Music and Fantasy in the Age of Berlioz by Francesca Brittan (review)

In Music and Fantasy in the Age of Berlioz, Francesca Brittan takes the reader on a journey spanning three centuries and featuring an ensemble of composers, poets, scientists, and ethnographers. Although Berlioz's name features in bold on the cover, the book is not about Berlioz, strictly speaking. Rather, it examines musical fantasy as a cultural phenomenon, with Berlioz as an active—but by no means its single—participant. While past studies of Berlioz typically position the composer as the center of his own universe, Brittan's study attempts a longue durée of the musical fantastic, beginning before the composer's birth and ending well after his death. Berlioz is not the destination, but rather a recurring theme—an idée fixe, if you will—that Brittan uses to explore topics as diverse as vitalism, pathology, colonialism, linguistics, and entomology. Though at times the book's numerous peripheral topics seem sprawling, Music and Fantasy in the Age of Berlioz is a major contribution to both Berlioz scholarship and nineteenth-century cultural history more broadly.

The book's first question is a crucial one: What is fantasy? Brittan poses this question not with a promise to answer it, but rather to highlight the "ontological uncertainty" of fantasy as a music-literary topic (p. 10). Part of the early critical struggle to make sense of Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique, Brittan argues, "emerges from a difficulty theorizing fantasy itself" (p. 8). Musical fantasy did not merely evoke fairies, ghosts, and demonic crickets; it became a structural signifier of otherness. This angle, inspired by Theodor W. Adorno, Jacques Attali, and Michel Foucault, allows Brittan to position fantasy not as a manifestation of genius but as a series of discourses. She explores these discourses in six interrelated chapters. Although they all feature Berlioz, their real purpose is to further the book's main inquiry: how music "interfaced with literary and visual fantasy and, more pointedly, with fantasy's emergence as a compositional category" (p. 5).

Chapter 1, "The Fantastique moderne," charts the reception of literary fantasy in early nineteenth-century France. One of the chapter's protagonists is E. T. A. Hoffmann, whose translated short stories caused a furor in Parisian circles. Hoffmann's writing first appeared in French in 1828 as a series of excerpts in literary journals. His popularity swelled in 1830, when Adolphe Loève-Veimars published a complete translated edition of Hoffmann's work under the title Contes fantastiques. This multivolume edition inspired French critics to associate fantasy with super-naturalism and pathology. Brittan examines this paradigm shift by offering a detailed survey of literature ranging from La Fontaine's Fables choisis (1688) to Pierre Larousse's Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle (15 vols. [Paris: Administration du Grand dictionnaire universel, 1866–76]). Within this context, Hoffmann's spell on the French literary imagination was immense; his work "threatened to unseat France's 'native' magical world, that of the marvelous, and along with it, a longstanding tradition of literary unreality" (p. 33). Throughout the chapter, Berlioz takes a back seat to his critics and contemporaries. Brittan sees his musical output not as idiosyncratic but rather as a symptom of his age.

Chapter 2, "Melancholy, Monomania, and the Monde fantastique," takes us into the world of nineteenth-century ennui. This most romantic of conditions constituted a "suite of symptoms," including anxiety, boredom, drug-induced hallucination, hysteria, and convulsion. Naturally, the literati were the greatest victims. Brittan traces multiple genealogies of this artistically inclined "disease," including a detour to the German notion of Sehnsucht as well as a brief discussion of the mal du siècle, the "malady of the century" described in writings by François-René Chateaubriand and Alfred de Musset (p. 63). The most revealing part of the chapter is when we meet...