioz, de sa famille, de ses contemporains ed. by Peter Bloom, Joël-Marie Fauquet, Hugh J. Macdonald, and Cécile Reynaud (review)

In 1860, Richard Wagner was in Paris, trying to arrange for the Opéra to give the world premiere of the revised version of Tannhäuser. In a letter probably written in May of that year, Hector Berlioz invited him to come over to dine. The various guests that evening, he promised, will share "a very lovely pineapple" direct from Brazil. And, after everyone else leaves, he and Wagner "will have the freedom to spend time together in my study." Presumably he meant that the two would talk about topics of common interest, such as the Parisian musical world or the recent activities of their mutual friend Franz Liszt. Berlioz's "pineapple letter" has now been published for the first time in the book under review (pp. 548–49). It was apparently written later than any other that survives between these great musicians. (They did meet again two months later at Pauline Viardot's house for an advance hearing of parts of Tristan und Isolde.)

Earlier that same year, Berlioz had written a sharply disapproving newspaper column about Wagner's musical style. Still, the friendliness evident in this letter shows him interested in maintaining an active relationship with Wagner based on an open exchange of views. The pineapple letter will, I hope, lead commentators to be more cautious when they—or we, for I am as guilty as anybody in this—write, or tell students, about a supposed sudden and complete breakdown in the relationship between these two bold spirits during the last decade of Berlioz's life.

This is just one of many revelations to be encountered in a major new book, whose title in English would be New Letters of Berlioz, His Family, and His Contemporaries. The title page (but not the front cover) adds a series title: Hector Berlioz, Corre -spondance générale IX, suppléments 2. The book is thus the final volume in the much-praised edition of all surviving letters—and any that were transcribed before the original sources were lost—written by the composer or to him (by family members, friends, professional colleagues, and government officials).

The Correspondance générale—a title that scholars often abbreviate as Corr. gén. or CG—was published by the Paris firm Flammarion between 1974 and 2003. Its eight volumes may be found in numerous libraries around the world. The primary volumes (Corr. gén. I–VII), edited under the supervision of Pierre Citron, were arranged chronologically. Correspondance générale VIII, edited by Hugh Macdonald, is an 850–page supplement that provides numerous corrections and makes available letters that had become known too late to be included in the relevant chronological volume.

Since the publication of the first supplemental volume in 2003, hundreds more letters have surfaced. This is in part a tribute to the success of the Correspondance générale itself. Other factors have helped as well, such as: (1) the increased speed of communications between scholars—and between scholars and archivists—that has made it easier to locate a letter and then consult it, perhaps in a photocopy or scan; (2) more letters finding their way from private hands into public libraries, notably the important Richard Macnutt Collection, now in Paris at the Bibliothèque nationale de France;(3) access by the editors of Nouvelles lettres to transcriptions of many letters that reside in distant libraries or in private collections;(4) the inclusion in this volume of a number of transcriptions (often incomplete) that have appeared across the decades in catalogs of rare-book dealers.

By any kind of logic, Nouvelles lettres (Corr. gén. IX) should have been published—like the preceding eight volumes—by Flammarion...