David Cairns
VOLUME TWO
Servitude andGreatness 1832–1869
26 EveningStar
27 Louis
28 LastRites
Epilogue
Bibliography, References, Abbreviations
Notes
Acknowledgements
Index
About the Author
David Cairns was chief music critic of the SundayTimesfrom 1983 to 1992, having earlier been music critic and arts editor of the Spectatorand a writer on the EveningStandard, FinancialTimesand NewStatesman. He has been Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of California at Davis, a visiting scholar at the Getty Center and a visiting fellow of Merton College, Oxford. In 2013, in recognition of his services to French music, he was made Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.
PENGUIN BOOKS
BERLIOZ
ServitudeandGreatness1832–1869
‘If it is possible to have an unflawed human endeavour, then this is it. This may be a book that satisfies the scholar but in every sense of the word it is a special work; it is a book which will also seduce the general reader’ Nigella Lawson, Samuel Johnson Prize judge
‘One of the masterpieces of modern biography … as broad in its perspectives on nineteenth-century culture as it is deep in its understanding of one of Romanticism’s most dogged and lovable individualists … [it has] a richness and wholeness which renders Berlioz more vividly and intimately real than ever before’ Rupert Christiansen, DailyTelegraph
‘David Cairns wins this year’s Whitbread Biography Award for his masterly evocation of the inner man as well as the outer world in which he lived and worked. The judges felt that his biography is a work of art in itself which will still be enjoyed and admired for centuries to come’ Whitbread judges on David Cairns’s Berlioz: ServitudeandGreatness
‘He is able to … assess his achievements as conductor, entrepreneur, journalist, and of course composer, with long and trenchant essays on the great works … Cairns has never penetrated to the essence of these masterpieces so deeply as he does here, in the context of a life in which the music was an essential integrated part’ Hugh Macdonald, TheTimesLiterarySupplement
‘Immensely readable. The descriptions of time and place are atmospheric … the treatment of the music is illuminating … the judgements are admirably clear and admirably forthright … the product of a lifetime’s study, understanding and love’ Terry Barfoot, ClassicalMusic
‘Berlioz himself described his life as “an improbable novel”. You may, as I did, break off to play a recording of the work under discussion (which is a tribute to the way it is discussed), but the sheer human interest of the tale has you plunging back in’ Francis Carlin, Opera Now
‘Monumental … How fortunate Berlioz has been in his latest, perhaps definitive, biographer’ George Steiner, Observer
‘One of the most difficult, and possibly useless, activities is commenting on a perfect work of art. What words can add anything to Ravels L’enfantetlessortilègesor Mozart’s LenozzediFigaro? It is in such a spirit that I salute David Cairns’s biography of Hector Berlioz’ Robert Tear, Oldie
To Rosemary and to
Isaac, Joseph, Molly, Laura, Isobel, Maisie and Oliver
List of Illustrations
Berlioz and his orchestra, caricature by Grandville, 1846
1. Harriet Smithson: lithograph by Francis, 1827 (Richard Macnutt Collection, Withyham)
2. Liszt: daguerrotype, c.1841, when he was 30
3. Paganini: a) lithograph by Edwin Landseer, c.1831–34 (Richard Macnutt Collection). b) drawing by an unknown artist (formerly André Meyer Collection),
4. “L’homme orchestre”: lithograph by Benjamin Roubaud, Caricature Provisoire, 1 November 1838 (Richard Macnutt Collection)
5. Meyerbeer: photograph by Nadar, c.1860.
6. Habeneck: engraving by L. Massard, c.1840 (Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Département des la Musique).
7. Jules Janin: photograph by Nadar, c.1856 (Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Département des Estampes).
8. Armand Bertin: engraving by G. Staal (Richard Macnutt Collection)
9. Handbill of Berlioz’s concert of 16 December 1838 (Richard Macnutt Collection)
10. Part of an autograph list of complimentary tickets for Berlioz’s RomeoandJulietin November 1839 (Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Département de la Musique)
11. Marie Recio: photograph, undated (Musée Berlioz, La Côte St André)
12. The Rhine: The Lorelei Rock, c.1817, pencil and watercolour, by J. M. W. Turner (Leeds City Art Gallery)
13. Schloss Stolzenfels, near Coblenz, 1850, engraving by M. Kolb after a painting by Karl Schweich (Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Département des Estampes)
14. “Une Matinée chez Liszt”: lithograph, 1846, by Josef Kriehuber.
15. Berlioz: lithograph, 1845, by August Prinzhofer
16. Prague: engraving, after a painting by H. Bibby.
17. Weimar, the castle: aquatint by F. Franke (detail).
18. Princess Carolyne Sayn-Wittgenstein: drawing, undated, by Hebert
19. Berlioz: engraving by Dumont after a drawing by Gustave Doré, Journalpourrire, 27 June 1850
20. L’lnstitut de France, Paris: lithograph by an unknown artist, c. 1860 (Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Département des Estampes).
21. The Crystal Palace, roller-printed cotton, c.1851 (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)
22. Photographs of Berlioz’s sister Adèle Suat, c.1840s.
23. Berlioz’s uncle Félix Marmion, c. 1860s.
24. Monique Nety, the family’s housekeeper, c.1850s (all Musée Berlioz)
25. Berlioz: caricature by a Côtois, 1845 (Musée Berlioz)
26. Pauline Viardot as Orphée: 1860, by D. Philippe (Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Département des Estampes)
27. Wagner: photograph, 1860, by Pierre Petit
28. Berlioz: photograph, 1857, by Nadar
29. A page of the autograph full score of TheTrojans, Act 3: part of the Dido-Anna duet (Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Département de la Musique)
30. Contemporary caricatures of TheTrojansby Cham.
31. Contemporary caricatures of TheTrojansby Cham.
32. Contemporary caricatures of TheTrojansby Cham.
33. Grévin (d), respectively in the Charivariand the JournalAmusant
34. TheTrojansatCarthageat the Théâtre-Lyrique: engraving, 1863, of the final act, “La mort de Didon”, published in the Monde Illustré(Richard Macnutt Collection).
35. Louis Berlioz, the composer’s son: photograph, c. late 1850s (Musée Berlioz)
36. Estelle Fornier: photograph, 1864 (Musée Berlioz)
37. Berlioz: photograph, 1867–8, St Petersburg (François Lesure Collection)
38. Berlioz: death mask, 1869, by Stanislaus Lami (private collection)
Thanks are due to the following for permission to reproduce the above-named illustrations: Richard Macnutt (1, 3b, 4, 5d, 6, 21a), The Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris (5b, 5c, 7, 9b, 13a, 16, 19, End-papers), The Association Nationale Hector Berlioz (8, 14a, 14b, 14c, 15, 21b, 22), The Leeds City Art Gallery and the Bridgeman Art Library (9a), Photo AKG London (9b), The Hulton Getty Picture Collection (11a, 11b, 17), Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (13b), François Lesure (23).
Berlioz and his orchestra, caricature by Grandville, 1846
1
Harriet
Harriet Smithson’s presence in the Conservatoire Hall on the afternoon of 9 December 1832 set the seal on one of the high dates of the Romantic calendar. Few can have missed the symbolism. Berlioz had not exactly kept his infatuation with labelleIrlandaiseto himself, and though d’Ortigue’s biographical essay in the Revuede Paristelling the story of the symphony’s genesis had not yet appeared, many in the audience would have known it or would have been apprised of it by their neighbours, as Heinrich Heine was by the man next to him.1 The sudden appearance of the actress herself in a prominent place just above the orchestra, with the composer no longer metaphorically but physically at her feet, had the hall buzzing. Here was the living original of the idéefixe, the inspirer of the symphony, come to receive back the music she had called into being. The passions she evoked were returning, if not to “plague the inventor”, then to trouble and perhaps inspire her in her turn.
All over the hall people were staring at her. She could hardly mistake their glances; Paris audiences had long ceased to show her that kind of attention – not since the great days of 1827 and 1828 had she been the object of such excitement. Though her knowledge of French was as yet sketchy she knew enough to grasp the gist of the literary programme she held in her hand, even without the thinly
veiled allusions of Maurice Schlesinger, and the English journalist Schutter, to the emotional origins of the work. If there was still any doubt who its heroine was, none was possible when in the sequel to the symphony she heard Bocage, the actor who took the role of the composer-hero, speak of his longing for “the Juliet, the Ophelia that my heart cries out for”. From that moment “she felt the room reel about her; she heard no more, but sat in a dream, and at the end went home like a sleepwalker, hardly aware of what was happening”. The words are Berlioz’s, not Harriet’s, but there is no reason to think them exaggerated.2 As Peter Raby remarks, it is not everyone who is wooed by a full orchestra.3
For Berlioz it brought five years of disdain and indifference to an abrupt end. His life was revolutionized. Even the revenge against Fétis, target of Bocage’s fiercest tirade, was forgotten. Within hours Miss Smithson had sent him her congratulations on his success. Next day he was granted permission to be introduced to her and they met. From now on he called every evening the English company was not performing. When he could not see her he wrote, in French, and she answered in English. Less than a week after the concert, “like Othello” he was telling her the story of his life since the day he had first set eyes on her, and she was weeping.4 “You can imagine with what intoxication I saw her tears flow.” On 18 December, scarcely able to believe it, he heard her say, “Eh bien, Berlioz … Je vous aime”: his feelings were answered at last.5 It did not matter that hers were not of the same intensity as his, but rather – he told his sister Nancy – “feelings which combine love, friendship and gratitude”.6 The agonizing hopelessness was over and past. She loved him.
Yet it was not till nine and a half months later, after a series of delays only partly external in origin, that they were married. Looking back on it many years later, Berlioz recalled it as a time of continual, almost unbearable agitation in his life; he was alternately “elated with wild hopes and racked with fearful apprehensions”.7 The course of true love never ran less smooth.
During those fraught, protracted months they did not become lovers, though gossip assumed they were. Whatever he may have desired, to her it would have been unthinkable. Her reserve often drove him to distraction – even his most restrained caresses alarmed her – yet at the same time he admired it and marvelled to find such innocence in a woman whose whole life had been lived in the theatre. It was bitterly ironic, he told his father, that Dr Berlioz should consent to his engagement to Camille Moke, a thoroughly promiscuous woman (as he had since discovered), but should oppose his marrying Harriet Smithson, whose behaviour had always been irreproachable.8
The family’s opposition was the first obstacle. Berlioz did not break the news to his father until the beginning of February, nearly eight weeks after he had begun courting Harriet; but Nancy’s reply to an earlier letter in which he opened his heart to her (as in the old days) gave a taste of what the reaction would be.9 She dismissed it as a passing fancy, adding a warning – like Germont pèrein LaDameaux camélias– that such an alliance would jeopardize Adèle’s chance of making a good marriage.10
As actress, Protestant and penniless woman, Miss Smithson was trebly obnoxious. Félix Marmion, who was in Paris (Berlioz watched him parade down the boulevard at the head of his regiment on 23 January), characteristically fastened on this last objection.11 It was not even a speculation on his nephew’s part, he wrote to Nancy: “the actress is ruined”.12 Colonel Marmion pinned his hopes on certain “information” about Miss Smithson, which according to Alphonse Robert had reached Hector and was causing him to think again. (This is a recurring note in the correspondence. Berlioz’s Côtois friend Edouard Rocher hints darkly to him about “fears” –presumably as to Harriet’s virtue – which the inquiries of “wellinformed persons” have confirmed.)13 In the second week of February Marmion took himself to the minor theatre in the Rue Chantereine where the English company had been playing for the past month, and sent a report to Nancy next day.14
I was very curious to analyse the potent charms which have wrought such havoc. Her features are indeed remarkable, she has an exquisite voice, and her gestures are noble. The theatre is so small that it’s not at all favourable to illusion. Miss Smithson is necessarily at a disadvantage there. On that stage she doesn’t even appear young. Without having my nephew’s eyes or unique nature, I nevertheless understand the impression this woman must have made on his artist’s soul. But has sober reflection, have the entreaties of his family no weight with him? We must see that he does not lack for either, so that we may have no reason to reproach ourselves. I confess that I do not hold out much hope.
Dr Berlioz remained studiedly calm. He accepted that their only weapon was time. “Our one resource,” he wrote to Nancy on 20 February, “is to multiply the obstacles.”15 He would not be swayed by threats. Hector talked of blowing his brains out; but Dr Berlioz declined to believe that his son would take his own life rather than lose so totally unsuitable a woman. Delay the marriage, withhold all financial support, and justice, common sense, family sentiment, might yet prevail. Meanwhile it was agreed they should keep the news from his mother as long as possible.
By refusing his consent the doctor forced Berlioz to resort to legal means, whereby a son who married against his parents’ wishes was not disinherited – a process which, requiring the presenting of three separate sommationsrespectueuses, took three months. During that time the wind might change. And for a while there did seem a serious possibility that before the period of waiting expired and they could be married, Harriet would be forced by her financial losses to leave Paris and return to England.
In the end, just as it had been with the issue of music as a career eight or ten years earlier, family pressure achieved nothing; but the marriage was delayed. Berlioz was forced to go to elaborate lengths to find a justice of the peace and a notary prepared to serve the summonses; his friends Just Pion and Edouard Rocher either refused point-blank or agreed and then backed down.
During those months his natural affection for his parents and his strong sense of family loyalties were stretched to breaking-point.
Saddest of all was to realize yet again how little his beloved father really knew him.
Saturday 23 February [1833]
Oh my father, my father, this is appalling!16 You go so far as to slander my future. Me a gambler! In God’s name, how can you say that? Have I not been through every possible ordeal that might have tempted me to become one? When I had nothing, did I gamble? No – I preferred the humiliation of being a chorister in a vaudeville theatre; I lived on fifty francs a month, but I never gambled. You speak of my love for Harriet as if it dated from yesterday. But for heaven’s sake, I told you about it; it began on 6 September 1827, and tortured my life for five whole years. The passionate episode which you use against me was itself occasioned by that love. It was all the talk about my obsession for Miss Smithson, my desolate constancy, that attracted the capricious attentions of Mlle Moke. She wrote to me, asked for a rendezvous, made me a verbaldeclaration, came for me in my room, got me to elope withher, etc., etc., and finally inspired me with a violent physical passion which I embraced with all the more ardour in that it seemed the only way of being cured of the other. You know the vile behaviour of that madwoman and her mother. But the horrible tempest was powerless to uproot the love that I still had in the depths of my heart for Harriet.
He thought he would never be loved by her in return. But now she loves him. His constancy has vanquished her.
I told her the whole story of Camille; I was completely frank about it. I knew who I was talking to. Harriet has a noble and lofty soul, but gentle and unassertive, for all her rich and varied genius.
Her conduct, in the world she lives in, lends her character a particular merit.
Father, you are utterly mistaken about her. It’s heartbreaking; but that is how it is. As nothing will disabuse you, I have one last prayer to make to you: not to destroy the affection my heart holds for you. I love you, father, with all the love naturally inspired in me by the tender care with which you surrounded my childhood. Don’t take it away from me; don’t, I beg you, make me an unfeeling son. You can be sure that, rightly or wrongly, there is nothing you can do that will separate me from Harriet. When I say I would do anything to
win her, I mean exactly that; but it is utterly inhuman to drive out the natural and loving feelings from my heart, to replace them with despair and all its frightful train. If you are going to say to me again that “in marrying Miss Smithson I shall bring her misfortune” and that “I will abandon her for another”, then I must tell you that in order not to lose my affection for you I shall not open any more letters from La Côte and there is no point in writing to me. I have sent Edouard a procuration, in order that, with the help of a notary, he can present you with my first summons. I have nothing to add; if you don’t understand me, it would all be to no purpose. H. B.
“In the last resort,” he asks his father in another letter, “what will be gained by prolonging my torment for three months?”17 And to Adèle, who alone of the family is not treating him like a pariah: “After everything that our parents have inflicted on me since I was twenty, one might have thought they would finally let me be.”18 “Will they prevent my marrying Harriet?”19 he writes to Adèle, a few weeks later. “No, a thousand times no. Today I feel so outraged by this abuse of legal force on my account that even if I ceased to love and respect Mlle Smithson and all my feelings for her turned to hatredand contempt, I shouldstillmarryher . But I love her with a deep and tender love which, now that it is shared, no longer has the dreadful bitterness of the first five years; and curses without end on all obstacles which delay what I regard as the moment of my supreme happiness.”
On her side Harriet was subjected by her family to direct and continuous pressure which played on her natural uncertainties. Her mother had not come to Paris with her but her sister Anne had.20 Though younger, and crippled, she had long assumed the dominant role in their relationship, and Harriet, preoccupied with her work and used to leaving all domestic arrangements and decisions to others, had let her. In opposing the marriage tooth and nail she spoke for their absent mother as well. Harriet was the family breadwinner and, until her recent troubles, a successful one. They depended on her. Marriage of any kind would mean upheaval to lives built around her career as an actress. Marriage to a Frenchman of doubtful prospects and erratic temperament would be a disaster and must not be
allowed to happen. In addition, Anne had taken an instant dislike to Berlioz. She was often in and out of the room during their têtes-àtêtes, watching with exasperation as he knelt, tears in his eyes, gazing up into her sister’s face. Once, when he had talked Harriet into letting him have a civil licence drawn up, Anne seized it from her and tore it up in front of them. When Berlioz was not there and Harriet was not at the theatre, she kept up a barrage of waspish comments, dinning into her the reasons why such a match was impossible and assuring her that Berlioz was actually mad; someone had written from London saying that it was a fact and all Paris knew it.21
From the beginning of March Anne had her even more at her mercy. Returning on the afternoon of 1 March from a meeting at the Ministry of Commerce and Public Works, where she had been discussing arrangements for a benefit, Harriet caught her dress on the carriage door as she was stepping down and, twisting her right foot, fractured both bones just above the ankle. Two passers-by caught her as she fell and carried her into the house.
The accident, the climax of three and a half months of misfortune and the death blow to the English company, may or may not have been psychologically motivated; but its consequence was a long and painful convalescence, during which Harriet was confined to the house in acute discomfort, a passive listener to her sister’s diatribes. The leg, broken in the worst place, healed very slowly. Three months later she could walk only with crutches. It was July before she ventured out, on Berlioz’s arm, to the nearby Tuileries Gardens.
The news was reported by Félix Marmion in a letter of 6 March to his sister Joséphine Berlioz, who by now knew the worst.22 Marmion remained pessimistic:
Only chance can save us – for it’s an illusion to believe that Hector will make the least sacrifice to the wishes and misgivings of his family. His madness is in the head, which is even worse than if his heart were caught. One can’t begin to reason with him; he doesn’t want to hear, gets easily irritated, and regards us as his enemies. Fearing probably that I’ll raise the matter when we meet, he appears to be avoiding me. I’ve not seen him once chez moi since I arrived in Paris. We’ve
written to each other, and Alphonse and I have met him a few times, to get information and to try to forestall disaster. Up till now the only hope we had was in the delay caused by his negotiations with his father and by the accident which has just befallen Miss Smithson: four days ago she broke her leg while getting out of a carriage. I was naturally anxious at the effect the news of this event would have on his volcanic temperament; but I found him, though much affected, calmer than I expected. I had written two days before to say that he and Alphonse absolutely must come and dine with me, and I gave them both a rendezvous – to which only Alphonse turned up. Hector didn’t even respond to my invitation but merely sent me, by a musician we both know, two tickets for a concert at which a piece of his is being played.fn1 It was last Sunday [3 March] that we were supposed to meet. I found Alphonse at our rendezvous; and after walking up and down for a while, with no sign of your son, we decided we would go and see him, to distract him from his gloom and force him to come and cheer up a little with us; for that was our plan of campaign: we were not going to treat the affair tragically but, on the contrary, to combat his absurd project by laughing at it. We found him in; he paced up and down the room, hardly speaking to us, visibly affected but none the less quite calm. We had agreed, Alphonse and I, to pretend not to know about Miss S.’s accident, so as to make our planned meeting more natural. I began by saying, “Well, we’re going to have dinner together, you must have had my letter, why didn’t you reply?” He answered, “I couldn’t. So you don’t know about the accident.” (Then he described it.) “But,” I said, “one has to have dinner, so come on.” “No,” he said, “I have to go and fetch a young man, we’re dining together.” “Can’t you put him off?” “I could, but I’m not going to, because you would involve me in a conversation that I don’t want to listen to.” At that Alphonse and I sadly took our leave, to talk over dinner about our abortive expedition and how little hope we still had. I had been thinking of attempting a visit to Miss S., to try to break down her resolution by telling her about the family’s unconquerable repugnance to the marriage, but hadn’t yet fixed a day. In addition I have to find an interpreter, and the move must be made with care. The recent accident gives me time to reflect. They both live a long way from me, which is another difficulty, not to mention that my work rarely allows me to get off before five or six in the evening. I may write to her. It’s vital not to make a false move, and above all not to aggravate that deranged mind any further.
With Harriet incapacitated, Berlioz assumed full responsibility for the benefit which they had both been organizing in the hope of paying off some of her debts – debts now swollen still more by her medical bills. He wrote letters in her name, which she signed, and saw to the practical details of the event. The intended gala performance of RomeoandJuliet, with a miniature concert in one of the entr’actes, was replaced by a miscellaneous evening involving many of the brightest stars of the theatrical and musical worlds –Mlle Mars, Mlle Duchesnois, Samson, Arnal, Rubini, Tamburini, Giulia Grisi, Liszt, Chopin, Urhan (Théâtre-Italien, 2 April) – which realized 6,500 francs.
After the accident Berlioz became if anything an even more assiduous visitor at the apartment in the Rue Castiglione, the street running north from the Rue de Rivoli, just round the corner from their old lodgings at the Hôtel du Congrès, where Harriet and her sister had moved not long before. For the time being, however, her invalid condition ruled out any decisive change. Worse, the weeks of discomfort and immobility further sapped her confidence, making her still less able to assert herself against her sister or respond to Berlioz’s ardour, let alone nerve herself to the momentous step of marriage. Even when she had recovered sufficiently to walk with only a slight limp, and the legal obstacles had been surmounted, she continued to hesitate. Whereas he had satisfied himself that the rumours he kept hearing about her were false, she had to go on listening to equally damaging charges against him which, reject them as she might, were persistent and insidious enough to leave a lingering doubt. Above all, not being used as he was to a hand-tomouth existence, the prospect of marrying on nothing terrified her.
As the weeks dragged on he was several times on the point of forcing himself to a separation. Always it was she who drew them back. In late February, just before her accident, the daily scenes with her sister of which he was the cause had become so acrimonious that he told her that rather than estrange her totally from her family he was ready to give her up (“which wasn’t true – I should die”) –only to abandon the idea in the face of the extreme distress and
heart-warming display of affection it prompted.23 “The one thing that frightens me is her faintheartedness,” he had written during the first weeks of their relationship; and it becomes a motif of his letters.24 At times he felt he would never succeed in overcoming it.
In the immediate aftermath of the accident he hesitated again. On 12 March he wrote to Edouard Rocher telling him “not to go on” with the legal submissions “for the moment; Ihavenofurtherneedto getmarriedjustnow.25 If, later, Harriet absolutely wants it, I imagine the first submission you made will still count.” The letter, shown to Dr Berlioz, was taken by the family as a sign that the immediate danger was over. Nancy regretted only that the submission had to be presented in a centre of gossip like La Côte, “where the houses are made of glass and domestic life is exposed to the four winds”.26 Ten days later Berlioz was telling Rocher to forget what he had said and present the second submission.27
In the spring a separation did take place. It did not last. Though Berlioz, in response to a desperate note from Harriet, remained “cold and impassive as a marble statue” when they met, she persuaded him to see her a second time and poured out a flood of “protestations and explanations” which at least partly reassured him.28 Lack of money was now their biggest stumbling-block. In July, and again in August, he attempted to raise a few thousand francs from his connections in Dauphiné, both times apparently in vain. A friend went to see Nancy’s husband Camille Pal to negotiate a loan. Even Nancy was touched by her brother’s plight, though such a loan was of course out of the question – the very thought of the money being used to “support Miss Smithson” was “revolting”.29 Harriet’s financial state was indeed desperate; she was still heavily in debt and talked once more of returning to England. She refused, however, to accept a penny of Berlioz’s money. Instead he managed to get her a grant of 1,000 francs from the Fund for the Encouragement of the Arts, and in response to her plea for help the Duc d’Orléans sent 200. Yet by the end of July Berlioz was again near to breaking free. He understood her difficulties; but she was wearing him out. “This evening I shall see Harriet perhaps for the lasttime.30 She is so
unhappy that my heart bleeds for her. Her timid, vacillating character makes her unable to take the least decision. But it must reach a conclusion; I cannot live like this.”
Once again he stayed. The scenes with her sister grew more violent. He wished he could “exterminate that bloody little hunchback”. She told him to his face that if only she were strong enough she would throw him out of the window. Each time he persuaded Harriet to the verge of marriage she shrank back.
He could bear it no longer. When she accused him of not loving her he took an overdose of opium on the spot, followed – in response to her cries and protestations of love – by an emetic. In an access of remorse she said yes, then “once more hesitated, her resolve shaken by her sister’s attacks and her alarm at the wretched state of our fortunes.31 She has nothing, yet I love her; but she cannot bring herself to entrust her fate to me. She wants to wait a few more months. Months! Damnation take it! I cannot wait any longer.” He had, after all, waited nearly six years.32 On Thursday 29 August he wrote telling her that he would call for her on Saturday, to take her to the mairie: if she refused, he would leave the following Thursday for Berlin. (By the regulations of the Prix de Rome he should have gone there in January.) “She doesn’t believe in my resolution, and has sent me word that I will have her reply today. It will be the same phrases – begging me to come and see her, saying she is ill, etc. But I shall stand firm, and she will see that if I have been weak and dying at her feet all this time, I can get up again, shun her, and live for those who love and understand me. I have done all I can for her, and she dares not take a risk for me. It’s too fainthearted, too reasonable.So I am going.” But he didn’t. Instead, she came.
A few days before, he had been approached by a group of friends on behalf of a young woman of eighteen, a fugitive from a brute who had been keeping her prisoner.33 The poor girl, terrified of falling into the man’s clutches again, was set on leaving the country. Would he help her get away?
It is quite possible that the romantic circumstances were invented by Janin and the others to appeal to his chivalrous nature and thus liberate him from Miss Smithson. But the girl was real enough. Berlioz met her, found her intelligent, charming and musical, and agreed to take her with him to Berlin and, with Spontini’s help, try to get her a place in one of the choruses.
This intriguing idyll would certainly have changed the story if it had happened, as it nearly did. Quite apart from the attractions of the young fugitive, he had finally made up his mind.
My passport is ready, I have a few things left to settle, and then I’m off. It must be ended. I’m leaving poor Harriet really unhappy, her position is appalling; but I have nothing to reproach myself with and I can’t do any more for her. I would still give my life for one month spent at her side, loved as I must be. She’ll weep and she’ll despair. It will be too late. She will suffer the consequences of her unfortunate character, weak and incapable of high feelings or resolute action … Then she’ll get over it and find that I was wrong. That’s how it always is. As for me, I must go forward, turning a deaf ear to the clamour of my inner voice, which tells me that I am indeed wretched and that life is an atrocity.
Harriet, however, must have realized that this time he meant it. Whether or not she found out about the travelling companion, his ultimatum brought her at last to the point. At the beginning of September she took the plunge. Their banns were published. (The fugitive was provided for by a subscription among his friends, and thereafter disappears from the scene.) A month later, on Thursday, 3 October 1833, Berlioz and Harriet Smithson were married at the British Embassy in the Rue du Faubourg St Honoré, with Liszt one of the witnesses and Hiller and Heine in attendance.34
The account in the Memoirs, though written after the disillusionment of their broken marriage, relives the unbelievable elation of that moment so long dreamed of and fought for, so long denied:35
On our wedding day she had nothing in the world except her debts and the dread that because of her accident she would never be able to make a successful return to the stage. I on my side possessed the
total sum of three hundred francs, lent me by my friend Gounet; and once again I had quarrelled with my family. But she was mine and I defied the world.
What of Harriet? What did it do for her? Because we have only his side of the story, not hers, because her career as an actress went into eclipse, and because Berlioz, though he never abandoned her, did eventually leave her “for another” as his father predicted, she has taken on the pathos and passive air of one to whom events happen; she is the irrevocably fading star, the helpless object of another’s fantasies, dragooned into a marriage she did not really desire – the “unfortunate Harriet Smithson” on whom, in Barzun’s phrase, Berlioz, “so constituted that his ‘tenacity’ would not let him yield anything on which he had once set his heart”, had fastened a love image that was the pure product of his imagination.36 “Berlioz,” says Hippeau, “is less to be pitied than the unhappy actress at whose feet he threw himself without knowing whether, once the splendid dream had become reality, domestic life would give him the satisfaction his ardour demanded.”37 Instead of the Juliet, the Ophelia he yearned to possess, says Tiersot, he found – “ô déception!”38 – that he had married “une dame anglaise”.
In all this, knowledge of the tragic end colours our attitude. The evidence suggests a different picture. Certainly Harriet, during these months, vacillated and drew back several times from the brink; but her hesitancy was perfectly natural. Her life had long been centred on her family; marriage was not a state that either circumstances or personal history inclined her to. To marry an impoverished foreign artist of no assured income when you yourself are deep in debt and have no immediate financial prospects, to start a new life and a new home under those conditions, would have seemed a questionable step even without a demoralizing physical injury and even without the propaganda she was daily subjected to – “the thousand and one absurd slanders”, as Berlioz wrote after their marriage, “which, she has since explained, were used to put her off me and which were the cause of her frequent indecisiveness, among them one that really frightened her: the assertion, which she was told categorically
was true, that I was liable to epileptic fits”.39 No wonder she wavered. But Berlioz’s letters reveal another Harriet: a Harriet who, despite everything, could not bear to be parted from him and who, loving him, took the initiative in their reconciliations; who stuck rigorously to her principle of never accepting the smallest sum of money from him and once, discovering that he had given her sister a few hundred francs, forced him to take them back on pain of never seeing her again; who was “glad he had nothing, for at least he could not doubt that it was for himself that she loved him”; who insisted that he got to know her as she was and not as the incarnation of the Shakespearean heroines she played, and for that reason forbade him to go and see her act.40, 41 This does not sound like a weak-minded woman who allows herself to be used by a man for his own egotistical fancy, nor like a woman who (as has been said) in her extremity turns to him for material support – in Berlioz’s case hardly the likeliest source of it. Her imagination, like his, was enthralled by his Romantic attachment and by the sense of their converging destinies. But everything we know about her indicates a person of spirit with a mind of her own.
Except for a single performance of RomeoandJulietat the Salle Chanteraine which he may have attended (Harriet appeared once each in Romeo, Hamletand Othelloduring the month of January 1833), Berlioz, who had last seen her on stage in 1827, did not see her act again until after they were married. Had he done so he would not have found an artist past her best. It is commonly assumed that Harriet had lost her power to appeal to the French (something the English professed to find totally mysterious in any case): at thirty-two, Sainte-Beuve’s “céleste Smithson” had aged and coarsened. Berlioz himself reported, just before he fell under the old spell, that she was “changed in every respect”.42 Without doubt Harriet was a good deal stouter than she used to be (a lighter person might not have broken her leg when she stepped awkwardly on to the pavement). But her Parisian peers did not find her any less remarkable. For them she remained not just a name but a living
force. And when she was in extreme need they gave their aid as to an equal.
Jules Janin, in a bravura review in the Journaldesdébats, might argue that it was too late to revive the glories of 1827 – the vogue for Shakespeare had been submerged in the torrential if melodramatic passions of modern French drama – but the great Marie Dorval knew that Smithson had as much as ever to teach her about the technique and emotional expression of tragic acting, and she watched her whenever she could.43 She was with Auguste Barbier and her lover Alfred de Vigny in Antoine Fontenay’s box on 26 December 1832 when Smithson played the last two acts of RomeoandJulietat a benefit evening at the Vaudeville.44 In January Dorval went to the Salle Chantereine, writing a day or two later to Vigny: “If you had come to the English theatre with me we could have visited her together in her dressing-room and then afterwards, together, at her place.45 [ … ] You know how keen I am to see Smithson.” Five years later, by which time she is reduced to performing isolated scenes with inadequate supporting actors, her lustre in the eyes of her fellow-artists is undimmed. Adèle Hugo, conveying Victor Hugo’s congratulations to Berlioz on the success of his Requiem, goes out of her way to praise, on her own and her husband’s behalf, Harriet’s wonderful performance in the fifth act of JaneShore, which they had seen seven months earlier and wish they could see again.46
The newspaper accounts of her acting in the winter of 1832–3 are of an actress still at the height of her powers.47 Miss Smithson, the Débatsreported,48 has more élan and passion than most English actresses. She is a tragedienne in the genre of Mme Dorval. Pathetic, gifted with the gift of tears, real tears, she expresses grief in all its anguish and intensity with a heartfelt truthfulness. Sometimes she exaggerates the tears and the cries; as Shakespeare says, “she o’ersteps the modesty of nature”. But she remains a remarkable actress, admirable above all in her mastery of shades of expression and in her extraordinary ability to pass from tender feelings to paroxysms of rage and despair. When she
does, her features become contorted, transformed, with the practised skill that only the greatest actors possess.
A month later, in January 1833, another critic writes that Miss Smithson is “not only one of those tragic actresses who speak clearly and project well, but an artist.49 And what is rarer than an artist in the theatre? To an exact and profound observation of nature – a quality found especially among English actors – she adds something of that élan and spontaneous passion of the south which has few examples or models in England.”
From such testimony we can see that Berlioz, in Raby’s words, “was not simply living in the past, reviving out of pity memories, distorted by time, of a few freak performances”. His faith in her genius was widely shared.
That she was a genius in adversity gave her a yet deeper appeal. Her troubles only made her more dear. They stirred his sense of chivalry: it was for him to rebuild Ophelia’s shattered fortunes, to repay her debts, to provide her with a new and happier life. Through all her years of decline the image of the Ophelia and the Juliet through whom the light of Shakespeare had first shone, “illuminating the whole heaven of art”, never faded.50
Ophelia and Juliet – Desdemona too (a role for which, though he never saw her play it, Harriet was celebrated) – weave their way into the texture of Berlioz’s letters during the year 1833. When he has seen her play Juliet (he writes to Albert Du Boys in January) – the one performance she is allowing him to attend – then, “after the tragedy, the realRomeo, the Romeo Shakespeare created, that is me, yes me, I shall be there at the feet of my Juliet, ready to die, ready even to live if she wishes it”.51 Then, breaking into a rapturous montage of phrases in English from the play, “I am mad, dearest, I am dead!! Sweetest Juliet! My life, my soul, all, all, ’tis heaven!”; and, in French, “speak then, my orchestra.” When, “like Othello”, he tells her of the long years of trial and adversity during which he loved her without hope, she weeps “abundant tears”. Later, as he sings her the Fantastic Symphony while she leans against his shoulder, her hand on his brow, she is “Ophelia in person – not
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