Berlioz et la scène: Penser le fait théa"trale by Violaine Anger (review)

Hector Berlioz's dramatic works have long posed a challenge to audiences and scholars alike, never quite achieving the same broad acceptance as his best-known symphonic creations. In a significant contribution to the ongoing reassessment of this repertory, Violaine Anger's book persuasively argues that we can better understand Berlioz the dramatist by considering his conceptual contributions to the role of music in theatre. As the term 'theatrical act' ('le fait théa"trale') suggests, Anger considers Berlioz's works not simply as musical scores, but rather as blueprints for theatrical events that create meaning in a dialogue with their spectators. The flexibility of this approach perfectly suits the generic hybridity and fluidity of Berlioz's output, avoiding unproductive debates around what to call these works (dramatic symphony, dramatic legend, semi-opera, etc.), and focusing instead on what techniques and goals they share. Though works traditionally identified as operas (like Benvenuto Cellini and Les Troyens) certainly get their due here, Anger also explores the theatrical implications in song (La Captive), oratorio (L'Enfance du Christ), and symphonic works (Lélio and Roméo et Juliette), providing a broad scope for her study.

Drawing on methodologies at the intersection of literary, theatre, and performance studies, the author explores how textual, musical, and theatrical techniques interact to create meaning, with a particular focus on the issues of vocality, embodiment, and subjectivity. Having published an earlier anthology on the question of musical meaning in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Le Sens de la musique, 2 vols. (Paris, 2005)), Anger is well positioned to probe these questions more deeply in Berlioz's works. Though her scholarly touchstones are almost exclusively French (most significantly, Remy Stricker, Berlioz Dramaturge (Paris, 2003)), this type of approach will be familiar to many anglophone readers of Carolyn Abbate's work, which addresses similar questions in a different repertory.

Proceeding chronologically through close readings of many of Berlioz's major works, Anger also makes a larger argument for the coherence of Berlioz's dramatic output, suggesting that his personal quest to expand the theatrical possibilities of music provides a unifying thread for works in disparate genres: 'We will develop here the idea that Berlioz would thus construct his life and his work around an existential question, to which each work would be a response, its proposed form equivalent to the chosen subject and the logical problem explored' (p. 22). The point of departure for the introduction is an incisive examination of an easily overlooked line from the final scene of the Roméo et Juliette symphony. As the warring families converge on the tomb of Romeo and Juliet, united in death, Friar Laurence offers a powerful exhortation: 'Voyez ce corps!' (See this body!). But as Anger reminds us, the titular lovers have no bodies to see in this or any other part of the work, creating a striking contradiction between the 'reality' of the diegesis and its visual representation. As many scholars have noted, Berlioz treated the voices and bodies of the lovers as too sublime for vocal or physical embodiment, preferring to transfigure them into orchestral music. But Anger goes a step further in describing the substitution of the listening imagination for theatrical illusion as a move designed to transcend the limits of theatrical possibility, enabling a 'representation of the unrepresentable' (p. 82), wherein 'radical absence is the strongest kind of presence' (p. 13).

To Anger, this gap between the apparent reality of staging and the much more expansive possibilities of the spectator's imagination is the essence of Berliozian theatre. Whereas his inherited aesthetic system presumed the unity of body and voice, as well as the unifying power of theatrical illusion, Berlioz's approach freely displaces and doubles voices, banishes bodily reality to the wings, and attacks the very credibility of theatrical illusion, all in order to access the more powerful realm of the audience's imagination. The key technology...